What do you do when you’re deep in your inner winter, either menstruation or menopause, and the world comes knocking with its demands? When you can’t get a duvet day.
Children, bosses and deadlines sneer at our inner winter as totally irrelevant;
How you respond to the demands will depend on how well stocked your internal larder is. To survive winter we need provisions; good friends, supportive colleagues, clear communication, to be well rested and have self-care cemented into our routines.
At Woman Kind, we’re blessed to work together and have each other for support. Generally, when one of us is in winter, the other can take care of the action for a while but in the last week, we’ve both been deep in our winters, just at the point when decisions and action about our next retreat event needed to be taken! So what did we call on to get us through?
Structure
Leaning into the structure we’ve built really helps to orientate us, the rhythm and boundaries of our work and daily life guide us when our judgment is wibbly.
Trusting the cycles
Having built awareness of our cycles over the years (and yes, even in menopausal and perimenopausal times, there are cycles of a sort) we can trust that we will swing back into spring as the inner season crosses over.
Sharing
Telling each other where we’re at really helps. Sharing with your partners, each other and children avoids resentment and confusion.
Support
Asking for help and delegating in winter can create a small miracle. In this case, we both opened up to the greater universe for help with the decision making, but also delegated some of our other tasks to family members so we could get some rest.
Taking a homeopathic dose
Where it’s not possible to lock the door and get the duvet time we need, taking a small dose of quiet is soothing enough to get us through. Sometimes though, we need to know that there will be a significant quantity of me-time in the near future, or we ain’t playing no more!
Loving the winter
As we get familiar with the vulnerability of our wintery feelings, we can learn to love this time, perhaps just as much as the more ‘acceptable’ inner summer.
Spending time in retreat is a great way to stock up your inner larder for winter, if you would like to join us for a day of rest and reflection, you can find the dates for the next retreat days on the right-hand side of the page.
Or you could join us for Am I Going Mad? our online perimenopause retreat.