There’s an implicit intelligence within the menstrual cycle, which can school us in starting things well, whether it’s a new relationship, a creative project, or a brand new new year.
We harvested some of the cycle’s teachings here, as a kind of guide to finding your visions for the year to come. We imagine this unfolding within you in your own unique way, just like your menstrual cycle, perhaps over several days or weeks. As always, trust your own rhythm.
The Cycle Shows us how to Prepare Ourselves for Visioning:
There’s a good window of time between the most active phase of the cycle - ovulation - and the time of dreams and visions - menstruation. In between these two poles of the cycle we find the inner autumn.
Beloved to some, confronting to many, the premenstrual phase is crucial to our visionary capacities when we bleed. The critical energy, the clearing away of the dross, and increasing permeability you may feel in the inner autumn are actually preparing you to enter your inner temple.
Likewise, before you begin to feel for your visions for the year to come, take time to slow down and let the previous year be composted. If you haven’t done this already, taking time to review your successes and challenges of 2025 can help you to release the old and make way for the new possibilities to come.
The Cycle Invites us to Make Space to Receive our Visions:
The void moment just before you bleed is an invitation to practice saying ‘No’ to the world and ‘Yes’ to yourself. This is just one of the ways that the cycle helps us to grow the muscle of holding our boundaries, which you’ll need in order to step out of the day-to-day stuff, to let go and rest back into visioning in Deep Time.
Just as with menstruation, your sacred tasks at this fresh new beginning of the year are to drop your agendas, rest, potter, drift with the pace of your actual being and do nothing, at least for a little while.
Remember that the 1% rule applies here. Even thirty minutes here or there can make a huge difference in preparing you for visions to arrive.
The Cycle Teaches us How to be With The Unknown:
We never quite know when our bleed is going to come. We have to hold the tension of uncertainty, and hang out with the mysterious, the fertile void. This is great training for the practice of visioning, which requires us to sit in the dark awhile, without reaching for resolution.
So, just as you practice letting go of the busyness of life when you bleed, you practice letting go of thoughts, strategies and ideas for the year. Instead focus on grounding. Plug yourself back into the Ground of your Being to hold you in the unknown.
The Cycle Reminds us of the Power of Cleansing and Renewal:
Once the bleed starts, you enter into a process of cleansing, detoxing, releasing tension, tiredness and anything negative that is holding you back.
Likewise, you may find yourself wanting to release the old in a more physical way, to make more space for visions to arise. Is there a cupboard you’ve been desperate to tidy for months? Now may well be the time!
The Cycle Offers us the Opportunity to be Held by Life:
A natural fruit of this cleansing process is the sense of union that can come with menstruation, a kind of exquisite intimacy with life, where all feels utterly holy and sacred.
If you’ve practiced your version of the previous steps, you’ve set yourself up well for a feeling of being held by Life, a deep remembering of ones Self, and a knowing that you have a place and that you belong in your life and in the world.
Your sacred tasks here are embodied presence and surrender. This is where the opening to revelation can arise - the deepest kind of visioning - a knowing of what you have come to serve.
We’d love to hear how this goes for you!
