If you’ve been practising menstrual cycle awareness for a while, we imagine you’ve been discovering how the inner seasons of the cycle can become a brilliant ally for self-care, stress management and inner work.
Whether you’re learning more about how to pace your unique energy levels, calm your nervous system, adapt your workouts and meals to your cycle phase or get insight about your creative projects - the learning is never-ending.
You’ve probably also noticed that you’re developing new skills to handle your emotions and make better choices around how to respond and behave to whatever each day throws at you. One way to take your cycle awareness practice to the next level is to use it to guide your decision making.
Here are some ideas you might like to explore for each inner season:
Receive Inner Guidance from Your Deep Self in Inner Winter
At menstruation, you’re gifted an opportunity to metaphorically ‘die’ to the self you think you are or should be, and be restored to the full potency of your authentic self.
Your capacity to let your inner winter wisdom influence your decision making rests on one vital thing: that you have at least a little time to abandon all responsibilities and do nothing. It’s exactly this rest, repair and renewal that can anchor you - it’s the magnetic true north that gets you all lined up, filled up, loved up and prepped to make good choices.
Practical suggestion: Create a sanctuary - a quiet, still time - for yourself that keeps the harsh realities of the world at bay, even if it’s just for an hour. Let yourself just 'be' with no agenda so that you can be 'available' to receive guidance from your deep being.
Take Risks, Play and Experiment in Inner Spring
After rest at menstruation, you arrive in your inner spring ready to start afresh and re-choose your life from a place of new possibility.
During the pre-ovulatory time, you’ve got the scope to try, test out, feel into and play with different potential options. It can be a liberating time: full of agility, flexibility and light-heartedness. You get to try on different hats, experiment with various styles and approaches, act ‘as if ’, and discover much through the world of your imagination.
Practical suggestion: if you have a big decision to make, use the playful, rising energy of inner spring to practice trying out different options - perhaps through imagining their outcomes in your journal - and let yourself be surprised by the fresh clarity that may emerge.
Let Yourself be Bold and Unleashed in Inner Summer (but don’t plan the whole month from here!)
For many, the inner summer is a time where your critical, judgemental mind generally gets out of the way, which can allow creativity and self-expression to pour out of you, unedited and unchecked.
You’re also less likely to care about what others think – if anything, you’re more likely to imagine everyone is on your side right now. So this can be a good time to make bolder choices that you might hold back from in other cycle phases.
Practical tip: Don’t make long-term plans based on your inner summer capacity and energy levels. In a couple of week’s time, you’re likely to find yourself wondering how on earth you thought you could achieve it all!
Channel Your Pre-Menstrual Truth-Telling Power
You receive a strong call to come back to yourself as this phase asks, ‘How are you really?’ Consciously meeting this question awakens your power to be more fully present to yourself and the internal rupturings, as you elbow away the distractions, demands and noise of the outside world. This makes it a particularly potent cycle phase to make decisions without people-pleasing or overriding yourself and your needs.
Practical tip: Back to Chloé’s story - it’s important to take yourself seriously in this cycle phase, but not necessarily act immediately on big decisions. If you can, give yourself some time to reflect on the possible impact over your bleed. Which brings us to…
Bleeding On It
If you have a particularly big and important decision to make, rather than ‘sleeping on it’ try ‘bleeding on it’. Your menstrual cycle is a container of time to incubate an issue, and you can also take a number of cycles to deepen into a big life change – each cycle giving you another level of meaning and clarity.
If you’d like to take your cycle awareness practice to the next level, or 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 all the information about it here.
