Just as the study of ecology recognizes that everything is bound up in invisible networks of relationships and interdependence - where every part has its worth and contributes to the worth of all else – we believe that your menstrual cycle and its transitions of menarche, matrescence and menopause is an inner eco-system. Which we call ‘menstruality’.
Menstruality is a hidden inner network that forms the substrate of the human experience – your health, happiness, relationships, and creative and spiritual life. It’s an intricate, ordained order, a precise and multilayered biological, psychological and spiritual system of evolution within the body.
However, until relatively recently, there was no word to describe this whole life process. In 2005, Jane Catherine Severn, a psychotherapist and educator from New Zealand, wrote an article in which she stated that as long as we didn’t name this vital field it would continue to be ignored and dismissed. So, Severn coined the word ‘menstruality’ to break the silence and invisibility around this field and bring it into the public conversation, and we’re deeply grateful to her for this.
While the idea that the menstrual cycle is the foundation of our wellbeing and creative and spiritual life may sound a little strange, the moment you bring awareness to the changing pattern of mood and energy of your monthly cycle you start to feel the tangible reality of this implicate order.
You sense the necessity of it, how good it feels to be in sync with it, the relief of being held in place by a deep, abiding rhythm (whether you suffer from menstrual health problems or not). And ultimately, the revelation of how tending to your cycle grows you up.
Menstruality is governed by the basic energy currents of the menstrual cycle. The events of bleeding and ovulation, and the hormonal interplay between these two states, create a dynamic dance of expansion and contraction. We call these two currents the Two Vias.
From the Two Vias, a phasal pattern of mood and energy emerges; we call this the Inner Seasons of the menstrual cycle, because our experience of these phases reflects the archetypal patterning of the four seasons of the year in the temperate zones on earth*.
Your respectful and conscious cooperation with your lived experience of these changing inner rhythms – what we call menstrual cycle awareness – creates an energetic and psychological web of meaning and order that continues to evolve and deepen over time.
The practice of menstrual cycle awareness (MCA) roots you into your inner ecology. Consciously living the changing rhythm of your menstrual cycle, and the ensuing self awareness and cyclical knowing that you accumulate, provides the groundswell, the momentum, to unfold you organically into and through matresence (if you have children) and menopause.
Your Leadership is Rooted in Your Menstrual Cycle – Your Inner Ecology.
Through the specificity and immediacy of your moment‐by‐moment experience of the menstrual cycle, menopause or life postmenopause, you come to serve the web of Life. Wherever you are in your menstruality process, you care for the place you’re in, as and when you’re in it. Give all of yourself to your part. In doing so, you give all of yourself to the whole.
Your leadership is about serving the web of Life – nourishing the Soul of the World. More specifically, it’s about you living in a way that’s true to what Life’s asking of you. Both MCA, matresence and the menopause will help to illuminate and keep you on track with this.
* For those of you living in tropical zones, we invite you find a metaphor that works for you in capturing these four phases of the menstrual cycle — menstruation, pre-ovulation, ovulation, premenstruum —and all the nuancing within them.
