Your Body Has Been Trying to Tell You Something: On Cycles, Intuition, and the Foundations We Pass On

I'm writing this on the first day of my cycle.

My body was shouting at me this morning. Clearly and loudly. And I think that’s what bodies do when we’ve spent too long not listening - they stop whispering and they shout.

It was asking me to stop. To rest. To honour the fact that a new cycle was beginning, and that the month before needed to be released. There was a heaviness. An aching that wanted peace and quiet. That wanted me to slow down, to not rush, to simply be still with what was happening.

Instead, I drove miles for work. I got the job done. I kept going.

I didn't take painkillers — I wasn't in that much discomfort — but I know that for many women that would have been the next step. Reaching for the paracetamol or something stronger. Pushing the pain down in order to push through the day. And that is so normal, normalised actually. So ordinary. So completely unremarkable in the world we live in. Women do it every single day, for pain far worse than mine, without a second thought. Because what else would you do?

In instances like this (every month), it really feels like we are living in an upside down world.

What Our Cycles Are Actually Telling Us

We are not taught to listen to our bodies. We are taught to manage them. To schedule around them. To suppress the inconvenient parts so that we can continue to function within systems that were never designed with the female body in mind.

We don't live in a world that accommodates, supports, even understands our needs. Our working lives — the employment contracts, the sickness policies, the 9 to 5 — do not synchronise with or honour the female body that has, every single month, days where rest is not a luxury but a physiological necessity. To take a rest on day one of your cycle, in most workplaces, you would need to make a phone call. You’d need to explain yourself. Navigate whatever comes with that. And if you do that 12 times a year - once a month, every first day of your cycle, at the very least - how are you then perceived as an employee? Does your reliability get quietly questioned? Are you overlooked in favour of someone else? The answer, in most workplaces, is that you would pay a price for it. And so we don’t. We push through. And in pushing through, we push something else down, something that was trying to speak.

Because a menstrual cycle is not just a biological inconvenience. It is a map. It is information. It is, if we let it be, one of the most powerful tools a woman has for understanding herself — her energy, her needs, her emotional landscape, her intuition. Each phase of the cycle has its own quality, its own wisdom. The season just before the bleed - the premenstrual phase, the autumn of the cycle - is when frustrations rise. When things that have been tolerated suddenly become intolerable. When the injustices that may be happening in our world become impossible to ignore. We call it PMS. We pathologise it. And we apologise for it. But what if it is simply autumn doing its work - the cycle’s way of surfacing what needs to be seen, before the stillness of winter arrives to release it?

The bleed itself — the wintering, the quiet that echoes earth’s natural rhythm — is asking for exactly what the natural world asks for in winter. Stillness. Inward turning. Release of what the previous season held.

When we honour these seasons, these phases in our cycle, something opens in our capacity. When we slow down in step with this wintering, we actually expand - we don’t contract. When we suppress what we’re being called to, we close ourselves off to our own knowing. To our own voice.

The Woman Who Listens

I want to talk about the woman I notice I am growing into.

A woman who listens to what her body is asking for and stops on day one. Who doesn't sacrifice herself to accommodate others' needs. Who is quietly, confidently assertive about what she needs - not anxiously, not apologetically, but with grace and self-respect. She is not asking for permission for her own needs to be met. She tunes into what her body is telling her and she honours it. Without guilt and without explanation.

She simply knows herself.

And here is what I believe: that is exactly the woman who walks into her birth rooted in herself. Who doesn't need to be told what to do. Who can feel the difference between outside noise and her own knowing. Who trusts her body because she has spent months — years — learning its language.

The foundations of birth are not built in the moment you bring your baby into the world. They are built long before. In the ordinary, unremarkable, quiet but revolutionary act of listening to your body when it speaks.

What We Pass On

So why am I talking about this? Why am I talking about menstrual cycle awareness when everything I do is about bringing consciousness and curiosity to babies - to the human experience before, during and after birth, at a time when the world still largely treats them as blank slates?

Because when a woman develops self-knowledge - when she tunes into her body, listens to it, understands what it is asking for and honours it - she becomes a woman who births intuitively. She is growing a baby that is gestating inside that intuition, that is their foundation. They grow up in a world where honouring intuition is just how life is lived. It is part of their blueprint, running through their veins. Whatever their life path, they have the odds stacked in their favour of being a human who knows themselves from the start.

And so the cycle repeats.

The work you do on yourself - the quiet, unglamorous, deeply natural act of listening to your body every single month - is not just for you. It is for the human/s you will grow, and theirs, and theirs, and so on. It is for the woman she might become. It is for the births that have not yet happened.

It starts on an ordinary day when your body is asking you to stop.

Once You Hear This, You Can't Unhear It

I understand why a pregnant woman reading this might never have connected her menstrual cycle to her birth experience. We don't live in a world that supports this knowledge. In many ways it is actively suppressed — because a woman who is truly attuned to her own body, who understands the intuitive power that moves through her hormonal fluctuations, who listens to the frustrations that rise at certain points in her cycle because they are speaking clearly to something real and unjust — that woman is unstoppable.

And unstoppable women are inconvenient for a world that runs on women pushing through.

But once you hear this, you can't unhear it. Once you begin to pay attention — to your cycle, to your body, to the quiet voice that has been speaking underneath all the noise — you are tapping into something powerful. Something that was always yours.

That is the work I am doing on myself. Imperfectly, on a day when I drove across a county instead of resting. But I am living more consciously, with more intention. Paying attention, even now. And knowing that I will continue to be imperfect, but that paying attention is enough to begin with.

What I am learning, I want to share. Because when we share, it comes alive. It exists outside of our own heads and has the capacity to ripple into the experiences of others. To make possible for the next generation what it has taken us thirty years to learn.

If you'd like to explore this work — the connection between body awareness, intuition and birth preparation — I work with mothers in Southampton and Hampshire. Get in touch here.