Cycles

This month, in SkyDancer, we are working with the Sacral Chakra. Which has had me deeply attuned to what creates the ecstatic current of life force within me.

And I’ve come across something that feels so completely true and obvious, that I want to share it. Stay with me here…

Previously, I shared about how my grief has spread out into an almost sign wave pattern.

I noticed that it seemed to wax and wane in cycles that map on perfectly with my monthly cycle.

During my cycle I’m deeply, deeply, grieving. But as my cycle ends, I’m able to function quite well. Perhaps because I’m letting myself go so deeply into when it arises?

The other thing I’ve been tracking is grief’s somatic signal. What is the felt sense or internal signature that precipitates the need to stop and grieve?

I was surprised to learn, at 42 years old, I didn’t really have a relationship with the felt sense of grief in my body.

This whole inquiry has led to a kind of theory… and a new practice….

As my cycle comes on each month, I now find myself deep in the throes of grief.

I suspect it’s because I’ve finally given myself permission to be overcome and engulfed in deep end with grief. Because I am bereaved.

Up until now, I had never given myself permission to be swept away by emotion like this. Not to this extent. Not without the punisher coming online to make myself wrong about it.

However, my main curiosity right now is around the cycle… and the body’s inherent wisdom, and if we might have been missing something…

I’m wondering if it is that our monthly cycle, and the irritability that comes up around that time is actually a space that nature intentionally sets apart for us to grieve each month?

The cycle is a shedding, a letting go, a death. Ultimately a transformation. So it makes sense that grief would organically accompany that.

However grief has been given such a bad rap in modern society. Along with all of our feral, wild, intuitive displays of emotions. We favor stoicism.

We can easily track how over many generations we’ve become so detached and removed from the inherent wisdom of our bodies. I believe this has resulted in an almost complete miss around our body’s grief signals.

I spoke with someone recently who mentioned that anger/rage is a strong indicator that someone might need to grieve.

But surely, if it’s anger divorced from a real world impetus, such as violation, or intolerance to injustice, there is a signal that precipitates the anger, and we are missing it.

I think this speaks to our deep cultural wounding around grief. That we are so collectively removed from the sensation of grief to the point we must be engulfed by emotions such as sorrow or anger to get to the grief underneath it.

There has to be a sensation that comes before all that.

The signal could be irritability. But what if…. The irritability comes about because of our natural tendency to stay “up”. Above the grief. When our body is calling us to go down. The incoherence between energetics, the friction between us forcing ourselves into an unwanted somatic state could actually be the thing causing the irritation.

What if we began to work with our cycles as a grief practice? (Or the new moon if one is post menstrual cycle) What if we really tuned into the sensations that came on board around this time?

Now that I’ve become a grief practitioner, I’m positive that there is no shortage of things to grieve in any given cycle.

If we cultivated a monthly grief practice around our cycle, perhaps something much softer, much more tender, much more fertile would be available to us if we gave ourselves permission to meet it, and go with it. Instead of treading emotions trying to stay above it.

We might then be able to reconnect to the transformative, alchemical, life giving properties of grief (and our cycle) with more ease.

And we would be cultivating another way to truly create from an open, ecstatic place.

The after effect of lament is literally ecstatic.

It’s so clarifying, clearing, unburdening, and baptismal in nature. There is a genuine sense of being reborn in it.

I’m curious if anyone would like to share, what is your somatic grief signal? Do you know when you are grieving before you are in the deep end?

#astrology #moon #sacralchakra #grief #death #transformation #mysteryschool #skydancer #medicine #medicinewoman

Artist was not listed.