Reclaiming the Cyclical Power of Women
I am writing this as I soak in the warmth of the late afternoon sun at the beginning of my menstrual cycle, just before the New Moon. It is said that thousands of years ago, many women bled with the New Moon and honored this time of rest, death, and rebirth. Anita Diamant beautifully and famously portrayed this in The Red Tent: women came together each moon cycle to slow down for a few days, honor nature’s rhythms, and nourish themselves and each other in community. What could it look like if we returned to this, individually and collectively? Can we imagine what we could heal, accomplish, and create from this fertile space?
According to the MyFlo app, during this part of my cycle I have “the greatest communication between my two brain hemispheres: the left analytical side and the right feeling side.” The prompt: “Allow yourself to turn inward to journal or reflect on where you are now.” While I write for myself and share for my healing and becoming, I also invite you in for us to get cozy and dream together.
Welcome, love. This is a tender subject for me to share about; please hold me gently.
I’ll begin with a potentially familiar story. It still feels strangely uncomfortable and vulnerable for me to acknowledge that I am in fact a woman, and I bleed each month. For most of my life, I was relatively disappointed about being female and definitely ashamed of menstruating. Everywhere around me in society I saw messages telling me that being a woman meant being less than. So as a young girl I naturally tried to be more like the boys: more outspoken and confident, less emotional, and definitely never ever weak. And my god, I loathed wearing dresses or being told to do anything that made me look too soft or feminine. My poor mother would have to drive far and wide across the Tri-State Area in the 1990s in search of dress pant outfits for young girls (ah yes, the pre-Google search days). Once I began to bleed, I remember hiding used tampons and pads in the bottom of the garbage, horrified and praying no one would notice. Oh, the pain and awkwardness of being a teenage girl.
After years of subliminally adopting a less-than mindset, it honestly became part of the programming running unconsciously in the background of my mind. I later chose to work in very male-dominated industries, proud of myself for being able to “hang with the boys,” rarely having the warmth or companionship of a female colleague. (A quick side note I want to highlight: I still cherish and heavily rely on my masculine traits. I believe the secret for each of us lies in finding the balance in both. Also, I adore men, and you can read more about my concerns on exiling the masculine, and in doing so isolating men, soon.)
After the thrill of this dream career path faded, I felt lonely, as my body slowly got very sick. While this pattern started years earlier in school, it hit a peak in my work life: I would push myself so hard to perform and my body would push back, telling me to slow down. I often felt my body was betraying me, and I wouldn’t listen to it until it inevitably reached a breaking point. My body would eventually win the battle, and I would succumb to retreating and resting until I felt well enough to blindly jump back into the same unsustainable cycles.
Once I hit a lowpoint of health subsistence and acknowledged that I didn’t want to continue barely surviving like this, the insanity cycle mercifully broke. I finally got a grip and started seriously prioritizing my health. Through what I perceive to be divine intervention at this pivotal point in my health and professional journey, I was invited to experience entheogens.
In ceremony, it was revealed to me that my body had never betrayed me. I had it backwards: it was me that betrayed my body, again and again.
These medicine journeys started me down a long path of reclaiming my female body and its inherent rhythms. I was coming home to myself and becoming more whole. I also started letting my hair down, literally and figuratively. And I discovered I actually loved wearing dresses and the way I felt in them. Sorry it took so long, Mom!
In time I felt newly empowered and delighted to be a woman. I developed a voracious appetite to learn about the Divine Feminine and all that it means to embody this form. This path led me to the Altar of Woman apprenticeship with Adya Cadden and Xochi Balfour. These incredible women introduced me to the energetics of my female body, its life-giving power, our innate connection to the elements, and the strength and magic of women. I received an initiation into womanhood that I never knew I was missing. What at first felt so strange or outside my comfort zone, I slowly began to open to and embody. I had honestly never thought about my womb or connecting to it. When in class we were asked to close our eyes, put our hands on our body, and try to feel into our womb space, I felt numb. This was very familiar for me, but I was nevertheless disappointed. Adya and Xochi lovingly normalized this and encouraged us, and slowly over weeks I began to feel something and to listen.
What I eventually encountered was a raw, primal power that blew my mind, a cosmic creatrix. A fertile void capable of birthing and caring for humans, projects, communities, universes.
I felt like magic was real and I was a goddess. What was possible if I operated with these beliefs? I began to adore playing with little rituals everywhere I could: lighting a candle with reverence, offering my blood back to the earth, whispering prayers into seeds and burying them, burning scribbles of what I was releasing with the Full Moon. The power of reclaiming these long-forgotten ways was electric, and my god, the beauty that the women around me were co-creating when we gathered was breathtaking. I felt alive and awakened, remembering what one of my teachers, Marilu Shinn, calls “the ancient future.” Can you feel it yet, love?
As I continued to explore my previously ignored truth of being a woman, I came across a podcast episode that completely changed my life. Lacy Phillips was interviewing Alisa Vitti, who spoke about infradian rhythms, the potential to feel amazing in a female body, and the magic that can happen when women are in tune with their cycles. I heard a message that was now becoming less foreign to me: it is not a curse to be a woman, it is a gift. Listening to this conversation and learning about infradian rhythms, something lit up within me. My rage and inspiration both ran wild:
How have we women never been taught that there are optimal, specific times each month we can flow more easily with to rest, to collaborate, to complete projects, to brainstorm? What if we were able to incorporate our natural infradian rhythms into our schedules and work? What would be possible not just for women, but for all of humanity in that sustainable cycle? That is a business model I am salivating to help birth.
I want to acknowledge and emphasize the distance we have to travel for all women, especially mothers, BIPOC women, and most especially BIPOC mothers, to be able to fully step into these cycles if they choose to. (A deep bow of gratitude to Qiddist Ashé for helping me see this fuller perspective.) Our current society and structures do not support this and we need to overhaul them. We won’t truly thrive collectively until we all have the support to make these choices for ourselves. I believe women living and working cyclically can be an exponentially powerful shift for our future, our economy, and our health. Isn’t it time we try a new model?
I’ve been privileged to personally experiment with this myself for over a year, and I am finding the more in tune I am with my body and its cycles, the better I feel, the more creative I am, and the more I flow with life instead of trudging through it. I feel inspired and delighted when I notice my body is craving juicy fruit and I realize that exactly supports the part of my cycle I’m currently in to metabolize and eliminate estrogen surplus. I feel like I’m channeling The Force when I’m brainstorming during my follicular phase; the creativity pours from me without my usual resistance. I’m learning when I move with the rhythms of my body, the rhythms of nature, magic ensues.
This weekend, I am thrilled and honored to pass along these re-membered superpowers. I get to gather with dear friends, mothers and their young daughters. We get to bathe together, adorn ourselves, reflect back to each other and ourselves how whole and complete we already are, and reclaim and remember the power of women. As my dear teacher Marilu says, we get to reweave the web of life and birth the ancient future. What will we create together?
I am slowly remembering that I am a child of the earth; I am the earth. My cycles are her cycles, and I move with them.
