One of the great blessings of menstrual cycle awareness is that over time, you become more able to track your thoughts and feelings, as well as cultivate a capacity to witness them, rather than believe them as the whole truth.
Never is this more useful than with your inner critic.
This tyrannical force inside often knows no boundaries. It can run wild within us, thinking it has carte blanche to comment on everything and anything in a negative and often brutal way.
Cycle awareness has helped hundreds in the Red School community to cultivate a different relationship with the inner critic, moving from shame to resilience, inner flexibility, greater freedom, more energy and more connection to a sense of purpose.
Here are five truths that can help you work with your inner critic
One: You’re Never Going to Win the Critic Over, Beat it or Make it Nice.
Its remit is to criticise and it delivers its message with a sting, which is a perfectly designed formula for disruption and disturbance within us. The beauty of this is that it is breaking down the walls of our protection - in other words, it is deflating our egos - so that we can grow and strengthen beyond what we’ve have known ourselves to be. Like the shedding of an old skin, so that we can grow into a bigger, more evolved, more mature and whole version of ourselves.
Two: Your Critic is the Catalyst for Your Power.
Through its provocation and criticism it challenges you to claim yourself, warts and all, and take responsibility for yourself and your POWER.
Three: Failing to Meet Your Critic is an Entirely Normal Part of the Process
Crumpling in the face of your critic is a challenging but vital part of growing into yourself. It’s necessary, it is how you build the muscle to face it. You fall down, lick your wounds for a while and then come back again to meet it once more.
Four: The Critic will Break you Open to Reveal your Deepest Vulnerabilities
In so doing it offers an opportunity for you to learn how to care for your vulnerabilities. You can then develop compassion for your humanness and others’ human-ness/fallibility which is a source of profound power.
Five: Cycle Awareness can Restore the Inner Critic to its Natural Home, the Premenstrual Inner Autumn Cycle Phase.
Each inner season of the menstrual cycle is a building block in your pathway to living into your power. And part of maintaining the order of the cycle is restoring the critic to its natural home. In fact, if you encounter the critic in one of your other inner seasons, we recommend you ask it firmly to leave. If it’s left to run rampant through the other seasons it becomes a source of destruction. But in the inner autumn, where it belongs, it’s our catalyst for growth.
Six: Your Sacred Task is to Become more Comfortable with Meeting the Discomfort of your Inner Critic
And when you do face your inner critic in inner autumn, your task is to practice taking your own side enough to hold yourself in the face of the critic and its fallout. To cultivate your capacity to be responsive in relationship to the critic and humble enough to learn from it.
Your sacred task is hold the discomfort of what is happening in yourself when you meet your inner critic. In other words, just hang out with the discomfort long enough to be able to hear what your critic is saying and to allow its criticism to illuminate something for you.
Menstrual Cycle Awareness helps you cultivate the emotional resilience to face the critic, be present with the emotions long enough that you can hear through the barrage of crap into the heart of what the critic is saying, and be able to acknowledge whatever kernel of truth there is.
If you’d like more support, inspiration and encouragement to work with your inner critic, come and join our self-paced workshop: Harness your inner critic to liberate your power.
