The power of making peace with our periods

“Once we start to work with Feminine power we begin to see that it is not our minds that are in control of this power – it ebbs and flows with the movements of the planets, the procession of the seasons, the moons and tides, our own internal cycles of menstruality, anniversaries, the events around us. All these and more impact our experience and expressions of power. We learn to become aware of these various patterns and their impact on us and work more consciously with rather than against or in spite of them. We learn that they are all part of the same process. We open towards the energy, rather than shut down to it. We learn to trust the flow.”
― Lucy H. Pearce, Burning Woman

 

Hey sis, how are you? My video on mayinbloom this weeks is about something very very important to many women.Today´s post is about something that happens to most girls/women each month. Days that you yourself might already be pretty familiar with. These are our days of the moon, cleansing and restoring.

There are a lot of interesting posts concerning periods on social media and many of them are actually quite funny too. They are always centred around the inconvenience and pain that is usually experienced during our menstrual cycle. A time that looks absolutely nothing like all the infuriating period products advertisements we usually are bombarded with as children.  Advertisement too embarrassed for us to even show their periods as blood red but rather we see a blue liquid, something that you never understand until you have it. Then you realize that that is because it is something taboo in a way.  Something of secrecy.

We don´t grow up being holistically invited into womanhood with wisdom, embrace, love and care – rather for me it felt like the time had run out for my childhood and it was now time to be reminded each month of the lottery I lost when you were born a girl. It is an introduction of pain and suffering that is meant to be had in silence. An initiation into a world of feminine burdens that have no space in a man-made world.

Since we asked for equality with men, we are supposed to exist in their world without being of inconvenience – you should be able to give a wonderful presentation in class/ at work like your partner John while experiencing excruciating knee shaking pain and just keep going and smiling through it all. A period is a constant unavoidable and often horrible inconvenience that is supposed to be experienced without a skip in the beat of life.

But where do all those feelings of despising and hating go? The language we use to describe our relationship with our periods? What does it do to our body? Yet, periods are a part of most women´s monthly life, they affect the way we plan our days and weeks, they affect our relationships with others and with ourselves. This is why I decided a few periods ago, that I would choose and make an effort to create a different relationship with my period. One of peace and acceptance after a 19 years of monthly mental and emotional battles.

This means that I would plan my months with it in mind, not as an inconvenience but as something I welcome, since it allows me as a woman to enter a different state of being mentally and physically. I have accepted that liberty of me as a woman means the embracing and making of space for all the things that make me who I am. Without shame, without hate and without resistance. My period is not an inconvenience because I am not an inconvenience as a woman. I will aim to honour it as I will aim to honour my own womanhood. I will hold space for it by making and keeping peace with it. Through the good days and the bloody bad ones.

That is my wish for all of us, that as we learn more about our holistic existence, that we also learn to love and hold space for those aspects of us that society has taught us to be ashamed of, that it has taught us to hide away and never to discuss openly. I wish for us to exist fully as women and celebrate all the ways that our existence connects us to ourselves and the rhythm of mother nature herself. I believe that there is true power in that: loving and accepting ourselves fully.

I wish you a lovely new week and I pray that life find you loving and embracing all the things that make you who you are, yes, even the messy bits.

 

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