Packed into each season of your menstrual cycle is a whole world of inner powers, self care, sacred tasks and developmental challenges. Put together, these support you to grow into your own nature and discover and express your creative potential.
The inner seasons of your menstrual cycle are an inner self‐development programme and guidance system to grow into wholeness. They set you up to navigate all of the great changes in life; from transitions like moving house or changing jobs, to losses like relationship breakup or bereavement, and to initiations like entering motherhood, and negotiating the ‘Big One’... menopause.
Your inner seasons = a micro-initiation
Your ride through the inner seasons of your cycle is a self‐contained micro‐initiation each and every month. It’s as if you get tiny doses of ‘death and rebirth’ - for example, at menstruation you encounter a mini version of the death and dissolution phase of any big transition.
Learning to engage with the process of your whole menstrual cycle (aka menstrual cycle awareness) builds in you the capacity to meet that initiation each menstrual month with more awareness and understanding, self‐acceptance and embodiment. And therefore meet the inevitable challenges that always come with big changes with a greater sense of dignity and readiness.
How the premenstruum builds your inner resources
Through the monthly undoing and ego deflation of your inner autumn, you grow resilience. You get regular practice in navigating the kind of strong emotions and increased sensitivity that often come with big life changes.
You also get to practice managing your inner critic – that critical energy that you can serve up to others and to yourself - which is greatly amplified during times of transition, just as it is in the premenstrual phase of the cycle. You learn how to create stronger boundaries to better care for your needs - vital for navigating the uncertainty that comes with change.
How the ‘void’ mentors you in negotiating big changes
The ‘death and rebirth’ at menstruation slowly but surely guides you in how to let go and allow yourself to be exposed to a world beyond your ego‐encapsulated self. Just before the moment of bleeding you enter what we call the Void – when the inner psychological ground on which you were standing seems to give, and you feel undone and possibly exposed.
This is the death of the ego, and it can last from a few hours to a day or so. As the blood starts to flow, a release and sense of surrender happens, and it’s as though you come to land on inner ‘ground’ again. That moment of the womb releasing its lining, the bleed, while an ending, marks the beginning of the new cycle process.
During all big life transitions, you’re likely to go through a similar sense of ending, like the one that you encounter just before bleeding. You step into a kind of void. You may experience a distancing or separating from the world and a feeling of emptiness and not knowing.
Practising being present with yourself during this phase of the cycle can help you learn to trust that a far deeper source will arise to support you in difficult times – the essence of you, the recognition of who you truly are. This can take time, but luckily the cycle keeps coming back around for us...giving us more practise at it!
