The Her Edit

For something that happens to us for the better part of forty years, most of us were taught remarkably little about our own cycles.

We learned the mechanics, perhaps, in a rushed lesson at school. We learned how to hide it — the discreet sleeve, the apology, the careful management of other people’s comfort. But few of us were ever taught to listen. To understand that the body keeps a rhythm, and that the rhythm has things to tell us, if only we knew how to hear them.

Le’Nise Brothers has built her work around that listening.

A registered nutritionist, yoga teacher and women’s health specialist based here in the UK, she is the author of You Can Have a Better Period and the host of the Period Story podcast, where women share the often-untold tale of their relationship with their own bodies. Her message, threaded through all of it, is one I wish I’d heard at fifteen: your cycle is not a monthly inconvenience to be silenced. It is information; a kind of fifth vital sign, quietly reporting on how the rest of your life is going.

Your cycle is not a monthly inconvenience to be silenced. It is information.

When you begin to pay attention — really attend to it; the body stops feeling like something that betrays you and starts to feel like something that has been trying to talk to you all along. The heaviness that asks for rest. The energy that rises and then recedes. The way stress, sleep and what’s on your plate ripple through everything.

There is something gently revolutionary in this for women like us; women who have learned to override the body, to push through the tired days, to treat our own rhythms as obstacles to productivity. To work with your cycle rather than against it is to stop apologising for being cyclical at all. It is to plan the demanding week for when you have the energy for it, and to let the quiet days be quiet without guilt.

So much of what we call ‘just hormones’ is the body asking, plainly, to be cared for. For rest it isn’t getting. For nourishment, for steadiness, for a little less from itself. The symptoms we rush to suppress are often the only language it has left.

Coming home to your body, this week, might be as small as noticing. Tracking, gently, where you are in the month. Asking what this particular day is actually asking of you, instead of demanding the same output you gave yesterday. Befriending the body you have spent years managing.

It has been speaking all along. The invitation is simply to listen.

What might change for you if you stopped overriding your body’s rhythms; and started planning around them?

Softly,
Fiona x