Many of us feel overwhelmed as we emerge from our inner winter. Your energy is returning, but so is your to-do list, and it’s most likely grown in size due to the time you’ve taken to rest at your bleed. This manifests as anxiety for some, others find it hard to know what to prioritise, or perhaps you find yourself rushing and losing track of yourself. Some experience depression, grief or a collapse in energy, just as they need to be gearing up for action.
(In general, it is highly sensitive people who feel much more comfortable with the premenstrual and menstrual phases and therefore grieve having to leave them.)
However it shows up for you, it can be tricky to deal with the day-to-day realities of life after a rich inner winter experience, whether you were able to fully retreat for a good chunk of time, or simply carved out an hour or two to drop your bundle. When you let go completely, even briefly, you can touch into states of menstrual consciousness which can feel deeply altering.
During menstruation, it can feel like you’re being tenderly held as you connect into your undefended self. Now, you must return to what can often feel like the harsh, humdrum realities of your life. Luckily, the final stage of menstruation - we call it Clarity and Direction - can help you make the transition.
Clarity and Direction is the ‘exit lounge’ from your inner temple of menstruation, and this is one of the most important parts of the cycle to focus on if you tend to feel overwhelmed as your emerge from your bleed.
You’re emerging from a womb-like energy field – a bit like a newborn chick hatching from the egg, or a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. You’re vulnerable but holding all the magic of new life, and your energy is naturally rising again, which means you might feel an urgency to get going, perhaps accompanied by a sense that you’ve ‘indulged’ yourself for far too long.
The real challenge as you emerge from the bleed is to hold true to your own timing and not get organized by the culture around you. We suspect that this tendency to rush is connected to our general lack of ability to hold to that deep knowing of ourselves as we engage with the world again. None of us were trained in this! And most of us are surrounded by messages urging us to be more productive, and more focused on caring for others, rather than tending to ourselves.
But you’re not a machine. You don’t flip automatically from one world to another, but rather, gradually transition. The outer ‘lights’ slowly come up and your inner ‘lights’ dim. Your outer ‘skin’, which was gently dismantled so you could enter the menstrual temple, must now begin to thicken or toughen up again.
We say ‘toughen’ cautiously, because we don’t want you to toughen so much that you lose your ability to feel and know yourself, or put back on the old defensive armouring that you no longer need. But you do need sufficient ‘skin’ to cope with the world.
Your sacred tasks in the Clarity and Direction phase are to pace yourself and not let the timing of others organize you, and sustain attention to your inner truth; to hold the thread to your inner self. Mindfulness is the name of the game.
So, as you arrive in the menstrual ‘exit lounge’, be mindful of it as a transition – you’re straddling two worlds, one of deep, protected intimacy and one of high exposure. Both worlds are glorious in their different ways.
In the five chambers of menstruation, Clarity and Direction is the fifth of the five chambers that we write about in Wild Power and teach on our Menstruality Leadership Programme. If you’d like to explore them more, this podcast is a good place to start.
And if you’d like more guidance and support for working with the power of menstruation, and the whole menstrual cycle, or if you’d like to work professionally to share menstrual cycle wisdom, we invite you to explore the Menstruality Leadership Programme. The doors will open for our 2027 programme soon - you can find more information here.
