Honoring Your Instincts & the Rhythms of Your Cycle

I love the idea of passing this wisdom down through generations. I always tell mothers: learn this for yourself first, and you will naturally and intuitively pass it down to your children. Your nervous system affects the nervous systems around you more than anything else. There is something energetically powerful about doing this work yourself — it influences others and sets an example. One piece I like to start with is teaching this hormone dynamic from a complete perspective and helping women learn to honor their instincts for nourishment and rest. Little things like: “I need to drink water now. I need to pee. I’m tired, I need to sleep.” If you can learn early on to trust that your body is giving you information — and respond to those impulses — that is powerful. And it’s powerful for children to learn, too, because throughout life they will receive messages to override their body’s signals. Part of the reason this happens is because women have been trained to override their instincts to keep pushing and to fit into a more linear mode of living. This is why I emphasize: listen to your impulses and get in the habit of responding to them. One thing I’m not going to go deeply into today, but that I want to touch on, is that our nervous system does not run the same way throughout our hormonal cycle. We have phases when we have more stamina and energy — particularly from the beginning of the cycle to ovulation. During that phase, our nervous system can move in and out of stress more easily. As we move past ovulation and into the next phase, before our bleed, we shift into a more sympathetic, stress-sensitive state. We may still have drive, but we need more nurturing and care because the system doesn’t rebound from stress in the same way. Once we enter our bleed, we’re essentially in a cleansing phase and need more rest on those heaviest days. This helps us build and retain Ojas — the container of our vital energy. Even just learning to notice this — how your body shifts and changes throughout your cycle — is something I wish I had learned much younger. I feel like I’ve only really understood it in the last five or ten years. It helped me respect these changes instead of judging them. Why this matters now — whether we're going through puberty, preparing for pregnancy, navigating the mid-phase of life, or supporting ourselves into menopause — is that each phase invites us into a deeper level of wisdom. From an Ayurvedic perspective, menopause is a powerful up-leveling. It's not a disease. Our hormones naturally begin decreasing around age 35, and continue changing as we enter menopause. If we enter this phase already depleted, it will magnify that depletion. Sometimes it feels like being forged by fire — hot flashes included — but it’s not about suffering. It's about recognizing that our physiology has been blessed with creative potential. All of the shifts we experience throughout our lives are connecting us to that potential, again and again. So how can we support these phases, rather than viewing them as problems to suppress or manage? The cultural language often labels them as issues or diseases — something to fix or repress. But when we shift into understanding and supporting these natural changes, the entire experience transforms.