ReddyPads - Intro

After listening to the many voices and suggestions of the journaling customers, we have updated and improved the journal in many new and exciting ways.

Firstly, there is SO MUCH MORE information about how to think about our bodies in a positive way, how to relate to our hormones, and how to integrate our hormonal reality in our lives.

The central theme of this journal is to validate our everyday experience of being a woman and to honor, celebrate and give a voice to that which has been hidden and shamed for so long. It is to give you a tool simply to notice, without judgment or a need to change. Our premise is that once women know themselves, they will heal themselves. We see the menstrual cycle as a vital sign of health just as surely as a pulse or blood pressure.

Many women we have worked with in this way have said that the awareness has given them a greater sense of self-esteem, alleviation of painful physical or emotional symptoms and a deep well of wisdom and power to draw on when needed. We are addressing women’s wellbeing in an integrative way by recognizing the importance of our physical, emotional and spiritual state to our overall health. They are inextricably linked and constantly inform each other. The menstrual cycle is a woman's gift to knowing herself fully in these ways. This journal will help you to practice your wisdom. It will guide you through all the stages of your monthly cycle from menstruation to ovulation and back. Along the way we will offer information, insights and suggestions for working with each stage. We offer this in service and gratitude to the lives of women all over the world and to the women who came before us.

Can simply tracking change how we experience our hormonal cycle? This is the finding of the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research:

"We found that, of 61 women with proven abnormal menstrual cycles and ovulation (amenorrhea, oligomenorrhea, regular anovulatory cycles and regular short luteal phase cycles), after one year of charting, 29 had a normally ovulatory cycle.

Prior JC, Vigna YM, Barr SI, Rexworthy C, Lentle BC. Cyclic medroxyprogesterone treatment increases bone

density: a controlled trial in active women with menstrual cycle disturbances. Am.J.Med. 1994;96:521-30.

Therefore almost 50% became normal. There was no difference in weight change, exercise change or whether they were in the cyclic mpa arm, or calcium or not. Therefore it is a reasonable inference that it was the charting and self-knowledge itself that improved their cycles and ovulatory function."