Your menstrual cycle can act as your own personal, evolutionary laboratory, helping you mature into a fuller expression of yourself and to grow up into your full potential.
Each inner season plays a particular role in this developmental process, and comes with a specific task for you to work with — which we’d like to explore with you today. These tasks are different ways of taking responsibility for yourself. They support you to meet the initiatory process of the cycle: the ego death and rebirth that happens each month. They help you to meet and be with this divine mystery.
Ok, so let’s begin with the developmental tasks of the inner autumn and the inner winter, which awaken the kind of permeability, subtlety and sensitivity that's required to be able to align with life’s mysterious evolutionary forces at work within you.
🌗 Inner Autumn: Meet Yourself
Your task here in the premenstrual phase is to face yourself in all your complexity and to meet your shadow (as you have most likely experienced!). This is the natural home of the inner critic and the place where — like it or not — you must face it head-on. Your work is to hold the tension as you face the shadow material that is surfacing, and to refrain from abandoning yourself so that you can take greater responsibility for your own responses and reactions.
🌑 Inner Winter: Surrender
Your task when you menstruate is to find restedness and acceptance regardless of what is happening. Another way of saying this is to let go of control, to utterly surrender and ‘die to what is’. Inside this metaphorical death a potent initiation is happening — a rebirthing of a newer, more mature and awake you.
Next, forged by your courageous shadow work and deep surrender, the inner spring and inner summer tasks help you to create a sense of solidity, fortitude, strength and newfound capacity.
🌓 Inner Spring: Cherish Yourself
Your task in the pre-ovulation cycle phase is to value your own unique pace, needs and nature. Your inner spring asks you to cultivate your capacity to cherish your uniqueness, and to protect, hold and guard your undefended self rather than performing a role the that culture has decided for you.
🌕 Inner Summer: Show Up
Your task in the ovulatory phase is you give yourself permission to be totally and utterly YOU. By practising showing yourself in your wholeness—not as a perfect version of you, but as a true expression of who you are today, you grow your capacity to bear increased vulnerability. Inner summer invites you to celebrate yourself, strut your stuff, and to cultivate your healthy egoic ‘this is me’ energy.
And then we circle back to the autumn once more, where we move from “this is me and I am great”, to the premenstrual “oh, and this is also me and that's not that great.” You remember that you’re human and you’re fallible, and in this way, you learn to hold and grow into the full, brilliant diversity of who you are.
Would you like support from us and an amazing community to bring these practices to the forefront of your life?
In module three of the Menstruality Leadership Programme, we turn our attention to the four phases of the menstrual cycle—the map of the inner seasons, working with the Inner Seasons as ‘The Embodiment’ of your power and leadership.
During this module we will:
Explore the map of the inner seasons of your cycle as the means to embody your power and leadership.
Discover the inner seasons as the personal developmental pathway—the process of building your ‘relationship to yourself’ through your relationship to each of the inner seasons.
Click here if you'd like more information on our Menstruality Leadership Programme
