text © 2015 Dana-Sofie Šlancarová, dana-sofie.cz / foto © pixabay.com
The wisdom of your lunar cycle. A fantasy or a uniquely female approach?
Born as women, we are endowed with the feminine hormone cycle that allows us, later in our lives, to conceive and give birth to our kids. Most of us, both women and men, however think that this cycle is connected merely to the annoying time just before the period starts (when the so-called PMS, or premenstrual syndrome, thumps into our lives) and the time of menstrual bleeding.
Yet nothing can be further from the truth. In fact, the levels of our hormones change every day and every day they, therefore, influence how we as women feel, think, behave, communicate, love, make love, or are confident and full of energy. Our cycle has an impact on every single day of our life, every single hour of it.
If we start to observe the repeating patterns in our cycle, we can see that there are four distinct phases, each of which brings us different enhanced skills. And if I speak about the wisdom of our feminine lunar cycle, I mean that we can wisely utilize the various enhanced skills that our cycle and our differing phases bring us, both at work and in personal lives.
What did your mum tell you about the lunar cycle?
I remember I knew already something from biology classes before my first period came. When it really came, my mum simply handed me a sanitary pad and that was it. That was all. Maybe she added a few words about hygiene, not going swimming, etc., but nothing about the psychological effects of being cyclic or about four different phases of our monthly cycle. But I cannot blame her. At that time she did not know, this information was not available, so she could not pass this knowledge over to me, her daughter.
In my work, I often meet women who were told by their mothers or grandmothers something like: „Oh, my dear, now you will have to stand this nuisance for most of your life. Poor you. It will ache.“ And guess what. These women very frequently complain that they suffer from PMS or painful menstruation.
Therefore I dedicated my work to teaching women that our lunar, hormonal cycle is not a nuisance but an incredible gift. It is just necessary to know our cycle, to respect it and to utilize the advantages it brings to us.
I have to admit that I was one of those girls with a very painful time just before the menstrual bleeding came. I suffered from immense pre-menstrual cramps that stopped only when the bleeding started. One or two days of pain and inability to do anything each month so annoyed me. It was a real nuisance.
Therefore later on in my life, I started to search for a cure, and I found it! I discovered books of Miranda Gray, Red Moon at first, and The Optimized Woman soon after. These were my „bibles“. And of course, I started to observe my cycle in practice and work with it. Then I translated The Optimized Woman into Czech and published it in my publishing house, and started publicly teaching this unique but so important wisdom. It started the movement of „cyclic women“ (based on the Czech title of Miranda’s book: Cyklická žena), impacting now the lives of tens of thousand of both women and men.
So what are the four main phases and their key characteristics?
Very briefly:
The first phase I call the dynamic (or pre-ovulation) phase. It is the phase that comes after menstruation and brings us enthusiasm, urges us to start new activities, and fills us with desire to be active. In contrary to the „sort of lazy“ menstrual phase, now we want to be active in the outside world and we also have enough energy and self-confidence to do so. It is the most suitable time for starting a new diet or a new project.
In the second phase – the ovulation phase – we want (and need) to spend a lot of time with other people. Further, we feel like taking care of them and we are also more likely to care for ourselves! Our sexual appetite is growing stronger (which makes sense – an egg has been released and wants to be fertilized). At work, this is the best time to spend time with our clients or colleagues dealing with their issues. Why? Because we are very empathetic and willing to listen and look after them.
In the third, the pre-menstrual phase most of us suffer because of the pre-menstrual syndrome (pain in the underbelly, migraines, mood changes, etc.) People around us find us intolerable – and so we find ourselves. ;-) However, Miranda Gray calls this phase „creative“, and so do I: it is also a time when we are immensely creative and have a lot of great ideas coming to us seemingly out of the blue. Moreover, this is the phase in which we are eager to finish things, work in a very systematic manner, and complete what we have postponed for quite some time already.
In the fourth phase, during the time of menstrual bleeding, we need to hide away. We don’t want to be available, we want to withdraw from the outside world. We tend to meditate, and desire to create alone and in silence. During this phase, it is really extremely important to relax because thus we can gain energy for the whole upcoming cycle. If we do not relax, we may feel „pre-menstrual“ (= tired, exhausted, ornery) the whole month to come. Think of it as of your mobile phone: the menstrual phase is the time when we need to charge our batteries in the same way we need to charge our phone!
How can we benefit from knowing our phases?
Unfortunately, unless you’ve already heard something about your lunar cycle, you are most of the time living your female life as if there were no cycles and no phases. Then you can feel angry with yourself because you are not so efficient as you were a week ago and you push yourself, and thus you get more and more tired and exhausted, and the symptoms of PMS start creeping in more and more.
I like to use the comparison with seasons. Each month we go through four seasons – spring (dynamic phase), summer (ovulation phase), autumn (premenstrual creative phase) and winter (menstrual phase). And there is no reason why to skip any of these phases. All of them are important. All of them have their advantages (and drawbacks as well). All of the phases bring us their gifts and allow us to live full lives as women. Without being cyclic we are not women.
Knowing your lunar cycle, you can start to love yourself more and experience „a huge drop in stress and greater feelings of fulfillment, self-confidence, well-being and happiness“ as Miranda Gray says in The Optimized Woman. And it also has a positive impact on your surroundings, because you have more energy and patience to care for your partner, your kids, your friends and colleagues or your clients.
Why bother?
Why bother? Because it is so easy to feel much better and be much more efficient – you just need to listen to your cycle and ride the cyclic wave…
As Miranda Gray says in her revolutionary book The Optimized Woman: „[Phases of the lunar cycle] have an important part to play in women’s everyday life, in their work, their relationships and within the family.
When women are given the environment to express themselves according to their [phases], they can experience a huge drop in stress and greater feelings of fulfillment, self-confidence, well-being and happiness. They also have an enhanced capacity to achieve more in their life, to create personal success and to fulfill their goals and dreams.
At work, women have the capacity to exceed productivity and efficiency, create happy and motivated teams, and generate groundbreaking solutions and revolutionary ideas, as well as having the potential to make companies and organizations leaders in their market areas…
Making the effort to understand women’s different [phases] brings great relationship rewards, and if you get it wrong this month, you always have a second chance next month!…
In essence, the menstrual cycle is there for us to create society and culture, and to support us in our individual goals and dreams.
When we redefine our view of ‘creativity’ the whole cycle becomes a vibrant and exciting creative opportunity.“
Dana-Sofie Šlancarová is a translator, writer, teacher, and entrepreneur. Her passion is to write and teach about the beauty of women’s cycles, pragmatic aspects of menstruation, and the incredible benefits of cyclic time management®.
She is the founder of the Cyklická žena® (The Cyclic Woman) project and an author of several books on this topic, including Návod na ženy (A Manual to Women: Navigating the Modern Man Through the Unpredictable World of Women, still only in Czech) that she co-wrote with Erik Hutter.
BE CYCLIC AND ENJOY THE RIDE!
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