Cycle awareness connects us to ourselves in the deepest way, and this process of remembering and embodying who we truly are can bring us into contact with the parts of ourselves that have been shamed, disrespected and disowned.
At the same time, as you track your cyclical ebb and flow throughout the cycle month, you build a new level of presence in your being. This presence enables you to hold emotional disturbance, to tend to your shadow side, and to hold space for your Achilles heel moments in your cycle experience.
Most of us experience trauma in our lives, to a greater or lesser degree.
Trauma is a puncturing of a fundamental safety within us that leaves us feeling powerless, overwhelmed, or beyond our capacity. There can be many layers to this trauma; developmental, acute, generational and collective depending on our life experience and the identities we hold, but there is one kind of trauma that we see show up in our work time and time again: menstrual trauma.
The widespread cultural denial of the menstrual cycle is a subtle forming of gaslighting which can create a trauma response in us; a kind of inner numbing, or inner concreting, or simply a sense of cognitive dissonance that this normal healthy part of life is dismissed, shamed and hidden away.
Menstrual cycle awareness is a form of somatic self therapy.
When we reclaim our cyclical nature, and commit to the daily practice of checking in with ourselves and how we’re feeling emotionally, physically, spiritually on each cycle day, we establish more safety in ourselves.
We reconnect to our bodies, and slowly, quietly work to repair the disembodiment that trauma can create. We reclaim the ground of ourselves. By developing our capacity for interoception - to track our own inner sensory experience, which is the bedrock for trauma healing.
Menstrual cycle awareness helps us to lean into the body’s innate organic intelligence
We love the work of Stephen Hoskinson - his approach to trauma healing is called Organic Intelligence. When we commit to honouring our ebb and flow throughout the cycle month, we lean into the innate, organic intelligence in our bodies. We become more aware of how it's guiding us and we learn to trust and work with our rhythms to support healing to happen.
Menstrual cycle awareness grows out capacity to be with intense feelings
When you stay close to your shifting emotions throughout the cycle, especially in the premenstrual phase of the cycle, you build up an important kind of resilience. So over time, our cycle tracking builds our capacity for meeting greater and greater levels of intensity with embodied presence - in a way we get
‘stress tested ‘, particularly in the premenstrual phase…
The premenstrual phase and trauma
The premenstrual phase is the time in the cycle where the veil between the conscious and unconscious softens, which means we can be confronted by all that we’ve been suppressing or repressing or ignoring within us (often for very valid reasons of safety, lack of capacity, circumstances which don’t allow us space etc).
(The same is true for the autumn of your menstruating years - usually in the 40s)
Obviously, this greater exposure to the parts of you that you have put in shadows and potentially also to the traumatised parts of you can be deeply uncomfortable, which is why we need to be resourced, and this is where menstruation, and the first half of the cycle can be our ally.
The first half of the cycle can resource us in our trauma healing journey
The wonderful magic of the two halves of the cycle can provide a supportive context for trauma healing. In the first half of the cycle - the via positiva - we not only experience a building up of our energy reserves, but also of our healthy ego strength. And particularly if we've been able to rest well at menstruation, we can experience an embodied knowing of our own goodness, our innate okayness and a sense of safety within ourselves (which will be more or less accessible depending on the identities we hold and how much safety that affords us).
We love this story from one of our Cycle Power graduates, Shalize, about her cycle-aware trauma healing journey.
”I didn't even realize I was carrying, at first, I was annoyed like, why now? Why all of this surfacing after all this time? Some of these memories I haven't thought about in years, but deep down, I trust there's a reason my body and mind have been holding onto these things, waiting for the right moment to let me face them.
And I find it so interesting. They come up as I'm finally working to heal my cycle and my relationship with myself. I don't think it's a coincidence. What's blown me away the most is realizing that so much of the healing I've been so searching for has been within me all along.”
