…on waxing moon/fall/luteal energy
Over the last few weeks I’ve chronicled out what living in alignment with my hormones/the moon has looked like for me. This is post 4/4, please go ahead and click back to post 1, check out post 2, and read post 3, if you haven’t caught them yet! Today I’ll cover the last cycle and how to tie all this up into your actual life!
Ok, if you’ve been following along with me, we did it! This final stage is culmination. The waning moon, losing light a little bit each night. The luteal phase, which has a check-the-things-off-the-list feeling. Fall – warm tea and cozy blankets and slow-cooker everything! Are you feeling the vibe for what this one brings? Fall is such a beautiful time of harvest – all the hard work planning in the spring, all the outward activity in the summer, and then all the bounty of fall! This is a great time to finish things up, and prepare for the winter and rest that is right around the corner. The moon dims her a light a little more each evening, to prepare for the eventual next stage. This can also be a time where you feel especially creative – not in the same way that you did in the energy of the waxing moon or spring, but in a hunker down with your laptop and write, or hunker down with your canvas and paint, kind of way.
How does this translate into your actual day-to-day? Well, the first thing to note is that this is actually the longest phase of the cycle, if you’re working with female hormones. This is the time to enter your expenses for your taxes, to organize your paperwork, to finish that project for the next round of classes you’re teaching next month. Clear out your inbox. Plan your meals, sort through your books, organize your kids closet (this last month I used this energy to finally clean out the garage, much to my husband’s joy – it seems easy but it’s always a lot of sorting, listing things on sites for sale, deciding what to donate, etc). Think – attention to detail.
If you’re tracking with your hormones, you might notice that the last few days of this cycle are PMS-y. This is a good indicator to you that it’s ok to back off some of the intensity and look after yourself. In fact, for me if I use the last few days of my cycle and the first few days of my next cycle as my “winter”, I can welcome the energy of “spring” before my period fully ends because I have a slightly shorter cycle. But this really only works when I’m tuned in – otherwise I just keep pushing in frustration, wondering what’s wrong with me and why everything feels so hard.
So. After all that, I just want to highlight one last pitfall that patriarchal capitalism may set for you. Not everything will perfectly follow a 28 day cycle. In fact it might even not follow the seasons! Sometimes you’ll have a “fertile void” or winter season that lasts – oh I don’t know, all of 2020? That was me! Sometimes you might notice that you only need a day or two rest before the buds are blossoming again. This is not a linear science. Sorry! Think about the cycle, either of the moon or hormonally, as the cake – it’s the structure. What you choose to decorate it with on any given day – the flavor of icing, how many sprinkles, etc – are the seasons or cycles to layer over top.
So, how do you take this from theory to practice – as in, how do you actually implement this? Well, the first and most important step is track either your cycle or the moon. You might even want to track both if you’re working with female hormones! This is my struggle – because I often bleed on the new moon, I find my energetic cycles are opposite to the energy of the earth. Does that mean that none of this works? Or that I’m constantly fighting the flow of the world to my own needs? No – it just gives me something else to be aware of, and some days it means a lot of grace for myself, where other days it means running at top speed headlong into what I want. Yesterday is a great example of this – for me, it was cycle day 4 and it also happened to be the day before/night of the full moon. This meant it was a really intense energy day for me, and I had to keep reminding myself that I will again have energy to live my life, even though today was really hard.
The most important piece to translate this into real-world action is getting it in to wherever you write down your activities. It might be an app, it might look like entering it into your google calendar, or if you’re like me it might be an old-fashioned paper planner. When you can see, right when you go to schedule something, what phase you’re working with, it will be that much easier to move things where they’ll serve you best.
Remember what I said in my first post – even if you can start to align just 5% of your life into these cycles, you’ll start to notice a shift. Some things may never fit in, and some things you might notice you are even already intuitively doing!
In conclusion, the patriarchy lied to you about how you “should” be able to work, and capitalism lied to you about what “productive activities” look like. The good news? You get to take your power back and you get to use the gifts of the earth to work smarter.
Now, go track your cycle, or look up the moon phase, and probably? Take a nap.
