Infradian Rhythm Informed Exercise and Practice

What’s the difference between being physical (sports, yoga etc.) and cultivating embodied nutritious movement? Missing periods were my big clue.

As an athlete, I used to be pretty competitive.

For decades I pushed myself to become a ‘badass athlete’. I took the bait, the challenge to keep up with the boys. It came from this wonky culture of ours, where women have to constantly prove themselves to be taken seriously, but it also came from within myself, from wounding behind my sense of worthiness.

I have always loved pushing myself physically and moving my body in the outdoors, playing in nature was my medicine. It was how I coped. But something in me took it past the point of passion, took it to obsession.

This also drove me to compete with myself in my early yoga career. I practiced with a goal of perfection in my postures. I narrowly pushed myself to overcome my body/mind, and this caused me to injure myself and disassociate.

Surprisingly, for how physical I was, I wasn’t very embodied.

At more than one point in my life I stopped menstruating. Long stretches of missing periods were, at the time, something I celebrated because, well, it was less hassle.

So much I didn’t know then.

I didn’t know that menstruation was a key indicator for my whole body health, and when it went missing, it was actually an early signal that I was running on fumes.

I didn’t know about the exercise polarity within the Infradian Rhythm. How the heaviest exercise should be slotted during the 10 day window after ovulation, and how I really needed to REST during menstruation.

I didn’t know that pushing myself to such extremes was depleting me. That my body couldn’t spare the energy and resources it needed to create life from scratch each month, so it stopped trying.

I didn’t know that all that masculine yang energy was burning out my sympathetic nervous system, further contributing to my missing periods and adrenal fatigue.

I didn’t know that without ovulation, I didn’t get important sex hormones that provide essential elements for vitality - namely progesterone which is only produced when ovaries release an egg. I didn’t know this was important for my wellbeing then and would also affect my future bone density and menopause experience.

I didn’t know I was ignoring the sacred feminine messages my body was sending me, because I didn’t know how to listen.

I didn’t know what to do with the wildness and radiance waking up in me, so I stuffed it down into my body and ran faster.

Thank goodness I started to listen.

Thank goddess I am no longer running away.

Thank the stars I found female teachers and elders.

I found a feminine approach to skiing, yoga and climbing that allows me to enjoy movement sustainably, in ways that don’t deplete me.

I no longer have to prove myself worthy of playing alongside the men, I don’t care if I keep up. I have no attachment to that kind of evaluation anymore.

When I move my body now, it’s pretty dang intentional. I’m mindful of the Infradian Rhythm, of my hormonal menstruating body. I move as if it’s medicine. Because it is.

Taking the striving, neediness, avoidance, and compulsion out of my movement practices has changed my life.

I move for pleasure. I move for play. I move with joy. I move with love.

I move to give my body nourishment. To move lymph and circulation. To fuel my life rather than deplete me.

I move from inspiration, allowing the muses of music, sunrises, wild animals and nature scapes, and my rich emotional life to move me.

I am moved by romance, by my love affair with white pine, hemlock, cedar.

Just because I was an athlete doesn’t mean I knew how to move embodied. Just because I was a yogi dosen’t mean I knew how to practice embodied.

It’s not really taught is it? I learned this the hard way, but I am happy. I learned so much else too, through diligent apprenticeship to nature, and to my body itself, through a slow process of resensitizing my nervous system.

By discerning what is me and what is not, and knowing my place in and of the natural world.

I rarely injure myself now. I know where my edges are, where my allegiances are, and I am reverent every day for the miracle that it is to move well.

To have a body that I take good care of and hold sacred is a gift. Sounds trite but it’s true, because many are not able. I try to give the gift of embodied movement to myself daily.

Well it’s kinda like a re-gift or a wholehearted receiving, because I was given this body originally by something more mystical and bigger than me.

I’m GRATEFUL.

Grateful to be human.

Grateful to be a woman.

Grateful to be wildish.

Grateful for my uterus, cervix, ovaries and pussy.

Grateful for my fascia, muscles, joints, and bones.

Grateful for my lungs and BREATH!

My heart and blood.

My beautiful brain and nervous system.

My ability to sense, my senses and sensitivities.

Grateful for this sacred relationship through my body to receive greater wisdom than my mind could ever comprehend.

May my sensitivity grow each day as I confront the ways I have numbed out or desensitized myself, and heal.

I wish this for you too.

To know your body intimately as a tuning fork, sensitive and discerning, a compass for navigation.

To know your wild impulses and no longer contort your body to unnaturally contain them.

And to know how to harvest the nutrients out of your movement practice, without injury or depletion.

In my upcoming mentorship program The Infradian Year, we will explore this distinction at length, listening and inviting deeper sensitivity.

Resonate? Apply here (begins in March): https://mailchi.mp/8a63e3ef0b9f/infradianyear

Love love,

WolfMother Sarah