Healing Your Cycle From the Inside Out | FAMM Practitioner Series | Carol da Selva (Episode 622)

Full Transcript: Episode 622

Lisa: I’m excited to share today’s episode with you. We have a brand new episode in our FAM Practitioner series, and I am sharing my interview with Carol da Selva. She is one of our FAM Practitioners, towards the end of her program. Today we cover a topic that I haven’t covered as much on the podcast, and it’s the topic of spiritual approaches to menstrual cycle issues. And what’s really interesting about our conversation today is we touch on the limits of some of those things and when we actually need to dive into the peer-reviewed research when we’re not getting the results that we want.

Carol shares her experience as someone with a deep connection to the spiritual side of things who came up against the limitations and was really looking for something deeper, a more reliable way to support her clients. She is the founder of Sacred Womb Rites and the creator of the Womb Awareness Course. She’s helped many women reconnect to their bodies and reclaim the power of their menstrual cycle through spiritual and embodied practices. She bridges ancestral wisdom and scientific knowledge in the hopes of building a culture of deep appreciation and celebration for the female body through her teachings. Let’s go ahead and jump into today’s episode with Carol.

I’m so excited to be here today with Carol. Welcome to the show.

Carol: Thank you. I’m excited to be here.

Lisa: Well, I’m excited to have you. I would love to start — I’ve shared a little bit in the bio about your background, but I’d love to give you an opportunity to share a little bit about yourself. And of course, my absolute favorite question on these episodes is — tell us about your first period and your journey into menstruation and ultimately what led you into the field that you’re in now and what inspired you to jump into the whole fertility awareness world.

Carol: I’m happy to share. I like to call myself now a menstrual cycle oracle, which is a mix of everything that I’ve been doing so far, trying to bridge science and spirituality and working with fertility awareness as a fertility awareness educator. My mission is to really awaken this wisdom of the female power that comes from the womb itself — feeling safe in our bodies, educating women about their bodies, helping them achieve their goals.

I also started to get interested in birth work. I trained as a doula. I studied a little bit of midwifery — that’s on hold now because I think I want to pursue that path when I’m in my 40s, 50s, when I have enough time and my kids are all grown. Right now I really want to focus on this educational piece, helping women with their cycles and their womb initiations.

I think I was nine, almost ten when I got my first period. I was on the early side. I remember my mom just being super happy, going downstairs, telling my dad. But that was it. There was no guidance through it. There was not really an initiation. It was just like, yeah, this is what happens with your body. And now it’s going to happen every month — which it didn’t, because then I didn’t have my period for several months. It only became kind of regular when I was around 13.

I was in this mix of grief and joy because I was happy to get my period. My best friends were older than me, so they already had their periods, and it made me feel special. But at the same time, I was like, I’m never going back to being a child. There was this interesting mix of grief and joy, and not being able to integrate those two parts.

When I was around 12, 13, that’s when the heavy periods, the extremely painful period cramps came through, and very irregular cycles. I also didn’t have anyone to walk me through that or really support my body. I was just eating the standard Brazilian diet — pretty much the same as the standard American diet — all the processed foods, all the sugar, not really paying attention to what my body really needed.

Eventually I found some ways through spiritual practice to bring back some harmony. But it was really when I found out about fertility awareness and started going into the physical stuff that it made a difference. That’s why I was so drawn to your program, because you really give us those tools of supporting the physical body. You can’t meditate your way out of everything. You can sit there and meditate for ten days and work through all your trauma, but you could also just get some vitamin D or eat some liver. And that’s how I got into this work.

Lisa: That’s amazing. Thank you for sharing. It’s interesting — I’ve interviewed many women over the years, several who had their first period at nine or ten, but it’s obviously not as common. It’s quite young. In your case, most of your friends were older than you and had already had their periods. You were kind of already waiting for it, which is so interesting at nine.

You may be the first person I’ve spoken to who had an early period but also had that kind of knowing about it. For many women I’ve spoken to who had their period on the younger side, it was the opposite — they didn’t even know about periods, so some of them experienced it as very traumatic because they literally thought they were dying. No one had told them. Do you want to talk a little more about that?

Carol: My mom was always very open about it. I would see her changing her pads and she would give me one just to put on white panties. She kind of told me what was going to happen — this is what happens when you become a woman, there’s this blood that comes every month. But there wasn’t necessarily a positive view on it. She also struggled with period cramps, and she was my only adult woman around. I didn’t have aunts or older sisters that could walk me through it.

My main references were the teen magazines that I started reading way too early — I remember being like seven or eight, reading those things. I think I was mentally prepared, but not maybe emotionally. That’s why I still held that grief within me. I wanted to be a child for as long as I could. But then I saw my friends going through that passage, and for them it was kind of the right time because they were already 11, 12.

I did have this curiosity and this feeling of — everything’s okay because this is what happens to women. But then, what else comes with it? I had no idea I would also have fury cramps like my mom did, or what to do to support myself through that. She didn’t know either. She suffered when I suffered. She felt guilty because she passed down her genes to me. She didn’t know that I needed to eat protein. She just fed us chicken nuggets and that’s okay. It was a mix of being in this limbo.

Lisa: I feel like you articulated an interesting dynamic — how we think about our periods and how we relate to coming into being a woman, both the spiritual aspect of what it means and the physical aspect of dealing with what’s actually happening in the body — inflammation, pain.

You said something really interesting: you can’t out-meditate this stuff. I relate to that. I remember reading all these books in my twenties where women would write that they meditated through their inner trauma and then never had another painful period. As someone who struggled with period pain for many years, it was just like — that’s nice for you, but this is a real thing. Not to say that going through your trauma isn’t real, but for many of us, it’s more than just a feeling.

You mentioned that you got a handle on that spiritual aspect, but it didn’t really help with your pain. Do you want to talk a little more about that?

Carol: There’s a story I share — I remember being in my teenage bedroom, just wailing, lying on the floor with pain, asking why are you doing this to me, you’re literally trying to kill me. And then I heard this voice. I’ve always been more clairaudient, so I can hear messages. I started talking to this voice, and it started to show me all of the trauma, all of the things that were held there — not just mine, but generational things. The pain that my mom felt, my birth trauma, the way that I was born was very traumatic. All the things that my maternal lineage had gone through.

At the time, I didn’t know any better. I didn’t have any tools to support my physical body. I just had painkillers, and I knew I always had to keep them in my purse because I also didn’t know when my period was going to come — my cycles were totally irregular.

But then eventually, with supporting my body with more regular eating, three meals a day, the foundational factors that we talk about — that is what eventually made the change. Although I know there’s still the energetic aspect that I need to work on, mostly what my body needs is to eat three meals a day, to take care of my blood sugar, to make sure that I remove the inflammatory foods in the weeks leading up to my menstruation.

There is a way to heal the body through the soul, through the energetic aspects, but there’s also a way to heal the soul through the body. You can’t sit and meditate all day when you are in pain. You can get really good insight about what probably is causing that on an energetic level, but you can also use physical things to heal the physical problem.

Lisa: Share a little bit then about your journey with your pain and with charting and getting into the fertility awareness aspect and how that shifted for you. It sounds like you had a bit of a calling around this work from young — quite a bit of insight even at a young age. So I’d like to hear how your personal journey contributed to your professional one.

Carol: I still struggle with the pain. There are a few months where I have no pain at all, and then all of a sudden the next cycle I get pain that I have to take medication for. It’s kind of like a wild card. We’ve worked through all of these things with the process we go through at the FAM program, and I’m doing the things that I can do — some things I’m still working on.

Just expanding my knowledge — for example, now I know I have a very irritating histamine issue, and I know it’s because I’m living in mold. As long as I’m living in a wooden cabin in a damp forest full of mold, my period pain probably will not fully go away. But now I have tools to mitigate these symptoms. I can reduce the high histamine foods from my diet, which also helped me with my ovulation pain — I used one of the protocols from the program to help with that, and it really did improve.

It’s still an environmental factor that I can’t change immediately. I know this is not going to go away until I move out. But just having the knowledge, reading the research, implementing these evidence-based protocols — I remember filling out my intake form and writing that I take vitamin D, although I don’t believe in supplementation. And then I did the protocols, and two or three cycles afterwards, it significantly improved.

If you don’t know that you have an option, then you don’t have an option. If the only thing you know is how to sit and meditate or to work through your trauma — that’s already great, that’s like half of the work. But what about the other half?

I’m now trying homeopathics, and it has worked for the previous cycle. But I know it might go away, and I’ll just have to keep implementing all of the things that I can, maybe getting more testing. It could be an endometriosis issue. It could be so many things. But now I know what the options are and I can take action and strategize. For now, it’s improved, but it’s not fully gone, and I’m going to keep doing what I can.

Lisa: I appreciate you sharing that. Within the FAM program, certainly one aspect of it is that when you jump in, we encourage you to also take yourself through the process that we are teaching our clients. I find it very interesting — the feedback that we get from our practitioners, because they obviously come to the program with a lot of knowledge already. What can happen when we have a lot of knowledge already is that we can get these blind spots. Especially when it comes to period pain.

If you’ve struggled with something personally for quite a long time, you might develop a certain opinion about it — like it can’t get better, or this is just how it is for me. FAM challenges all of our practitioners to look at all of that, because we have plenty of practitioners who have those similar thoughts. One of the benefits is just going into what we think, but diving deep into the research and looking at what clinical trials have been done and what results those things showed. When you see those consistent results in the trials, you’re much more likely to have success when you implement those types of protocols.

Beyond that, going into these processes, many of our practitioners find that things shift. Period pain is an example of that. And also when it comes to the luteal phase length — that is something super interesting. We’ve had a lot of practitioners who have charted for a long time and maybe always have a 10-day or 11-day luteal, and they just feel like this is just how it is. But then they jump into FAM and all of a sudden the luteal is 12, 13 days. They’re doing pregnancy tests on day 13. But really, it’s just because we’ve strengthened that.

In order to be a good practitioner, I think you have to go through it yourself so that you’re not approaching clients with sugar-coated glasses — so that you’re able to be objective and not thinking, well, I had this experience and it doesn’t change, therefore my clients who have this experience, it might not change either. We have to get to a place where we can be objective and apply the protocols based on what the research has to say, for ourselves and our clients.

Carol: We’re all resistant to change. And I think focusing only on the spiritual for me was a way of dissociating from my body. The more that I support my physical body, the more I can have clarity in the spiritual sense. I thought I was always this ethereal person who is more easily going to other realms than being in the physical world. But it’s just because I wasn’t eating enough. I was a vegetarian since I was 16. The years before that, I was eating who knows what. Was I this ethereal and spiritual because this is just my nature and I have a superpower? Or can we be real here and say that I was just dissociating from my body? I didn’t have the energy to do other things other than being in another realm.

When someone else comes in and walks you through that process — no, let’s look at this first, follow this protocol — and when they start seeing the results, they’re like, oh, yeah, I guess this works. And then that resistance is gone because they’re actually seeing the results in a very short period of time.

The luteal phase thing that you mentioned — that happened to me last cycle. I actually took a pregnancy test because apparently I’m having a 15-day luteal phase now. I was scared. I looked at my chart and I was like, I think I did all the things correctly. But yeah, it was after cycle seven and eight — maybe five or six months of implementing this change, which is what you estimate, right? Within six months you’ll start seeing significant change. And that’s exactly what happened to me.

Lisa: That’s amazing. And I didn’t know that — I just said it because it’s one of those really common things. In our last groups it was almost like a running joke, because every time we would have our hot seats, this would be the topic.

You said a couple of things I just want to talk about as well. When we are in the fertility awareness community, there are so many different ways to address the menstrual cycle. There are plenty of women who work within the menstrual cycle field who have taken the approach of womb healing and cycle alignment with the moon and all of that. And I think it’s great.

Even in The Fifth Vital Sign, I shared some research around this practice of sleeping in the dark except around mid-cycle, where you put on the lights at night — and there’s actual research on how that can help to reset your cycle. So there are a lot of really interesting aspects to it. But I’ve certainly taken a stand — anyone who listens to the podcast knows I’ve chosen to focus more on the science. Part of the reason is that when you’re working with a high volume of clients, you want to help them achieve consistent results. When you found your protocols on science, you are more likely to have that consistent result.

What was interesting was that you wrote on your intake form that you take vitamin D, although you don’t believe in supplementation. That’s a part of this world. And our practitioners also find when they start doing their practicums that they will have clients who are kind of over it and often a little bit distrusting — especially period pain clients. They’ve tried all kinds of stuff. They’ve kind of decided already that it doesn’t do anything. So they’re sometimes not really willing to try it.

What you said about focusing on the spiritual being a way of dissociating from your body — I thought that was really interesting. And I would say that’s one of the reasons why I like to focus on what the research has to say. What can happen is that you can get into all of these things and try all these things, but you’re not necessarily getting predictable, sustainable results.

Carol: You can heal the soul through the body and you can heal the body through the soul — but you can do both at the same time. That’s the point. You don’t have to say all this stuff is woo woo. It might help someone to reach some insight. And you don’t necessarily need to say, I don’t believe in science because it’s all funded by the pharmaceutical industry. Just try it.

What we’re creating through tracking your food intake and taking care of your body is true connection to the body. The way you connect to the physical body is through the physical world. The reason why we’re here in this physical body is to experience the physical world, and the way you experience that is by eating, sleeping, and moving. Please do meditate — it’s great for your soul and probably for your body as well, as the science shows. But please also eat and sleep and move and do the things that the body wants.

I received tremendous insight from all of these years exploring these ancestral ways of connecting to nature’s cycle and realizing that we follow the same energetic pathways. But at the end of the day, you still need to eat your 90 grams of protein and you still need to sleep your seven hours a day. I like to do both now. I think I found my balance in trying to unify those two fields, and that’s what’s working for me.

Lisa: This conversation is super fascinating to me. I really like what you said — both aspects are important. From a very practical standpoint, this is why I love having the menstrual cycle as the barometer for what’s going on. You’ve got data — where you started, what is happening during those stages, and where you’re at now. It’s not a finite thing. We’re always moving to the next cycle and it doesn’t guarantee forward motion. When you do the things, you see the results. But when you don’t do the things, you see different changes.

If you are really struggling emotionally, it’s probably going to help you to actually look at what’s happening in your physical body and support the processes you need in order to produce sufficient hormones, to encourage blood sugar stability, and to acknowledge if you have nutrient deficiencies. You can do a lot less if your iron is in the ground, if your thyroid is totally off, if your blood sugar is always up and down, if you can barely make enough progesterone to have a decent length luteal phase.

There is a lot of value in appreciating and studying and learning about the physical body, learning about the foundational factors and the foundational nutrition aspects and all of these different things. Once you can strengthen your physical body and get it working a little bit better, we start to see the results in the menstrual cycle. I feel like that gives you more strength to be able to then address the emotional. So I agree with you — we shouldn’t be focusing on only one or the other. We should be focusing on both.

Carol: For example, when I was still a vegetarian, my cycles would be in the 35 to 45-day range. It would take really long to ovulate. I have no clue how long my luteal phase was, but probably very short because I was not eating enough. I was a single mom. I was stressed.

And then I learned all this stuff about how to sync your cycles to the moon. At the time it was like, okay, now my cycle is just syncing to this phase of the moon. This is the message that it’s bringing. Great. I know how to navigate the energetics of it. But still having 35 to 45-day cycles is not normal. What’s going on with the body? Why am I not looking at that piece? It’s important to know what’s within the range of normal and to really give the body what it needs.

Lisa: I feel like we’ve had a number of practitioners from various different disciplines, and I have heard that before — practitioners come to FAM because they want to ground what they have already started in their different practices with the science. They want to marry them so that they can feel more confident. It really comes down to having the ability to have standardized protocols so that you can have somewhat predictable results with your clients. You feel a lot more confident when you actually have a process that you can rely on.

Now that you’re at this stage — I love that this conversation took such an unexpected turn, and I feel like our audience is really going to appreciate it. What are your plans, and how do you plan to incorporate the spiritual aspect with what you’ve learned? How is your practice potentially changing now that you’ve jumped into the FAM program?

Carol: I still have my online Womb Awareness Course, which is where I teach all of this stuff. I still stand by it. There are three pillars. There’s womb communication, where you really learn to connect intuitively to your womb. Then there’s the innate womb wisdom, where we explore more of the cultural and the ancient womb cosmology and realize how we got to this state where the period is something to be ashamed of. And then we get into the womb sovereignty part, which is where I was teaching Taking Charge of Your Fertility, just as an introduction, because that’s how I started tracking my cycles after reading that book.

I still have that available for people who want to understand more about those energetic and spiritual aspects. But from the womb sovereignty, I want to create another program that also includes ceremony, awakening the archetypes and the seasons and the elements and all this spiritual stuff that I love. I love holding ceremony. I love having a sharing circle where women can just witness each other and see each other grow. I feel this brings so much healing from this lack of belonging that we feel nowadays — we don’t have our rites of passage anymore, we don’t have the community, the sisterhood of women that we all long for.

From that, I do want to focus on the physical. We start with the physical, but we also integrate some of the ceremony and the energetics and the spiritual, because then we are supported both emotionally and spiritually while also doing the things that the body needs to heal.

Lisa: I love seeing how you’re able to integrate them. For a lot of our listeners who have dove into our FAM Practitioner series, many are considering if this would be something that would potentially help their practice or elevate it or shift the way that they’re working with clients. I’d love to hear your thoughts for someone who is considering it and wondering what it might add to their practice.

Carol: I think it’s very clear from everything we’ve shared so far. What made me step into the program was — if I feel this calling, if I’m interested in this subject, if I’m already reading all the books, listening to all the podcasts and trying to apply this method by myself, then why am I not fully taking responsibility in sharing this with other women and teaching other women, and taking it really seriously?

The real question that pushed me into this work is — what do I want the world to be like for the future women, for my daughters, my nieces, my granddaughters in the next 20, 30 years? Because as you always say, the studies show that it takes around 20 years for conventional medicine to start applying the research. It takes generations of women teaching each other and building this new paradigm to reach a critical mass. I felt the calling. And if you feel the calling, if you’re already seeing clients, then how wonderful would it be for them to learn from you and to at least know that they have other options?

What really sealed the deal for me was the research series podcast. In college I also did some research and I was really into going through the papers, reading, writing my own papers. I was blown away by the clarity that Lisa brings in her interpretations of the studies, how she breaks everything down, the critical thinking behind it. And you deliver all of that in the program and much more — you also go into the human aspects of relating with the client, helping them achieve their goals, learning how to coach them, take them through a process, and actually see the results in real time.

I’m also learning how to build my business and give my messaging in a way that is going to attract the right people. I know it’s not the focus of the program, but there are some really great trainings in there with the guest speakers. It’s the whole deal. It really changed the way that I approach my cycles and the way that I want to move forward with my work.

Lisa: That’s amazing, Carol. Thank you for sharing. It’s sometimes hard to convey all the different things. My team behind the scenes — we are constantly updating curriculum and doing all of this other stuff that you don’t necessarily see on social media and don’t necessarily hear on the podcast. So I appreciate you sharing some insights into how deep we go in the program. Fertility awareness obviously has to be the main focus, but we do have business building trainings and all kinds of other things. Because at the end of the day, when you are trying to integrate this into your practice and find the right clients, you do have to talk about marketing. But you also need a really solid foundation on the science in order to feel confident about what you’re offering.

I would love to invite you to share a little bit about what you do and where our listeners can find you for more information.

Carol: Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure being here and encouraging other women to take this big step. Right now I’m not so active on social media, but you can follow me at Sacred Womb Rites — that’s sacredwomb.r-i-t-e-s on Instagram. My website is the same, sacredwombrites. You can find there my Womb Awareness Course and a soon-to-be-released program where I’ll also take one-on-one clients and have the whole ceremony mixed with fertility awareness.

Lisa: Amazing. Carol, thank you so much for being here today. I look forward to seeing you again soon in the program.

I hope that you enjoyed today’s episode with Carol. This was such an interesting conversation diving into the spiritual aspects. Being in the menstrual cycle space, there are a lot of practitioners who heavily focus on that aspect of things. I have chosen a certain path with the teaching and the certification program — we really focus heavily on the science. I’ve had many practitioners come to me who are well-rounded in the spiritual aspect but are really wanting to be rooted and grounded in science so that they can feel confident when making their recommendations.

I’m glad that Carol came on the show and shared her experience and also shared how our Fertility Awareness Mastery Mentorship has helped her to balance the spiritual aspect of things with the scientific approach. Our next class of FAM starts in May of 2026. Make sure to head over to fertilityfriday.com/FAMMLIVE to learn more about the program and to apply to join us in our next round. I hope you have a wonderful week, and as always, until next time, be well and happy charting.