How to Know your Calling is Calling?

What is your Calling? How can you recognise it? And how can your cycle awareness practice help you to cultivate an intimacy with it, track it and learn how to embody it?

We speak about the term Calling a lot at Red School. This word means different things to different people. This quote from our book Wise Power says a little about what we mean by the word…

Your Calling is your particular genius or compilation of talents or gifts that you bring to the world, alongside your shortcomings and limits—this original combination of you. When you feel your Calling, you feel the rightness of who you are, and the vital place or niche you occupy in the ecology of Life. You sense that who you are and what you offer is wanted….A Calling is more than just being good at something. You may have many different skills, some or all of which will be crucial in serving your Calling but are not the Calling in and of themselves. To state the obvious, your Calling calls you’

The process and practice of cycle awareness is your ultimate ally to discover, embody and learn to express Your Calling over time. It creates the container—the necessary limits, tasks and rhythm—through which you forge the necessary psychological growth and spiritual maturity that allows your Calling to be known and fully expressed.

Your Calling is present within you from the moment you’re conceived, and lies dormant until your first bleed at menarche, when it announces itself and begins to inform and orchestrate your life path.

As we explore in our menopause book Wise Power, we see the culmination of your menstruating years as your ultimate preparation for living your Calling – it’s a profound initiation into your authority, purpose and leadership skill.

Here are some ways to recognise your Calling when it comes calling…

1. You receive a powerful vision
   Perhaps this is simply a sense of the way the world could be, or a vision for what is possible which stirs something deep within you. It could be something you're called to do, create or otherwise bring about. The inner winter / menstruation is the quintessential moment for receiving vision (but it can of course land at any time). Take your menstrual visions seriously, even if they appear ‘too big’ or impossible!
2. You receive quiet inner nudges
   Sometimes your calling shows up much more quietly—as a felt sense of something meaningful at work within you, which often feels unnamable and wordless. Your job isn’t to necessarily figure out the how or why, but more to trust that these inner promptings are taking you somewhere over time.
3. Your natural talents and gifts
   As you get to know yourself more and more through your cycle awareness practice, you uncover more of your particular talents—where your Calling meets a need in the world.
4. You notice that you find real pleasure in a certain thing, activity or way of being
   Your Calling is not a job description. It is your own genius, which is easiest to see by looking for whatever puts you in the joy stream of your pleasure; the activities, causes, places and people you most love or light you up, the values you hold dear, the simple things that spark joy (and possibly have done since you were a child).
5. You feel pulled to serve something bigger than you.
   At its core, your Calling is in service to something greater than you. It's a simultaneous recognition of how special you are, but also how you are part of a bigger orchestration. And that inside the orchestration, you are required to be nothing other than who you are. (This often really becomes apparent at menopause—either as a radical shift, or as a deeper expression of what you're already doing).

As we explored in last week’s Red Thread (which you can read here),  inner winter can plug you into your Calling in a profound way.

And then, through each inner season that follows, your Calling becomes a little bit more embodied, a little bit more integrated and expressed, as your cycle continues to evolve you all the way to menopause and into your post-menopause years. It's such an intelligent, complete system.

Our Menstruality Leadership Programme is designed to help you access this deep intelligence within the menstrual cycle ever more, so that it can take centre stage in your life, guiding you towards the full expression of your calling, and a life of great meaning and purpose.