A Woman’s Menstrual Cycle: Its Messages Of Life For Women & Men.
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I will say it… I enjoy when it is that time of the month. When I tell people, most look at me like I am crazy.
It is something difficult to explain. For me, it gives me a feeling of comfort, nurture. I find myself saying I love it! and I do not know why. There is just something about it. I am in touch with my body, my feelings.
It is a time where my insights, realizations present themselves the strongest.
It does not mean I am not uncomfortable at that time. I have zero energy, sometimes awful pain, but still it is accompanied by a sweetness… something natural. An internal feeling, a knowing that cannot be described.
It is a time for rest, away from others, perhaps closer to my intuitive, feminine energy — it speaks more vibrantly then.
For me, it is a time where deep-seated emotions come to the surface, which I embrace as they come with deep understandings. I cannot bury them any longer.
My subconscious lets me know how I truly feel, a time of exploration, and direction.
Perhaps it is a time where women’s feminine wild side emerges from suppression. A time to celebrate women. What it means to be a woman… our special gifts we offer to the world.
Remembering sisterhood, motherhood, that deep connection, that something that binds us. A statement and reminder that we are here carrying life force within us, and the strength, courage, and power to endure, persevere against all odds.
I would like to share with you at this moment in time an except from Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Women Who Run With Wolves:
“Women from ancient times as well as modern aboriginal women often set a sacred place aside for this communion and inquiry. Traditionally it has been said to be set aside during women’s menses, for during that time a woman lives much closer to self knowing than usual; the membrane between the unconscious and the conscious minds thins considerably. Feelings, memories, sensations that are normally blocked from consciousness pass over into cognizance without resistance. When a woman takes solitude during this time, she has more material to sift through.
However, in my exchanges with tribal women from North, Central, and South America as well as female progeny of some of the Slavic tribes, I find that the “women’s places” were used anytime, not just during menses and more so, that each woman often had her own “woman’s place” consisting of a certain tree, place at the water’s edge, or some natural forest or desert room or ocean cave.
My experience in analyzing women leads me to believe that much of modern women’s premenstrual crankiness is not just a physical syndrome but is equally attributable to her being thwarted in her need to take enough time away to revivify and renew herself. I always laugh when I hear someone quoting early anthropologists who claimed that menstruating women of various tribes were considered “unclean” and forced to leave the village until they were “over it.” All women know that even if they were such a forced ritual exile , every single woman, to a woman, would, when her time came, leave the village hanging her head mournfully, at least until she was out of sight, and then suddenly break into a jig down the path, cackling all the way.”
More importantly, there is just something about the pain. It teaches us how to breathe with it, to follow its waves. Breathing is the key.
You practice breathing in order to follow the waves of the pain because that is how it comes…in waves, just like life. You learn to flow with it. If you go against it, you are taken over. You have to ride it and follow its rhythm.
A very important lesson, I believe. It prepares us, provides more endurance, strength, so now we can cope with the next wave.
It is all about breathing, if we do not breathe with it, we will roll, falling beneath the waves, struggling to come up. We will have to take painkillers, drugs and seek external forces to numb the pain, we will lose the lesson it is here to teach us.
Pain in not always bad, you know. It has something to show us. If we reject it, drug ourselves up, curse it, get angry at it, suppress it, bury it, it will just come back again next month. We can blame our misery on it, or face it like a wise teacher.
You cannot stop it. It is a natural process that we all go through. What if we accept it, love it, care for it… understand it?
It is simply a natural part of life.
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Gaia (Γαία) Giakalli is a therapist, writer, photographer, dancer, cultural anthropologist and nature-dweller. She loves creativity, and nature, especially trees. Her passion is connecting people with nature, in which she has spent most of her life in solitude, contemplating and enjoying its wisdom, and empowering people to be their authentic selves, reconnecting them to their true essence and calling in life. You can connect with her on The Tree Mouseion of Creativity, Gaia Giakalli World Productions, Facebook or Twitter.
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