Christine Marie Quigless [00:00:00]:
I had had multiple surgeries, been on every kind of pill you can have, and would walk around with a heating pad and nausea. And I was just a mess. Birth control is one of the biggest mistakes because it is not. It is for birth control, but it is not for the other things that doctors keep prescribing it for. When we just be, then we actually gain energy in our being and we're actually doing a lot. I have seen a snap to within two weeks. I've seen people where when the period does come, it comes with no cramps, even in just two weeks.
Mike Koenigs [00:00:37]:
Well, welcome to the big lead podcast. We have something very different today, and it's all about ending period pain the easy way with Christine Marie Quiglis and what I would say every man, every woman at some point in time in their lives has to deal with this particular issue. And Christine has a very interesting and unique way of putting things together, and she creates this beautiful metaphor about the human body being a 3d printer in a multitude of ways. So you're going to enjoy this podcast. I learned a lot today, and you're going to get turned on by her fire and her passion, even if this isn't your topic.
Gay Hendricks [00:01:19]:
Gay? Yes. Well, I think it is everybody's topic because everybody is going to have a chance to interact with women and period pain and solutions to that in their life. And I have really valued my connection with Christine Marie because she's opened up a whole new area of knowledge and insight for me. And you'll hear more on the podcast. But we felt so strongly about her work that we gave her a grant from our foundation. So we're very eager also to hear how she's developed it. And so come along with us on a ride into an interesting territory that you may not have thought too much about.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:02:05]:
I am so amazed that we did this because I had no idea what was going to come out. Every podcast I've heard is entirely different, and it flows so organically, and I just was on tender hooks about what am I going to say? What am I going to do? And I'm really happy with the result. This is a ride. This is a ride.
Mike Koenigs [00:02:37]:
All right, well, here's what you're going to walk away with. What's great about this particular podcast is Christine's got a very unique point of view. You're going to learn a lot about her work, but you're also going to learn a really great story about why she's here and how she managed to get here in the first place and how manifestation and making dreams come true and the elements of great luck all coalesce all at the same time. So you're going to love this episode. You're going to love Christine and gay. And I have some fantastic questions for her. So enjoy.
Gay Hendricks [00:03:20]:
Welcome to our podcast. We have an amazing young woman today on the podcast that I began to follow her work a while back, and now I've become a huge fan of it. And, Mike, you and I are going to get to have a conversation that two guys don't often have today. And that is a conversation about Christine Marie Quiglus's work on helping women basically have a better time with their periods. Lessen PMS, pain, and you'll hear more about it. But I got very excited about the possibilities of her work, not just for women, but also a lot of the principles have to do a lot with what we men can learn from that. So, Mike, are you ready to have some new synapses come to life about women and their periods today?
Mike Koenigs [00:04:18]:
I love uncomfortable conversations. And one thing that this is the conversation every man has and needs to have, but doesn't admit to or doesn't talk about in general. So I'm 100% on board, and I can't wait to hear what some interesting insights that Christine may have. So take it away. What are your top questions? And I've already got a bunch of them.
Gay Hendricks [00:04:43]:
Okay, good. Well, Christine Marie, how about just start from the basics? How did you get interested in this kind of a subject?
Christine Marie Quigless [00:04:55]:
Okay, well, it's really cool what happened. Something that you talk about a lot in conscious luck is how lucky we are if we just decide to be. And I was in 6th grade, and I failed. And Sister Rose sat with my parents and said she has to repeat 6th grade. And my Mother said, I need a second opinion. And she said, whatever happens, she cannot go to 7th grade at this school. So they got a second opinion. It turned out that I had a high iq, and they put me in a different school system.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:05:29]:
And I thought the psychologist was lying. We were at Carolina in Chapel hill, and I knew he was lying. I just had a fun time playing some word games and stuff. And then suddenly I qualified for this crazy program that was academically competitive. And I said to myself, wait, I'm stupid. I know that I'm stupid. I know the mental has nothing for me. And from then on, I started hacking academic situations, hacking any situation.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:05:58]:
So I would look at the system, and then I would look at the easiest way to get the goal, to get the a, to get on the teacher's good side to win the classroom. I was always looking at the system and looking at how to beat it with ease and without the mind. Cut to 20 years later, and I have created a life of hacking. And so I'm sitting across from a student. I had hacked a solution for standardized exams for the act, sat GrE, and GMAT. And I'm sitting across from the student, and I look at her face and she's cramping. And I say to her, and I should mention that since the first year I got my period, I was in pain. I was having crazy pms.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:06:42]:
I had had multiple surgeries, been on every kind of pill you can have, and would walk around with a heating pad and nausea, and I was just a mess. And so I had experienced firsthand how bad it can be, and I'd gotten multiple diagnoses for my imbalances, and so I was at a loss. But I would look every month, I would look at the research. I would read all the books. I would find out, has somebody found a solution? And the answer was always no. And so I'm sitting with this student, and I look at her face, and I say, you're cramping. And she goes, yeah, I am. I'm looking at it through the computer, and I say, you're cramping.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:07:23]:
And she goes, yeah. And she said, but I'm about to go on the pill, and then I won't have cramps anymore. And everything that I had been through and lived through, I was like, she thinks that the birth control pill is going to solve her problem, and it's just the beginning of more problems, because from my experience. And I said to her, I wish I had a solution. And then suddenly, download all the learning I had done, all the work I had done, hoping in earnest that somebody else had figured it out. I was like, wait, I'm a hacker. I hack systems. I got this.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:08:04]:
And I said to her, will you wait? Will you try something with me? I've got an idea. And she was like, I got nothing to lose, so I'll try it. She never went on birth control. I tried it with another student. She had cramps. She went off birth control. I tried it with her. Never went back on birth control.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:08:23]:
For birth control. Love you. Thank you. Birth control. To control something that is not what it's made for. Let's just put it like this in AI. If you put biggest mistakes in medical history per decade, because I had to do this. When I was trying to research a paper I was writing, birth control is one of the biggest mistakes because it is for birth control, but it is not for the other things that doctors keep prescribing it for.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:08:48]:
And so then I was number three. I tested myself and I had made other solutions for problems. Like for sat, for tutoring, for dresses. There's a problem, I solve it. But I never thought that I was allowed to benefit from the solutions I created. So I thought, I will not win with this because I am doomed for life not to have pain free, PMS free and consistent cycles. And I tested it and it worked. And I sobbed for about a week and a half because I had never known what it was like to have nothing, to have no pain, to have no reactions, to have no velociraptor coming out of me, taking over me.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:09:41]:
And I did not trust it. And every solution I've created, I have courses online of all the different things that I've made were pragmatically created, which means I don't trust theory. I never have, I don't trust the mental. So I would test and test and test, and then once I would get my solution, I would say, okay, how easy can I make it? How easy can I make it? How easy can I make it? And that's what I set out to do. And I've been doing that now for three years. That's the.
Gay Hendricks [00:10:13]:
Wanted to. We'll tell you more about this later. But Christine Marie has a new book, ebook and an audiobook that you can get that describes the program in detail. And I also want to let you know that this is all still a work in progress. You're a very young researcher. I can't imagine if we're having this conversation ten years from now what you will have amassed and been able to digest and put to use. Just to summarize it, you basically hacked your own period pain and eliminated it. That's a really good thing to know because one of the things that always comes up when somebody suggests a new method of healing is, do you use this on yourself? And I know, I'm proud to say that I use all of our principles in my relationship and in my life, and it sounds like you definitely do.
Gay Hendricks [00:11:19]:
If you found a way to reduce or eliminate the difficulties with PMS.
Mike Koenigs [00:11:26]:
Two quick questions. One, just a statement. I looked this up while you were chatting because you just talked about know you always found workarounds and shortcuts. And I bumped into a quote this last week. It was Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger during their Berkshire Hathaway meetings, always talked about something they call rational laziness. And the belief is that rationally lazy people are going to find shortcuts and smarter solutions to problems. And really, it's all about how lazy people often find efficient ways to complete tasks and avoid unnecessary work. And you and I are very similar that way.
Mike Koenigs [00:12:05]:
I've never really done anything if I could find a shortcut, outsource it, or manipulate a situation so I didn't have to do. You know, I always look for people who think like that, so I appreciate that very much. But the question I had was, how did you and gay and Katie, originally, the. Because it's always going to be something you were attracted to, the values or something happened, either a shift in consciousness, a shift in desire. Know, interesting people usually find each other through books, but what was yours?
Gay Hendricks [00:12:42]:
I can't remember, actually. And I have a hard time ever remembering how I met anybody. And I'm going to have to throw it over to Christine Marie for this one. Do you remember how we met?
Christine Marie Quigless [00:12:55]:
Oh, my gosh. It's one of my best stories. It's one of my favorite things. I love talking about it. Yeah. So there's parts of it that you don't know that I didn't tell you that I'll tell you now. So this goes really well because your podcast with the. You guys did an interview with the guy about luck two weeks ago, and one of the things he said, stuart Lacey, he know, one of the easiest ways to access luck is as soon as I heard that, I was like, ding, ding, ding.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:13:33]:
That's how I met gay. What happened is I was part of this. I really wanted to do entrepreneurship, right? I had had three. I'd had two prior failed businesses because I couldn't get over. There was a hump, there was always a wall I would hit, and I couldn't get past it. So I spent a lot of money on this networking program, and I did not like the program. I didn't like it at all. But they mentioned the book in an aside.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:13:59]:
It was an aside in the middle of another course that wasn't even pushed in the program, but I was watching it, I was doing it. And she just know, read gay Hendrix, the big leap when you have a chance. And then she went on to the next thing. And I'm one of those people. When I read a page, I read the footnotes, and then I go in and, like, dig in and dig in and dig in because the raw materials hit a different know. And so I read gay Hendrick's book, and before I could finish podcast. I recorded a YouTube video about it, about how women's menstrual imbalance is upper limiting. And I was, like, shaken to the core.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:14:46]:
And I wrote an email to the Hendrix foundation, and I said, this is exactly what your book is, exactly highlighting what I see women are suffering from. But I had gone through one of the darkest periods in this entrepreneurial journey because people in my niche had been telling me that they were laughing me out of the room. They were telling me what I was doing was impossible. Doctors were saying, you cannot stay, eliminate. You cannot. Even though I had walked people through my data, through my process, they were like, they still couldn't wrap their brains around it because it's learned helplessness. You can't see what you've never seen before. Like the Native Americans encountering the large ships.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:15:40]:
There's a story from, I think, belas Casas, where he says they couldn't see the boat because they couldn't fathom it. So they were watching the water waves, and they noticed that something had to be pushing so large to make the waves that big. And it was only from working backwards that they could really finally see the thing that they had never seen before. And that's kind of what, when you say to somebody, I can endure period pain, I can endure cramps. That is, it's. So anyways, I was like, how did you do it? How did you get people to listen to you? Because I want people to hear me, and it is breaking my heart that I can't be heard. And I said, I go to Ohio all the time. It does happen that one of my best friends lives in Ohio, and I lived in LA for 13 years.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:16:33]:
And so I was like, I'm in Ohio all the time. La, la, la. I was in Germany, and I was like, I can be there whenever you want. And a gay eventually got in touch. You guys wrote back, and you said, when are you around? And I just chose a date. And you were like, okay, great, here's a day. I mean, I said, here's a window. And you guys said, here's a day.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:16:54]:
And 09:00 a.m. On a Monday morning, February 27, I rolled up to your house, and we met, and I was late, and I upper limited. I was late, and I had this giant breakdown where I started sobbing right when I sat down across from gay because the energy that emanates from his heart just cracked me open. And he had a limited schedule, as usual, and so just one thing to the next. And so I knew I didn't have time to cry, so I immediately started pitching through my tears and the rest is history.
Gay Hendricks [00:17:42]:
And I suggested that Christine Marie apply to our foundation for conscious living for a grant to further her work. And it's all come true. One thing I love to do is see the outcome of the grants. We so, you know, to have it show up out there in the world as a little book that people can read and an audio that people can listen to and presentations like we're doing here that people can listen to. This is kind of what our foundation dreams of. And we love to support folks like Christine Marie because she has a drive and a passion, and that's what we like to reward in the world. The world is full of ideas, but good ideas that have passionate people behind them. That's a kind of a rare thing, and that's what we look for to give our grants to.
Gay Hendricks [00:18:38]:
So I'm really grateful and I want to dive into what some of the principles are. Could you give us an example of. Yeah, just spell out a few of the principles and then we'll talk about how those become practical in a coaching relationship.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:18:57]:
Absolutely. Yeah. Actually, my sister in law, who's also obsessed with you, my whole family is now everybody's got your book in their house.
Gay Hendricks [00:19:07]:
Okay, great.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:19:08]:
If they didn't, they have it now. But it's my sister who's the Stanford and she's up in the Bay area. And my sister in law said to me, I did not think that your work applied to me except that my mom was like, christine Marie's work is exactly what your problem is. I'm not going to go into detail about the issue that was being discussed, but she was like, your branding is so wrong because you say period pain, ending period pain. But it is showing women how to lean into their wholeness, how to tap into their superpower in a way that makes them unstoppable. And so there is a lot of practical use to my stuff. So the biggest one, I would say is that in my research, and then I embodied it, and that's how it became a way to get to pain free pms, free, consistent menstrual cycles. In my research, I did look into what it meant to be in your feminine energy power.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:20:19]:
I don't like to use terms like divine feminine and divine masculine, because that's another world for me. I'm very in the body, pragmatic kind of thing. And our elements for women, historically, this is in myth, and even today we'll see it by default, is being our power is being. And so our elements are water and earth because they be. We do not say, is it earthy outside? Is the water wet? In contrast, masculine energy is doing, it's sun, it's wind. Is it windy today? Is it sunny outside? And if you just look at that one basic premise that we be, when we just be, then we actually gain energy in our being. And we're actually doing a lot in our being because we are doing a lot of receiving, we're doing a lot of sifting and sorting and fine tuning. And then we shift it over.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:21:22]:
We throw the ball to people born without a uterus. And they do with it. Now, of course, everybody has both feminine energy and masculine energy. It's not people born with or without a uterus. But I've just found that when I had people lean into their innate givens as people born with a uterus and starting with being and starting with accepting that they are enough, which is one of the hardest things, one of the most difficult things for women to do than the women I work with or the people born with the uterus, because I want to be inclusive. When they start to accept that, things start to shift. And we discussed this gay I call the body a 3d printer. The 3d printer of the.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:22:11]:
I look at the holistic being and we have the intuitive body, the physical body, the emotional body, the mental body, and the physical body is a 3d printer for what's going on in the other three intangible bodies. So if you want to hack the body, you treat this. And the most practical way to treat a person who is having period problems, or a person who's having a person born with a uterus, who's having really most problems, burnout, period problems, that kind of thing is to allow them, is to show them how to be. And the first way to do that is by letting them learn. And you guys have discussed this in multiple podcasts on multiple topics, multiple episodes. No is our power word. And so when I start with people, one of the first things we start, we work towards is no, because no takes a long time. And so that's one of the first principles is leaning into your getting aware of and then being willing to be with your superpowers, your innate givens, and starting with no practicing, no.
Gay Hendricks [00:23:26]:
What would your approach be? Let's say if I were a woman and I called you for some coaching, and I was right in the middle of having some cramping, what would you do in that situation with the person? What would you say to them? What would you have them actually do. Could you give us an example?
Christine Marie Quigless [00:23:46]:
Sure. So to relieve the cramps immediately, we would do what is always done. Heating pad, ibuprofen. Those are the go to, or paracetamol if you're on the other side of the pond, those are the go to that's going to give you short term relief. What I wouldn't do is tell them to go work out, which a lot of doctors do, because that short term gain is going to lead to long term pain, because they're literally stripping their body of the resources that are supposed to be used for restoration, because that's what's happening in your body is it's pushing out what no longer serves. It's pushing out the uterine lining and the lining of the uterus, and it's also restoring within. So our appetite is very low, our energy is very low. Our body set us up for that because it expects that we're going to accommodate that.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:24:43]:
So I would immediately have them resting, not having them eat a lot, because, again, that's pulling food, is pulling resources that need to be taken care of, rebuilding these different processes and these different functions that have been working for 28 days prior. And if you have cramps, it's because you have probably been stripping your body systematically for a very long time. And so I would just say for the first three days, rest as much as you can. You will be surprised how much rest your body will accommodate, especially if you're cramping and especially if you've never rested. The threshold that we have as a society for rest is dangerously high, and we are operating in hyperburnout. And I have seen a snap to within two weeks. I've seen people where, I've had clients where their crazy periods that they're getting every two weeks, not only when the period does come, it comes with no cramps, even in just two weeks of just telling them, radical rest, go to sleep, take a nap, find the time. I even made a course just about how to assert yourself so that you can create time for rest in your life, because rest is that powerful.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:26:07]:
So I would tell them to take those things to rest, and then once they were ready, and once they were in the next phase after their period, I would have them start my course because it's ten minutes a day and it passively informs them of a lot of knowledge, so that the information is absorbed, because I'm always going to lean into our superpower and we actually absorb knowledge. We're not micro tasking. I mean, we're not multitasking. We're micro tasking and it comes over us like a world. And it absorbs and then the information percolates, it roots and then it blooms as this inner knowing. And we're willing to follow that. We'll follow that much more powerfully than we'll follow a list. A list is an opportunity for failure, for people who are trying to lean into their feminine energy being.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:26:57]:
And I offer this to men as well, who want to get into their bodies, lean into that trust that the right knowledge will be there for you. It's terrifying and beautiful. It's like skiing a new slope and you don't know what's going to happen, but you know how to know and you practice that. So I would do that. And if they were working with me, then we would definitely be. I'm certified with pure life coaching from ICF. And so that's the client as the leader. And so we would ask the question.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:27:28]:
We might ask a question like, what are these cramps wishing to address? What is the body printing for me? What is the body saying? Is the distress, the disease? That if I get this out of the way, a lot of relief can exist in my being, in my life. And we will, and I've done it many times, we will get to the root in about 2030 minutes. And that's something that pure life coaching question and they're guiding their we're feeling our way into it and we get there and that will help offload so that when they go around their next 28 days, they have a lot less to expel. And the less you have to express, the fewer cramps. I know it sounds way too simple, and I am simplifying it a lot, but this is in the book. It's all there, the science is all there to back up exactly what I am talking about and why this is possible. Does that answer your question?
Gay Hendricks [00:28:29]:
Yes. Good. Thank you. I'm enjoying this. Mike, did you have things.
Mike Koenigs [00:28:35]:
I do have a question. So you talk quite a bit about the science and your past clients. And I'm just curious, aside from living through this yourself and witnessing it once you talk a little bit about the science that you did, the research that you did, beyond the psychology, and I like the 3d printer analogy. I think that's a powerful metaphor. And it's smart. It's really a projection. It's a combination of all these things projected. But tell me a little bit about the research behind this and what you've done, because obviously we've come so far and yet we're so far away with combining all these.
Mike Koenigs [00:29:18]:
So talk a little bit about that.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:29:21]:
I'm really glad you brought that up, because it's super interesting. So I got to the solution with zero science. I don't have MD in my background. I didn't major in biology. I went to a school that we didn't even have core curriculum requirements. We just had to have writing. So I didn't even take a science class in university. The body life.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:29:42]:
It's Occam's razor. The simple solution is usually the best one. The body very clearly tells us what it needs. And so when I looked at the womb as something that's not broken, as something that's absolutely perfect, instead of trying to adjust ourselves to meet the needs that are created by people whose bodies reset in a 24 hours hormonal cycle, I started looking at it as, whoa, back that up. We have a lot more going on. This is a protracted timeline, and there's a lot that we can do. I'm going to touch lightly on, like, that's where I came from. I got the solution.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:30:24]:
I found the science to back it up afterwards. I did not start with science, and I think that is why doctors can't get behind the idea of there possibly being a cure, because something that's medically proven has to involve a physical intervention and has to be created by somebody. And we didn't create this. We're just following directions with the womb. The science that I found when I was challenged to find it, thank God, because of my assignment from gay, the science that I found was that we have this relay in our brain, the ovarian relay, the pituitary relay, for people born without a uterus. And it is constantly collecting, like, imagine like a ball boy at a tennis court, just constantly collecting information. And we've got distress that's being fed you stress and distress. And what happens is that it's all being collected, but because the brain has to function, it has to keep the body going.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:31:21]:
These flights, these microaggressions, these big aggressions, all of this stuff, it gets filed away, and this intangible information shoots down this thing called an HPA axis. And I can't tell you right now what HPA means because it's not in the front of mind for me right now, but HPA, it shoots down the HPA axis, and it deposits into our sex organs, and it deposits as material that is actually able to be seen with the right medical equipment. What happens is it deposits, and the more distress we're feeding it, the more storage space it needs. And so at first, the body says, okay, I got to offload this. I have a window of time to offload. It's called the period. I'm going to offload it. Okay.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:32:17]:
I've got too much stronger cramps. I've got too much longer flow. I've got too much more periods. Let's have more periods. Okay. If we have more periods, that means that our other processes that are happening during the other four menstrual the other four phases in the menstrual cycle are getting short. They're getting shorted. If we're not getting each thing that we need in our cycle, then we are stripping our body even more.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:32:41]:
We're tearing it down. We're ripping it apart, because the body's trying to catch up to itself, and it never can. And what do we do? We also drink Red Bull so that we can stay on top of things when we're on our period. So the one time we get to try to reset, we short ourselves of that as well. So we're walking around, and I know that I'm not in the science, but this is the metaphor for the science, because the science is not going to save us. We have to get out of pain now. And if we're waiting for somebody to give us all of the proof, we're going to be waiting a long time, because clinical proof takes a long time. It's very simple.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:33:21]:
Go to sleep. Be aware of all of the ways that you are living in a way that does not serve you. And when you address those tiny, tiny micro things moment by moment, you will find that you have more time, you have more energy, you have more rest. You're making greater impact with less effort. And the world around you is reshaping itself because of what you're modeling, and it is growing and thriving. And that is when we start to see the world really change, because we're in our wholeness, and it gives permission for other people to be in theirs. And what do you end up with? A bunch of people who can no longer. This is the ten years from now thing where we say we look at bloodletting as a crazy idea, where we can look at cramps and periods as that archaic thing that used to happen because we wouldn't let people born with a uterus harness and leverage their power.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:34:20]:
And now that we do, now that we're living on mission, now that our body's no longer printing the distress that we're feeding it, a lot of times that we're knowingly feeding it what happens is that it becomes a thing of the past, and the discussion around the period goes from discomfort to joy and excitement. And to put it, I'm on too much of a tangent, but I'll just say this one thing. I had a client who told me how her daughter said, mommy, I can't wait to go in the temple with you when I'm in my priestess phase. Because that's when you're on your period. I have use embodied names, mommy, I can't wait to go in the temple with you when I'm in my priestess phase. That is the conversation that can exist instead of, you got your period. Like, sucks to be you. I'm so sorry.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:35:14]:
Here's chocolate and an ibuprofen, by the way.
Mike Koenigs [00:35:19]:
Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt you. It's good. So I'll give you, by the way, HPA is hypothalamic, pituitary, adrenal. So the bottom line is, it basically just says a complex set of direct influences and feedback interactions among three components, the hypothalamus, the thalamus, and the pituitary gland. And ultimately it controls reactions to stress and regulates body processes, including digestive digestion, immune responses, mood, emotion, sexual activity, energy storage, and bottom line, it affects what's called the general adaptation syndrome. So if it's out of whack, you're not functioning on all the levels. That's the short version.
Mike Koenigs [00:36:10]:
Got it.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:36:11]:
I love that. And thank you.
Gay Hendricks [00:36:14]:
Don't you also, a lot of times have to get out from under the notion that a lot of people think of their body as a bad thing. Maybe they've got a lot of religious programming and they've been taught that their sexuality is bad. I can remember clients where I wasn't working with their period, but just had to help them get out from under a lot of crazy programming that caused them to distrust their bodies. Because what you're talking about is really helping people open up to and understand and feel themselves in a whole new way.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:37:01]:
Yes. And I've actually had people on different social media complain to me and ask me to please stop talking about this stuff because it is Eve's role. It is a woman's role to suffer because she tempted Adam. She's supposed to suffer. These people think it is their duty, these women, it's women who come to me and tell me this, that it is their duty to be in pain during their period because they are serving penance. But your point, what's so interesting? And I think that's why I had that one and a half to two week cry was that it is so unknown. Our majesty, witnessing our majesty and our power. It is like that moment.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:37:50]:
And I'm sure Gabe will appreciate this. I don't know how into that rock you are, Mike, but that moment in wizard of Oz, when you're watching it with Pink Floyd and it goes from Technicolor to color and the know that part happens and that is how it feels. It is a whole new way of being. And that was why I created all of my. I have this online wonderland, this membership dedicated to being as supportive as possible for showing women how to lean into their power because they want to turn back. There's the upper limiting. That's the upper limiting. They want to turn back when things start getting good because they are moving into their zone of genius, and that is terrifying.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:38:43]:
And they feel that they are going to let down the world if they were to do such a thing. It's totally unknown. It is, yes.
Gay Hendricks [00:38:53]:
I appreciate this other perspective on it, though. That's really good because I have it from the male perspective. But it's really great to hear how you're translating it into things that can be of direct benefit to feminine as well. Mike, you had other questions and thoughts.
Mike Koenigs [00:39:12]:
Well, the main one, when I was listening to you, I'm curious, have you found, because you obviously are young, you have a certain message that resonates. I'm curious what age ranges you're finding your message today resonates the most or the best with. I'm just curious. Yeah, I'm going to leave it at that. It's a little bit of a set up, but I'm super curious.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:39:50]:
It's such a good question. And the age range is actually 35 to 45, 35 to 55. Because when you have good menstruating years, you have good perimenopausal years and into menopause. And the people who come to me in perimenopause with turbulence, we ease them out. And it's all the same process. What it is, is that your body is responding to the pain that you've been feeding it. And the perimenopause is a result of long term trauma when you have a tough one. So it's women who feel particularly abandoned, specifically abandoned by western medicine, and not because they didn't try.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:40:36]:
These are the people, again, using that term that I love so much, learned helplessness. These are the people who have been told, not that things cannot get better, and to just learn how to suffer in comfort. And usually it's around 35 at the youngest. When they become willing to give up on medicine, they're tired and they want to believe that something can change. And they're too tired to be everything for everybody. They finally just stop and say, there must be a better way.
Mike Koenigs [00:41:13]:
And abandonment. Have you found that the women you resonate best with experience abandonment in other parts of their life? Have you found a direct correlation between that emotion showing up and their experience? And are there other abandonment issues that they have dealt with or deal with that show up in the rest of your practice?
Christine Marie Quigless [00:41:44]:
I would say the abandonment. Those of us who have graduated to extreme menstrual imbalance, that shows up as, like, endometriosis or polycystic ovarian syndrome or premenstrual dysphoric disorder, fibroids. We have been abandoning ourselves for so long because we've been taught to. So we live in a world of abandonment. This is normal. So I don't look at it as one core issue, because it's everything. It is the core of everything. And interestingly enough, I was looking at the masculine energy and mother and father wounds recently, and I think a lot of us have tried to be.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:42:36]:
We've tried to create order out of chaos, and we have tried to control, like, we've leaned very strongly into the masculine energy in an effort. So we've abandoned our essence that we were born with. As I say in the book, we are a Porsche, and we're trying to be a Buick, and we're doing the things that a Buick does and are surprised that our Porsche keeps falling apart. We're not using ourselves in the optimal way that we were designed to be used. There is no abandonment. Okay, I want to say this last one, this last thing, because I think I've almost kind of missed your. I skirted past your question, which is that my clients, when they shift, they are seeding themselves on their power, and love comes from them. Love emanates from them in a way that they do not lose all the things they thought they were going to lose.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:43:46]:
They actually realize that the reasons they thought they were being loved were not why they were being loved. And they're actually allowing their friends and their family, especially their family, to really love them, and they're in a place where they can receive instead of constantly giving all of themselves. Yeah. Did that get the.
Gay Hendricks [00:44:12]:
Also, I wanted to just throw in something else, too here and kind of check it out. I don't know the research on this, but I would guess that there is a lot more menstrual discomfort in general now than there was 100 years ago because the amount of environmental noise that's going on as well as social media and the air is full of vibrations that it wasn't full of. And also inside 100 years ago, people ate a pound of sugar a year. Now they eat two or three pounds a week on the average, because it's in everything. And no human nervous system can evolve that fast to be able to go from eating a microscopic amount of sugar to eating a massive amount of sugar in a very short period of time. And I was just wondering, to what extent are things getting worse in today's environment?
Christine Marie Quigless [00:45:18]:
Yes. And I talk about this also in the book, which is that as homo sapien sapiens, we have been evolving for 90,000 years and we've been able to keep our species going and have our periods and not living with this kind of discomfort. And then about 150 years ago, we start with cottage industries and industrialization. And so now our people, our people born in the uterus, who are in a cave, who were in the figurative cave in the home and running their life on a very different schedule than is run outside of the cave, are forced outside of the cave. And the best practices and the things for which we are rewarded, for which we reward members of our society are things that actually are, by default, easier for people born with the uterus without a uterus, because form follows function. Their form created the function. They created the workday. It's based on their up energy, down energy, these four menstrual phases that we go through for 28 days.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:46:29]:
You guys are living through that in 24 hours, and it suits very well. So that is one major source of the distress we're feeding ourselves is that we are trying to win a race that, and I do this in the book, we're trying to win as a hare when we're a tortoise. We can win the race, but we don't have to run it. We don't have fur and long legs. Come on. But we're still pretending like we are. And so. That's such a good point.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:47:02]:
The work sphere, this is the best. Okay? There is profit that we're leaving on the table. We're leaving money on the table by forcing people born with a uterus to live on this schedule and to not have the three day restorative time. Because that three day restorative time slingshots them back. Think of a slingshot you don't use. A rock that's jumping up and down that rock can't fly in the slingshot because it can't ever rest to be carried back. That rest is the slingshot. And then boom, we go flying into our soldier phase and we're working at hyperspeed.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:47:41]:
And our brain is like our mental body had just come back from vacation because we let it rest during our periods because it doesn't want to be. Sorry. I go into so much detail about how all these bodies work, so I want to get to the body part. But yes, if we made the work day around our wombs, then we would have more innovation, greater consistency, because our rhythm would be an acceptable rhythm. Because it's a rhythm. It is a rhythm. It has a pattern. And we would have more profit because we would have people who are wanting to support the company instead of get out of it.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:48:21]:
Lean in did a report, the 2022 women in the workplace report was called the great breakup. Because women are leaving the workplace because they cannot live like this anymore. They're in too much pain, it's too expensive, it's sick days. And then the other part where you said the sugar, one of the things that is a byproduct of living in menstrual alignment and having these ten minute doses of learning about these different parts of yourself and then acting on the information as it avails itself as an inner knowing, is that you actually start to lose weight. And you don't lose weight because you're losing weight. You're losing weight because you are listening to your body. As you can tell, I'm against lists. I'm not going to give people a list of food to eat during each phase, no matter how much they beg me, because their body knows and I want them to just say, what am I craving? And somebody would say, yeah, but I have a sugar addiction.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:49:17]:
So if I listen to my body, I'm just going to eat a bowl of sugar. But again, the body is a 3d printer. When you're feeding the other three bodies, the mental, the intuitive and the emotional, nutritious information, you are no longer wanting comfort food because you're no longer needing comfort. You want to feel all of those nerves telling you all that information because it's going to be brilliant and you don't want to miss out, you don't want to handicap your system. And it's not a conscious, I don't want to handicap my system, so I'm going to have lettuce. It is more like a. My body's not craving that, so I'm just not going to have that right now. And it's not.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:49:59]:
Yeah, I struggle with cogency. You know that. Gay. I'm trying.
Gay Hendricks [00:50:06]:
Well, but you make up for it with passion. And passion can take you a long way in life, especially if you combine it with something as you're doing that's actually useful to people. And so I want to celebrate your useful passion and let you know that we really support you here. And let's also tell people, and we'll have it in the show notes, too, where they can get your book and your audiobook. Tell us quickly about how the best way to get hold of you is.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:50:40]:
Yes, the book and audiobook. The book is called the Easy Way to in period pain. The facts behind the shift to pain free pms free consistent menstrual cycles. And it's a short read from Kendall on Amazon. Or you can get it as an audiobook from Audible. And the links are in the show notes. And if you are like, yes, I'm liking the. Oh, they have a special link.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:51:10]:
Okay. This is really cool. It is CM for the Kindle book and then CMA for the audible. Thank you for making that. It's very pretty to see with my.
Gay Hendricks [00:51:24]:
CM stands for Christine Marie. And so just go to that link and we'll have all that for you. So it's easy to do. Well, I really appreciate you coming on with us and giving us a whole new look at a whole other world that we don't often get a chance to look into. And so thank you for sharing this. I've never done the demographics, but I would suspect we have about as many women as men listen and vice versa, listening and watching our podcast. And I know these principles speak to all of us. So blessings to you on your work and thank you for stopping by to share it with us.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:52:09]:
Thank you so much.
Mike Koenigs [00:52:13]:
Love your fire very much. You can tell you're very passionate about this and helping and passionate about helping people. And I'm going to be very curious to see how you see your evolution over the decades as well and where this leads you and where your interest and passion brings you. Next.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:52:34]:
Thank you. Thank you both for this podcast. I mean, it is medicine. This podcast is medicine. And especially for the entrepreneur who just is trying to get to the next day, sometimes this one tip can change everything. So I am very grateful for the honor to get to be a guest on the show. And gay, thank you for continuing to be this amazing light in my life. And Mike, it is so wonderful to meet.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:53:06]:
I feel it is so cool to get to swim in this pool today. So thank you guys.
Gay Hendricks [00:53:14]:
Well, thank you. And I don't even want to ask what time it is in Switzerland right now that we made you get up in the middle of the night and do this. But thank you so much. And Mike. Yeah. Why don't you bring us in for a landing from Austin?
Mike Koenigs [00:53:28]:
I will do it. Well, good thing is Christine and the links are active. I double checked them here. So one more time, just head to bigleeppodcast.com cm for the book and Bigleeppodcast comcma for the audiobook. And if you enjoyed this, let gay and I know so make sure you send a message to info@bigleeppodcast.com and or what always makes the biggest difference is just leaving your comments, questions, your upvotes, your five stars on Apple Podcasts and on YouTube if you are watching the video. And let us know if you'd like to hear more podcasts like this because this is a little bit out of our normal zone, but we love pushing boundaries. If you know anything about gay, he is a boundary pusher. There are very few lines that he doesn't cross over.
Mike Koenigs [00:54:21]:
And I say that in the best ways possible because he is an absolute learner and passionate about learning and giving people a platform, as am I. So thank you for being a powerful, young, wonderful female entrepreneur. We need more women business owners more than ever in the world we live in right now. So anything we can do to support your growth, it's an honor and a privilege to be here with you. So thank you. And thank you for your time.
Christine Marie Quigless [00:54:49]:
Thank you.
