Natalie: Hi everyone. My name is Natalie Ledwell. This is the Inspiration Show and today my special guest is Suzanne McQueen. I would say how are you Suzanne?

Suzanne: I'm good. Thanks Natalie. Thanks for having me this morning.

N: It's an absolute pleasure to have you on the show today because we're talking about understanding ourselves as women and specifically understanding how we work. And I think the information that you're going to be sharing with you today is something that a lot of women will find as God's send and already, after we've spoken a little bit, I've understand a little bit more about myself because of this. So why don't we start first of all with your background and your story and how you got into this kind of work?

S: Well, you know, I'm the most unlikely person to be actually coaching women regarding their female monthly rhythm or their female cycle. I'm just the most unlikely person because our hormones are something, my hormones are something I never, never considered to have anything to do with what made me tick. So I and I think that's because first of all I didn't have a wacky cycle, second of all I didn't like the reputation that women had around it, you know, what society threw it as far as our cycles go, you know, it must be that time of the month or in the United States we can't get a woman into the presidency because you know, she might push the button right before that one week, something crazy like that, I'm just so tired of it. So this is not something that's really my field at all. I happen to be an entrepreneur. I was in business and I ended up in a sort of a funny way of ending up a hair dresser and then owning a couple of salons and then I built the first large day spa here in my area, in Southern Oregon. I had a large staff. I had a staff of 30 women, mainly women. I had a large clientele coming into the spa, mostly women. We had a lot of men as well. So I was just surrounded, I would say I was in the sea of women's rhythms really, and I really enjoyed that. I wasn't really paying attention or identifying anything on the hormones. I'm also past president of woman entrepreneurs of Oregon. I was always an advocate for women's equality and well-being. And I just never, never thought that the female cycle would be a path to me thinking that, that would be our missing link to our women's empowerment. And I was so convinced at this point that I was not being in love by the power moves and understanding this rhythm is the missing link to our empowerment.

N: Right. So what we're talking about here is understanding how our body works - our cycles and rhythms. So what's the importance of knowing this information and how can we use it in our lives?

S: Well the importance of knowing this information is that we've really only been able to tap the science of hormones. What happened for me is that in the late 90s when I had this large staff, I felt that for my business I was good at disseminating information, I felt that I was clear about the vision but I found myself making instances and decisions that no one ever said anything about it, I just found this for myself and it really bothered me and I did the unlikely thing of realizing that may be I need to track my cycle and see if I can find any insight. I'm not even sure why that came to me to do but I did and I track for a couple of months, I didn't do anything that was a big of a deal just wrote down notes, you know, how I was feeling that day. And one day, I went home on a lunch break, standing on my kitchen, eating my sandwich and I was flipping through my day planner at that time, looking at my notes, and the words fall, winter, spring, summer literally floated to the surface (4:08) of my day planner and if I have known in the past, I mean, I've known myself for getting large visions this way. This is just something, this is how my mind process and I think I have an open channel, basically. I saw exactly how the cycle works. I knew exactly what it meant. I decided to pay it forward if you may by planning it out on my day planner myself, like today, let's see, I'm day 17 of my cycle, that means I'm on week three spring and next week I will be in summer, and you know, did that. I did that and discovered in no time that this was an incredibly accurate system. I realized that this was a part that we have never learned which is crucial to understanding how our hormones worked. In other words, mind, body, spirit or science, experience and wisdom, part of our cycle and growing up, most of us, the vast majority of us only learned the science of the hormones. We learned in health class or somewhere along the line about the period or the folecular stage you know, this kind of thing, it doesn't mean anything to our day-to-day lives and how we make decisions and this particular practice or method completely makes it relative and relevant to our day-to-day experience. I can give you some examples of that.

N: Yes. So we're talking about different seasons as part of our cycle, so what's the significance of say summer or spring, so what's the significance of those different seasons?

S: Well, let me start up by telling you how an easy way of how this works, again, this is, we were talking a little before the broadcast about the fact that this is, what's shown basically is an imprint that we have as females of entire life, from the time we're born until the time we die, but this imprint surfaces during our reproductive years to show us the blueprint of how it goes. So what happens is that I take the approximate of 28 days as a very broad template and break it down to 4 guided weeks of 7 days each and each week is a week 1, week 2, week 3, week 4 identifies fall, winter, spring or summer. It also identifies with the moon phases - the new moon, the waxing moon, the full moon and the waning moon. When we look at universal rhythm, when we look at pretty much all the rhythms in the universe, you have a basic structure of a resting phase, a building phase, an expression phase and a deconstructing phase and back to rest. And the female cycle is absolutely no different. So we're all rhythmic beings, we all have a 24-hour circadian rhythm. So we all have a resting phase, which is our sleeping phase at night, we get up in the morning and everything starts to jump into action. All of our organs and everything become to come alive, at some point in the afternoon we peak and at night we wind back down and then we get back to our resting phase again, and we may do this a couple of times a day, but every human, every living thing in the planet has this resting, building, expressing and deconstructing phase depending on the time frame. We can see it when we walk outside with the flowers and that kind of thing. So women happen to also have these 4 phases in a month's time. We have to have that because we're construction zones, we're building a nest, we're building a uterine nest to prepare for pregnancy and if none happens, we deconstruct that nest and that's it, that's basically it. All of this are really very simple when we break it down. But all of those phases affect us differently. No different than that circadian rhythm, that 24-hour period affect us differently. When we're at that resting phase we don't feel like, we want to sleep, we want to rest and it's important that we do, if we don't it messes us up. We all know that, we might get away with 1 night party to good booze, a birthday party or whatever party it is but if I missed two nights of sleep, I'm a wreck for a couple of days. So we have to have the resting phase. We choose different times of the day where coffee might be good and we have other times when we say, no, no, no, no thanks. I don't want any coffee. We understand, we make decisions sort of unconsciously we're not really paying attention that we're rhythmic but we make decisions all day long that are rhythmic. Women have not been taught to make decisions based on their rhythm. All we have learned about our rhythm is negative. It's negative beyond the period. There are all kinds of horrible stuff thrown at us around that and women feel poorly about themselves. They feel bad, they don't even want to talk about it. In workshops, they all have all kinds of sad things to say about it. If we are on the fourth week which is traditionally the PMS time, I get rid of that concept altogether, but if they're in that stage they're considered threatening or considered a bitch or we're considered something really horrible and women are actually very, and you know, this is a secret sadness, a secret embarrassment that women hold and it doesn't matter if they are CEO of a fortune 500 company. Every woman on the planet has a different feeling around this issue that is very difficult to talk about because we haven't been handed anything positive about it. But when we understand this rhythm and how to make decisions throughout the different phases, everything changes, everything changes and we can stand on our core power finally.

N: Yeah, I know that you've done this work since the 90s and you've done this with hundreds of women and with men as well, to help them understand their partners' rhythm and cycle too.

S: That's right.

N: So tell me some stories or some really great examples with the people you've worked with and how this work has really improved their life?

S: Great. You know I was in a, the first thing that comes to mind is that I was in a festival last year doing a workshop, you know, I had a booth with my books and things like that, and I had this one young woman come by the booth while I was there and I was, at that time, I was talking to someone else, and she came over and she was looking at the books and just a matter of minutes she left, and you know, as the person standing there I was thinking, oh that just did not resonate with her, she saw it and just didn't want to have anything to do with that, but I would say that this book is very beautiful too, so usually, somebody will stand there and say, oh it's fully colored, it's color-coded. It has over 60 images in there. So usually even when they're not interested in a topic, they're usually interested in the book but she took off, and so I thought it just did not resonate with her. Well, about 20 minutes later, she came back and she came back with her boyfriend or her husband may be and by that time I finished talking to the other person, and she came right up, she brought him and she wanted to know about it. I must have spoken with them for about an hour, he was very interested, she was very interested. She had some challenges, it was affecting their relationship she felt, really what happens is this, when a man understands the rhythmic sex drive of a woman, everything in their relationship can improve. If he's a cool guy that really cares about her and like if she's interested in really allowing herself to express when it's time to express. If she's really allowing her to rest, when it's time to rest. When she really accepts that she likes variety sexually, women like variety, everything is sexual with women inside and outside the bedroom but it comes in a variety of ways. Just having our feet rubbed can be incredibly sexy, things like that. There are ways that we connect and there are times when we are over the top in our sexuality. When the man actually gets how that works, he understands how that can be successful at supporting her, how he can be successful in their sexual relationship because otherwise, what happens is, let's say he's kissing her shoulders one week and she just loves it and then he kisses her shoulder the following week and she just wants him to get off of her, so he doesn't understand that, he doesn't understand what, it doesn't make any sense and actually she doesn't understand it either. (13:11) she's feeling rejected and you know, and it just is a bad scene. Anyway, it was really great to talk to this couple, they were in their 30s or something, I could see it made a difference, they bought the book, they bought the book set, they were going to track and they were really excited and she looked so thankful, and I've had so many women write to me, I've had them write to me from all over the world saying, oh my gosh, I'm not crazy, I'm really not crazy and I'm just so thankful to have this information, that this is all logical, predictable, supposed to be a wonderful rhythm that now I understand and can get in sync with.

N: Yeah. So with our rhythms, do they change over our lives or do they stay pretty much consistent the whole time?

S: Well, we change all the time depending on, what we can look at is like this, it's basically, I don't think our basic four phases change but within that is our weather patterns, let' just take a look at the four seasons for a second, the four season, we can count on fall, winter, spring and summer, where we live in some version even if you're in southern California or something, you know, I grew up in southern California and I think, where you lived, you know, I can feel the seasons in southern California, even though people say they are numb there. I know when, fall feels very electric, winter has its certain personality but within the seasons there are different weather patterns happening, every day is a little bit different. And so as women, we are the same, we have these 4 seasons within a one month's time, I say but every day is a little bit different depending on the circumstances around us, depending on what's going on with our health, depending on all the circumstances of our lives, so those will always be an influence in our hormones, but basically this is a very predictable rhythm that we have that we can start to really understand and we can actually predict when we might feel depressed or sad, there are times that we start discovering patterns in our own personality. Certainly, over the years as we go on that rhythm starts to change especially in our pre-menopausal, right before our menopause, things can become very wacky but the closer we track, the more we'll see that we're hanging on to a certain pattern and then after menopause that rhythm gets more mellow, but we still have it. If they are cycling women I have them track their menstrual period. If they are non-cycling women, I have them track start tracking on the first day of the new moon.

N: Alright. Awesome. Suzanne I know we just barely scratched the surface and we're running out of time, if people want to find out about you and the work that you do and possibly work with you, where can we send them to find out more?

S: Well, they can go to my website which is a number of ways, one is 4s4w.com or 4seasons4weeks.com. I will be having a 13-week online course beginning May 27th, I would love to have your listeners on there. This is a group-cycle tracking circle, we will do coaching, we will have live calls, live q & a, some guest speakers. Women can track all by themselves just fine. They can get the book, they can track by themselves and I do have a book online that's a must that they must get, there is a daily tracker and journal that they can get and do this by themselves. It is also just supportive and wonderful to do it with a group of women. That's a good way to go.

N: I can just imagine how that will go, it's just like how you were mentioning before how as women we go through a lot of these changes, our body does weird stuff and no one, we never really talked about this with each other. How to silence and to that in a group situation with women so that you know you are not alone and you're not (17:30) and you're not going through these stuff personally, it's basically a lot of women sharing the same experience. So I can imagine that.

S: I never got tired of that. When I'm with groups of women, I just find it to, my heart just expands. I know it's important. The women are just so happy to speak with each other, and to speak with their hearts. It's really lovely work and it's really important.

N: Excellent. Thanks for sharing with us and thanks Suzanne for joining us, I really appreciate your time today.

S: Thank you Natalie so happy to be here, thank you.

N: Now guys, I encourage you to share this video, you can do that by clicking the Facebook and the Tweeter share buttons on this page. I also encourage you to download the app, if you haven't done so already, so you can watch the shows on the go, it's not necessary to be in front of your computer and make sure you put your email on the box on this page as well, so I can send you the manifesting with the masters video e-course. It is actually valued at $87 and I would love to send it to you for free. So until next time remember to live large, choose courageously and love without limits. We'll see you soon.