Latest / Healing Her Story with Riva Jean-Paul / Moon Phases & Feminine Power: Your Weekly Cycle Sync | Four Ways to Find Balance After the Full Moon (Including One You Probably Haven't Tried)

Transcript

Moon Phases & Feminine Power: Your Weekly Cycle Sync | Four Ways to Find Balance After the Full Moon (Including One You Probably Haven't Tried) · Healing Her Story with Riva Jean-Paul

• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, and welcome to today's episode of the Healing Her Story podcast.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: If you are just joining us here today, I trust that you have found your way to this community in your perfect right time and way.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: If you are returning, welcome back.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Today we are gathering for our weekly cycle sync episode.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: And today I'm feeling like I just want to dive in, y'all.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: So we're gonna get ready to do that here in a moment.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: And before we do, as always, I'm going to invite us into a moment of stillness or silence, or perhaps a little bit of both.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: If you are driving, maybe just bringing a little bit more presence into your driving.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: If you're working on another task in the background, can you slow down that task or perhaps maybe stopping, even if it's just for a moment?
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: And in this moment of silence or stillness or both, I'm gonna invite you to really feel into your heart.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll share a little bit more about why, if you're not sure why.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: And creating a little bit of space for the heart here to really feel and be present with what is here.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: If that's not feeling supportive for you today, then feeling very free to do what does feel supportive for you today.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's just some quiet breaths.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's just some gentle orientation, just looking around your space and noticing what you see.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: I've shared lots of tools and practices in all of the episodes.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe not every week I share one, but there's there's plenty wheat in.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: So if you have another one that you've experienced in the past that you know works well for you, feel free to do that here as well.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna get one minute on my insight timer, and I will also put my mic on mute, and we will begin our minute of silence now.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know about you, but that went by really quick for me today.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like I was just kind of settling in, and then the timer went off.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: And it was interesting, I was really just kind of taking some time to notice the beat of my heart and the steadiness in my heart, and just took some time breathing with that steady pulse of life.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: And as I was doing that, I had this very familiar and pleasurable sensation that I often feel.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: I would describe them as goosebumps, and they're like smaller than goosebumps.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's like more of an effervescence, like it reminds me of like sparkling soda or something, and it feels really good.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: And to me, that's an affirming sign from my system that I'm on to something, that something is putting me on the right track, that there's something there.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: And as I was sitting with that, I also reflected on an exercise that we did very similar to this in my new student orientation.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'll share a few updates here, and then we'll move into this week's lunar energy.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: Just last week, I had my new student orientation for Southwestern College out in New Mexico, and I'm just officially starting my master's program.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going for my master's in counseling and art therapy.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's a dual track program with a dual license at the end of it, and I'm I'm really excited.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's a big step on yes, my professional journey, and I know it's gonna really impact me personally as well.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: All of the work that we do there is in this transformational learning style.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot of experientials, meaning we're not just reading about material, we're actually trying things on in our bodies, in our systems, and doing the work that we are going to be supporting clients through ourselves, which is how I already operate.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: So I feel like I'm in the right place.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: And on one of our um orientation days at the end, we did this heart coherence uh sort of meditation, and that's what we did.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: We just took some time breathing into the heart, noticing the steadiness of the heart.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: There's a little bit more to it that I won't share here today.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: But if you've never heard of the heart math uh organization, I would highly recommend looking at their work if you're feeling a little curious here.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: They've been studying the heart and the electromagnetic field around the heart for a very long time, and it's quite fascinating, the power of our heart.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe you were also able to feel into a little bit of that power today.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe there's a little bit of emotion here too, just depending on what might have come up for you over the last couple of days.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: Because this week we are tuning to the energy of the full moon.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: And to be clear, we are just on the tail end of a full moon that landed last Thursday or Friday, depending on where you are in the world.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: So you may have already experienced the peak.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: And as we're gathering here on today's episode, this episode is airing on Monday, about three days after the full moon.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps this episode can offer a few ways to bring more balance into your week ahead, especially as we are now officially in Libra season.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: I'm excited because I'm a Libra son and this is my season.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: And we're also officially in the season of fall, which is my favorite season.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: So you're gonna probably feel a lot of excitement and passion and depth from me on an even deeper level for the next few months.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: There is a big shift happening right now, no matter where you are in the world.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: And it can be easy to carry that momentum and that energy of summer right into autumn without really pausing to acknowledge that something has changed.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: And while that can be useful, it can also be problematic.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: So today I want to offer you four invitations for creating more balance after the full moon as we move through this season together.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: The first invitation is to get active.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: Balance is not always about slowing down and doing less.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: While that is absolutely a big part of it, especially living in a female body in a patriarchal world, we can't have one without the other.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: And something I haven't spoken to much on the show is how sometimes using our sympathetic active energy in an intentional and healthy way can actually be more supportive than trying to force ourselves into stillness.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: I'll share a little bit from my personal experience to bring this teaching in in a deeper way.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: As I was leaving for work, or rather, uh leaving work today after a full day with kiddos, who, by the way, can feel a lot of this full moon energy too.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: So um, yeah, campus is usually a little bit more wild the weeks of the full moon.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: And as I was leaving today, I could still sense that active energy running through me.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: There was this kind of like fluttering and buzziness in my chest.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: I was noticing myself kind of reaching for my phone and like checking my email and just kind of looking for something.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I could sense that it was gonna be hard to sit still.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: And that maybe trying to push myself into a meditation, maybe that wasn't actually what my body needed in that moment.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: So I went to the gym and lately I've been really focusing on my strength training.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: Would love, by the way, for someone to come on and talk to us about strength training if you're listening and you're an expert in this area, specifically for women in the female body.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: As I'm doing my strength training workout today, I was really challenging myself to meet the edges of my capability while keeping good form and staying connected to my breath and really bringing a lot of focus into what muscles are being activated.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a very embodied workout for me.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: And when I left, I felt genuinely more relaxed than I would have if I would have just tried to lay down and force myself into a still meditation.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: And this is because all of that active energy, that sympathetic air energy that I was carrying, it had somewhere to go.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: And there's research that actually supports this, of course.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: There's been studies on exercise and the automatic nervous system, and they show that moderate to vigorous physical movement can actually help metabolize stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: What it's doing is it's essentially completing the stress cycle that can otherwise keep us in that state of activation.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: In um some research on burnout, uh, it sort of talks about this and it describes it as literally completing the biological stress response through movement.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: The nervous system needs to know that the threat has passed.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes movement is how we tell our system that.