Charting your cycle.
Cycle charting is powerful way to intimately understand your body and your cyclical experiences, as you move through your monthly hormonal changes. You open a conversation with your body, by bringing awareness to and documenting how you show up on each day of your unique cycle, empowering you with body-literacy self-knowledge!
It’s about learning to be with your body and listen to what she is saying to you. When you learn to listen, you can consciously and appropriately respond.
Within your menstrual cycle, different concentrations and ratios of hormones are flooding your bloodstream, meaning that both your needs and, well sometimes personality is different. Yes that’s right, personality! Hormones impact neurotransmitter production and flow, which has a direct influence on your brain activity as well as how you think and feel.
It’s definitely real if you feel as though you are one person one day and another the next!
Tracking your physical, emotional, mental and spiritual flow, keeps the dialogue between your mind and body running and helps you to develop a deep sense of self-understanding. You know when bleed, you know when you cry, you know when your fertile, you know when you need space, you know when you feel sensual, you know when you are most creative or productive, and you know when to say ‘NO’. You will come to know your super-abilities and vulnerabilities and where they lie within your cycle.
Knowing that hormones govern these changes, is so incredibly validating. You may have an imbalance if PMS, period pain, fatigue or irregular periods are an issue for you, but you’re not going crazy and you’re not broken.
Flow, empowerment and radiant wellness, what else can I say?!
Body-literacy is a potent addition to your self-authority toolkit. Imagine being able to decipher the root cause your symptoms according to where they are showing up in your cycle. Excess oestrogen will cause particular ailments at certain times of the cycle, stress will have specific repercussion, inflammation generates symptoms and poor diet will lead to a whole host of traceable imbalances.
There are also many signs or body communications, that help you to know when your hormones are shifting. Strong anxiety a day before you bleed, for example, can be crippling and confusing. Just knowing (because you have been charting), that anxiety occurs for you at this time is a step ahead already, but further investigation would conclude that you are impacted emotionally by a sudden decrease in progesterone, which occurs just prior to menstruation; progesterone is one of the most anti-anxiety substances that the body produces.
Self-knowledge is power.
Have you ever felt the burn of ‘medical gaslighting’ or walked away from the doctors’ more confused than when you went in? Visits to the GP or gynecologist office feel so much le ss disempowering, when you have gathered data on your own cycle AND you have some understanding of hormone jargon! (‘see what is the menstrual cycle… exactly?’ and ‘meet your cycle hormones’)
I could honestly keep writing and writing about the wonderful benefits of intimately getting to know your cyclical patterns but the best advice I could give you is to just start doing it. So, chart your cycle and deeply know yourself!
If you feel that you have a hormone imbalance and would like personalised 1:1 menstrual cycle nutrition consultations, send me a msg through the contact page. I’d be honoured to support you on your hormone journey!
For more information on the psychosocial aspects of the menstrual cycle and menstrual cycle awareness visit Red School or Claire Baker.
Keisha xx
