I sleep under moonbeams.
I crack the blinds to invite the luminous streams of the half-full moon to pour into my bedroom.
I swim in and out of dreams.
I toss, turn, rise to catch a winking glance of the moon. I splash back down into pillow, cool blankets, and plunge into the immersive film-like narrative vividly surfacing the subconscious to be felt, seen, released.
I wake rested and restless. On the edge of dream-hued memory teases a color, a prideful red that if followed brings me to a clustered hall of Elizabethan courtiers. The confident crimson gleams from ruby-drenched necklaces, scarlet gowns, fanciful shirts, and even seems to paint the air with a charged magnetism, a sizzling intensity.
My midnight reading of a fantastical witch trilogy set in 16th century England explains the backdrop; but I believe my inner knowing borrows the historical scene to boldly express an ancient wisdom (one older than Shakespeare) that is reemerging, rearranging, reorienting me to my feminine life-force.
The moon is half-full and so is my nourished hope to return to radically living a holistic, supportive life that honors and collaborates with my hormonal phases, the ones reflected in the waltzing dance of the moon.
And in swaying in rhythm to the moon, I gently land to last March, when I first felt inspiration stir and take root to catalyze an unfolding into true wellbeing.
If I could spin time backward to this point last year, I’d be experiencing a surreal slowness. Austin shut down and the city’s quarantine abruptly halted my fast-paced days. Late-night improv performances, weekend morning rehearsals, teaching yoga in libraries and schools all evaporated from my calendar. A sudden stillness permeated as traffic instantly dissipated, theaters went dark, and days blinked open in an unfamiliar spaciousness.
I circled inward. I explored a body-focused approach to meeting the days, to caring, inquiring and acting upon my body’s whispers and needs. And here I synched with feeling my cycle, sensing the start of my bleed, and the slowing down became a fuller expression of lushly noticing the miraculous functioning of my intrinsically intelligent body.
That exquisite moment is the seed of the new moon. Hands to lower belly, eyes wide, to detect and gather gracefully a pang that pulls me closer to existing in the aliveness that is my body and also into a flurry of questioning around how to naturally nourish this multifaceted vitality.
When I felt my body begin to shift toward menstruation, without the digital reminder of an app or a surprise announcement, I woke up from a heavily layered dream, a dream that had fogged my personal sense of sovereignty. I awakened to the serene strength of embodied awareness, and the attentive epiphany sparked an empowered quest to understand my cycle, befriend my body, and love myself through each phase of this cyclical way of embodied being.
And this is an invitation for women and men -- to live in the truth of cycles, to connect to the wise rhythm of the Universe shown to us in the phases of the moon, in the seasons, in the collective archetypes of the masculine and the feminine.
There is a particular power associated and available to us through each phase of any cycle.
A reason in the season.
A divinely supported time to plant the seeds, grow, bloom, harvest, celebrate, digest and rest, and rest so deeply in faith that that we can let the seeds of spring be nurtured through our purposeful non-doingness.
The unhurried pace of nature is our wise teacher, encouraging us to tend to the inner garden, to shift the outer gaze to the inner landscape. The moon holds sway over the waters of our bodies. When we re-remember this truth, we are nature, we come home to our true nature.
This embodied, cyclical awareness, for me, is freedom.
And this liberation begins for me last March. And a new moon, which is spring, the maiden archetype, symbolically resides over the start of last year’s yellow brick road quest. Just like I curiously scamper after the red dashing through the corridors of my dreams, I journey down an underground pathway that tugs in loudening resonance at my heartstrings.
Here I find the companionship of fiercely compassionate writers who blaze as truth-tellers. Their writings include science, history, spirituality to dissipate shame, pierce through centuries of feminine oppression, cultural conditioning and societal delusion to gift me back the power of my cycle and to integrate the engrained gifts in my female biology, in each symphonic phase.
And here the moon is half-full and I commit to charting my course, old-school style with paper and pen. Acknowledging the consistent change that is my cycle liberates me. I delight in discovering patterns and making empowered choices around foods, exercise, even daily to-dos and routine that take in caring consideration of my hormones, and grant me breathing grace to change, adapt, pivot. Incorporating my infradrian rhythm reshapes how I create and flow into my day.
This choice to weave in my monthly cycle rallies like a revolutionary NO to the male-hormone oriented mainstream. This over-emphasis on the circadian time-clock pushes for grinding productivity, perceives the body as commodity, and therefore, periods as a liability, and pedals pills to shut up symptoms that cry out from a deeper misalignment of attempting to exist and thrive in a society that is anti-feminine.
And this is a history of anti-femininity brutally spotlighted in the witches trilogy. The one I read before sleeping under the half-full moon, the one that reintroduces me to the earth-enlivened wisdom of Elizabethan witches who reverently collaborated with their moon-guided cycles to rest, create, give, renew. The book’s wrenching details of the time period’s witch trials releases tightly held trauma in my individual and collective DNA. These holistic healers, these intuitive informers, these witches or star-seeds, or heart-centered thinkers were tortured, silenced, shamed, mercilessly murdered.
I see this brutal history living within me. I illuminate the insidious, invisible threads operating within my own psyche to discredit, disregard, disown the divine expressions of femininity. Awareness initiates the reconciliation. The half-full moon sends encouragement. My healing and reclamation travels backward and forward in time – so my healing and reclamation is their healing and reclamation.
The moon cradles their stories and their stories shape my red-infused dreams. And the call is to follow the spirited red, the pulse of life-force, my feminine magic, along the castle corridors of my internal world and out loud in the spinning world and under the half-full moon.
If curiosity has been sparked, then kindly presenting a few reads, articles and moon-centered guides on embracing and loving feminine rhythms and tides. In The Flo: Unlock Your Hormonal Advantage and Revolutionize Your Life by Alisa Vitti
Code Red: Know Your Flow, Unlock Your Superpowers, & Create a Bloody Amazing Life. Period. by Lisa Lister
“The Four Seasons of Woman’s Cycle Explained Week by Week,” written by Sheleana Aiyana – found here https://risingwoman.com/4-archetypes-of-the-female-cycle/
Divine Feminine Life-Coach, Ellen Gilbert offers exquisite meditations, journaling prompts and writings that inspire and free on her website -- https://www.ellengilbert.com/blog