How To Get Started With Cyclical Living (taking you through my method)
In this video, I want to explain to you what cyclical living is and then show you how I’m doing it, and how I’ve implemented it in my life. I’m going to share with you why I’ve decided to do this and also some of the benefits that I’m seeing. And I hope that you can make enough sense of this if you’ve been interested in cyclical living if you’ve heard about it, but you don’t really know how it works.
I’m a very practical person, so I’ve tried to make it very practical for myself. So I thought the best way for me to explain to you how I’m doing cyclical living or incorporating it into my lifestyle is with my wonderful flip chart. I’ve created some charts for you that I’m going to take you through.
First, I wanted to just share with you why I’ve decided to do this. I’ve been on a journey of embracing my feminine energy this past year. And this really comes as a result of me feeling burnout and overwhelmed and struggling with chronic pain. I’m learning it all came because I was pushing too much from my masculine energy.
So I was basically living from the head up. I think a lot of us do this. The world is set up that masculine energy is the driver, there’s a lot of focus on achieving, there’s a lot of focus on achievement. And yes, we need our masculine energy. But we also need the feminine, we need the yin and the yang, we need that balance, we need that union of energies.
One of the ways that I’ve awakened my feminine energy, one of the ways that I’m really embracing that, and embodying it, is by following my menstrual cycle, and also by following the yearly cycle.
And they are actually pretty similar, which I’m going to show you just now and what I found is it has allowed me to slow down. So that is one of the biggest things, one of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned and that I’m still learning is to slow myself down.
I’m a typical type-A personality, always pushing, always driving. As a highly sensitive person, I often overthink things and spend a lot of time deeply processing information. I’m an empath, feeling and taking on a lot of emotions of other people.
So I had to come to a point where I needed to slow myself down, where I needed to be able to draw strong boundaries, and where I could actually come back to myself. And this is one of the ways in which I’m doing this. So let me take you through how these cycles work. You can then see for yourself if this is something that you want to try out.
The way that we have been conditioned to operate is regular emotions, regular moods, regular everything, the same amount of energy 365 days of the year. And that simply isn’t possible for us women because we have a hormonal cycle of 28 days.
Our hormones and emotions go up and down through the cycle. if we reject that, if we are trying to just be the same every day, we start seeing our emotions, our moods, our bloatedness, our PMS, we start seeing all of these things as a liability.
We buy into the societal norms that say, at certain times of the month women are so volatile and that it’s something to be ashamed of, or that something that’s really a problem and we reject our own essence in the process.
So it’s really important when you begin to work with your feminine energy when you really embrace that part of yourself, to allow for all of these moods and all of these fluctuations to happen. What you’re also going to find is once you start living in accordance with these cycles, you are going to perform better in the sense that you are optimally aligning yourself with your body’s energy.
So you are going to be able to plan, which is the masculine part, you’re going to be able to plan what to do when, so that, it is in alignment with where you are in your cycle. And this applies not only in your menstrual cycle but also in the yearly cycle.
So we have our menstruation cycle, we have the follicular cycle; ovulation, and then luteal.
These four cycles of menstruation align with the four seasons of the year. So, menstruating is our inner winter, follicular is our innerspring, ovulation is our inner summer, and the luteal phase is our inner autumn. Now, obviously, the seasons of the year are quite clear, because we’ve got 12 months, four seasons, so it’s basically three months per season.
So that’s easy enough, your three months of autumn, three months of winter, three months of spring, and three months of summer. And this is good to know once you start doing reflections and intention setting throughout the year. So you basically work in three months brackets.
But in terms of our menstrual cycle, it’s going to be different for different women. So in essence, the time while you are bleeding, can be anything from three to seven days. When you are in your follicular stage, this can be anything from seven to 10 days. Ovulation can be anything from three to four days, and then your luteal stage can be anything from 10 to 14 days, and this makes up the amount of your cycle.
So, not everyone is on a 28-day cycle. Some women have a 30 or 32-day cycle, some women have a 21-day cycle. So the first thing that you need to do if you want to start working with your cycle and start incorporating it into your lifestyle is first to take a month or two to see how many days are you in a cycle. Are you on a 21-day cycle? Are you on a 28-day cycle? And usually, if you are taking birth control, then you will be on the 28-day cycle.
Once you know exactly the length of your cycle, you can begin to predict when are you going to menstruate, when are you going to be in your follicular, when are you going to ovulate and when are you going to be in luteal and then you begin to plan your month or even your week. That’s what I do. I do my weekly planning on a Friday. And because I know where I am in my cycle, I also know what to put into my plan for the next week.
Let me now just take you a little bit deeper into what do you do then in the different sections.
So we start again in winter and winter is typically a time for rest. So when you are menstruating, this is a time to raise your body, this is a time to reflect, this is a time to review.
What happens in your body hormonally is your left and your right hemispheres are in sync. So it’s really a good time for your brain hemispheres to work together. So you are able to do that review, you’re able to do that assessment. You want to do activities such as walking or yoga. So really very gentle kind of activities that’s not strenuous. You want to tune into your intuition. You want to connect to your inner wisdom.
These are really these aspects of you that are going to be easier for you to tap into and rely on when you’re menstruating, and also when it’s winter. So when you start doing your quarterly review or your seasonal review, you will do activities that have to do with reflection and looking back at where you have come from, you’re not going to take on new projects. Also, when you’re menstruating, you’re not starting with big new projects that are very demanding. This is really at the end of the cycle.
Then we move into spring, which is follicular and this is where the rebirth happens. So think yourself about spring, all of these new green leaves everywhere, everything feels alive, there’s lightness in the air, things feel charged.
So we’re starting to feel more alive, we start to feel more active, so hormonally you are open to new things. All right, so this is the start of the creative juices beginning to flow.
In winter, you’ve had time to connect into what it is that you want to create and what is important to you. . And now you can step into the creation thereof.
The type of activities that you will do are things that are more invigorating. Things that can really start to use this energy of yours that’s coming alive. This is also a time of planting. If you think about spring, it’s a time of planting.
So, you are beginning to create the intentions, you’re going to sow the seeds for what it is that you want to co-create in your life, you’re going to tend to your garden, you’re going to weed out all of those things that don’t serve you. It’s a time to declutter. It’s a time for you to move your energy, it’s a time for you to start to let go of things.
So in your work, this is the best time to start working on your projects to really begin to bring them into fruition to do a lot of planning, to do a lot of visionary work is what you can do over here.
Then moving along with the cycle, we move into summer, which is really the growth cycle.
This is when you’re ovulating, hormonally, your verbal and your social centers are on fire. When you think about the summer season, things are growing, things are becoming lush, they’re becoming ripe. So this is a time to celebrate.
It’s a time to celebrate, and it’s time to play; it’s a time to be joyous. So in your summer solstice reflection consider how you can play more. It’s a space for you to also do a little bit of shadow work, by asking yourself where do I sabotage play in my own life? How do I prevent myself from celebrating? Where do I stop myself from fully emerging and from fully immersing myself and really enjoying everything that life has to offer me?
And then we move into autumn or our luteal phase. This is the harvesting phase.
So now what’s happening is all of the things that you’ve been creating and tending to and allowing to grow are now ready to be harvested. Hormonally, you’re very good with your attention to detail. It’s a time for you to complete projects. So start to bring things to the end. And harvesting is also a time of releasing; it’s a time of letting go so that we can move into our rest cycles.
So when you are then on the autumn equinox, you can start reflecting about all of the things that you’ve been planting during the year, how has that developed? Where have you come from? You can reflect on where are you now? What are you harvesting? And then: what can you release moving into rest phase so that you can then start to rebirth something new in its place.
Most of this information regarding the hormonal side of how we can align with our menstrual cycle I’ve taken this from the book from Alisa Vitti called In the Flo. I can recommend it if you want to start aligning with your cycle. If you’ve been curious about starting with cyclical living then I hope my explanation of how I do it has been helpful to you!