You probably think you're connected to your body. Most facilitators do. I did too.

I was a yoga practitioner for ten years. On my mat every morning at six. Teaching for years. If you had asked me, I would have told you I was deeply connected to my body, and I believed it whole-heartedly.

Then I discovered my menstrual cycle, and later my nervous system, and I understood that I had been disconnected the entire time. From my womb. From my cyclical nature. From what my nervous system was actually doing while I taught, which was mostly running in flight, sometimes fight. I was dysregulated, on the mat and off it, and I had no idea.

Hard to believe? I hear that a lot, usually right before a yoga teacher in one of my trainings recognises herself in it. Because here's what I've come to understand: a practice can be beautiful and still carry you up and out of your body. Transcendence and embodiment are not the same thing. You can spend years in one, believing you're in the other.

And this matters for your work more than almost anything else, because you can't hide it from a room. Women's nervous systems read your nervous system before you say a word. The subtle flatness in some of your sessions. The classes that were good but didn't quite land. The days it took everything you had to hold the space. You've probably blamed your content, your structure, yourself.

My doorway was yoga. Yours might be the circle you host, the classroom you teach in, the clients you coach, the retreats you lead. The pattern is the same wherever women hold space for women.

The room was never reading your content. It was always reading you.

Regulated, because you're in real contact with your own nervous system. Paced by your cycle instead of at war with it. And the room responds immediately, because the same channel that leaked your disconnection now transmits your presence.

✦   You rehearse your opening lines on the way there because part of you is bracing for judgement

✦   You drive home from your own sessions replaying the one thing you said wrong

✦   You check the registrations again and again, wondering if anyone will show up, and what it means about you if they don't

✦   You over-plan every session, because the plan feels safer than presence

✦   You couldn't say, right now, where you are in your cycle or how it's shaping your energy, your voice and your capacity today

✦   Nobody has ever taught you how your female nervous system actually works, even though you hold space with it every day

✦   And underneath all of it: you want women to leave your rooms saying "I don't know what that was, but I felt it

YOUR TEACHER

Hi, I'm Jaime

Founder of Cyclical Living, a trauma-informed school for Teachers, Coaches & Facilitators, and creator of the Menstrual Cycle Educator Certification. I've trained over 70 women who are now carrying this work into their own communities around the world.

Women often tell me they learn as much from watching how I teach as from what I teach. Slow. Regulated. Somatic. That way of facilitating is a practice, rooted in my own cyclical body. And it can be learned.