Your body is a powerful and important channel of information, offering vital intelligence that can inform every aspect of your lived experience. One of the most beautiful and potentially life-changing benefits of Menstrual Cycle Awareness is how it helps you to tune into your physical experience of life in a human body. It is a lifelong path to become more and more conscious of your physicality.
As you grow your body awareness - aka your somatic capacity (interoception) - you grow your foundation for knowing yourself and holding bigger energies and power in your life. It builds an embodied intelligence that arises from your own cycle experience. Over time you will feel like you are being held in a ‘knowing field’. (This really goes up a gear post menopause and is the outcome of practising all the other Menstruality skills we teach on the MLP.)
Interoception supports you to step up as a leader in the following ways:
It Helps you to Regulate your Nervous System
Interoception is the perception of the sensations inside your body, from your skin inwards, including your breath, your temperature, your levels of comfort or pain, your levels of relaxation or tension, and even your heartbeat. Cultivating your awareness of these sensations creates nervous system regulation and brings your frontal cortex online so that you can observe yourself and see multiple perspectives, as well as be receptive and responsive.
It Helps you to Build Emotional Literacy
In menstrual cycle awareness, the repeated noticing of your changing physical state grows the body literacy that you need to be able to awaken greater emotional literacy. The practice of interoception creates the ground for you to hold the tension in times of heightened emotion, by bringing you into sensation rather than thought or story. And crucially, when we hit inevitable disturbances on our leadership path, it is interoception that brings us back into the moment and allows us to be present and stay with the process rather than get entangled in the ‘trigger’ or the reactivation of a historical wound.
It Enhances your Intuition and Empathy
Interoception lies behind our sense of intuition—when something feels “right” or “wrong” without an explanation. The stronger your interoception the stronger your emotional intelligence about yourself and the stronger your intuition and empathy with others. As you listen to someone speak, interoception keeps you present and gives you a gauge into the energetic communication. You are ‘home’ to receive.
It Helps you Manage Conflict
When we find ourselves in conflict situations, being aware of our nervous system, heart rate and breathing helps us to regulate and come back into our body. We are no longer in fight, flight or freeze—we are back in response mode. This supports us to also see our own side and be aware of our own thoughts as well as see and understand the others perspective (even if we don't agree).
It’s Key to your Physical Health
Your awareness of your body's needs guides you in what to tend to, what’s required. Sensorial feedback is your body's way of signalling early warning signs for your wellbeing. Often we become numb or dissociated from the difficulties in our body but it is in the reconnection with these that we open to wise communication for healing.
In summary, practising the menstruality leadership skill of interoception helps us to develop our Feminine leadership because it creates more choice and opportunity to stay with all that is emerging around us and within us. In Feminine Leadership we need to straddle two worlds—the material and the energetic—inhabit both concurrently. Like the roots of the tree, interoception is the rooting that allows you to embody a more expanded consciousness.
Reflection: How much do you sense that you inhabit your body? How sensitive are you to the sensations within you? How well do you take care of your body? And what level of safety do you feel within your body?
How to Weave the Practice of Interoception into your Daily Cycle Check-In:
1. In your Menstrual Cycle Awareness practice each day, pay close attention to and note down your physiological experience.
2. Be as specific, detailed, and nuanced as possible. For example if you feel a knot in your belly, see if you can notice exactly where it is, the temperature of it, and how it feels physically; spiky, tense, buzzy, heavy etc.
3. If you encounter an emotional experience when you check-in with yourself, experiment with paying attention to your physiology, rather than going into the story around why you are feeling this way.
