Podclass Show Notes and Links
Summary:
Episode 2 delves into why we believe it’s so important for women to live in sync with our cycles. We explain why this cuts down on the “work” needed to overcome uncomfortable and stressful hormonal imbalances such as endometriosis, infertility, weight loss resistance, hormonal acne, and so much more…all while creating a health toolkit that allows for long-term healing.
Important Links:
Zestyginger.com to learn more about the 4 Phase Cycle Approach.
Zestyginger.com/cycle to get our FREE Wild Feminine Cycle Guide to get started with everything you need to know about living in sync with your cycles.
Zestyginger.com/healthyhormones to join our 3 month Healthy Hormones Group Program. This program includes functional lab work with a complete hormone and neurotransmitter panel, with a personalized protocol created for each participant based on their results.
Follow us on Instagram: zesty_ginger
Transcript for This Podcast
Hi there. This is Alex again. Thank you so much for joining me for our second Podclass. You guys are just the best. I wanted to hop in today and follow up with something that we started with last week. Which was syncing with your cycle. So, last time we talked about what the even meant and what it can do for your life. But today I wanted to talk about why syncing with your cycle is so so so important. And I wanted to give you some explanations and some examples of parallel things that we believe that I think we can apply to our cycle and the way that we view our health as females. Alright? Ok, so lets get started.
So why is syncing with your cycle even important? Modern life gives us a whole lot of challenges that are very unique now that haven’t existed in the past. We are always constantly bombarded by so much more stuff than we ever have been as humans. And so part of the tenant of syncing with your cycle is actually beginning to change your relationship with some of the things that modern life pushes us to do. It is saying goodby to things like: being everything to everyone, running yourself into the ground, or feeling inadequate or weak inside your own body. So syncing with your cycle, those are all the things it’s not. We are never going to tell you that you need to be everything to everyone, because that not realistic. Somehow we’ve ended up being a full time mom and a full time boss and a full time employee and full time wife or partner that supposed to just have a freshly cooked meal and want to have sex at night and want to do all this stuff. There’s just so much that we are asked to do, and it’s time for us to take that power back and say, “I will choose what I choose to be in the world. I will choose what I will give and what I will receive.” And that sort of balance is so much more healthy for us, and allows us to take a step back out of that rat race and try to get back to what serves us and what fuels us. Ok, so that’s the point.
Now we are unique, Megan and I are unique, in that we structure all of our group programs, we have our Four Phase Cycle Detox that’s a great program, and our Healthy Hormones Group program where we do functional lab work and then create a personalized protocol for each of our ladies, just because we very much believe in the power of lab work to know exactly what’s going on. And a lot of times we want to explain why we do thing that way. Because even in the functional world we are a little bit quirky and that most people ignore what is happening. You can start another group any day, and most people even plan then around things like “January 1st”, right, because it’s handy. Or when summer starts for the beach body workout. Or whatever. It’s all external to you instead of realizing what is happening internally is something you can either work with, or you can work against. And obviously we think it’s better to work with. Let me give you an example: when we have seasons in our world we kind of instinctively understand that in the winter everything is going to rest, nothing’s going to be blooming, everything is going to die off and kind of go into hibernation mode and restoration. Now, that’s not to say that nothing happens there, right? We know there under the ground the plants that grow in that region where it gets cold, or it rains, or whatever it is, there’s still things happening under the surface. It’s just that it’s not quite as exuberant and outwardly. As something like Spring where everything is blooming. It’s summer time now when I’m recording this and our rose bush that’s outside just blew up with roses, there are so many on there and it’s gorgeous. Like nature doesn’t hold back, right? I can’t even count the number of roses are on that one bush, and that’s just one thing in my yard. And we have no problem with this. We understand this is how it works. And what we do in modern where we also try to, a little bit, fight against this. We can make a flower bloom in the winter by; expending a lot of energy, expending a lot of resources, changing the setting. We can do that, but as you know if you’ve ever had a strawberry in the middle of the winter that tastes like a potato, it takes a lot more energy and you don’t get that same end result. Whereas in the spring everything comes up on it’s own. There is nothing else that we have to do. I didn’t have to do anything to that rose bush. It just bloomed because it was time for it to bloom. And that is exactly why it’s important to sync with your cycle. I can have you, Megan and I can create you a protocol, and then have you follow it blindly without thinking about your cycle, and honestly that is what we did and we did have quite a bit of results, but the women that we’ve had them take their cycle into account and sync with that, the results are there that they’re so much better with a lot less energy expenditure on our part, and the part of the ladies that actually do it. I mean, it’s just makes it – it can be done, but the results are not as good, and the energy is a lot more, and unfortunatly what ends up happening is that the results are short lived because unless you change your relationship to not only your external world, but your internal world, it’s really hard to heal from certain conditions. And I’ll give you and example from my pain problem, or even infertility. But I’ll stick with pain because that’s my number one thing that I’m working through.
So, I have the belief that I am quote “a chronic pain person.” And what I’m trying to change that belief to is “I am a healthy person who has a history of chronic pain.”
And you can see that while the difference is subtle, it actually changes, can change the success that I have with the things that I do. Because, if I believe that I am a healthy person who has had the experience of pain, I can now take actions to keep being a healthy person and leave that pain experience behind. Whereas when you believe “I’m a sick chronic pain person” – even if I motivate myself up, I get my willpower in check, I’m really you know getting excited about everything – I will still continually sabotage myself because in my subconscious I believe I’m a chronic pain person and I want to be congruent with my beliefs. So at some point, I will begin to sabotage what I do to get better, because if I do that and I succeed, then it’s not congruent with what I believe about myself. You can’t be the sick person and wear that mask; and be the healthy person and wear that mask. You just can’t do that. You have to put the sick person down. You have to put that belief down and pick up the new one that says “I am healthy, I’m fertile, I’m pain free.” Whatever it is for you. But that is why we believe the long difference takes. Because it’s really easy, actually, for us to have you do lab work, we get your results, we get your intake questionnaire, we look at everything, we create a protocol for you. And it’s easy you go to the store, you buy the stuff, and you start taking it. Right? When it comes down to it, that work is actually quite easy to do, which is why people tend to focus there most of all. What we found though, is that you will always end up sabotaging – or, I’m using the work sabotaging – but you’ll basically act in such a way that it matches up with your belief. So, even if you get better and you stick with that for a while, a lot of times we’ve seen the moment you kinda stop thinking about it, you revert back to where you were. Because that is truly what you believe. So this cycle work is deep. There is a lot going into it. There is a lot more stuff we have to consider about our experience of this world, and our bodies, and our place in it that goes beyond taking supplements, and doing detox tools, and all of that. Which we will talk about that, I promise. But I want to set up the reasoning behind why we do and why we focus with syncing with our cycles so much, Okay?
So lastly I want to finish this Podclass with two things. I want to go over the four phases of the cycle, just real quick because the next one’s going to be much more detail talk about that. And then who the people are. All the ladies that we’ve seen that would benefit from this type of work especially.
So the Four Phases of the Cycle include:
- The Release Phase – which starts from day one of your period.
- The Rise Phase – which is my personal favorite, because your hormones are risings, you’re gearing up to ovulate, you have all this energy to do a bunch of stuff.
- The Plateau Phase – which is when our hormones tend to kind of level out and that’s when we power through and stick with whatever we initiated.
- The Pause Phase – the wrapping up and reintegration into our real life for whatever we wanted to incorporate.
And so those are the four. And really this type of living is how I hope eventually, Megan and I, it’s our hope that all women will live like this. And historically women have been, you know the whole red tent, and not that we all want to go live in the desert or in the woods for a week while we have our periods, but the whole point remains is they honor that time and they honor the cycle. And there is even, I read a really interesting book about the, in history the relation of the moon to the feminine. Which if you don’t have a cycle, we are going to have you follow the moon cycle. It’s another cyclical event that happens in a really close proximity. The average female cycle is 28 days, the moon is 29 and a half, so we have you follow that if you don’t have a cycle. But hopefully all women will live like this. But it is especially helpful if you are dealing with things like; infertility, hormonal acne, weight issues – whether its weight gain or you have weight loss resistance where you are just starving yourself and working out and can’t lose the weight and you don’t know what’s going one-, or you have autoimmune issues – hypothyroidism, all of these-, endometriosis, PCOS, all of it. All of those kinds of issues whether you have spotting or you want to kill your partner three days before your period every time. All of that can help, because even though women are all very different in the way they cycle, we’ve had people with 20 day cycles, we’ve had people with 35 day cycles. We’ve had all sorts of diagnosis; hypothalamic amenorrhea, to PCOS, to endometriosis, to POTS (which is Postural Orthostatic Hypotension (Tachycardia) Syndrome), we’ve had it all. But the truth of the matter is that when we take a step back and look at all those ladies with all those cycles, there are still similarities. And when you draw a map of each woman’s cycle throughout the month, and you overlay all the women in the world, that cycle will kinda look like the same thing. And so we can impact and include all of these differences in cycles within this flow, which is really great. And it’s especially true if you’re already struggling with cycle related things, and hormones, endocrine system, blood sugar regulation, gut, liver, whatever. All of this interfaces with it. And then the other thing is that regardless of where along the endocrine system, whether it’s in the hypothalamus, your pituitary, your ovaries, your adrenals, your gut, wherever the problem is happening, or whatever diagnosis that you have received, the thing is it’s not discrete, like how we usually think of it. It’s not ‘Infertility’, oh you go to a reproductive endocrinologist. And oh ‘Diabetes’ or ‘poor blood sugar regulation’ you go somewhere else. For us it’s all one system, and so all the women we work with fall into this same category. And instead of looking at everything like this is different, this is different, this is different from each other, and let’s separate them. What we want to do is bring it all back because once you impact the entire endocrine system, it all begins to align, because the body is made to sync with the cycle. And what we are doing is just being aware of it and facilitating those things in your body, man our body is amazing, it will take care of the rest. Okay? So hopefully that makes sense. Hopefully you understand the nature analogy and why we want to honor the downtimes, the really abundant times, and everything in between.
And next week, or next class, we are going to kick off with details about the four phases of the cycle, and kinda do a broad overview. And then after that we’re going to dig in to each individual phase, and look into action items.
Now Megan and I, I’ll do a quick note, are all about the action steps. So today the only thing I want you to do after this podclass is go in to your apps on your phone and download some sort of cycle tracker. Our favorite is the MyFlow app and the person that created that also does some cycle related work, even though our interpretation of the physiology is different. So we will say that some of the things you see on there is her take on it. Ours is a little bit different. You now, we base ours off physiology textbooks and looking at the raw data that we had. And that’s how we came up with ours. So, I don’t want you to get confused, but that’s a great app. It even reminds you, “hey you’re in your ovulation phase” “hey your in this phase” “ you’re about to have your period.” Or whatever. And it’s a nice reminder to be like “oh, it’s time to go do this” “oh, that reminds me I have to go do that.” And so go on there, get some sort of cycle tracking app, or even if you want to use a calendar that’s fine. But your homework today is to go out and make sure you’re starting tacking. If you are already doing that and you want to get a little bit more granular with tracking your cycle, you can also go out and purchase LH strips – ovulation strips- and that measures one of the hormones that rises prior to kicking off ovulation. And you can check for that starting around when your period get done, you can start checking those days and then see if you are ovulating. If you don’t have a cycle that’s totally fine. What I want you to do is go download a moon app, or just go google it and find out when the cycle of the moon is. Because everything else that we’re going to do is either going to fall into your individual cycle, or if you don’t have one either because of PCOS or you’re breastfeeding or whatever, you are going to go by the cycle of the moon.
It’s actually really interesting. I’m go on a little side tangent. There’s, most women, the ideas that you ovulate during the new moon. Or, I’m sorry, you have your period during the new moon, that’s the dark moon sub phase, so that’s when you don’t see the moon in the sky. And then ovulation, would happen around the time of the full moon. And historically that’s how many women, because when we live out in our environment, we’re more responsive to that kind of stuff, many women actually fell into that natural cycle. The healers were known to have the opposite cycle. So the women that tended to take care of the women, tended to have their period at the full moon, and have ovulation in the new moon. So you were basically flipped. And those were the women who took care of everyone else when they were having their period. Which is fascinating to Megan and I. And it’s funny because practically when I’ve been struggling, or Megan has been struggling, whether that’s stress at work, stress with life, kids are sick, whatever it is, we will flip into the cycle with everyone else. Having your period during the new moon. And then the other person who is taking care of the partner ends up having the second cycle, the other version of it. So it’s just fascinating how we interface with nature, and how our bodies are so smart and so willing to kind of help us out and give us the signal “hey girl, you’re now in the phase, you need some help. So let Megan take care of you.” And we, the more I live with this, and the more I sync with my cycle, the more beautiful that ends up. Because, instead of feeling like “I’m slacking off,” “I should be writing blog posts,” instead I’m asking asing Megan to do some of our work because I’m not feeling well, that ends up being ok. And it’s totally fine. And I’ve done the exact same thing for her. And when my body gives me that message, I actually try to listen, because I get out of that phase, I recover from whatever happened, and I get on with my life. And my cycle will reflect that. When I’m ready, I’m ready to go. Okay? And so Megan and I tend to fall into this cycle, the healer cycle. But that all falls within normal. It doesn’t matter if you are syncing with the moon. But that is just to say, if you are not having a cycle, the moon is a great thing to follow, because historically we really have.
Okay guys, hopefully you guys found that interesting and helpful. Make sure you do your homework, don’t forget. And then come back and listen to the next class. Alrighty, have a great day. Bye!
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