Rise Up with Self Love
Discover the magic of your menstrual cycle and maximise your natural superpowers. In other words, harness your hormones and get your cycle working for you.
The energy within our menstrual cycle is a force we call our Wild Power. It’s an animating presence, a holy intelligence that holds the blueprint of who we are and our highest potential.
For centuries within our culture, the feminine way of the menstrual cycle has been denied, demonized, and rejected. We’ve been led to believe it’s a limitation or a weakness we must overcome in order to succeed. We need to challenge that and learn about the extraordinary truth, that our cycle is, in fact, our ultimate guide to befriending ourselves and utterly relishing the full pleasure and authority of being a woman.
The moment one starts practicing menstrual cycle awareness and encounters the living presence within you, you reunite with the source that nourishes you and restores your connection with the natural world, the cycles of life, and the divine force of Love. First, one requires a significant shift in perspective and willingness to name and validate the menstrual cycle — lifting it out of the shadows and into the foreground. We need to debunk the myth that perpetuates the idea that menstruation is a handicap or limitation that makes women emotionally unstable. While it’s true that woman change throughout the menstrual month, that change does not equal unreliability or weakness. In fact, having a menstrual cycle gives a woman much more predictability around her moods and energy than someone without one. And most importantly, it gives us a wonderful capability to work with change — that unalterable fact of life, so many of us resist.
As we travel through the menstrual cycle, we experience different sides of our nature, our strengths, and our vulnerabilities, and we embody different types of skill or power. To see the cycle as the enemy can set us up for more suffering. But working with and within its rhythmic imperatives can be your foundational path to your superpowers.
Learning Menstrual Cycle Awareness (MCA)
Like meditation, the simple act of getting to know your own cycle and charting its progressions on a daily basis builds inner spaciousness and mindfulness into your life. Menstrual Cycle awareness is a spiritual practice and the ultimate mindfulness tool for women. It allows you to get to know your unique rhythm of power and learn how to live in sync with it, heal your menstrual symptoms, and awaken your inner superwoman.
How to do it:
Create a menstrual chart and on its record which day of the cycle you’re on. Day 1 is your first day of bleeding. At the end of each day on your cycle, record the dominant feelings, your dreams, your energy levels, and so on. Maintain basic daily observations, including synchronicities, sexual energies, by writing them down.
Drop any expectation that your cycle should be in a certain way. Through practicing MCA, you’ll discover your own personal version of it and how it reveals your talents, strengths, and vulnerabilities. Therein lies the magic of your menstrual cycle. It’s a custom-built path that serves you if you cherish it and honour the intimacy of your own experience.
The two Vias
Think of your cycle as having two poles, menstruation and ovulation. Like the South Pole and the North Pole. At each pole, something happens. At menstruation, you bleed, and at ovulation, you release an egg. In between these activities, your being is in transition.
The two Vias are the two currents of energy within the menstrual cycle: Expansion (menstruation to ovulation) and Contraction (ovulation to menstruation) and the fulcrums where they meet: menstruation and ovulation.
The transition times are more dynamic and less stable than the “poles” because your spirit travels from one state to another. Where there’s a transition, there’s more potential for emotional turbulence, unease, and doubt to slip into your being. The importance of paying attention to our cycle and natural tendencies is crucial in the transitional phases, whereas at the “poles,” it can feel easier to be present and relaxed.
As you become conscious of this rhythmic pattern within the intimacy of our cycle, you begin to become attuned to your being.
The inner seasons
Each month you move through an inner winter, spring, summer, and autumn. Each phase ushers in a set of specific psychological challenges. In meeting these challenges, you grow your power and build the inner container to hold your full magnificence.
As you learn about yourself through The Inner Seasons, you develop the skills to handle your emotions and make better choices around your behaviour. It’s a means of personal therapy and healing that teaches you how to harness the power of your unique nature.
Winter
Everything begins and ends with menstruation: your inner Winter. If you surrender to this season and receive its gifts, you are perfectly set up for the succession of seasons that follow.
Menstruation is the time to abandon all responsibilities and do nothing. It’s the moment for rest, repair, and renewal. It’s time to claim space for yourself, let go and rest, nurture yourself. It’s the true magnetic north that gets you all lined up, filled up, and prepped for the creative art of living. The inner winter is the natural de-stress time when you surrender all the stuff and reconnect to your core. Its role is to undo you so that you can experience some true respite. Then it puts you back together again, freshly built to go out and conquer the world.
Spring
After menstruation, you arrive in your inner Spring cleansed and set free to start afresh. Everything is possible once you emerge feeling footloose, cloaked in love and affirmation you received. While it is great to be motivated and inspired by others, it’s sublime to discover that you have a natural motivator within. This is one of the great gifts of preovulatory time. There’s a rise in the desire and an increasing appetite to make real the ideas you receive during menstruation.
The innerspring is a time of “build-up” and growing anticipation. You may feel your sexual energy wake up and suddenly notice just how attractive X looks. You may start to feel more attractive yourself, especially towards the end of Spring.
Move tenderly as you emerge from winter. You have to remember you’re like a newly hatched chick. Cherish this tender self, then allow yourself to really feel the rising of new life. Spring makes you open and curious; it’s time to abandon the weight of responsibility, experiment, and try stuff just for the heck of it. Dare to risk, Take a chance!
Summer
And the Summer! A time of plenitude and ease. You have arrived. Your energy is at an all-time high, giving you the capacity to have it all.
There really are no limits now: you can be all things, Superwoman lives, and you get to be her, for about ten days, that is. While it lasts, you can be a powerhouse of productivity, multi-tasking, and fun. It’s a time of ease and deep embodied presence in the world of sensual delights.
You may experience a sense of mastery as all your skills and competencies come together. Your critical and judgmental mind generally gets out of the way, allowing creativity and self-expression to pour out of you. Your magnetism is high, drawing what you desire towards you. It can be marvelous to be deep in the flow of your ovulatory time and feel the high of knowing that everything is possible. The whole world is at your feet, and you can feel natural confidence and comfort inside your skin.
It is time to express yourself, to share, to be appreciated by others. This season honours the woman you’ve become and urges you to celebrate your talents and beauty. If you have projects or ideas you’ve been working on, you can draw natural confidence now to share your efforts.
And because you feel so wholehearted and harmonious, it’s the perfect time to capitalise on self-praise and a few hearty pats on your own back. The more generous you can be with yourself, the more resilient you’ll feel when your inner Autumn comes calling.
Autumn
For many, this season is misunderstood and mismanaged. It has a bad rep. Your shadow side is starting to awaken. The things you’ve neglected in yourself the needs you’ve sidelined can all break the surface as they seek recognition and integration. The premenstruum is an illuminating time: it shines a light on what’s important to you and where you’ve fallen short.
You really get to know yourself this season. You learn where your edges are and the lines you truly need to draw. Women often notice compulsion to clean, tidy and organise stuff at this time.
During your inner autumn, your senses are heightened, and you feel increasingly sensitive to what’s going on around you. You feel more permeable as your psychological boundaries fade away, and you may notice a fiercer need to strengthen your outer boundaries.
You may feel saturated and sick and tired of pretty much everything. If you don’t realise you’re in the dying days of your cycle, you might wonder what’s wrong with you, why you feel so lazy and unenthusiastic. These feelings are usually not cherished, and many women give themselves a hard time and just push through.
But the cycle is wise, and you’re being prepared for something. This lack of interest ushers in a superpower, the power to let go and give in. Don’t for one minute underestimate the potency of this power. Who would have guessed that this potent power, one that’s so hard to muster when the ego is going full tilt and you’re full of energy, is readily available at your lowest point? In the same way, tiredness gets us to sleep. This state prepares you to step back and enter a deeper state of consciousness at menstruation.
The prementsruum is the classic feedback moment in your cycle. You’re being shown exactly what needs your attention, what needs to change, what isn’t working. You get feedback on your stress levels, how well you’re caring for yourself, your relationships, spiritual life, and more. Your task is to stay present and receive feedback with as much self-kindness as you can muster. Your energy is at its lowest point. You may feel misunderstood, tired or insecure. Your task now is to practice radical self-care and permit yourself to step away from mundane life.
The challenge is to enter Autumn mindful that you’re human and the tasks aren’t always doable, and don’t be hard on yourself if you fall into this pitch a million times.
And don’t forget, during autumn, you’re returned to yourself, your needs and desires. The bubble of illusion is popped. You step out of the mainstream mindset and restore to a deeper truth.
MCA — The full box and dice
Mindful attention is the first step in this journey. MCA is just as it sounds, the act of noticing and noting where you are in your cycle. As you chart, bear in mind the Inner Seasons and the crossover days. What season are you in in the given days? Can you begin to catch the transition moments from one to another? With time you’ll notice a pattern unfold, the unique rhythm of power.
As you get to know your power rhythm, it’s recommended to organise your diary around it. Over time you’ll learn about your needs and tendencies around each phase and the powers that you naturally tap into so you can plan events to suit your cycle.
We often have such high expectations of ourselves. We believe we should be on the ball the whole time and anything less than that just feels not good enough. The next step in this practice is to give credence to and respect the feelings and energy of any particular day of your cycle. The “art of menstruality” requires complete trust in the integrity of the cycle.
In many ways, this is a new beginning for us all as we usher in a sane new world, one menstrual cycle at a time. Remember, with each day of cycle awareness, you consciously evolve this living body of knowledge.
If you give it attention, your menstrual cycle will lovingly hold you to it. The magic recipe is your ongoing, intimate exploration of your own cycle, making your discoveries and daring to live its full brilliance in the world.
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