F*** Consistency & Tune Into Your Cycle

Far too often, as a result of capitalism, we measure our worth by output metrics. How much did you do today?, What have you produced? What tangible things have you contributed to society? How much money have you made doing that?. After spending most of my life absolutely beating myself up for being what I labeled as lazy and inconsistent and forever trying to be more productive. I'm proud to say that I no longer identify with being productive.

In this episode, I want to talk about the fallacy of consistency. We've been conditioned to think that consistency is super important to living a good, productive life. I'll break down exactly why I no longer strive to be 'productive' in today's episode. I also dive into how to live more in tune with the phases of your cycle. I hope that all people who menstruate can learn more about their cycles to relax more into their natural rhythms. 

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why I don't believe in ''consistency.''

• The metrics I now measure my life by 

• The 4 phases of the female menstrual cycle 

• How the male and female hormonal changes are different

• How to tune into the magical messages that your body sends you each month
  

This podcast is for YOU, so if you ever have any questions you’d like me to answer on the show, or topics you’d like me to cover – reach out to me on email here or over on instagram @eleanorhadley

Links & Resources

Join the Embodied Course: Waitlist

To work with me 1:1 head to eleanorhadley.com/work-with-me

Know Your Yoni: Natural Birth Control: https://www.eleanorhadley.com/podcast/18

Book: Invisible woman: ​​https://www.booktopia.com.au/invisible-women

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Sensuality Academy Podcast!

The Sensuality Academy Podcast is edited and produced with thanks to Lucy Arellano. You can find her work at @_saltmedia.co

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Episode Transcript

Eleanor  Welcome to Episode 49 of the Sensuality Academy podcast. After an epic round of my online course embodied, I've been taking a little bit of a break from teaching while I plan out our next round coming up again soon. And I'm so excited to be hosting this six week intensive course with you again soon, where I share in depth teachings on how you can embody your femininity, enhance your sex life and elevate your relationships. This course is jam packed with over 50 video lessons guided meditations, journal prompts, workbooks and self practices to help you become fully embodied. Trust me, you don't want to miss out on this course and enrollments open again soon. So be sure to get your name on the waitlist at the Sensuality Academy.com/embodied-waitlist. And you'll find a direct link to that in the show notes too. 

So in embodied I have an entire module, one of the six modules, which is dedicated to teaching you all about the power of your menstrual cycle, and how to tune into the magical messages that your body sends you each month, and how to live more in tune with the phases of your cycle. And now I'm super passionate about this because I really feel like women and menstruators get ingrained with this messaging that were crazy, were broken or just simply too much in some way because of the fact that we bleed each and every month. And the way that that impacts us. 

Learning about my menstrual cycle was an absolute game changer for me and my connection to my femininity, my essential self and my sexuality. And it's my hope that all people who menstruate can learn more about their cycles and consequently relax more into their natural rhythms. Which is of course why there's an entire module that goes in depth in embodied all about menstruation. But today, on this episode, I want to talk about the fallacy of consistency. We've been conditioned to think that consistency is super important to living a good, productive life. 

Now, if you've listened way back to Episode 12, you'll know that I have a fraught relationship with the word and the concept of productivity. Far too often as a result of capitalism, we measure our worth by the metrics of output. How much did you do today? What have you achieved showing me what you've done? What have you produced? What tangible things have you contributed to society? And how much money have you made doing that? I'm proud to say that I no longer identify with being productive. And after spending most of my life absolutely beating myself up for being what I labeled as lazy and inconsistent, and forever trying to be more productive. I no longer strive to be productive. Fuck it. I've created my own metrics to live by now. And they don't correlate with those forced upon me by capitalism. It's hard. It's really hard. Let me say that. I slip up all the time. But it's something that I find to be so important. And I measure my life now instead by how much space and time I have, how present I can be, the depth of connection I can cultivate with people in my life, the impact that I can have with my work and my mission, the slow small moments. Now back to this concept of consistency. we're expected to do the same thing every day, to focus on having a routine in order to live a good life. 

Now, I don't know about you, but the amount of pressure that I've put on myself in the past, to have a set routine every single fucking day. It's created some serious stress and resentment in my life, which is the opposite of what it's supposed to do, right. We're told to wake up, meditate. Go exercise, be consistent keep adding all this bullshit. It sounds good, it sounds good. It's well intentioned, but you know what, I'm not consistent at all. And I don't think I'm ever going to be consistent, not in the way that society deems consistency to be. So for us menstruators, people who have a menstrual cycle, we operate on a monthly cycle, our energy levels focus, motivation, our emotions, mood, our libido, our appetite, and our tolerance shifts and changes on a daily basis throughout a monthly cycle. We aren't the same person day by day. And throughout history, we've been made to feel wrong or broken because of this. 

A quick little breakdown for you. And I go into this in much more detail inside and bodied. But the menstrual cycle is split up into four phases lasting roughly a week at a time, everyone is completely different. But this is just a rough guide to give you an idea and to illustrate my point. 

So we have day one of our cycle, which is the first day that we bleed our menstrual phase. Now, it's also the phase that we can refer to as winter. This is because during this phase, we feel the call to retreat to go inwards to be more quiet. And still, we tend to want to stay inside, not be very social, and kind of cozy up under the blankets, much like you would in winter. This phase is all about resting and repairing is also about renewal. And it's vital that we honor this phase of our cycle, so that we can enter the next phase, the spring phase feeling refreshed. But if we don't honor this time and take adequate rest, it can lead us towards burnout. Then we have our pre-ovulation phase, which is akin to spring, energetically, this feels like a fresh start. After the heaviness of our winter phase while we were bleeding, we tend to have more of a natural ability to focus at this stage and to feel more optimistic. After what I contend to be a dark cloud of menstruation. We're more articulate in our spring phase, and we feel far more energetic after spring comes summer and our ovulation phase. And in this phase, we can feel like a bloody superhero. We have heaps of energy to get shit done. We're extra productive at this stage. And I know, I know I just said I hate the word. But this phase is where we can really take off the to do list and feel more able to cope with things we can get a lot more done. Our sense of self and confidence is strengthened and we feel way more social and flirtatious. Essentially, this is the time when we're ovulating where our body is screaming at us to make a baby. So we tend to feel more attracted to people, we are more frisky, horny, and we're literally more attractive to others. Due to our pheromones at this time. Our bodies are so incredible, honestly, amazing. And of course, this is also the phase where we are the most fertile. So it's very important to use adequate protection. If you are not wanting to get pregnant, if you're wanting to get pregnant, this is the place to get it on. 

But fertility aside, that's a huge topic and not one that we can adequately go into today. But if you are interested, by the way, in learning more about natural fertility methods, I definitely suggest listening back to Episode 18 and doing some more research of your own from there. 

Okay, then we move on to the final phase before we cycle back around to our period itself. And that is our autumn or our premenstrual phase. Now this is when we can experience symptoms of PMS, and it's the one that has the worst reputation. So in this phase, we are beginning our descent back at once, in preparation for abolade. We can feel a lot more emotionally sensitive at this time and quite tuned into our feelings, which is actually an incredible superpower, although it's not often seen or even felt that way. 

In this phase, we have a very, very highly attuned bullshit, radar. And we can see through things quite well. And if we're tapped in, we can actually have a much more heightened sense of intuition in this phase as well. 

So as you can see, as menstruators are energy waxes and wanes just like the moon throughout the cycle of a month. Now a menstrual cycle tends to be a month or roughly 28 days, though Everyone's will will differ if you have an extended cycle, you'll still go through these phases, but they might be longer or shorter depending on where you're at. But we are consistent in that we will cycle through these four phases. every single month, every cycle and back again, and again. And again, we'll always come back around to summer, spring will come around just as autumn and winter will always be present. But when we contrast that with the hormonal cycle of the typical male, we will notice that we're actually quite different. And yes, men also have a hormonal cycle. But theirs tends to cycle through within the space of a day, not a month. So their testosterone levels will peak in the morning, and then slowly drop off throughout the day. 

So in a way, we can look at their daily cycle through the seasonal lens, with their morning, being spring, having summer throughout the day, then winding down in their Autumn in the evening, until they finally enter their winter hibernation phase while they sleep. Can you see now how it doesn't quite make sense for us as menstruators as to expect a consistent flow of energy every single day? Imagine if someone woke you up at 3am and demanded that you give a presentation for work and be super energetic, sounds ridiculous, right? But in a way, and yes, I'm using a very simplistic example here. But in a way, this is akin to expecting high energy. 

When we're bleeding, we're in winter, we're in hibernation mode for fuck sake, we're literally bleeding out of our vaginas. without dying, we need rest. And yet, in a world that damn near fetishizes this productivity and hustle mentality and routine in a society that equates our value and worth with our ability to get shit done. It's no wonder that so many of us feel utterly burnt out and overwhelmed. We're not designed to be on all the time. But this collective patriarchal obsession with consistency is creating unsustainable expectations. And I'm just so over it. 

Honestly, I'm so over all the bloody books and apps and programs with their daily checklists and formulas on how to be the best version of you, you know, insisting that you show up every single day no matter what. And I've been through them all. I've been there only to feel like a fucking failure when they don't work for me. Sure, they might work for some people, and they probably work really well for men. But for those of us who have a menstrual cycle, these habits tune us out of our bodies and make us wrong, when we don't have the energy to keep up. Because Reality Check half of the population bleeds every single month. Also, and this is something that spoke to me significantly for a while, even before I understood all things cyclical. The whole 30 Day Challenge framework, or slack right off. I remember doing some gym challenges years ago when the studio would reward you for coming every single day for 30 days straight. And at first glance like oh, wow, super motivating, yay, fitness. But if you think about it, there's absolutely no consideration of the fact that half of their members will be bleeding and sometimes in serious pain for anywhere between three and seven days of that 30 Day Challenge. You know what I mean? When I started looking at the way that our world is designed through a cyclical lens, instead, so much of it just seems downright illogical to me. But of course, this world or our society, rather, was never designed with women and with menstruators in mind, nature was nature means we know that nature is innately feminine, seasonal, constantly going through phases of death and rebirth in perfect balance. But as humans, we've messed things up royally. 

And actually, if you want to get extra mad about the way the world has been designed, with the women as an afterthought at best, I highly recommend a book called invisible women, exposing data bias in a world designed for men, which is by Caroline Criado Perez. It's amazingly eye opening and also incredibly infuriating. I'll link it in the show notes for you. It's wonderful, but it will make you mad. So be prepared, it took me a little while to get through it, I had to take regular breaks, because I was so angry. But it's illuminating, and I highly recommend it. 

So of course, we know that our society views masculine energy as the gold standard, right. So consistency, therefore is seen as this day to day thing, do something shall have every single day. But for me, something that I've learnt, and for those of us with a feminine essence, as well as menstruators, were consistent, yes, but over the course of a month. And this challenge is the norm because I know for me, I'm not showing up every single day in the same way I can't, I have different energy levels on different days, which can be a superpower when we attune into it. But it can also be really, really challenging to exist in this world that has these certain structures in place, that sometimes you just have to squeeze yourself in order to get by. 

Now with those phases that I mentioned before, if we look energetically, we can see that the spring in the summer phases, those tend to have a more masculine energy to it. Now remember, when I say masculine energy, I'm not talking about male, I'm talking about the energy of the masculine, the single pointed focus, the ability to do and get things done and not as attuned into our feelings, our body, it's more about the mind, right? Then we've got the autumn and the winter. And those are typically feminine energies, they come from our ability to connect, to feel deeply, to be in touch with our emotions and to be intuitive. Those are the things that tend to come out the traits that come out in those phases. 

So if you think about that, you can see how, when we are in our spring and summer, that's when we feel the most aligned with capitalism, with the structures that are at place in our society, with the masculine way of doing things, the way the world is set up. It's easier for us in those times, but then coming into autumn, into winter, into our feminine phases. The world's not set up to support that. That's the problem. And what I hope is to share this with people who menstruate, who don't menstruate, with everybody to understand this about us the way that we are cyclical. And I think that there is so much potential for us to change the way that we operate and not expect consistency every single goddamn day. But to allow us to use certain phases and say, Hey, in a couple of weeks, I'm going to be in my summer, that's when we're going to do that presentation because I'm going to be on fire. For me. I know in my work, I schedule certain things when I'm teaching, especially when I'm doing in person workshops. I'm doing that in my spring in my summer, because that's when I can articulate myself the best when I'm more vivacious. And I feel more confident and going on dates when I am ovulating, when I can be more flirty. And when I am going to be bleeding. I know when that's coming up, I've got it in my calendar, I'm not doing anything on day one. Like No, don't book an interview with me, I'm not available. What I'm going to be doing instead is like sitting in my bed, watching Netflix, or just sleeping and journaling and just being by myself because that's what I need. 

Now I had the luxury of course, and the privilege to work for myself and do what I want each day. I know that not everybody has that. And that's why I want to spread this message so that people can understand it a little bit more. Maybe we can create systems that allow that, something to think about. 

So my invitation to you is to stop to slow down to tune into your body and into your cycle. Forget the blueprint that all of these gurus and trainers and business coaches out there swear by and honor your cyclical nature. What works for some people is not going to work for you and that's okay. Once you tune into your cycle, you'll understand that yes, you can be consistent but in a cyclical manner. Not the same every damn day. 

All right, my love's that's all from me for today. If you're intrigued to learn more about your cyclical nature and all the phases in depth and how to work with them, be sure to put your name down on the waitlist for the next round of embodied. Opening up again very soon. You'll find the link in the show notes of course, or simply head to thesensualityacademy.com/embodied- waitlist and join to make sure that you join even if you have signed up for the past round. This is a new waitlist for the next round. And I hope that I see you in there. I really hope that this episode resonated with you. If it did, I would love it. If you could please leave me a rating and review. In your podcast app, share the episode, screenshot it, share it with your friends on Instagram on your stories, it would mean the absolute world. 

Thank you so much, love you and until next time, stay sensual.