A Woman's Sacred Cycle

With knowledge, we can turn menstruation from being a disempowering, painful and an exhausting experience, into the most healing, deeply inward going, enlightening experience.

Today I want to talk about a theme that is present in many women's lives: experiencing our bleed as painful and burdensome. The sacredness of our bleed has been taken away from us. We can reclaim this important time of our month as something deeply healing and nourishing an all levels of being.

In society and throughout history, bleeding hasn’t been honoured and women therefore experience menstruation as a burden, something that is shameful, dirty and painful. It feels more convenient to hide it and numb it with painkillers so that we can function the same, all year round.

In reality, our bodies change daily, as our hormones fluctuate depending on where we are in our cycle. This is how a woman’s body is supposed to function and we will naturally feel different every week, every day.

How we stepped into Menarche (our first bleed), lays the foundation of how we relate to our bodies. If we learn to recognise menstruation as sacred and recognise our body as a temple, we will naturally love and honour the different cycles of a woman’s life, feel safe in our sexuality and who we choose to be intimate with, accept our unique body shape and have a precious and healing bleed.

When we don’t honour our menstruation, we may see our bodies as dirty, end up with hurtful sexual experiences, experience PMS and period pain, disliking our bodies and its cycles as a burden to us.

As we step into menarche and becoming fertile, we are stepping into womanhood. We are still young girls, who are trying to find our way to growing into a woman. In the midst of that, there’s so much shame over our bodies. Shame of blood in our pants, of how we smell and how our bodies are taking shape. Shame of feeling sexual and exploring ourselves. Together with that, a rollercoaster of hormones that messes up with our mood and thoughts, it can feel unbearable. And that’s the time we lay the foundation to how we relate to our menstruation.

There is a lack of honouring our body as a sacred feminine temple in our culture. Our mother was often not honoured by her mother and we were therefore not thought to honour the feminine. They might not have talked to us about menstruation, or showed us what we need in order to take care of ourselves. We didn’t learn that when we are bleeding, we need to slow down and rest.

This lack of guidance can lead to PMS and period pain. And the result, we dislike our period. We disconnect from our womb and femininity. We disconnect from the sacredness of bleeding, of how empowering it can be: a tool to understand who we are as women.

With knowledge, we can turn menstruation from being a disempowering, painful and an exhausting experience, into the most healing, deeply inward going, enlightening experience.

When we slow down and listen to our womb as she sheds blood, when we can be with the pain and the sensations of our womb, we can gain deep insight into our being. She can become our teacher and guide. She will detox through shedding blood and emotions, rather than holding onto pain.

This is the time of the month when you effortlessly can feel your womb.

You can to meet her in the pain she is expressing, and once you start to listen to that pain, you may discover there are important messages being revealed and the pain starts to release.

Often we numb the pain with medication and we might not have a choice at the time, but to experience true healing, we need to meet our womb when she tries to tell us there is some kind of imbalance in our life, be it physical, mental or spiritual, our bleed is not supposed to be painful.

When we slow down and listen to our bodies during menstruation, we learn about what changes we need to make in life to find more balance. When we rest during our bleed, we will feel more energised, less stressed, with the feeling of having come out of a detox; refreshed and renewed.