Culturally we are not encouraged to embrace the dark, the unknown, the uncertain. It’s no surprise then that the premenstrual phase of the cycle is where many of us face the most challenge. The second half of the cycle, or the ‘via negativa’, is the current of contraction, that takes us out of certainty into greater complexity and unknowns.
One of the things that happens when we try to avoid the second half of the cycle is usually some kind of catastrophe that forces us to stop. Many of us have experienced this with our health. If you push too much and go too fast, eventually your body will force you to stop by making you ill.
In our experience of the cycle, this second half is where we come back home to ourselves and our inner authority. It invites us to question and re-evaluate what’s working and what’s not working. In that slow down and stopping, we’re brought deeper into connection with the reality of our situation and we ask the bigger, more difficult questions. We’re confronted by the more difficult truths.
Towards the end of the cycle, there’s a moment just before we bleed at menstruation, which we call the ‘void’. It’s the most vulnerable moment in the entire cycle. Our energy is at its lowest and it’s as though the ground goes from underneath us. We may have been managing and coping with the daily challenges of life, and then BAM, we lose the thread.
This void moment can be a time of deep darkness. Sometimes the hole is so deep it can even feel we’re going to be annihilated. We can have suicidal thoughts here, particularly if we have experienced a lot of trauma in our life. It can be a bleak place.
However, when you understand the void, it becomes the ‘great unknown’ – a place of new potential and possibility. It can be a gap in the fabric of life, where spiritual connection can happen. This moment of void is the most powerful place in the cycle, where we can potentially experience a profound feeling of union.
Let’s take this to the world’s current situation. It can feel hopeless and devoid of possibility, a massive hole of unknown and uncertainty. There are many people who are really struggling on many levels.
We are more vulnerable, and in that vulnerability, we can learn new ways to hold ourselves and stabilise ourselves within the unknown. This may begin to open us up to the signals, the new lights emerging, the seeds of a new story trying to pulse us.
If we can learn how to pace this unknown territory, we enter the great opportunity of the void… to let go of the old ways, to shed our skin, to drop our masks, and let life change us. To come into a new conversation with the world.
Just like the moment when the blood begins to flow, and we feel the ground underneath our feet again, as well as the holding of the great ‘mother hug’ that is available at menstruation, so too will we find our feet through these times of collective challenge.
We will see what is emerging, the new order that is implicate, but this requires us to be – as Oprah would say – ‘spiritually ripped’! It requires that we listen loyally to our cycle as it works us.
If you’d like to deepen your loyalty to your cycle, please consider joining us for our Menstruality Leadership Programme…
