A modern story of cycles.
If you are on instagram and you have a period, then you have probably heard of the menstrual cycle revolution that is currently taking the world by storm! This is a beautifull thing! It’s all menstrual phases, archetypes, banishing menstrual taboo, embodiment and charting the cycle. People are publically talking about the elephant in the womb. We are cyclical and people bleed!
The framework widely offered is a new cycle story that has evolved from thousands of years of storytelling, into a neat little package of the 4 inner seasons. It’s a user friendly way to categorise the female hormonal cycle, using the imaginal mind to correlate menstruation, pre-ovulation, ovulation and the pre-menstruum, to the 4 common seasons of the English-speaking, outer world.
Accessable and digestable.
And powerful, because the hidden parts of the mind so love symbolism. The pattern of birth, blooming, decay and death is deeply imbedded in the innate knowing of humankind. We have watched this process unfold and flower for millenia, in a multitude of ways throughout the world. Our body and psyche remember. We have witnessed the earth circle through stretches of cold and heat, abundance and scarcity, growth and decline. Seasons of life and the earth coming and going, always following the same natural cycle.
Many, many, many cultures hold these patterns within folk story and mythos. These stories were told generation after generation, embedding themselves into the fabric of our existence. Each tale in itself, is a dreaming and teaching vortex, that helps us to feel and imagine sustainable and wholesome ways of living in communion and connection with the earth, ourselves and with each other. Through old stories we come into contact with a model that we intuitively already know and if we listen, find within our own selves an innate guide that can us lead toward wholeness and belonging. I would call this, magic. (More about this in a later blog!)
The great works of thought leaders like Jane Harwicke Collings, Alexandra Pope, Sjanie Hugo Wurlitzer and Claire Baker, collates and organises much of this natural and cultural wisdom, into a psycosocial+spiritual+hormonal Femm gospel that has been spread around the globe over the last few decades, sparking the much needed uprising. Thus we have the inner seasons grouping system that we all love and know.
The inner seasons story.
Inner spring
Hormonal phase: Pre-ovulation.
Life-stage: Pre-menarche + menarche.
Archetypes: The Maiden, The Smith.
Initiatory impulse: Birth, growth.
Inner summer
Hormonal phase: Ovulation.
Life-stage: Young adult to perimenopause.
Archetypes: The Mother, The Creatrix, The Lover.
Initiatory impulse: Bloom, bear fruit.
Inner Autumn
Hormonal phase: Pre-menstruum.
Life-stage: Perimenopause.
Archetypes: The Wild Woman, The Enchantress.
Initiatory impulse: Decay, harvest.
Inner Winter
Hormonal phase: Menstruation.
Life-stage: Menopause.
Archetypes: The Crone. The Wise Woman.
Initiatory impulse: Death, end.
Sending love,
Keisha xx
