We are here to support you in taking a little time for yourself every day; so simple and yet so hard to do! Here are the goodies to get you started. Watch the videos below to get all the info on charting and how to use the seasons to manage your energy.
You’ll find the spring, summer autumn and winter practices by scolling down. Feel from to choose a practice to match your cycle or mood!
There are instructions in the next video that will show you how to chart your menstrual cycle, or if you don’t have one, how to chart with the moon.
You can download your menstrual chart by clicking here or a moon chart by clicking here. We recommend you print a few off straight away so you have some for next month too.
Get inspiration from Leora’s cycle updates on Instagram. Now come over to the Facebook group and say hi!
Your Inner Spring – Vulnerability to Florescence
Your gifts are nestled in the Inner Seasons of Menstrual Cycle Awareness and this week we’ll explore Inner Spring.
To get a feel of what it’s like, let yourself sink into how you might connect with the seasons of the yearly cycle.
Outer spring – the time when we watch the green shoots and then blossom emerge from wintry stillness.
Inner spring in the menstrual cycle is when you step out of your phase of menstruation/inner winter and before you enter the phase of ovulation/inner summer. It’s a time to be curious, playful and inquisitive in the creative cycle.
As we take our first few steps into inner spring, we do so with great care; it can be a deeply vulnerable time.
Your inner spring experience may be led by your relationship with the time of menstruation. You may experience your bleed as a deeply physical, psychological, emotional and/or spiritual process, or, depending on your journey, just wish that it wasn’t happening at all.
At this point, it’s important to say, ALL FEELINGS are welcome and please do use the Facebook group as support, not just from us but the wise women gathering there.
This is why deep care is required as we step from inner winter into inner spring. Charging over this liminal space, hell for leather and guns a-blazing, after such a potentially tender inner winter time, is a recipe for disaster for your energy and psyche.
But if deep care is taken at this transitional point, you have the rest of the phase to begin exploring life around you and your inner landscape again with curiosity, a spark of innocence, renewed enthusiasm and potential playfulness.
Creative Spring
Creatively, this is a time that ideas that may be showing their excitable shoots and begin to flow. All the tenderness and vulnerability of pre-ovulation also applies to the early stages of a project; can you explore and play with the new possibilities without forcing them out into the world super-quick? Dear women, please keep them in a safe place, as it’s too early to share them. In this season, the critics are banned and reality is not required, instead, we can playfully stretch the possibilities of what might be like a child with a toy box.
Our capacity to trust the process of creativity and embrace the new possibilities without judgment is absolutely dependent on how rested we are; if you’re half way to burnout, there’s no way you’ll have the spirit to enjoy the new cycle and engage with your new project.
Now, to unwrap your gift…
Your Self-Care Massage Guide – Vulnerability to Florescence
Kindness kit list:
- A space for you to relax in for your massage time
- Maybe, a Do Not Disturb sign on the door to be clear of your intention!
- Set aside 10 minutes each day to settle into the massage
- A pillow, cushion or bolster to put under your knees
- Your Self-Massage guide recording
- Massage balm or oil
- To massage your womb, you’ll need to pull down your underwear to your pubic bone
- To locate your womb, place your thumbs on each hip bone, then bring your index fingers together over your lower belly. Your womb is beneath your index fingers. Or find your pubic bone and your womb is two finger widths above your pubic bone.
When not to massage over your womb:
- While you are menstruating – you want your flow to release
- If you have taken painkillers – as pain might be masked
- If you have an IUD fitted
- If you think you’re pregnant
- If you have an infection
Why enjoy self-care belly massage?
- Our wombs receive a maximum of 5% of our body’s circulation. That’s on a good day when circulation is flowing well. If you have tight ligaments or congestion around your womb, that percentage decreases, and this can affect womb and digestive health.
- A high percentage of serotonin, one of the happiest happy hormones is created in the gut – constipation makes us grumpy!
- 80% of our immune system is created in the gut – quite simply belly massage keeps us healthy
- 90% of us have a misaligned womb, whether that is from posture, trauma, or our natural physical state, massage helps ease those tight ligaments around your sacred womb
- When we connect to our womb, we open a space for ourselves to converse with the most sacred part of our being, our source, our creative centre – whether these creations are of children, of ideas, of businesses, of art, of writing, or of anything we set our mind and heart to initiate.
- We acknowledge that the connection may not be easy and straightforward, so gentleness is key when you massage yourself, especially if vulnerability arises.
Connecting to the qualities of Inner Spring, we’ll explore our relationship with our womb and belly as we experience our Vulnerability to Florescence self-care massage.
Download the self-care massage audio here
To download it for safe keeping, you’ll need to be on your computer, just click on the link above then on the arrow on the right-hand side or you can listen below.
Your Inner Summer – Welcome To The Pleasure Zone
In the menstrual cycle it’s the phase of ovulation; in the lunar cycle it’s the full moon phase; it’s the most potent time in the creative cycle.
Outer summer
How does outer Summer look to you? Is it the lushness of the grass, the abundance of foliage, the fruit ripening, and the colours of nature strengthen with vibrancy, that catches your attention? Or is the long days with all those hours of light, increasing your vibrancy?
Inner summer
All of these outer natural manifestations of summer are mirrored in the archetype of the “fruitful mother”, of ovulation and full moon energy.
The phase is where we can pick up our Wonder Woman shield and lasso! With our energy at it fullest we can take on the world and more. Our diaries fill up as anything and everything is possible right now. The focus turns outwards.
In the menstrual cycle, your energy has been rising throughout spring and that playful maiden is maturing into a sensual ovulatory woman.
What you may be experiencing now is a growing ripeness. That mirroring of nature in ourselves is felt in the physical too; during ovulation our labia and vagina become more engorged and full, feeding our sensuality. Your libido may rise, as we are potentially at our most fertile and pleasure seeking. Your yoni may become your sensory focal point.
Pleasure seeking may be with a partner, but please don’t forget yourself. Self-pleasure is just as potent, sometimes even more so, than spending sensual time with a partner.
As well as your meditation gift, we have a Commit to Kindness invitation this week to explore your own sensual needs. It’s the ultimate act of kindness really, an exploration of yourself and the possibility of orgasm, which releases oxytocin, leading to a lowering of cortisol. Feel good all round! It’s a winning combination!
Care in summer
If you’re on your fertility journey this may be a highly charged time in your cycle, with much expectation. We urge you to perhaps step up the kindness, seeking whatever meets your needs.
For women in perimenopause, the shadow side of this abundant energy can bite you on the bum quite quickly. Energy levels may be limited, even in inner summer, so it’s a time to be mindful of packing too much in.
Women in menopause and post-menopause, this energy may or may not be within reach; sit with the information here and see what resonates for you. Exploring your own individual cycle, whether it’s with the moon, seasonal or a daily cycle, will help you find a path. One thing’s for sure at this time, we need more kind self-love, more kind healing and more and better loving attention. Our vaginas know what’s what and if there ain’t no love, there ain’t no juice.
Creative summer
The archetype is “the fruitful mother” but the term refers not only to birthing a child, this is where your creative mothering comes into her own.
This is the point in the cycle when ideas may be flowing with gleeful abandon. That’s perfect, please don’t hold back; you may be at your least self-conscious, so being visible with your ideas and projects will feel easier.
This outward, optimistic and unedited energy can be piled in heaps into your creativity and projects. This is time to make the most of this summer energy, as autumn is just around the corner…
Kit for summer kindness
- If we’re blessed with a dry day, you may choose to sit outside, on the grass to completely infuse yourself in summer energy!
- A cushion, chair, meditation stool or blanket to sit on
- Your journal for noting down your feelings or reaction to the visualisation
Enjoy your Welcome to the Pleasure Zone guided visualization
To download it for safe keeping, you’ll need to be on your computer, just click on the link above then on the arrow on the right-hand side or you can listen below.
Your Inner Autumn – What Stops You From Taking Time?
Summer is fading softly and autumn is creeping in. This is the point in the cycle where the outward, exuberant energy changes direction and we start to move inward towards ourselves. Actually, for many women, it’s an abrupt bang as the door from oestrogenic generosity slams shut and we face our inner needs again. Ouch. Turns out we’re not Wonder Woman after all. Or not all of the time.
If you feel you haven’t really got started, don’t worry. No matter how often you’ve done the practices or taken time for yourself, or not, just setting a daily intention to be more kind is the first step to making changes in your life.
Edit and review
The autumnal part of the cycle is the premenstruum for menstruation and in the creative cycle, it’s the bit where you test your project and get feedback. This is the natural time for editing and assessing what’s not working for us.
Your autumnal practice
This week’s practice is to make a daily journaling date with yourself. We’ll be using the time to investigate what it is that stops us from taking time out for ourselves and follow what our bodies need; the beliefs, the fears, the ‘but I can’ts’…. Allowing these critical voices to have their space is tremendously revealing and can show us how, and often why, we keep ourselves small and restricted by not giving ourselves enough rest.
By bringing these negative voices into the light, you can start to familiarise yourself with them, so that when they show up in your everyday life, you will be able to recognise and zap them into harmlessness. In fact, our inner critic loves to show up in autumn and tell us where we went wrong, it’s her natural home. But if she shows up in other seasons, just tell her firmly to go. Autumn is where she belongs.
By increasing your awareness of how the negative voices show up for you, you can take your power back and build internal muscles to help you choose kindness more often.
Your commitment to kindness
Each day this week set aside at least 5 minutes for yourself with a pen/pencil, a timer and a journal or paper.
What to do
2. Set a timer for 5 minutes
3. Write continuously until the timer dings. If you get stuck, just write “I’m stuck I’m stuck…” until a new thought comes into your mind.
The prompts
If I took time out to look after myself then…
How did my mum take time out for herself?
What beliefs or judgments did my mum have about taking time out?
What beliefs or judgments did my dad have about my mum taking time out?
I can’t put my own needs first because…
I only deserve to take time out when…
If I got a letter from my 80-year old self it would say
If my body could tell me what it needed it would say
If I could advise my teenage self I would say…
What do I need to let go of so I can really look after myself?
What words do I use to describe someone who rests when she needs to?
Top Tips
- It is of course absolutely essential that what you write is kept private to you and you only share if you choose, so keep your writing in a safe place!
- Do not censor what you write; this is a place to release all those dark fears of what awful thing will happen if you put your own needs first.
- When you come to look at the prompts, be mindful which to pick, if the emotional charge is high there’ll be gold in the ground!
- You may want to set your time for longer as the week progresses.
- You may find that you start a conversation with your inner critic. Don’t be afraid of writing out the dialogue you have with her, if it feels natural.
- There’s often shame attached to doing nothing and resting. In our opinion, this is the patriarchy keeping women small and powerless. Just saying.
- At the end of the week have a look at what you’ve written, what are the themes that have arisen for you?
- Whose voices do you hear speaking these words?
- When you notice these voices in your head in your everyday life, what can you do to lessen their impact?
Do come and share your experiences on the Commit to Kindness Facebook group, where you’ll find a big-hearted band of women all wrestling with similar issues ready to share the journey.
If you find you are struggling, here are our suggestions for everyday kindness in the face of negativity:
- Choose which voices you pay attention to (hint, pick the kind ones!)
- Ask yourself “Is this voice kind, does it nourish me and make me bigger or smaller?”
- For the most powerful negative statements, try writing an equal and positive statement. For example “I’m lazy” becomes “I nourish myself with rest”
- Get the support of your trusted allies and friends by sharing your process.
Your Inner Winter – Deep Rest
It’s our last week in Commit to Kindness and the season has turned again from autumn into winter, it’s time to slow down and drop inward.
The winter part of the cycle is the time for deep rest. A time when our natural inclination is to look inward, go slow and receive guidance.
When winter comes
In the cycle of menstruation, it’s the time of your bleed, though it may start a day or so before. In the creative cycle, it might be the time in between projects or when inspiration deserts you. Menopause can be a deeply wintery time, with the external world falling away as we turn our attention to our inner world.
A time of deep rest
These wintery periods are not particularly popular in our world because it looks like nothing is happening! Our constant drive to prove our worth by crossing off tasks and taking care of everyone else makes the winter-time deeply unpopular.
But taking rest has a two-fold advantage. We have to have physical rest in order to power ourselves up for the dizzy excitement of summer; deciding to stop sleeping every night would not make a sustainable solution to productivity. Taking regular time out to do nothing also allows us to connect with our spirituality and receive guidance from higher realms which will nourish the next cycle.
Inner knowing
It’s also the place where we have easy access to our intuition and innate knowing, and a natural spirituality becomes available to us. In the same way that we ‘sleep on’ a problem and wake up with clarity, ‘bleeding on’ an issue can provide great insight and wisdom too.
Your Wintery Gift
So for this wintery week, our offering is a Wintery Yoga Nidra for you to use every day. It is 15 minutes long but now you are kindness-pros we challenge you to take this time out every day to listen to it.
Yoga Nidra, literally translated as ‘yogic sleep’ is a guided meditation that induces a profound relaxation somewhere between waking and sleeping.
Kit for winter kindness
1. Make sure you won’t be disturbed for 15 minutes.
2. Find a space for you to practice your Yoga Nidra, make it as comfortable as you can. It can be a yoga mat or the sofa (if you lie on the bed you’ll tend to go to sleep)
3. Get really comfortable with cushions for your head and under your knees; this is really important! Do not compromise on your comfort!
4. You can lie or your back or your side, or even do your meditation seated if you prefer.
5. If you feel the need to move during the meditation, just notice it and see if the desire goes away. If it doesn’t move mindfully so that you are comfortable enough to regain your stillness.
6. Try to stay awake, but Yoga Nidra is an adaptive process; if you sleep, it’s because your body needs to sleep and that is perfect. Your subconscious will still be receiving the words and spirit of the Yoga Nidra.
To download it for safe keeping, you’ll need to be on your computer, just click on the link above then on the arrow on the right-hand side. You can also listen by clicking below.
Wanting to move back into spring again?
You might enjoy this guided self-care massage, ‘Winter Into Spring’ will take you further into the possibility of moving gently into the world again with a joyful womb.
or listen online by clicking below