The Inner Seasons of your menstrual cycle are your guide to getting to know yourself as well as being the necessary preparation for accessing the spiritual powers of menstruation.
Your ally in self-care, stress management and inner work, your Inner Seasons help you to;
- pace your energy
- calm your nervous system
- get insight and feedback on your overall wellbeing
- they are the building blocks for embodying all aspects of power.
As you learn about yourself through your Inner Seasons, you develop the skills to handle your emotions and make better choices around your behaviour.
It’s a means of personal therapy and healing that teaches you how to harness the power and tend to the vulnerabilities of your unique nature.
As a template for the creative process, The Inner Seasons reveal the very precise stages every creative project goes through. This is built into your body – it’s your personal creativity coach for accessing inspiration
and manifesting your ideas.
Each Inner Season holds a key initiatory step, or stage, that works you month after month through your menstruating years in order to become and claim your full self.
Like the seasons of the year, through your menstrual month you move through an inner winter, inner spring, inner summer and inner autumn and back to winter again.
Each season has it's own unique characteristics, natural gifts and challenges that help you know yourself, take care of yourself and embody your power.
In meeting the challenges you strengthen your metaphorical muscles, and build the inner container to hold and express your full magnificence or your Wild Power.
To give you a rough idea of these phases, in a classic 28 day cycle:
However, do not get too hung up on exact days. The important thing is to sense and follow your own cycle experience, and discover the season changing moments for yourself.
We have only one rule when it comes to exploring the power of your menstrual cycle, and we call it our Big Red Rule. It simply states that:
YOUR OWN EXPERIENCE IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANYTHING WE MIGHT SAY
Drop any expectation that you ‘should’ experience your menstrual cycle in a certain way. There’s an ‘archetypal cycle’, and through practising MCA you’ll discover your own personal version of that, and how
it reveals your talents, strengths and vulnerabilities. Got it?
As you bring consciousness to and care for each season in turn, you restore the order of the cycle, your inner ecology, and with that create a feeling of greater ease and pleasure, coherence and effectiveness in using your power.
Our free Love Your Cycle online course will help you to nurture a real intimacy with the rhythm and flow of your menstrual cycle (exactly as it is), so that you can:
Enhance Your Vitality --> You’ll explore how to read your body, manage stress and tailor your self-care so that you can thrive throughout the cycle month.
Know Your Power --> You’ll cultivate your relationship with the powers of each cycle phase, so that you can feel more confident, inspired and at home in yourself.
Live Your Cycle Wisdom --> You’ll discover practical ways to actually live your cycle in a linear world.
You can join LOVE YOU CYCLE for free here:
First let's focus on the inner winter - the time of menstruation.
Your Inner Winter is a season full of the most amazing resources such as the ability to experience expansive awareness and altered states of consciousness, effortless presence, ecstasy and visioning, and love and Union.
The key that gives you access to these resources is the sacred task of Surrender.
Surrender is your ability to let go and allow.
It sounds so simple but in our action-driven, productivity-focused world, surrendering can feel almost impossible... there is always another thing to do. And if we're honest, letting go can feel a little bit scary for most of us.
Stopping may expose us to feelings that we may have been keeping at bay with activity. We might also feel like we are missing out, or it could feel plain boring. But, if you are able to find your unique way of creating just a little more rest and space, you will come into a more aligned, wholesome place with your power.
Menstruation is the anchor of your power process. It is both the beginning and end of it. It’s the place where you root deeply into yourself. And surrender is the means by which that anchoring happens. As you let go at menstruation you release tension, repair and refuel(through rest and the activation of the soothing balm of oxytocin), re-connect, remember who are and what you are really about (your Calling or Wild Power).
Your inner spring is a place of becoming. You are in transition from the deep interiority of your inner winter and negotiating your way to the full expression of yourself in your inner summer. You are firming up your sense of identity, getting more and more comfortable in the sacred art of being you.
To help you with this quest, your inner spring comes replete with much goodness. Perhaps uppermost is the inner ‘yes’ you can feel as the energy rises, a yes to yourself, a yes to life. You are held in a world of possibility and hope, have a natural motivation and focus, and a playfulness that can easily segue into devil may care foolhardiness. Who would have thought foolhardiness was a power?
But it is. It’s the force that pushes you out the door to do things before you think you’re ready...and all meaningful projects require a little foolhardiness!To help you access your inner spring’s gifts you need the sacred task of cherishing yourself. It’s important to approach the inner spring and yourself with tenderness and care.
Cherishing has a protective quality, a warmth and preciousness. Within that protective circle of cherishing is a delicacy, tenderness and appreciation. There is something so gentle and precise - you really see the uniqueness and exquisiteness of yourself.
The inner summer is the ‘glamourous’ part of the menstrual cycle.
This is the season that is most acknowledged, valued and recognised as powerful in our culture. It’s what we normally think of as power….getting stuff done. And it is power.
However it sits in a continuum. It is made possible by all the ‘power’ work that has gone before - surrendering yourself at menstruation to reconnect and remember who truly are; and the tender cherishing of your emerging self in the inner spring.
The inner summer invites you into the fullness of who you are - the liberated expression of your power. This phase ushers in the power of being visible and getting down to manifesting your Calling in the world. You blossom, you fulfill yourself, your spirit. And that will look different for each person.In essence your inner summer is about the expression of your power in the world, daring to really be true to your own nature more than anything else.
It’s about showing up as who you are. Remember you are unique. And THAT is your POWER
To help you access all this extraordinary summer juiciness, to unlock its full power, there is a crucial task, a sacred task. And it is Self Celebration. It's time to recognise and celebrate yourself.
The inner autumn is where you are challenged and tempered to grow up, and take full responsibility for who you are.
In holding the tension of the complexity of who you are, the light and dark, you allow your power to evolve. You have the power of ‘no’ on your side to clarify what’s in and what’s out and establish firm boundaries.
As you learn to root in your authority and align with your truth (this what the autumn is asking of you), you come to wield your power wisely.
The inner autumn is the 'home' of your inner critic. The critic’s role is...well...to criticise. It’s remit is to challenge and it delivers its message with a sting. And it’s this combination of criticism delivered with a sting that is perfectly designed to cause disruption and disturbance within you, to break down the walls of your protection (in other words deflate the ego) so that you can grow and strengthen beyond what you have been before.
Your sacred task to meet this figure is to Hold Yourself - to hold the discomfort of what is happening in yourself when you encounter the critic. In other words, hang out with the discomfort long enough to be able to to hear what you critic is saying; to be present with the emotions long enough that you can hear through the barrage of crap into the heart of what it is saying and be able to acknowledge whatever kernel of truth there is, while simultaneously holding on to your own goodness and standing up to what’s not true in the critic’s words.
And your reward for meeting this month after month...a fierce, truth searing capacity to hold to the full brilliance of yourself and a tender humility; a resilience and responsiveness to life. In short Wisdom.
Our free Love Your Cycle online course will help you to nurture a real intimacy with the rhythm and flow of your menstrual cycle (exactly as it is), so that you can:
Enhance Your Vitality --> You’ll explore how to read your body, manage stress and tailor your self-care so that you can thrive throughout the cycle month.
Know Your Power --> You’ll cultivate your relationship with the powers of each cycle phase, so that you can feel more confident, inspired and at home in yourself.
Live Your Cycle Wisdom --> You’ll discover practical ways to actually live your cycle in a linear world.
You can join LOVE YOU CYCLE for free here >>
