When I first heard about Ireland’s growing band of self-styled menstrual mentors – women who run retreats, charge handsomely for the privilege and invite other women to spend weekends communing spiritually with their uteruses – my first instinct was not curiosity, it was to reach for something cold and wonder what had become of us.
A weekend retreat, focused entirely on your menstrual cycle, the thing that has been arriving every twenty-odd days since you were about 12.
My grandmother raised eight children and never once visualised herself walking into a deep red cave to commune with her womb. She was far too busy.
Very LA, I thought, very woo-woo and very much the preserve of women with disposable income.
I’d much sooner spend the money on a spa break with champagne cocktails. Then I started looking into it and, rather against my will, I started to understand.
Ireland has always had two competing female archetypes.
The first is the saints-and-virgins ideal – serene, composed, her grotto on every country road from Donegal to Cork.
The second is the Sheela-na-Gig, the medieval stone figure carved on to church doorways across this country – squatting, unashamed.
For centuries we celebrated the first and quietly buried the second. We built a culture where what women’s bodies do every month is managed in silence and endured with dignity.
Perhaps that is where the trouble started. Because silence does not just shape culture, it shapes healthcare.
The average time from first symptoms to a confirmed endometriosis diagnosis – a condition affecting one in ten women, causing pain so severe it can derail entire lives – is nine years in Ireland.
At the end of 2025, over 1,000 women were waiting for endometriosis care across just five hospitals.
Broader gynaecology outpatient lists run to over 30,000, with thousands waiting beyond six months.
Women walk into GP surgeries having endured a decade of pain and walk out with a prescription for Ponstan and a suggestion to keep a diary.
Endometriosis is the sharpest example of a much wider failure – a healthcare system that has historically struggled to take women’s pain seriously.
Into this vacuum of dismissal, delay and inadequate answers, a new kind of practitioner has emerged – women who were themselves failed by medicine, who found their own way to understanding and built something from that experience for the women coming behind them.
The menstrual mentor did not emerge from a wellness trend. She emerged from a waiting list.
Kitty Maguire is not what I expected. Based in Dublin, where she lives with her two boys aged six and 12, she describes herself as a womb therapist and has been doing this work for well over a decade.
Her Red Alchemy practice offers one-to-one sessions and immersive retreats – candles, crystals and what she calls magickal yoga.
She also plays the cello during her nervous-system yoga classes, meditative sessions open to men and women alike.
Her story begins with a traumatic copper coil insertion in her 20s, performed by a doctor who, she says, ‘just kept telling me to calm down and stop crying’.
She sought help afterwards from her Dublin GP.
‘The best solution I can offer you is to have a baby, it might ease things,’ she was told. She was 22.
‘I got to the point where I stopped asking,’ she says. ‘I just thought, this is what you have to live with.’
Kitty Maguire describes herself as a womb therapist and has been doing this work for a decade
She turned instead to somatic experiencing, trauma practice and cyclical intelligence – the idea that the body holds memory and that disruption in the cycle can often be traced to events never properly processed.
‘The church and state colonised our womb,’ she says. ‘How we cross that threshold – our first bleed – will dramatically shape how we see ourselves as women in the world. If it’s something dirty or hidden, that stays in the body.’
She is clear, unprompted, that she does not replace medicine.
‘I’m not there to fix anything,’ she says. ‘I’m there like a midwife, to bear witness and help them along the journey.’
She holds herself to a rule I find unexpectedly moving.
‘I won’t teach from the womb until it’s healed in me,’ she says. ‘I have to wait until it lands.’
On sceptics, she is entirely unbothered.
‘Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it,’ she says. ‘I’m not here to convert anyone – I’m booked out until August.’
Then, almost as an afterthought, ‘When I tell people I’m a womb therapist, they either lean in or lean out.
‘In my experience, it’s the men who lean in first. They’ve watched someone they love suffer for years. They get it.’
She watched the Netflix documentary Louis Theroux: Inside The Manosphere recently with her 12-year-old son.
When one of the men declared that nothing in the world had been created by a woman, her son turned to her and said: ‘The womb brought them here.’
‘I was so proud in that moment,’ she says.
For Lisa de Jong, that kind of understanding came decades too late. From around the age of 15, Lisa was in serious pain – confused, embarrassed and missing school.
Diagnosed with endometriosis in her mid-20s, the surgery she received in Ireland – ablation, during which tissue is burned rather than excised from the root – did not resolve her symptoms and the pain remained.
She is now founder of the Menstrual Coach Academy, which trains practitioners in cycle-based approaches to women’s health.
The six-month professional certification costs €3,500, with payment plans available. It’s a figure that gives pause, until you understand the market.
Her trainees are mostly working professionals – psychotherapists, yoga teachers, physiotherapists and, this year, she tells me with some amusement, a garda.
‘The medical system was just sort of behind,’ she says. ‘It tends to be behind when it comes to women’s bodies.’
She is candid about the more colourful end of her industry.
‘There are people doing this who are very much, start chanting, imagine yourself in a red cave,’ she says. ‘That’s not really my personality.’
What cycle awareness gave her was a reframing that medicine never offered.
‘My brain was conditioned to dread my period every month,’ she says. ‘My whole life was organised around managing pain – could I go to that concert?
‘Could I get on that plane? The hypervigilance took over everything, it became an obsession.
‘I describe what I do the way mindfulness relates to mental health – an additional tool, not a replacement.
Lisa de Jong is the founder of the Menstrual Coach Academy, which trains practitioners in cycle-based approaches to women’s health
‘If women are taught that periods are painful before they even arrive, that conditions the brain. Hypervigilance creates a biochemical environment for pain.’
Paula Byrne’s answer to that is simpler: catch them before it starts. She came to this work from a classroom rather than a treatment table.
A registered member of the Teaching Council with 19 years in education, from Co. Laois, she believes menstrual literacy should be standard in how we educate girls.
Her own story follows the same pattern as Lisa’s, as Kitty’s, as so many Irish women’s – severe pain from her first bleed, years of missed school and work. She was diagnosed with endometriosis in her mid-20s.
‘I was heavily medicated, I took paracetamol like Smarties,’ she says. ‘My mother had similar pain, so she assumed it was just normal.
‘I wish my 15-year-old self had known that eight days of severe pain every month was not normal.
Paula Byrne is a registered member of the Teaching Council with 19 years in education
‘If paracetamol and ibuprofen aren’t touching period pain, that is not acceptable. Teenagers should not be heavily medicated just to get through their periods.’
Her school sessions run 60 to 90 minutes and cover breaking awkwardness around terminology, moving through the four phases of the cycle, red flags and when to seek medical help.
‘What really stands out is students saying, “Thank you for letting us ask questions,”’ she says.
‘They don’t always feel comfortable raising this with teachers. That’s not the teachers’ fault. It’s the system.
‘The body-literacy piece is simply not there. We’re taught to function on a linear, 24-hour productivity cycle, but our hormones ebb and flow.
‘Rest increases productivity. That’s not respected in society.
‘I didn’t have the language to explain what was wrong with me. Now I want teenagers to know it’s okay to speak up if something isn’t right.’
For all this good advice, however, there is a line, and in the menstrual wellness world it can be worryingly hard to find.
The global wellness industry is valued at approximately $6.8 trillion, and menstrual wellness is one of its fastest-growing corners – cycle apps, red tent retreats, womb massage and crimson cave visualisations, much of it aimed at women who have spent years feeling dismissed by conventional medicine.
In an entirely unregulated space, the distance between a thoughtful practitioner and someone who completed a weekend course and started charging four figures is invisible to the woman sitting in the room with her eyes closed and her credit card processed.
CORU, Ireland’s multi-profession health regulator, confirms that menstrual coaching is not a regulated profession and the title ‘menstrual coach’ is not protected under the Health and Social Care Professionals Act 2005.
‘Using terms such as coach, advisor or educator does not, in itself, indicate that an individual is a regulated health or social care professional,’ a spokesperson says.
Anyone can call themselves a menstrual mentor and be open for bookings tomorrow. There’s no qualification required and no oversight whatsoever.
Dr Jennifer Donnelly, a postdoctoral researcher at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, sees the trend clearly.
‘The rise of menstrual coaching reflects a broader gap in women’s health, where many individuals are seeking support for complex, nuanced experiences that are not always well addressed within existing medical pathways,’ she says.
The appeal, she argues, is straightforward: women are turning to more personalised approaches that offer accessible, relatable validation of their lived experience.
But she urges caution too.
‘The evidence base for menstrual coaching as a structured intervention remains limited. This highlights
an important research priority – strengthening the scientific understanding of everyday menstrual health and identifying which approaches are safe, effective and appropriate.’
Dr Aideen Brides, GP at Rossmore Clinic in Monaghan, is more direct.
‘We are seeing a significant shift on social media towards rejecting hormonal treatments, with a great deal of information being shared that is not evidence- based,’ she says.
‘For many conditions – including endometriosis – hormonal treatments are the first-line option and are very effective, often preventing the need for surgery.
‘Women should always seek medical help if they are experiencing painful periods.’
On supplements, she is unambiguous: ‘No supplement is necessary or helpful in the treatment of endometriosis.’
Lisa de Jong echoes the concern from the inside. She has watched women swing from medical disappointment into extreme wellness plans, some developing what amounts to orthorexia around healthy eating.
‘There’s so much fear in their nervous system,’ she says. ‘They don’t know how to integrate the work.’
And yet women in Ireland are still waiting nine years for an endometriosis diagnosis, still being handed Ponstan and told to keep a diary, still walking into surgeries with a decade of pain and walking out without answers.
Then somewhere online, a woman says: I hear you, I had exactly the same thing, and here is a way to finally understand your own body.
That is not nothing. In the vacuum the Irish healthcare system has spent decades carving out around women’s health, it is, for many women, everything.
Paula Byrne, Lisa de Jong and Kitty Maguire did not create the gap they work in. They are not the cause of the problem, they are the symptom of it.
And perhaps, for the women who find their way to them after years of being dismissed and unheard, a small part of the solution.
Ireland has spent centuries choosing silence over the body, composure over pain, secrecy over understanding.
The Sheela-na-Gig, that ancient unashamed figure carved into our church doorways, was buried so thoroughly that most Irish women don’t even know she exists.
The women in this piece, in their various ways – some more cave-related than others – are trying to dig her back up.
I find I can’t argue with that. Even from a spa, with a champagne cocktail in hand.
