Reconnecting with Her Menstrual Cycle: A Woman’s Gateway to Knowing, Being, and Loving Herself.
Once upon a time there was a woman who knew literally nothing about her menstrual cycle and hated her period because it hurt so much and gave her raging PMS.
Until one day, finally over struggling so much, she started listening to her body, got herself educated on her cycle, started paying real attention to it, healed it completely naturally, and in the process… fell wildly in love with it.
Reconnecting with her cycle was a gateway to knowing herself, BEING herself, and loving herself more fiercely than she could ever have imagined.
It helped her to get to know her patterns and change the ones that weren’t serving her anymore.
It helped her to find acceptance for the parts of herself she held insecurity or shame around.
It helped her to heal familial trauma and be the cycle-breaker in her lineage.
It helped her to meet herself with grace and love as she moved through the cycles and seasons of life.
It helped her to discover her purpose and build a business that transformed other women’s lives.
And it helped her to become the calibre of woman who was available and ready for the relationship of her wildest dreams.
In other words - it completely changed her life.
And this is the story of how reconnecting with your cycle can change yours.
Half Your Lifetime
Before I go into the how, it’s important for you to understand that, on average, a woman has around 450 cycles in her lifetime, which equates to around 40 years.
That’s half your life (ish).
Pause for a moment.
How old were you when you got your first period?
How many of those years have already passed?
How many cyclical years do you have left?
And how deeply do you desire to know yourself, to be yourself, and to love yourself throughout those years (and beyond)?
If your answer was something along the lines of “quite a fucking lot actually”, keep reading.
Cycle 101 - The Phases
Your cycle can be broken down into 4 phases. I’ll save you the science lesson for now, but here’s the need-to-know.
Your Menstrual Phase runs from the first day of your period, until your period has finished, and marks the beginning of a new cycle, where your hormones are at their lowest.
Then comes your Follicular Phase, from when your period finishes, up until you ovulate, which is where a couple of hormones are doing their thing, most notably oestrogen, which is what gives that rise in energy, productivity, and most notably, sex drive.
Your Ovulatory Phase comes next, which is the time around ovulation (which is actually the peak event of your cycle, where an egg *hopefully* gets released… if your hormones are in check). Both oestrogen + testosterone are peaking here, meaning peak energy, peak productivity, and peak sex drive.
And last up is your Luteal Phase, which runs from ovulation until your next period starts, where progesterone, another super-duper important hormone, is the star of the show (if you ovulated). This is perhaps the part of our cycle you’re most familiar with after your period, and also often goes by the name of the pre-menstrual phase, or my personal favourite, the realm of no fucks to give.
The Seasons
These phases in turn correspond to 4 seasons; just as Mother Earth is cyclical, so are we.
Your menstrual phase, period or bleed corresponds with Inner Winter. This, just like outer winter, is a time of rest, of turning inwards, staying warm and cosy. It’s a time where we’re at our lowest energy, most introverted, and most reflective.
Then just as winter turns to spring, your follicular phase reflects an Inner Spring. This is the re-birth, a time of setting intentions and new beginnings, and full of emerging energy, inspiration, and creativity. Your energy is rising and you’re starting to turn outwards.
Your ovulatory phase corresponds with your Inner Summer, where your energy is at its highest, you’re fertile, radiant, expressive, confident, sexy, magnetic, and turned on by life. Everyone LOVES summer.
But every summer turns to autumn, and your luteal phase is your Inner Autumn, with your energy levels decreasing, your desire to connect waning, and there’s a deepening sense of winding down and turning inwards. Your BS detector is on its maximum setting, your intuition is at its highest, and your inner critic has a tendency to get pretty loud here. Andddd, you’re most likely to pick fights with your partner.
Just as Mother Earth keeps shifting through her seasons year after year after year, you’re also shifting and changing with these inner seasons, cycle after cycle after cycle.
It’s really important to be aware at this point that these are not clear-cut categories. Every woman’s cycle is unique, and your cycle can and will shift from month to month depending on what’s happening in your life.
Sometimes it rains in the spring. Sometimes it’s sunny in the winter.
Sometimes we have a long summer. Sometimes autumn comes early.
And the seasons don’t turn in a single day. There are transitions between them, sometimes quick, sometimes long and drawn out.
Understanding your inner seasons is about doing exactly that - understanding your inner seasons.
This is not about fitting yourself into a solid mould or a blueprint or following any rules, it’s about finding out what is true for you.
How This Knowledge Can Change Your Life
Reconnecting with your cycle brings you into an unparalleled and unprecedented level of self awareness, which, when combined with curious and compassionate self enquiry, and a willingness and commitment to show up and ‘do the work’, can facilitate radical transformation in your life.
Cycle Tracking offers a way for you to start exploring yourself, and through doing so, to start to understand your patterns as you move through your inner seasons, through your cycle, and through the cycles and seasons of life.
As you get to know yourself in your inner winter, your inner spring, your inner summer and your inner autumn, you get to learn who you are, what you want and what you need. You get to learn how to meet those needs, how to communicate them, and how to receive support.
You get to learn how to nourish yourself, how to take care of yourself, how to show up for yourself in meaningful ways.
You get to learn how to accept yourself, how to bring love to even the darkest parts, and how to stop self-abandoning in even the subtlest of ways.
And you get to explore, and ultimately to embody, every expression of who you are.
You get to be yourself - all of yourself.
Welcome to your Ultimate Permission Slip as a Woman
The cyclical woman is multi-seasonal, multi-faceted, multi-dimensional.
She is always shifting, always changing.
She is introverted, extroverted, intuitive, creative, expressive, sensual, sexual, magnetic, reflective, and so. much. more.
Reconnecting to your cycle re-sensitises you to this truth and to your very existence.
The truth is, we are wildly, devastatingly disconnected from our own womanhood.
We pump ourselves full of birth control.
We reject or shame or hate on or blatantly disregard our blood.
And this is not our fault. This is not one more thing to feel shame for.
It’s common. It’s generational. It’s societal.
And it’s the shadow side of feminism - of trying to prove we can do everything a man can do, and totally missing the point that it is that we are women that is so powerful.
So re-connecting with your cycle requires that you disconnect yourself from that narrative, from the conditioning that runs deep in the girls and women of this world.
It requires that you bring in presence and compassion, and to meet yourself with grace and love in all of your seasons.
It requires that you make a conscious choice to re-attune to the felt sense and to the emotional and energetic experience of cyclical womanhood.
It requires a commitment to daily self awareness. To tuning into the overt and subtle changes that occur within you as you move through your cycle.
When you do this, you’re able to access, embody and express your full feminine range.
And you get to fall wildly in love with yourself in the process.
So How Do You Start Tapping Into All This?
It’s so damn simple.
Start tracking your cycle.
Every day. Every season. Every cycle.
This is not a once and done practice. As one of my beloved teachers says, “you don’t eat once and then you’re full forever.”
It is an act of daily devotion to yourself, that in turn allows you to more deeply know yourself, to more fully be yourself, and to more real-ly love yourself.
Start with these questions:
What day of my cycle am I on?
What season am I in?
How am I feeling - physically, mentally, emotionally + spiritually?
What does that mean for me?
What do I need?
Ask the questions. Listen to the answers.
Then… go give yourself the damn thing.
Show up for yourself.
Rinse, repeat.
Cycle after cycle after cycle.
It’s a practice of radical self-awareness meets radical self-enquiry meets radical self-care meets radical self-love.
And it holds the power to change your life.
with love,
WHATS UP NEXT …
