N is for: Navigating Personal Energetic Cycles
This post is part of a series I’m so excited about: “The ABC’s of What I’ve Learned as a Medium and Intuitive Healer.” This is my full-time career, and I am thrilled for the opportunity to share what I’ve learned!
*I say Spirit to mean God, the Universe, the Cosmos - I use these phrases interchangeably for all enlightened beings who help us. I use “greater Spirit” or “Spirit” to mean everything out there, taking care of and managing in here: Them as a group and concept. You may choose to substitute the word “Spirit” with Jesus, Archangel Michael, Allah, Lakshmi, Kuan Yin, The Universe, The Cosmos, or about a billion other names, and it doesn’t matter. Spirit is all this and so much more than we can ever understand. They don’t care what you call them so long as you give them the same respect they give you. I work with these beings closely, as they are an integral part of my practice and career. It is a relationship I heavily encourage everyone to build, as it enhances every aspect of our physical lives and spiritual practice.*
Personal Energetic Cycles
We're (generally) aware of biological monthly cycles, but each of us has five personal energetic cycles, according to Spirit. We each go through a daily, weekly, monthly, annual, and two-year energetic cycle, respectively. These are different for everyone, and each of us would do well to mind our own natural cycles. If we're trying to move when we need to rest, or trying to plan when it's time to take action, we'll be lost. It's difficult sometimes to know we're on the right path, and all we want is the comfort of knowing we are. Our personal cycles can help us recognize the moments we feel off track and switch the narrative.
No matter the length of the cycle, there are four steps of every single one: intend/plan, take action, rest, and reflect. Each has a distinct purpose, and whether we're talking about our daily or our two-year energetic cycle, we have to hit each of those steps to complete it. We have to plan, act, rest, and reflect to complete one cycle and start a new one. Otherwise, we restart the same cycle.
Many of us get stuck in one step and never see some of the others, and this is why we don’t move forward. We each likely know some who constantly plan, but never move. Or who constantly rest, and never intend or act. We’ve likely known people who move constantly, we couldn’t call them lazy, but they still never get anywhere. They’re stuck in the action step!
If we learn to work with instead of against our natural cycles, there’s pretty much no end to what we can accomplish.
We want each of our cycles to be playing into the others, almost like nesting dolls. We’ll always have a daily cycle, but hopefully we’re not just starting the same daily cycle over and over. We want our daily cycles to be contributing well to our weekly cycles, which we want contributing well to our monthly cycles, etc., so each time we finish, we’re starting a new cycle and not the same one we just failed to integrate. Some of us start over every day, meaning in some sense we’re also regularly starting over every week and month, because we never move from intending something to doing it, or we never move from doing something to resting. If one of our cycles is off, more are likely to be off as well.
This isn’t said to hurt or shame anyone, just to help us see the disconnect and how to move with our cycles and a little more intention!
The Steps
We each tend to like some of these steps and dislike others, and usually pretend some do not exist altogether. We’re usually really good at at least one or two of these, but regularly lack comfortable completion of all four. This can help us recognize the cycle so we can work with it on purpose, even when we don’t like a step!
Plan/Intend:
The plan is the beginning. We get a feeling which leads us to a thought and hopefully the two lead us to an intention! We don’t get thoughts and feelings for no reason - we’re meant to do something with them. In a short-term and a long-term sense, we receive feelings and thoughts which could lead us to possible intentions all the time. Many of us are full of intentions, and it’s the next step we never get to.
Moving from planning to doing is hands-down the step we tend to avoid longest, which is unfortunate, because it’s the very first step!
For an example: Say while we're doing the dishes, we receive intuitive guidance (a feeling and thought) which encourages us to take a closer look at a painful childhood memory which has been resurfacing lately - we suddenly get the feeling there is some healing to be had there. We can choose to ignore this (and most of us do), or we can choose to analyze the intuition - analyzing the intuition is intending. It’s planning. Those may not be the words we usually use for this, but that’s what it is to Spirit! When we ignore intuitive guidance, it’s business as usual. We have to hope we’ll be on the vibration to receive the guidance again in the future, and that we’ll listen then.
When we decide to analyze intuitive guidance, we’ve made a plan! We’ve made a plan to get to know ourselves a little better. We’ll continue this example with the further steps.
Take Action:
We tend to hear these words a very specific way, and we generally think of action as physical action. However, there are mental and emotional actions too and they’re actually much more prevalent! Finally working through a memory which has plagued us and understanding it at its root like we just talked about? This is an action: a behavior which frees one from thoughts.
Continuing our example: We have made the plan to follow our intuitive guidance and analyze a painful childhood memory which has recently been resurfacing. Deciding to do so was the plan, actually analyzing the memory is the action. Allowing yourself to remember, analyzing what comes up as a result, really thinking about it and making attempts to see new perspectives. This is the action.
This is a great example of a mental and emotional action which could have been ignored, and the kind of action which is usually ignored! We ignore a lot of physical advice, but undoubtedly more mental and emotional advice from our higher self who tries to show us when we're ready to work through what has held us back mentally and emotionally.
Rest:
Even mental and emotional actions need periods of rest after! We tend to understand that we need to rest after doing physical work, but mental and emotional work are just as exhausting and require rest also.
Continuing our example: We planned to work through a painful memory, and now we have taken the action and actually worked through the memory. We’ve seen what it’s been trying to show us, and we understand why this memory resurfaced at this time.
Now, we must rest. We can’t take more action; we can’t make a new plan, not in this same regard - it just isn’t time for that. It’s time to rest. To refuse to feel or think anything new in this area! This is what resting is about. We integrate the lesson just learned (whether the action taken was physical, mental, or emotional), and we ideally don’t do or think anything else (to do with this topic) for a little bit.
This, however, is the second easiest step to mess up! Many who take action refuse to rest, recuperate, and integrate afterward, and these are still vital steps of the cycle.
Reflect:
This is really the second step of integrating this whole process. We need to reflect on everything that just happened: the plan, the action we took, the rest we took after, and see what we could or should have done better or differently, while celebrating the milestone met and achieved and being excited for the future! Reflection is about acknowledging the cycle complete and looking to the next cycle with optimism.
For the last step of our example: We planned and took action on a painful memory, rested afterward, and now we can think on all this. Could/should we have recognized this memory sooner? Was it something we’d been able to work through for some time? Do we like how we worked through it? Is there more to be analyzed in the same regard? Is this complete, or are there deeper memories to work through? What will we do next in this same area of life? What is available to us now that this memory isn’t hurting us? What space was cleared? Etc. Reflection is about self-inventory, recognizing what has changed, and looking forward to what will change in the future. *It is not possible to fully integrate a lesson, even one well-learned, without this step.*
Once we’ve completed all these steps, it’s time to start over. We’ve cleared space which tangibly changes our energetic systems and physical body, and now new feelings and thoughts (which we’re looking at here as intentions) can arise. We should never really consider ourselves done. There is an infinite nature to these cycles because there is infinite possibility to learn, grow, and evolve as long as we’re alive (and once we’re not).
The Daily Cycle
The daily cycle is arguably the most important because it’s the starting point - the cycle which feeds into all others, whether positively or negatively. If you can conquer the daily cycle, you can conquer them all!
The daily cycle is mental and emotional.
This is because mental and emotional action should be taken every day. Physical action does not need to be taken every single day, and thus does not need to be part of our daily cycle.
This is something very easy to misunderstand. It’s important not to mix up what we’re calling “physical action” with things like exercise or activity. We can exercise and do activities every day. What we mean here is we do not come up with physical and material plans to move one's life forward and execute them every day - a physical plan for our life is generally larger, and should usually take more planning and executing than one day.
However, we should hopefully execute this entire cycle mentally and emotionally every day so we are not living the same thoughts and feelings every day.
That is the point of our daily cycle: to introduce new thoughts and feelings by clearing space which is full from storing the old ones.
Each daily cycle begins every day at a certain time, depending on when you last successfully completed all four steps of the daily cycle. (The last time you successfully reflected, closing a daily cycle, your energetic systems reset right at that moment.) So my daily cycle may begin at 5 AM, but yours may begin at 10 AM or 8 PM. This is especially problematic for those whose system is beginning to intend in the middle of the night when they are asleep, and they may even wake up in their rest phase, having missed their time to intend or reflect altogether (in which case they need energy healing, right away)!
Whenever our cycle begins, sometime shortly afterward, we will be in the intention step. We will have received feelings and thoughts which have guided us toward mental or emotional actions we need to take to move forward out of the current cycle.
During a daily cycle, each step will last around six hours, if none is taken. You may have noticed you naturally have a time of day which is easier to work or act, easier to plan, easier to rest, easier to reflect - this is how your body is programmed!
They don't *have* to last this long, this is just if they're not paid attention to. Say the moment you go into the intention phase, you attack it and make your plan. Well then you'll move into the action step immediately, which would then last for around six hours or until you completed the action! So we can really complete a daily cycle in a matter of hours by actually *completing* each step and achieving what it intends to achieve, or we can go through each step for six hours per day, ignoring them.
Patience, restraint, joy, and excitement play heavily into daily cycles and how well we go with the flow, either helping with or keeping us from getting into a comfortable daily cycle. These four emotions play heavily into the daily cycle because these are the four we need - one specifically for each step.
Patience for the Planning:
We need patience for the planning and intention stage so we can ensure we do not rush out of it before we have properly made a plan. Taking action before a plan is fully-formed is a significant amount of the problem we see on earth.
Restraint for the Action:
We desperately need more restraint involved in our action phases! Following a plan should be almost mathematical. Even taking mental or emotional actions are mathematical steps to feeling better through more self-awareness and understanding. Significant problems are caused by one starting a plan which is ill-informed, or which has not been informed at all by thoughts and feelings. Many of us have been taught to act and even to act blindly, but restraint is about knowing when to apply pressure and when to release it, and that is a vital part of every action step. Knowing when to stop moving is a vital part of every action step. This is why we need restraint along with action, it’s the only way to take purposeful, guided action.
(Going back to that example to show why restraint is so necessary for action - say one slams into that same childhood memory, but hasn’t made the plan to analyze and heal through it. Now they’re wading through something painful but it’s ill-informed - they don’t know why they’re there or what to take from it. They’re very unlikely to actually work through to the root of it, and are more likely to come out in even more pain than they went in, plus now there’s confusion in the mix. Does this sound familiar? This is how most of us deal with painful memories. We go swimming in them without having set the intention to heal and clear space.)
Joy for the Rest:
Joy is related to rest because we should feel good about a job well done! We should recognize what we have done and that it is no small feat. We should recognize that we were given intuitive guidance, and we really should learn to see following our thoughts and feelings as an intuitive practice, because it is. Following our intuition is the opposite of living on autopilot; it’s listening to our inner voice. As we rest, we should feel joyful that we followed our guidance, we took the action we needed to take as far as we needed to take it, and now, for now, we are done. We do not need to move further forward, we don’t need to think hard, we don’t need heavy emotions weighing on us. We just need to celebrate a job well done!
Excitement for the Reflection:
Excitement is discernible from joy, and that distinguishing factor is important here. Excitement implies understanding that something else is going to come in the future. We need to get excited as we reflect because it shows that we understand what we’ve done is take our life into our own hands and that is exciting because it means we can do it again tomorrow. We can get excited about the idea that even when a very hard feeling or memory surfaces, we know exactly what we need to do with it to let it go forever and feel better permanently. We can get excited that our life is ours to build, and everything that comes up is something that has a solution. Reflecting on what we did well and on what we could’ve done differently should be very exciting because it is knowledge and tools that we get to use toward every single tomorrow.
The Weekly Cycle
The weekly cycle is mostly mental.
Pattern recognition is the most important thing to discuss for one's weekly cycles: to see whether we're in an energetic rut, so to speak, or whether these patterns are working to our benefit.
Pattern recognition and mental acuity are so important for the weekly cycles because still, we should not be taking large physical actions on a weekly basis. Energetically, we are simply not ready to take and make big external life changes this frequently.
Our weekly cycles are mental. This means that for the entire week, we will be going through one over-arching, mental plan, action, rest, and then reflection, guided and dictated by our daily cycles. While our external lives shouldn’t change on a weekly basis, our minds should!
Ideally, we’ve gone through seven varied and different daily cycles which have contributed well to this weekly cycle in which we can learn something new, grow our knowledge, and move forward as a more mentally and emotionally aware and intelligent person.
Realistically, at our best, we're likely to hit a few days and miss a few others, which is still great!
Unfortunately, most of us are more likely to go through seven identical daily cycles, which usually means our weekly cycles are doomed to repeat as well.
To learn and move forward on a weekly basis, we really have to take those mental and emotional moments of intuition on a daily basis.
During the weekly cycle, each step will last a couple days, unless acted upon. So think about what this means in a larger sense! Just like on a day-to-day basis, we have times of day when we'd rather act, rest, or plan, we also do on a weekly level. Each week, depending on when you last restarted your weekly energetic cycle by completing all four steps, you'll have a few days when planning comes more naturally, as well as when acting, resting, and reflecting does, respectively.
The Monthly Cycle
The monthly cycle is mostly biological, which plays into emotional, mental, and physical cycles.
People of every gender have a biological monthly cycle which comes with its own complications, and those emotions play into our shorter cycles. Mental health also plays a role in our monthly cycle and how we work with it, and whether this monthly cycle is helping us move forward and take action in our lives or if we’re "starting over" every month, so to speak.
Hopefully, as we restart a monthly cycle, we have grown emotionally and mentally on a weekly basis throughout. These mental and emotional changes are what will lead us to be able to take more guided actions on a monthly basis! Again, speaking realistically, we’re more likely to move forward emotionally and mentally some weeks, and stay stagnant or even move backward others. It’s likely dependent on how well our daily cycles are going.
The monthly cycle is also where things begin to become physical. While we shouldn't change jobs, homes, relationships, or make huge life changes in general on a monthly basis, we can still begin to intend, act, rest, and reflect on smaller physical life scenarios in this time.
During the monthly cycle, each step takes just slightly over a week, unless acted upon. Which means there will be a week in which it's easier to plan, to act, to rest, and to reflect as well, in a more general sense.
The Annual Cycle
These can be difficult for many of us to see! We follow two different annual cycles: one mental and one emotional, and we hopefully use them toward creating new future goals.
It’s good to note that this is creating mental and emotional goals - this is not typically a physical cycle. This is because if we spend an entire year on a physical plan, in nearly all cases, that’s considered too much preparation. There are rare outliers to this - some plans do need a very long time. But typically, we’ll be working on physical plans with our higher selves over a matter of months, and it isn’t typically tied to our energetic cycles, other than in how well or how poorly our energetic cycles are working toward our ability to plan. To say that again, while your higher self may work with you on a physical plan for a month or a few months, and these energetic cycles undoubtedly play into how you handle your physical life, they're more about mental, emotional, and spiritual change. These internal changes almost unequivocally turn into changes to one's outer world as we begin to carry ourselves differently.
The Two-Year Cycle
This is mainly emotional.
We go through a cycling of emotions every two years which are meant to help us make our way forward emotionally, reach new depths, begin new emotional initiations, etc. This is heavily informed by each and every underlying cycle! This is the least likely for us to fulfill because we’re so likely to give up on the shorter cycles which would need to lead to a successful two-year cycle.
How to Use Your Cycles
Getting the information:
If you have a psychic or divination practice, you can ask your spirit guides for any amount of this information. For each cycle, I would ask a few specific questions, such as when you last successfully completed it and how long you’ve been repeating the same cycle, now. For your daily cycle, I would ask what time of day it is currently resetting. You can ask what you need to know for the cycle, what you’re currently missing for the cycle, which steps you handle best or most poorly, why you handle certain steps well or poorly, how the cycle is contributing to your physical life and the situations you’re seeing on an external level... You can probably also come up with a whole bunch of questions I haven’t listed here! In any case, doing this through psychic abilities or divination is a little bit easier.
However, one who does not have psychic capabilities or use a divination practice can also locate their personal cycles and learn how to navigate them, it just takes more self-awareness and more willingness to put work in. Do you have a specific time of day when it’s reliably easiest to intend? That gives you a great idea of when your daily cycle is re-starting. Then think back to recent cycles. Have the same memories been resurfacing; the same thoughts? Likely, yes! Just like on a weekly basis, you’ve probably been seeing some recurring patterns in your life. Since planning is the first step in any cycle, it’s usually the easiest to locate. One can do this by taking a fierce self-inventory.
Using your cycles toward life:
It is not possible to overstate how important understanding one's cycles is to manifesting what we want in life! If we are intending when it is time to rest or if we are acting when it is time to reflect, our energy is not where we need it to be at the right time, and we will simply not be able to achieve what we want. It doesn’t matter if we are talking daily, weekly, monthly, or any cycle. If we are doing the wrong thing at the wrong time, and if the step has not been adequately informed by the steps which must precede it, we simply aren’t going to move forward.
Now we may find ourselves accidentally becoming aware once we’re already in the action phase, as in, we realize we really want to start moving on something, but we haven’t planned. Well, even if our energy isn’t perfectly aligned to planning in that moment, so it won’t come as naturally, we should still force ourselves to sit down and make a plan before acting, because if we skip any step in the cycle, we will not finish the cycle. If we act without having planned first, without having taken our feelings and thoughts into consideration, we have skipped a step in our energetic cycle and cannot complete it. So if you find yourself in the mood to act, but realize you didn’t make an adequate plan, you can still work backwards and begin at the plan step. If you find yourself wanting to rest, but it’s very important to you to make it through a particular daily cycle, you can fight backwards and make a plan, take an action, and then rest and reflect. We are not a slave to our daily cycles - our daily cycles have been created by our repeated behavior. To manifest something new it’s important to become the master of one’s cycles and not feel that we are being governed by them.
This is also a great way to build up psychic gifts! If you know that you go through this cycle every single day, you know what the four steps are, you know what the four big emotions are for the daily cycle - why not begin to talk to your guides about it? The number one way to build psychic gifts is by asking specific questions. A lot of the time, not knowing how to build one’s gifts comes from not knowing what kind of conversations to have or what questions to ask. Beginning to work on your daily cycle gives you those questions to ask, such as the ones I listed above. Ask a question and then see what comes to you. Really give it a chance. Then play with what you got. Did you receive the answer visually? Did you hear it or think it? Did you feel it in your body? How are you receiving and then interpreting psychic information? This can be a great way to really get to know yourself as a psychic, since everyone’s gifts are completely unique.
One who understands their personal cycles simply will feel better in every regard. We don’t give this enough credit, but it’s incredibly important! There is nothing in this world that we want for any reason other than we think we will feel better when we have it. If we want a new job or home, a partner, for our mother or child or dog to do something differently… there is literally nothing in this world that we want unless we think having it will make us feel a little bit better. If we make feeling better the goal, all of those other things tend to come together like magic. Navigating our personal cycles instead of fighting them teaches us to go with the flow in a way which simply makes us feel immeasurably better. We can tell that we are aligned with our higher self, and that we are working with the natural ebb and flow of the very planet we stand on. For many of us, most of life has felt like coming up against a huge, invisible force we don’t even understand how to fight. A lot of that is coming from misunderstanding the navigating of one’s personal cycles and taking the right step at the wrong time.
Understanding and working with our personal cycles is the best way to fulfill our inner potential. No matter what, our higher self is doing everything they can to move us toward a sense of purpose and fulfillment. They are trying to align us with our personal cycles. When we fight them, we can’t hear them, which makes it so we are never really moving forward at the rate we should, or at least could. When we align with our personal cycles, we align with our higher self, and they effortlessly and with purpose move us forward toward everything we could ever want. There is no way to fulfill our maximum potential while out of sync with our cycles.
Through my Etsy shop, I offer a reading on your personal cycles.
Thanks for reading! I hope this helps and I would love to hear about your experiences with your personal cycles!