Here are a few helpful perspectives and ways of organising your life around your cycle, as well as a few cunning tips, tricks and cycle-savvy methods for carving out space and time to follow your own unique cyclical pattern and work with the inevitable tension when life isn’t fitting into the pattern of your cycle. This is how we create a cycle-smart world from the inside out.
1. Accept the cycle you have
Acceptance is extraordinarily powerful in affecting every aspect of your cycle experience, including how you practise it out in the world. When you’re at peace with your cycle you create a sweet intimacy with yourself that’s magnetising—you generate a subtle energy field around you that affects everyone and everything you come into contact with.
2. Use the power of intention
This is a powerful tool for any area of your life—intention-setting has a way of stimulating inspirations and actions almost immediately and can lead to the fulfilment of your idea or dream. The more you strongly and clearly state your intention about how you’d like to live with and experience your cycle, the more it manifests.
3. Claim your cyclical nature
The practice of cycle awareness naturally builds your sense of entitlement to a cycle-centred life. Through observation your cyclical rhythm becomes inseparable from who you are. It can naturally, over time, support you to clearly stake your right to fully embody it in the world. You’ll literally feel a new swagger in your hips and a new sense of authority that says you do have a right to this.
4. Let your partner in on your MCA discoveries
If you have a partner, share your emotional and physical needs and tendencies in each season with them (as well as how your sexual energy varies). In our experience, many men love to be in on the mysteries of the cycle and want to know more about our needs and tendencies. (And if and if you don’t currently have a partner, you may like to call in the deeper presence and connection of one of your closest friends around your cycle awareness practice).
5. Gather your loved ones around your cycle
As you embody your cycle and share it naturally as part of everyday life, you’re educating community (and your children, if you have them) in cycle-centred living. You could consider adding your menstrual cycle dates to your family calendar on the kitchen wall, or a shared online calendar, so that when others are making appointments, they are mindful of your menstrual time (and other cyclical needs) and arrange things accordingly.
6. Raise the ‘red flag’
The menstrual cycle is a shared experience, and you can call on allies for help. Don’t struggle on alone. Call on friends, sisters and neighbours, and ‘raise the red flag’ when you want practical help. Lean into the support of your community, especially if you have children, and ask for help when you need some time out from mothering, caring, cooking or other forms of tending.
7. Activate menstrual ‘cruise control’
When you menstruate and it’s a big work day, find ways to go more slowly, work more quietly, take the pressure off yourself and just let yourself cruise in your own little menstrual bubble. You could imagine yourself protected in a menstrual cave—no one need know or guess that you’re there. On the outside everything will look ‘normal’ but on the inside, you’ll be holding a lovely tender intimacy with yourself.
…And if this whole notion of practising cycle awareness, and organising your life around your cycle awareness practice, just feels impossible or overwhelming, we have a final offering.
This idea could well leverage you out of this hole and onto the fast track towards a cycle-centred life in no time at all…
8. Practise the 1% shift
If you’ve been with us for a while, you’ll be familiar with this idea—the power of small moves to make big changes. We also sometimes call it ‘the homeopathic dose’. Start by giving your imagination free rein and let yourself dream up what a cycle-centred life would look like for you. Then ask yourself what 1 percent of that change would be. Let it be something really small, seemingly insignificant and imminently doable. Then do it.
