mission and philosophy

Our Mission

So many menstruators still live genuinely believing something is wrong with them.
Moon Cycle Sanctuary exists to change that.

Moon Cycle Sanctuary’s mission is to provide heart-centered, mindful, and integrative menstrual cycle education that helps menstruators live healthier, more conscious, and more connected lives — in body, mind, heart, and spirit.

The Problem

For most of human history, the menstrual cycle has been silenced, stigmatized, and misunderstood.
Today, many menstruators still lack a clear, lived understanding of how their cycle actually works — and how deeply it shapes everyday experiences: energy, sleep, appetite, emotions, libido, creativity, pain, pleasure, sense of self… and more.

In short, we’ve been taught to override our signals, dismiss our instincts, and power through pain.
This disconnection doesn’t just keep us from ourselves — it keeps us from each other.

The Cost of Disconnection

When we don’t know what’s happening inside us, we can’t meet our needs — physical, emotional, relational, and beyond.

We lose clarity on when to rest, how to move, what to eat, when to speak, or where to say no.
And without that inner knowing, we struggle to express our needs, communicate our limits, or hold others accountable with compassion.

We mold ourselves to meet the world, instead of also asking the world to meet us.

The Relationship

We are not our hormones.
But without a grounded understanding of our body’s rhythms, it’s too easy to mistake normal hormonal shifts for something being fundamentally wrong with us — mentally, emotionally, physically, or spiritually.

Instead of using these cues as vital information, we misread them — and lose the chance to move deeper into alignment, health, and wholeness.

At Moon Cycle Sanctuary, we believe it’s possible to build a different relationship — one rooted in rhythm, choice, and connection, and balanced in both listening and action.

Reclaiming Rhythm, Reclaiming Self

We live in a culture that values the mind and surface-level pleasure above all else: the logical, linear, and instantly gratifying.

But the body — and life itself — is cyclical, fluid, ever-evolving, and moves on its own sense of time.
And true pleasure comes from the kind of presence that’s only possible when you know yourself and treat yourself well.

That’s a lot harder to do when a key piece of the puzzle — your cycle — is missing.

The Cycle as Teacher

The menstrual cycle is the container — and the highlighter — that makes room for both.

It gives us the space to release into the feminine — its depth, wisdom, and wildness — and then pulls us back when it’s time to return to structure and clear action.
And it does this on repeat, until we’re ready to listen.

Because it takes understanding, awareness, and practice to learn how to read its signals — and courage to actually do so.

Walking the... Spiral

This isn’t about choosing one state over the other — but learning to live in the flow between, and to trust the synchronicity and alignment that arise from staying present with the process.

Let’s skip the overcorrection phase — the one where, in reclaiming the feminine, we shut ourselves off from feedback, and forget true power, and belonging, means being able to get it wrong sometimes.

And then leap into the wild joy that arises from embodying this truth — and seeing what comes next.

The Portal

Because the real gift of the menstrual cycle is that it holds both sides: the feminine and the masculine, the up and the down, the internal and the external.

And it shows us that we are powerful and wise and messy and wrong and human and loved — over and over again.

Until it finally sinks in: this is not just a menstrual journey, but fundamental to the human experience.

But not everyone is lucky enough to have a cycle to guide them.
Your cycle is not the problem. It’s the portal.
And Moon Cycle Sanctuary is here to walk it with you — every phase, every time.

The original “surrender and open,” circa 2012, that now serves as the inspiration for the MCC logo and general guiding philosophy

MCC encourages students to explore cycle and self through a variety of techniques including journaling, artwork and music.

Moon Cycle Sanctuary: Coursework & Community

MCC coursework integrates a wide range of disciplines and philosophies to support students in developing a deeper, more balanced, and more nuanced relationship with their menstruating body and self.

You’ll find teachings that draw from neuroscience and mental health, Buddhism and Taoism, fertility awareness and holistic health tracking, psychological frameworks, wilderness education, and the inherent lessons of the natural world.

All of this is framed within a historical and cross-cultural context that helps you understand how broader cultural stories shape your personal ones — and how these forces impact you physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Each course is carefully designed to offer just the right balance of new information, self-inquiry, and group exploration — all with a sense of groundedness, connection, and even fun.

MCC is also a collaborative and community-rooted space. We partner with experts across fields: from ayurvedic and herbal practitioners, to fertility and nutrition coaches, to yoga, research scientists, movement, and dance professionals — as well as farmers, wilderness guides, artists, breathwork teachers, sexuality educators, and more. Whenever possible, courses include a guest expert who brings their own lived wisdom and unique lens to the work.

While our courses are primarily designed for those who currently have, have had, or will have a menstrual cycle, the deeper truths we explore — rhythm, seasonality, rest and action, yin and yang — are woven into all of life. So if you feel called to this work in any role — student, instructor, collaborator — we welcome you.

Professionals:
If your work aligns with MCC’s vision and you’d like to explore becoming part of the teaching community, please contact moon.cycle.sanctuary@gmail.com.

Menstruators:
Explore the course list to find the right entry point for you. If there’s something you’re longing for and not seeing, let us know — we’re always evolving in response to the community.

core values

Moon Cycle Sanctuary seeks to embody and deliver these core values

  • Education and Empowerment

    When we understand how our bodies work, we feel safer and more confident in ourselves. Moon Cycle Sanctuary seeks to provide a foundational education and understanding of the menstrual cycle and how it interacts with our physical, mental, emotional, social, cultural, spiritual (I could go on) selves. The more we know, the more we build trust with ourselves and bring together all these parts to live our most authentic and fulfilled lives.

  • Openness and Curiosity

    How do we apply new knowledge to who we are now while remaining curious and open to the change yet to come? Learning the science of the menstrual cycle is important, but equally so is learning to embody the ebb and flow of the menstrual cycle, and life, with openness and curiosity. Moon Cycle Sanctuary seeks to provide tools and community to support participants in grounding in their knowledge of the now while simultaneously developing a practice of mindful curiosity for all the future cycles of life, one step at a time.

  • Connection, Play and Balance

    Neurologically, we learn best when we feel safe, connected and are having fun. We live best that way too! And yet, as the menstrual cycle teaches us, everything is a balance of ups and downs and ebbs and flows. Moon Cycle Sanctuary seeks to create spaces that encourage learning through play and connection, while also honoring (and not hiding from) the reality of the challenges and inherent pain present in life. Whether daily, menstrually, or throughout the stages of life, we are always cycling. We make these realities sustainable by finding our own balance and connection in it all.

  • Giving and Receiving

    Moon Cycle Sanctuary seeks to create spaces that encourage participants to be open to the many gifts of life that are always available to us through the practice of finding joy, gratitude, and opportunities to give and receive within community.

about me

Hello and welcome!
My name is Rae [or Rae Rose, depending on the day] (she/her), and I am the founder and lead educator at Moon Cycle Sanctuary.

I have been studying the menstrual cycle from a variety of perspectives for over ten years now.

I first became interested in the menstrual cycle in 2012, when I stumbled upon a hormone tracking app one fateful fall evening. Learning that my body was on a monthly hormone cycle that affected every part of me differently at each point in time — not just that I had a period and then it was over (as I’d thought before) — was revolutionary to me.

I was hooked — and started steering every research project I could (I was studying neuroscience at the time) toward menstruation and hormones. I wanted to understand how this constant but unspoken rhythm was shaping my life, and the lives of other menstruators.

I started with the most zoomed-in focus — how menstrual hormones interact with brain structure and psychology — but quickly found myself exploring everything from birth control and hormonal development to pleasure, pain, cultural history, and the cycle’s connection to mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health.

I also began exploring my personal relationship with, and experience of, my cycle. Once I started tracking, it became clear to me it was showing up in — and dominating — so many areas of my life, and had been since its onset.

Gaining this new knowledge was exciting and inspiring, but, at the same time, I was also confused and angry.

Why had this information not been available, or even mentioned (!!!), to me before?

I began to wonder how I might have approached myself differently over the years since I started menstruating if I had known this cycle was present from the start.

This curiosity led me to one of my primary research questions, and motivations for doing the work I do now:

What is the psychological and developmental impact of having a menstrual cycle, but not knowing about it?

As had been true in my life — and is the norm in our modern world.

And on top of that:

What is the impact of having a menstrual cycle, not knowing about it, and living in a culture that — on one end of the spectrum — values the always-perfect, always-productive, linear model of life (aka passively unsupportive of the menstruating body), and — on the other — still holds and communicates deeply rooted messages of shame and stigma to people with menstruating bodies?

In addition to wanting information on my cycle, I found myself craving:

  • a teacher or mentor to guide me,

  • and a community in which to explore my cycle and self more deeply.

Where were the experts on the menstrual cycle and the female body?
— I couldn’t find any.
And I could feel, deep in my bones and body, that this was something that was needed — for myself and for other menstruators as well.

Over the years, I have come to believe — through my personal practice, academic research, and professional work with other menstruators and in other areas — that these pieces:

  • the reality of having a menstrual cycle in combination with not knowing it exists,

  • and the presence or lack of a menstruation community —

are hugely integral pieces of the puzzle, and largely responsible for the majority of menstrual issues (and beyond) that menstruators are facing today.

Life is complex. The body is complex. The human experience is complex.


But over time, I’ve found that with practice, tracking, and a lot of personal work (aka, the cycle alone is not the soul answer — it is the guide), there is a simplicity underneath it all.

And, as much as our Western culture would like it to be, life — and especially a meaningful one — is most often not about having the right answer.

It’s about engaging with the questions and the process in a way that feels authentic and sustainable — and allowing our paths to unfold along the way.

So, while I cannot claim to have clear answers to all the questions I have explored around the menstrual cycle, I can say — both as a menstrual cycle educator and menstruator myself — that the act of asking the questions, and the process of tracking and observing, are transformative.

And I am so excited to bring this work into community with all of you.

~~~

Beyond my ever-present obsession with the menstrual cycle and its intersection with just about every part of our lives, my education and professional experience land primarily in the fields of:

  • somatic and depth psychology, neuroscience, mental health

  • spirituality, sacred sexuality

  • outdoor and wilderness education and leadership,

  • and small-scale farming/agriculture.

I am passionate about education as a tool for empowerment, and believe that delivering educational content that is relevant, engaging, and meaningful is equally as important as delivering well-sourced and accurate information.

I also love music, singing, art, dancing, and all things expressive and flowy in the world — and actively seek to incorporate all my areas of expertise and exploration into my work.

If you have any questions about my personal story or professional background, please don’t hesitate to reach out:
📧 mooncyclesanctuary@gmail.com
or fill out a connect form on the website.