Menstruation and menopause awaken us to the magic, power and authority of our deep selves, but to do that, they ask that we pull away from the world and stop and rest.
So how do we deal with the fact that actually figuring out HOW to rest is a great challenge for most of us, due to the momentum at work in our world today.
If you struggle to ‘just let go’ and rest when you bleed, or during the unfolding of your menopause process, this article is for you.
Reason #one: fear
We know, from talking with so many of you in this community and from our own personal journeys that there is a very deep, often icy-cold fear that we need to negotiate on our personal quest to surrender to rest.
It's an incredibly important practice to pause as soon as you begin to feel this fear. It’s a moment to resist the urge to push yourself past it, brace, override or brave your way through.
Instead we recommend working with it as a moment to build more sensitivity and connection to yourself, to feel more of what's happening within you, and to be with your own vulnerability.
When we slow down around the edges of this fear, we can begin to hear what it's saying to us.
Simply this process of turning towards yourself will soothe your system and support you to drop.
Reason #two: our inner critics can get very loud when we try to rest
Have you ever noticed that doing-doing-doing is a great way to keep your critic at bay? When you begin to slow the momentum, you can feel flooded with all the feelings you haven’t been allowing yourself to feel.
This is like a red flag for our critic who is right there, ready to jump in with a steady stream of oh-so-helpful comments like “you’re such a slacker” and “you can’t afford to stop”. It will comment on all the things that you’re not comfortable with in yourself; that thing you said or did; the way you handled that recent conflict and so on.
The truth is that we need a feeling of ground and a sense of safety in order to be able to hold ourselves and our vulnerability when we rest. (Particularly for those of us that have experienced trauma in our lives).
Cycle awareness can help us to cultivate the capacity to turn towards ourselves, pace our nervous systems and understand what it is that we need in order to feel safer in each moment.
Reason #three: there are cultural and systemic barriers to rest.
As well as looking to the reasons that exist within ourselves, it’s also important to name that it is less accessible and safe for certain people to be rested in our world. Women in general experience obstacles to rest due to ongoing sexism in the work sphere (for example, in the UK women still only earn 86 pence on average for every pound earned by men and women take on three times as much unpaid care and domestic work as men around the world.)
There are further obstacles for Black, Indigenous, People of Colour, people in the LGBTQ+ community, people living with a disability and anyone with a marginalised identity.
So, as we learn to become more rested in ourselves, we can also - from a rested place - be working to create a world that is safer for all of us to rest. (A great resource here is Tricia Hersey from The Nap Ministry and her book Rest is Resistance)
So, what can we do? Here are some of our favourite ways our cycle-awareness practice can help us to rest:
If you’d like to explore the skills of Interoception and Restedness, and the 10 other Menstruality Leadership skills we teach on our Menstruality Leadership Programme, we’d love to have you with us, you can find out more about it here.
