What day are you?
Six months ago, I started tracking my menstrual cycle with my dear friend, S. We are both 48, on the cusp/midst of perimenopause and fascinated by the tidal rhythms of our changing bodies as we enter this new phase of womanhood. S has always had a regular, almost textbook 26-28 day cycle, whereas mine have been irregular, even suppressed. In fact, there was a 10-year stretch after childbirth and nursing my three children when I stopped menstruating altogether. But then, two years ago, my daughter got her first period and that nudged something open in me and I started bleeding again. I recalled how, living with female roommates in college, our cycles would often sync up - because of hormones, but also because we ate the same foods, kept similar hours, and spent a lot of time in each other's rooms talking about any/everything.
S and I started listening to a podcast produced by the Red School, whose mission is to "activate the vitality, creativity and leadership of a million people, through the magic of menstrual cycle awareness and a conscious menopause." The Red School aligns the menstrual cycle to what they refer to as the four inner seasons and offers powerful language to describe the connection between our bodies, minds, and spirits. Each episode begins with the hosts and their guests (health practitioners, spiritual coaches, natural healers, Chinese doctors, etc.) sharing the day of their cycle and how they are feeling. Borrowing this practice, S and I often start our texts to each other the same way.
Our check-ins range from simple notes like this -
Day 21 (S) – Today, I feel very open (in a raw/very unprotected way).
Day 40 (b) feeling grounded and steady.
To more multi-faceted explorations such as this -
Day 13 (S) woke up feeling clear headed, ready to take on today, and wanting to go for a walk but also know I should rest.
It’s been almost a full cycle for me since we started our MC Day sharing – yay/wow/shared 光
It’s been really amazing (and transformative) seeing each day with a new awareness/perspective/lens and then…
Thinking about how this new insight could be applied to different aspects of life/relationships/myself and then…
Actually applying them to many different aspects of life and then…
Observing/processing/analyzing/readjusting, not to mention also experiencing the effect on myself physically/emotionally/mentally from the above and then…
This is actually a lot AND also deserves acknowledgement, gratitude AND space and time for nurturing, recovery, and healing.
Day 64 (b) aware that my attention/energy feels split, like light refracting through a prism. Not good or bad, just spread in a different way.
S and I have very different constitutions - she crackles with energy, her passion radiates outward and her heart is big and she is never afraid to let it crack wide open; she has an engineer's mind and is drawn to systems. My energy is folded in and when my heart splits, it splits quietly, in fractals; I have a writer's mind and am drawn to patterns. I've observed this from our 10+ years of friendship, but it has deepened in really exciting ways through our cycle check-ins. In sivasana and meditation, we are often instructed to "return to our bodies," after our spirits have drifted into a different state. We're asked to wriggle our fingers and toes to remind ourselves that we are housed in this physical body, in this moment in time. Being on this cycle awareness journey with S feels exactly like the moment right before we are roused from a meditative state, because we are simultaneously in our bodies and deep within the fibers of our emotions. Our cycles might not be in sync (her last cycle lasted 22 days, and mine was 98 days), but this desire to understand who we are as women - not just in a cultural way, but in a visceral, bodily way - is in sync and these notes we share feel like we are in each other's dorm rooms, talking deep into the night about any/everything.
