Hacking with cycle tracking
You will never get me to shut up about how cycle tracking has changed my life…
For most of the time that I’ve had a period, I had absolutely no idea about my body and what it was capable of.
I got taught almost nothing growing up.
It took me until I was almost 30 to start learning about the different phases of my cycle, my hormonal fluctuations and the right words for parts of my OWN body.
You might have heard words like follicular and luteal but never really understood what they meant in relation to you.
You might have heard people speaking about what day of their cycle they’re on or maybe even talking about an inner season.
There is a lot of confusing language around periods and our menstrual cycle and this is something I feel really passionate about making more clear - for everyone, not just people who menstruate.
I’ve been cycle tracking now for over 3.5 years and with every cycle comes a deepening of my knowledge and understanding of my body.
I can always tell if I haven’t been looking after myself properly during a cycle because my period is SORE. I have often been crippled in pain on the first day of my bleed, sometimes even into the second day.
However, since I started tracking, I have had a pain free period for the first time in my life and I now regularly rely on pain relief less and less than I ever used to.
I really believe that we have lost connection with our intuition and, for me at least, there has been a lot of guilt around actually letting myself rest. I pushed past everything my body was telling me - loading myself up with painkillers just to ‘get on with it’ - but this is never how we were supposed to live.
Men have a completely different hormone cycle - they operate on a 24 hour cycle compared to our (on ‘average’) 28 day cycle. Yet we expect ourselves to keep up with the same demands on our bodies and our lives.
There is SO much power in listening to your body and supporting it properly at the different times in our cycle. If you make changes that are effective for you, it can actually make you even MORE efficient and MORE productive because you’re taking action when you have the energy for it and you’re resting when you should be to actually let yourself recover.
Compared to a lot of people, I’m still relatively new to cycle tracking having been completely free from hormonal contraception for 3.5 years and tracking my cycle in depth for the last 13 cycles. BUT the quality of life that I live now (already!) is so much richer than how I have ever lived before because now I have a much better understanding of myself.
I no longer feel guilty for I’m resting when I’m exhausted or changing the type of exercise that I’m doing instead of pushing myself to run and lift weights in the same way at every phase of my cycle.
Our hormones change.
Our energy levels change.
Our appetite changes.
Why do we expect to stay the same?
The important part is that I am not the expert.
Neither is anyone else.
Only YOU can be the expert of your own body.
I simply help give you the tools and the support to help unlock the knowledge you already have inside of you and tune back in to your own inner wisdom…
I’m going to be delivering my first EVER in person Menstrual Magic workshop in Aberdeen later this month and I would love for you to join us.
I’ll be covering all of the basics from the phases of your cycle, how to track and hack your cycle to make it work for you as well as understanding the beautiful nuances of each inner season to live more mindfully and in alignment with your body.
I am a qualified Menstruality Mentor after studying in depth with Red School on their Menstruality Leadership Programme and I have since been accepted to apprentice with the Red School founders, Alexandra + Sjanie, over the next 2 years which I am VERY excited about!
I truly believe that menstruality and menstrual cycle awareness are going to change the way we live our lives for the better and I can’t wait to see more of these discussions and practices happening around the world.
If you’re interested in working with me 1:1, please just get in touch and we can chat about what that might look like for you.
