All The Seasons Are Inside You
This could be the map you’ve been looking for
One evening recently, I was in the latter part of my cycle and I was feeling my body begin the downward drift towards menstruation. One of my usual evening activities felt even more necessary.
I laid down on the floor and put my feet in the air, in legs-up-the-wall pose or Viparita Karani. To my understanding, it’s what they call a “restorative” yoga pose, and that is what I was there for—restoration. The room was dimly lit. For good measure, I’d laid a small flaxseed microwave heating bag over my closed eyes to reduce the incredible amount of tension I tend to carry in my face. I was doing deep breathing.
My husband stopped as he walked by the room I was in and said: “It’s so nice to see you do that.”
“Do what?” I asked, confused.
“Taking care of yourself,” he replied.
His comment surprised me but I understand. It wasn’t always this way.
I used to fight tooth and nail against the mere idea that I needed to take care of myself.
It made me really, viscerally angry. So if I did anything I did the bare minimum and I did it for the wrong reasons. It just felt too unfair that I had a body that needed caring for, in a world that did not give me ample space to care for it. And at times my body needed an extraordinary amount of care. My health had limped along since I was nineteen and I pushed it as far as I could all through my twenties.
What I thought I actually needed was the ability to go and go and go and go. That was the solution I was grasping at. Stopping, resting, caring—there wasn’t time for that, not in this economy. I was already so behind. I just needed to be more resilient, which I thought meant being so tough and so strong and yet also so balanced that I could simply bounce back from whatever came my way—like that stupid several days of bleeding each month.
Care was too hard a word to swallow. What did it really mean? What did it look like? Where would I fit that in? “Self care” felt inaccessible and not for me—I didn’t like to paint my nails, or do spa nights. And I didn’t need another item added to my checklist. What else could care be?
Still, this body of mine needed caring for. So I fought and fell down, over and over, until in tiny pieces over years, it finally clicked. Then suddenly one day I have my legs up the wall and my husband says: It’s so nice to see you taking care of yourself.
And I realized: my menstrual cycle helped get me here.
At twenty-six, I had a traumatic GYN experience and I was diagnosed with Lyme disease.1 Years of poor health followed, as did more diagnoses. Fatigue had me in its clutches constantly, so going and going was no longer an option. I quit my job after being unable to go in for weeks at a time. Getting dressed before noon was a noteworthy event. I lived in a constant haze of things feeling disturbingly unreal.
I was desperate for solutions. So I looked and looked, and read and read. Some of it led me no where, some of it led me to healing my chronic health problems, and some of it led me to menstrual cycle awareness. By what I now realize was great luck or something more, I found the work of herbalist and fertility awareness educator Clara Bailey.
I think it must have been from Clara that I first heard about becoming cycle conscious and the inner seasons of the cycle, a framework for viewing the ebbs and flows of the menstrual cycle. This concept was perhaps making a splash on social media at the time too, but its roots are old. The idea is that every phase of the cycle corresponds to one of the four (or five) seasons.
I see this concept tossed around still as though it’s quaint or a fun little extra. And when I first heard it I too thought, Aw seasons. I like the seasons. That’ll be fun.
Now this model guides my everyday life.
All The Seasons Are Inside of Me
Viewing the phases of the cycle as internal seasons is a concept that appears to come from Traditional Chinese Medicine.2 I’ve seen mentions that there is a similar model in Aruyveda and traditional medicine systems in Europe.3 Every phase has a season and every season has all kinds of elemental, metaphorical, spiritual, and psychological correspondences.
If this sounds crunchy or woo, bear with me a minute. I’m not saying your uterus has its own climate.
The inner seasons of the cycle is a pattern to follow. A map to guide you.
And when it comes to navigating our menstrual cycles, if there’s one thing I think a lot of us could use it’s a good map.
The Seasons and the Science
This isn’t something pulled out of thin air, though. It’s rooted in our biology. We’ll focus on hormones only for now, but there are other parts of this I want to get to another day.
This is a representation of a menstrual cycle.4 It begins at menstruation and ends the day before the next menstruation would begin. Ovulation occurs some time around the middle but is different for every person (you may have heard: it doesn’t only happen on day fourteen).
There are four hormones shown here: estrogen, progesterone, follicle stimulating hormone (FSH), and lutenizing hormone (LH).
Menstruation begins with estrogen and progesterone low. As menstruation ends, estrogen starts to creep up, peaking just before ovulation. Follicle stimulating hormone is doing what it says on the tin; it is stimulating follicles to mature eggs. The peak levels of estrogen tell the body to release LH, which triggers the release of an egg (or two) from the ovaries. Having risen to the occasion, estrogen drops. Ovulation has happened. Here, progesterone takes over. Both progesterone and estrogen start to fall further as menstruation nears or just as it begins.
One way the cycle is represented is with two phases: the follicular or proliferative phase, and the luteal or secretory phase.5 Personally, I don’t find those terms very cozy or even descriptive. It can also be looked at as having four phases: menstruation, follicular, ovulation, luteal.6 This is better, but isn’t quite enough for me to connect with. It feels clinical and doesn’t tell me much about the experience of each of these phases (and let’s be honest, quite often it is an experience).
The Inner Seasons of the Cycles
Most of us have had experiences with the seasons though. We know the feeling of an oncoming winter, we know the joy of spring flowers, the warmth of summer, and the drop of autumn. Or however that all goes down in your part of the world.7
Seeing our cycles as having seasonality is a tangible way to engage with our cyclical natures.
There is so much to this model and I’m only going to be able to scratch the surface today. I’ll get into each of the seasons individually and likely continuing circle back to this concept because it guides my menstruality practice.
Here is that same diagram of hormones with the inner seasons overlaid.
Menstruation = inner winter
In this model, menstruation is your inner winter. This is the first day of full flow, not spotting. As we said estrogen and progesterone are low, and you too may feel a bit low. Ideally, this is time for rest (in whatever way you can make that happen), going inward, tending to yourself first. You might want to tuck yourself in like a daffodil bulb curled up in the ground, waiting.
Pre-ovulatory/follicular = inner spring
Once the last spot of blood as come and gone, you’re gearing up for ovulation. Estrogen is starting to surge. Eggs are being matured. The momentum is building and whatever you didn’t have in your inner winter (energy, focus, tolerance for other people) should hopefully return.
Ovulation = inner summer
The inner summer includes the days leading up to and around ovulation. Things are blooming. Estrogen is peaking. The egg is being released. Things are happening.
Post ovulation = inner late summer
But here’s where the way I’ve been taught differs. Clara Bailey includes an extra fifth phase: the inner late summer. I love this because, at least where I am, late summer differs greatly from the first rush of summer. In early summer here, there’s lettuce in my garden because the heat hasn’t killed it yet. By late summer, there are peaches at the farmers market. An inner late summer is the first few days after ovulation, when you might still be fertile. I really think it has a different flavor than the heady days around ovulation, like crisp lettuce v ripe peaches.
Pre-menstrum/luteal = inner autumn
I distinctly feel a shift from inner late summer into inner autumn when progesterone picks up and, though it can be hard, I like it. I’ve long felt this shift so it’s comforting to have a way to explain it. This is a time when things begin to turn back inward. I feel myself prepare for the impending inner winter. In the natural world at this time, the nights and shadows grow longer. So too, as our inner autumn deepens, PMS (or worse) may rear its head.
For me, viewing the cycle through the seasons charts a course through my experience of what is happening to me physiologically. It’s at the crux of how I try to live in line with my cyclical nature.
Fertility awareness (which I talked about last week) gives me data about what is going on inside my body. The inner seasons is the poetic framework I lay over that data to make it more palpable and easier to interact with.
This way, I have guidelines. Caring for myself didn’t make sense before. But seasons? I get seasons. I’ve worked on farms and kept a garden. Observing nature and tending to the natural world is a concept I can get behind. Now I tend this little patch of earth that is my body.
I no longer rage against the idea of caring for myself because with this model it’s far less confusing. With a glance through my chart, I can begin to identify my needs. Getting to know my inner seasons, I can more easily make choices about what food to cook, how to exercise, what activities might suit this time, herbs to take, when to rest, and other ways I can tend to myself. On my fridge, I have little cards with the names of the inner seasons and I put out the one for where I am in my cycle. It reminds me and it reminds my husband too.
This is what cyclical living looks like for me. I know that right now I’m at the very end of my inner autumn—my bleed will probably happen tomorrow or the next day. Winter is coming. I’m trying to wrap up tasks so that when my bleed arrives I can do a little less for at least the first day. I have a stack of new library books waiting for my period; I gathered them up like a chipmunk hoarding acorns for winter. And when I start bleeding, I will nestle down with my books, a blanket, my heating pad, and a cup of ginger tea. I’ve already asked my husband to make a beef and broccoli dish for dinner that first night, whenever it comes.
And while it honestly can be difficult, I also feel the absolute necessity for this way of life now. Embracing cyclical living is counter-cultural. We live in a world that to me seems to want to believe there is only ever one season, and it’s one where growth and flourishing is constant. But for all we humans can do, I doubt we’ll ever find a way to fully escape the natural world. And in the natural world there is a cycle of life and death, of brightness and dark, of seasons. My biology follows that pattern too. It turns out we are not so very different or separate, the natural world and I. I think this respect of cyclical patterns rather than constant linear upward growth is something the world desperately needs to understand again.
On a personal level, my body no longer feels like a thing that I’m either dragging along or it is dragging me. The battle as stopped. We’re going along together, through the unique ways each season will manifest this cycle.
There is every season within my body and for everything there is a season.
What do you think? Can you see applying this to your own cycle, or would it help you connect with your partner’s experience of cycling? Does this model work for where you are in the world?
I will likely write about this more another time.
I’m trying to learn more about where these models comes from and the ways they may be distinct. I’m particularly interested in a traditional Celtic model I’ve only seen mentioned, since that is my genetic background.
Adapted from Taking Charge of Your Fertility by Toni Weschler.
I’m speaking as someone who lives in the Northern hemisphere, and in the north eastern US. I’ve only experienced a few months of a Southern hemisphere winter, so I can’t speak how this applies to life there.