Day 13 or 14 is usually the most challenging day of my entire cycle. I can go to sleep with a ‘yes’ for life and wake up with a unsettled, irritable, the-glass-is-distinctly-half-empty ‘no’ for life.
What a relief it was over a period of several months of cycle tracking to look back at previous months and identify that this is a pattern, and related to hormonal shifts.
Right after we ovulate, it’s like we shift currents – from an expanding current that can be harnessed for outward expression and manifestation, to a contracting current, where our energy moves back into our internal world. The shift from one to the next is so palpable in me, and I’ve learned to hold myself tenderly as I adjust to this next phase.
This is one of the most precious gifts of cycle awareness that I have received. . . to stop judging myself for feeling a certain way or feeling like I am ‘wrong’ for feeling something, but to recognize it, witness it and hold myself in it…. and the gifts are never far away. Once I adjust to the new current I am riding, the journey drawing inwards is full of riches.
But every month is different… there is no guarantee that each month will be the same… I think it depends on outside circumstances and also the magic of our menstrual cycle and what it wishes to reveal to us, in service to our healing. No wobbly day so far this cycle, only today the distinct feeling of the outside world being less interesting and my energy starting to draw inward, and an emerging desire to feel myself from the inside. My self-care today is a longer yoga practise than usual and recognising and releasing guilt for choosing solitude over company.