Fertility awareness education, grounded in body literacy

I did not grow up learning how my cycle worked. Like most women, I was taught how to prevent pregnancy long before I was taught what a cycle actually was. That gap followed me into my twenties without my noticing it.

The shift came after I graduated from UC Santa Barbara, where I studied anthropology with a minor in educational studies. I spent the months after graduation traveling through Mexico and Central America, learning from birth workers and sitting with women who held a different relationship to their bodies than the one I had been handed. It was a rediscovery of my own divine feminine, and something in me began to rearrange. I realized I had spent years on an IUD without ever asking what my body was doing underneath it.

I wanted to find out. I took out my IUD, let my body menstruate again, and found an educator to learn from.

What I learned was a practice older than the medical system I had been raised inside. Charting a cycle is not new, and it is not alternative. It is a skill. It is the daily observation of cervical fluid and basal body temperature, read together, to understand where you are in your cycle and what your body is telling you. Anthropology gave me the lens to see why this knowledge had been kept from so many of us. Education gave me the framework to teach it back.

I went on to train through The Well School of Body Literacy under Sarah Bly, CNM, and accredit through the Association of Fertility Awareness Professionals. I have since attended more than eighty births as a doula, which taught me something charting alone could not. The reproductive arc is continuous. Preconception, conception, pregnancy, birth, and postpartum are one body in motion. I teach charting inside that full picture, not apart from it.

Stone Fertility exists because the body literacy I found late should not be rare. It should be the starting point.