How I Rewrote My Hormone Story
From painful periods, PMS, and infertility to navigating hormone balance in early motherhood.
Women’s Intuition
As women, I believe we have a deep knowing that there is something intrinsically divine about our monthly rhythm. Whether we see our periods as a nuisance or a gift, there is an understanding that our bodies do not adhere to the 24-hour clock.
I had this subconscious awareness, but through cultural conditioning and a dearth of accurate information, I lived for two decades under the assumption that as a woman, I’m either on my period or off. It wasn’t until a deeply personal struggle with infertility that I started to look at my cycle through a more curious lens.
Even then, my motivation was an unanswered call to motherhood—I was studying my cycle with the end goal of getting pregnant. It wasn’t until 3 years and two babies later, in the depths a postpartum hormone desert, that I started to realize how much a part of me this cycle was. And how much I missed it.
That’s when I started to rewrite my hormone story.
If you prefer storytelling by video, I share my story here too.
Old Habits Die Hard
After my son was born, I went right back into exercise as soon as physically possible. Sleep-, nutrient-, and hormone-deprived, I jumped right back into the high-intensity exercise that I thought was the answer to my overwhelming feelings of fatigue and unworthiness.
What I didn’t realize until much later, was that I was in a perpetual cycle of depletion and burnout. Still, I felt like happiness was on the other side of a perfect workout week and as an empowered mother of two, I needed to simply suck it up.
A Whisper Becomes a Scream
Then, on a relatively uneventful day, I showed up to my workout space. I was dressed and ready to go with a monitor in hand with a precious 30 minutes of potential nap overlap on the clock in which to squeeze in a workout. This particular time was different though. I felt a visceral resistance to what I was asking my body to do. I felt almost paralyzed as my body stood there in protest. I wasn’t excited about it. It felt like an obligation. It was about as far from self-care as one could get.
So I took a long shower instead. Such a simple choice might appear insignificant, but after a lifelong battle with obsessive exercise, this was a huge choice for me to make. It hardly felt like a choice because my body had been whispering to me for so long and it finally started to speak loud enough for me to hear.
What followed was a retrospective exploration of how I had been approaching movement and exercise. I showed up at the same time, every day with the same movement patterns. I would get bored and take a week or two off. Then jump back in again, fast and furious. I never understood why the same workout could feel so invigorating on one day and like complete torture two weeks later.
This was the beginning of my journey in living in alignment with my cyclical nature.
I started reading about and researching the menstrual cycle with a renewed sense of curiosity. This time, I was coming at it from a new angle—as an entry point to self-care. As I learned more about cycle alignment and embarked on a journey in body literacy, I decided to try on a workout program that was variable and mapped onto my menstrual rhythm. And I haven’t gone back.
An Inspired Mission
My hormone story involves an awakening late in life that has me feeling more energized in my late thirties than ever before. Now, it has become my mission to shortcut that timeline for menstruating women everywhere so we can all access the potential embedded in our cycles and show up the way we want to in the world. How? By creating a space for cycle-friendly movement and meditation practices that support each unique menstrual rhythm in a different way.
A place for the body to be seen, heard, and moved.
Move Like the Moon
At lunae, we move by the moon. This means engaging in exercise that meets you where you are—all days, all shades, all ways. When we are moved through empowering practices, we get to show up as our best selves.
We can exercise efficiently to awaken a natural state of energetic flow. No more resource depletion.
Cultural conditioning encourages women to power through periods, but there’s a better way. When we choose to leverage our cyclical nature—instead of perpetually overriding it—we enter into the flow. It’s where our potential resides. It’s where creation happens. It’s where we get to be free.
There is a peace that arrives in surrender. When we stop fighting our bodies and literally go with our flow. Be not mistaken though, it is not a passive place. It is a committed daily practice of self-care.
That’s why I created the lunae collective.
Ready to give cyclical fitness a try? Get a full cycle of workouts and meditations below!
