Our world is becoming so much more cycle aware - it’s starting to infuse more and more aspects of our public sphere, and our culture is waking up more every day to the power of the menstrual cycle and menopause.
In today’s article we’re exploring some of the many ways you can contribute to this movement, from career paths directly focused on the menstrual cycle and menopause, to weaving menstrual cycle awareness into your relationships, family and community life, to infusing menstruality into your existing work, including the often invisible and (frustratingly) unpaid caring, earth-tending and energetic work that so many of us do, which weaves this world together.
There’s an important role for each of of us to play in the normalising, dignifying and honouring of the power of the menstrual cycle and menopause, starting with your own personal relationship to your cycle or menopause process…
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The first way that we can all honour and dignify the cycle, is by dedicating ourselves to our own menstrual cycle tracking practice. By committing to your own intimate connection to your cyclical nature, you are helping the menstruality body of knowledge to evolve.
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Next, you can get vocal about your practice; sharing your cycle check-ins and experiences with your friends, family, kids if you have them, colleagues and community. This is world-changing work. There’s a magic that’s unleashed when you get really congruent with your cycle: you subtly start to organize the atmosphere around you in this new, ancient rhythm of living, and respect for organic life. You’re modelling radical self-care and sustainable living.
And then there are those who have a specific calling within the world of menstruality…
For some people, teaching menstruality is a core part of your purpose and you may find yourself feeling called to teach, coach, mentor and guide others. Often this is inspired by our own personal experiences of running the gauntlet of living with a womb in a patriarchal world:
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Perhaps you’ve endured menstrual challenges such as menstrual pain, PMDD, and PCOS, and want to help others heal.
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Or you may have journeyed through your own rite of passage through pregnancy and motherhood, postpartum, infertility, and menopause or other rites of passage, and feel called to offer the kind of holding you longed for, but didn’t receive.
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You may have awakened your passion for this work when your own teens or tweens started their periods, and now you want to offer menstrual cycle education to young people.
Or perhaps you’d like to explore how you could weave cycle-aware living into your established work or career. There are many ways to weave cycle awareness into your work as a therapist, a coach, health practitioner, doctor, naturopath, herbalist, healer, or you hold space for people in other ways. Likewise, if you support people through movement and embodiment as a bodyworker, Yoga teacher, somatic experiencing practitioner, or another kind of teacher or guide, such as:
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Bringing an awareness of cyclical living into your sessions.
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Teaching menstrual cycle awareness to your clients as a tool to help them understand their needs, strengths and vulnerabilities, to enhance the healing, trauma resolution, personal development or growth work you’re doing together.
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Menstrual coaching or mentorship: either from psycho-spiritual perspective or health - whether it’s mental and emotional health or physical health (or a fusion of both)
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Creating products to support menstrual health and menstrual cycle literacy, like first period boxes, cycle-aware meditations or cycle tracking journals.
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Writing a cycle aware book to share with your community: some of our Menstruality Leadership Programme graduates have published brilliant books including: Lucy Peach’s Period Queen, Claire Baker’s 50 Things You Need to Know About Periods, Kate Codrington’s Second Spring: A Self Care Guide to Menopause, and Lisa Lister’s Code Red.
If you’re a writer, artist, poet, musician or a maker of any kind you can weave your your embodied understanding of menstruality into your creations,
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By giving expression to the power of the menstrual cycle and menopause through poetry, writing, art, crafts or music, you can organically inspire, educate and uplift others to connect more deeply with cyclical consciousness.
Many also feel called to bring menstrual cycle awareness and cyclical living into in their workplaces or places of study:
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Perhaps you could be one of the people quietly working behind-the-scenes with your own cycle awareness practice to enhance your work in non-related fields; perhaps as a school teacher, an engineer, a lawyer, or in other arenas.
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Some feel called to work on menstrual or menopause policies in their work places, which are thankfully becoming more and more common place.
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And many of us are leaning into the powers of the inner seasons to inform our leadership in our own unique ways (on the Menstruality Leadership Programme we also share twelve menstruality leadership skills, or ‘dark arts’ to guide you to weave cyclical intelligence into your leadership).
And if you’re in the world of academia, there are lots of new, exciting possibilities. There are now several pHd students in the Red School community who are weaving the psycho-spiritual intelligence of the menstrual cycle into the world of academia.
And lastly, some feel called to be a menstrual and menopause activist…
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There are so many social justice issues to tackle, including period poverty at home and across the globe, reproductive justice, and finding inventive ways to put menstrual cycle awareness in the hands of everyone, including communities whose identities are marginalised, and particularly those who are socio-economically challenged.
Of course, this list is not exhaustive. There are as many ways to grow this movement as there are humans willing to contribute. If you’d like to be surrounded by a supportive community who are as passionate about this work as you are, you might feel at home in our Menstruality Leadership Programme, and we would LOVE to have you with us for our 2027 journey into cycle-inspired leadership.
