Towards the Emergence of Menstruation
Journal Entry, October 4, 1989
sibylle, sibylle in the centre, whispers, "leave it all behind.
Sink into your own love."
Is that what my menstrual blood is?
The outpouring of love?
For most of my menstruating life I managed, in between periods, to block
from my mind that I would bleed again. If the fact did cross my mind, I
would make sure to think, "It can't possibly be as bad next time."
Yet it almost always was.
At some point during almost every period, I would, after eating, begin
to feel confused. The "confusion" operated at both physical and
intellectual levels. My forehead would feel off, as though some gear had
fallen out of place. I would suddenly find it difficult to follow a logical
argument or to do simple calculations. An intensely uncomfortable sensation
in the area just below my left breast always accompanied this confusion,
a hardening that would not let up, that seemed to want to repel touch or
contact with anything. Before I learned better, I would eat anything I thought
might be able to loosen the grip of that hardness, hoping desperately that
this time I would find the food that had the power to change my inner situation,
to stave off what I knew was inevitably on the way.
Then I would feel the first twinges of pain in my ovaries. Soon the
pain would flicker back and forth between my ovaries and a particular spot
on my lower spine. As the pain intensified, other symptoms began: loud buzzing
in my ears, tingling in my fingers, a flickering screen descending over
my vision (the sight of the world would take on the visual equivalent of
buzzing), a clammy coldness taking over my feet and hands, and a hard chill
centering in to constrict my chest. And some part of me, timid at the best
of times, would curl up, tighter and tighter, trying to escape the sensations
that were making me feel as though I was hearing chalk that wouldn't stop
screeching across a blackboard, sensations that grew, grew, as I shrunk,
until my eardrums were overwhelmed, entry to my head was gained, and I blacked
out. The sound of my fall would usually wake me instantly. On regaining
consciousness I would have to vomit, again and again. The pain in my belly
and back would go on for hours more.
On other periods the tingling and buzzing remained as background noise,
while pain in my ovaries and back grew increasingly intense, and I would
writhe, rock, move incessantly, even beat my head against the floor in an
effort to find relief in the form of distraction. The sensation of hardening
in my stomach would spread across my midriff, until I felt only a merciless
barrier there. As this feeling approached its apex, uncontrollable nausea
would send me running to the bathroom. Food I had eaten two or three hours
before would emerge looking untouched by the digestive process. At the same
time violent cramps would overtake my bowels and I would have to shit, uncontrollably.
This would go on until I was vomiting only clear liquid and had nothing
left to pass through my writhing bowels. The vomiting and the shitting were
the only things that gave me momentary relief from the pain in my ovaries
and back.
My pain usually eased once I managed to pass large clots of blood, generally
some four to five hours after the start of these experiences. Exhausted,
emptied, I would often function at sub-normal levels for up to a week afterwards.
Yet for years I did not even think of everything I have described above
as a real illness. I thought of it as my period. As a lifetime of ill health
began to improve in my late twenties, however, I began to wake up to the
drastic after-effects of these "attacks" and it dawned on
me that I was experiencing a real illness, and that because this was so,
I could do something about it!
This writing is an attempt to articulate how I have healed, and continue
to heal, my menstrual illness. I have written it in the hope that what I
have learned through my healing journey will be helpful to others.
Journal Entry, April 17, 1990
Last night.
I am having menstrual cramps, accompanied by nausea.
The pain is not as severe as in times past.
I receive an image. The garbage cans outside a motor hotel, the kind
filled with Coke cans, empty mickeys, half-eaten wieners clinging to plates
smeared with mustard, potato chip bags. The worst garbage I know. The kind
where I would rather not even touch the lid of the can.
I come to understand that this image of garbage represents how I perceive
myself no wonder I want to vomit. Suddenly I realize that I feel like
garbage because I am sexual. And on my period, so sexual.
I speak out loud, three times:"I am sexual. I am a sexual being.
I have sexuality." What a relief, even to recall and write it again.
For a few blessed moments, all pain subsides, my torso resolves into
a three dimensional being, all the organs in place.
A long chain, far longer than my individual life, created my conviction
that my bleeding body was garbage. This chain would be growing more of its
brutal links every day, expressing itself through my life, if I allowed
it. It began to intertwine itself with me in earliest childhood, in my family
life and at the church we attended. Later I would find more of its multitudinous,
twisted tentacles in my doctor's office, on the job, in the tampon ads printed
in women's magazines.
It is always difficult to know just what another person is feeling and
why. My mother's mother told her bleeding was "sin," and my mother
often told me, after I began bleeding, how as a young woman she had worn
one cotton pad for her entire period, regularly rinsing it in a lake near
her home and wearing it like that, cold and wet, so that no one in her family
would know about her blood. I know she did not want me to go through what
she had endured. I remember that she cried the first day I ever bled - it
seemed to me out of a mingling of grief and happiness at my growth, I really
wasn't sure. After the newness of my life-change wore off, less supportive
voices emerged in her. To my mother, blood remained a stain. I'll never
forget a morning she searched for bloodstains on my sheet because she knew
I was having my period, and despite my protest, angrily found them where
I knew were only shadows. She made cloth pads for me and my sister and took
control of washing away my blood every month.
My mother taught me that menstruation was something that disgusted men.
I was reprimanded when I occasionally forgot a used pad in the washroom
my father used, not only for my lack of responsibility, but because my father
had had to "see it," this said in a hushed, pleading, ashamed
tone. Naturally then, I was also taught that it was socially improper for
girls or women to ever mention to boys or men that they were menstruating.
I remember my sister and I, fantasizing about marriage, trying to figure
out what we would do should we find ourselves menstruating on the honeymoon!
"What would you say! What would you do!" I recall how much courage
it took on my part the first few times I decided to break this taboo, and
speak matter of factly to men other than my lover (I'd gotten than far!)
about my period's presence. I also discovered, years after leaving home,
that one of my own unconscious voices imagined that my bleeding was an insult
to men, and that through it I was taking revenge on them for the injustices
they had done me in a sexist society: so thoroughly had I internalized the
conditioning that my female functions were repellent to men.
From both my parents I learned not to consider my menstrual difficulties
to be a real illness. They very much took the outlook, taught them, I'm
sure, by their socialization, that "women's problems" were part
of the ordained order of things, painful but inevitable. They ascribed my
symptoms to menstruation rather than to some difficulty that was preventing
me from menstruating in a healthy way. Despite the extremity of my distress,
they made no efforts to find the root cause of the symptoms or to respond
effectively. I try to understand this from my current distance from that
time in years, space and, I hope, wisdom, and posit that their shame around
sexuality prevented them from being able to truly address the situation.
Looking back on my own role while I was dependent on my parents, I can see
my bleeding self as literally throwing my period into their face and simultaneously
doing penance for the presence of my sexuality, my illness fulfilling deeply
felt, unspoken agendas for both myself and my parents.
My parents were not unique in their social milieu in their difficulties
with coming to terms with their children's sexuality. Probably the single
most important source of harmful attitudes towards sexual reality that I
had to deal with during my childhood and adolescence was my family's active
membership in a Baptist church. The church taught that some forms of social
and/or sexual connection were intrinsically right, others intrinsically
wrong, as a means, I believe, of maintaining its power and group identity.
Sex outside marriage was especially wrong. That people might be able to
make responsible sexual choices for themselves and might also be able to
fulfill the demands of love and mutual respect in non-marital sexual relationships
were ideas outside the realm of possibility in the minds of church leaders
and teachers. While I can look back and appreciate the ideals of commitment
these people upheld, the emphasis on the outer form of a relationship as
a key mark of virtue left precious little room for individual pathways of
intimacy, whether of a sexual nature or not, or for individual responsibility.
Agonizing, eternal punishment in hell awaited those who deviated from the
prescribed relationship forms and did not repent of their ways.
Thus the "flesh", "desires of the flesh," and even
music "that moved you below the waist" delineated dangerous territory,
the places where sinful connections might be all too easily made, where
one felt temptation too overpoweringly to be able to resist. Everything
I ever heard and saw in church, especially the bodies of the other women,
confirmed that the tension I held constantly throughout my own body was
proper and "godly". I dared not let it go, for fear of the uncontrollable
beast below. Tension would save me from sin.
Within this context I heard the preachers of my childhood explain without
the least qualification that the phrase "filthy rags" in Isaiah
64:6 ("But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousness
are as filthy rags, and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities like
the wind, have taken us away." KJV) euphemistically refers to
a woman's menstrual rags. (This passage is related to Leviticus 15:19-24.)
I checked The New Jerome Biblical Commentary for the purposes of writing
this article (Prentice-Hall, 1968); it confirmed this interpretation. The
authors of the commentary go on to distinguish ceremonial from moral unfitness,
explaining that menstrual rags belong to the first category. Whether or
not this is true, if it is a common scholarly interpretation of the passage,
its meaning was not communicated to me at my church. I remember learning
to believe that Isaiah, prophet of God, meant to equate a natural female
bodily function with moral and spiritual degeneracy. And so far as I recall,
the validity of Isaiah's metaphor was not questioned by the spiritual authorities
in my life. When I heard this interpretation of the verse expounded from
the pulpit by the man my parents taught me to respect above all others.
I remember feeling I had better silence any questioning voices.
The world beyond family and church, the two predominant influences of
my childhood, offered little to help me come to terms with my femininity.
Like many girls, I began menstruating when I was eleven, in grade six. My
periods in public school were very heavy. Yet no references to the physical
changes accompanying puberty were made in the regular curriculum until I
reached grade nine, the high school. Nor were pads or tampons available
in the school washroom until then. I was too shy, and too repressed about
my body, to approach any of the other girls in my grade six class for information
or camaraderie. It came as a surprise to me, through overhearing a conversation
in gym class, that I was not the only one menstruating. My isolation astounds
me now.
In high school, menstruation was, at least, acknowledged. One could
be excused from swimming class during one's periods. This I appreciated,
despite the acute embarrassment I felt over having to face my gym teacher
with the excuse.
My first clear memories of my menstrual illness date back to grade nine
(my thirteenth year). Doctors could do little to help me. One, faced with
the depth of my panic and pain, advised me to breathe deeply, and he was
right. But within my familial and social context at the time, the advice
was useless. Breathing isn't conducive to denial of the flesh.
Consulting a doctor about my heavy bleeding also resulted in unnecessary
surgery when I was seventeen, performed under general anaesthetic. The operation
made no impact on my condition whatsoever; neither could my doctor give
me any satisfying explanation as to why it should have. In fact, when I
attempted after the operation to find out what had been done to me and why,
he told me that the tests supposed to accompany the operation and shed light
on the reasons for my difficulties, had, for some obscure reason, not been
done. By this point in the conversation he was mumbling, and quickly! Then
he attempted to recover some authority in his voice and instructed me to
begin keeping a record on my calendar (with a red marker, no less) of which
days I bled heavily and which lightly. I walked out of his office knowing
I had been used to augment his income.
Not until my late twenties did I encounter information from the naturopathic
community, from practitioners of Chinese medicine and from St. Hildegard
of Bingen's medical treatise that proved vital to a better medical understanding
of my menstrual problems. But the non-allopathic care-givers, I eventually
came to understand, were also missing an important point. Like conventional
doctors, most seem to feel that menstrual health is indicated by a woman's
ability to function as usual while menstruating. This task I set for myself
in agreement with the doctors (and everyone else). Failing at it perpetually
embarrassed me. Now I see my efforts to function as usual as reflective
of our societal striving to control and subdue natural processes a
compulsion by which we lose our vital connection to their power.
In my twenties, economically independent for the first time, I also
learned that the doctors' expectation, that a woman be able to carry on
as usual, partners an economic demand. Doctors, women and employers are
assumed to have a common interest in ending cramps, backache, irritability
and fatigue, as these are a significant cause of absenteeism and drops in
worker productivity. The demands of the job, and of paying the rent, certainly
provided me with further incentive to try and relegate my menstrual experience
as far to the background as possible. This is considered a mature and responsible
attitude towards work in the society at large. Despite my pain however,
I always refused to use drugs to block my symptoms. I envied women who could
work without worry throughout their period. In a competitive, individualistic
economy, they had an economic edge over me.
My socially based oppression around menstruation continued in the so-called
women's magazines. Here, images of elegant women, so competent that they
were able to wear white shorts without fear while menstruating, shamed me.
I seemed forever unable to keep my period from erupting in every direction,
no matter what brand of "feminine hygiene" product I used!
Eventually I would decide that menstruation-related marketing also echoes
the doctors and economists when it pitches products as being desirable because
they allow women to continue uninterruptedly with everyday pursuits. Menstrual
technologies are hyped as liberating women from a biologically created prison.
Consider, for example, the menstrual pad brand names "Stayfree"
and "New Freedom." The message I hear is that our female bodies
are something from which we must liberate ourselves in order to find pleasure
and fulfillment in life.
Perhaps I wouldn't feel as confident making the foregoing statement
if women themselves had not so frequently given me that very message. I
vividly remember a high school girlfriend who calculated how many days of
her life she would have to menstruate. Together, we expressed our outrage
and sadness over the wasted time! We were young and uninformed, but the
theme has not changed as I've grown older. A survey of American women cited
in the Utne Reader, Number 46, July/August 1991, indicates that given the
choice, 69% of women would rather not menstruate. The majority of women
I have spoken with about their periods express only feelings of annoyance,
discomfort and pain in conjunction with their monthly bleeding.
In my life, our massive society-wide repression and repudiation of menstruation
bore painful results. During the years of my menstrual illness, at some
point in almost every period I literally could not bleed until my body (or
denied self, there are many ways to look at it) had, with the necessary
forcefulness, cleared a path through the layers of repression standing between
myself and my menstrual flow.
Considering this, I have come to see my menstrual pain, and the menstrual
pain of other women, as, paradoxically, a sign of our determination, unconscious
though it may be, to experience menstruation. As long as our society requires
us to block or hide the natural expression of menstrual processes, we will
rebel, our ovaries and wombs will rise up once a month and demand their
hearing. The costs, personal and social, of such a relationship to menstruation
are grievously high. The rest of this article will describe my arrival at
a different relationship to my bleeding than that encouraged by my cultural
conditioning.
As my knowledge of feminism and holistically oriented psychology grew
as I reached my mid to late twenties, I slowly began to recognize that the
cultural constructions surrounding menstruation described thus far were
just that - cultural constructions. They could be challenged, rejected,
transformed. I came to consciously reject ideas such as that it was dirty
to bleed, shameful and embarrassing to accidentally stain one's clothes
in public and improper to mention one's bleeding to men. But my illness
continued, for I had not yet addressed the way I internally replicated those
constructs, the way the energy patterns the words can only represent had
infected and altered the functioning of my organs, tissues and cells. Nowadays
I feel grateful to my illness for not letting me be, for insisting on liberation
or else. In the summer of 1989, my 28th year, I could never have dreamed
I would ever be able to say such a thing. My attacks continued to arrive
with their usual ferocity despite all the energy and effort I was investing
into trying to attain greater well-being. But that summer, my desperation,
and perhaps, growing strength, drove me to finally grasp for what I previously
had thought impossible: I would find a way to get well, no matter what.
For the first time, I told myself I simply did not deserve to suffer so
much pain. I did not have to take this anymore.
By that point in my life I had already survived a major life-threatening
sickness, getting well had consumed my mid-twenties. One of the keys in
my healing process had been the changing and manipulating of my diet. So,
it seemed sensible to turn to the question of food that summer. No doubt
because of the decision I had made on my own behalf, that I would get well,
no matter what, I found the clarity, in the middle of a bout of cramps,
to crawl into bed, put my hands over my hara centre (a major energy centre,
just below the navel), begin breathing into the area my hands were touching,
ask myself what to eat, and wait silently, assuring myself I would receive
a reply sooner or later. And I did, within a few minutes. It became clear
that specific foods I had been eating because certain dietary teachers said
I should were helping cause my cramps. My rigid, over-enthusiastic adherence
to these teachers' authority had overruled my inner wisdom; I had been been
contributing to my illness by not listening to myself. This theme would
come to be central to my healing process.
Over several months after this first small breakthrough, I slowly gained
the insight that to a great extent I had been using dietary and other holistic
therapies to try to force my body to "behave," to "be good."
I was channeling potentially helpful healing modalities into oppressive,
authoritarian structures my culture had taught me, into an impoverished
idea of wellness. Used like this, the world's best therapies could have
given me only limited help at the time.
Changing my diet according to my inner knowledge was a help to my condition,
but I still suffered greatly. Next, inspired by the body-centred psychotherapeutic
work I had been pursuing for several years, (and perhaps by that doctor
I had been brought to many years ago!) I began attempting to continue breathing
through each monthly attack, to feel fully everything happening to me. I
began to notice improvements in my eyesight and a general feeling of release
after vomiting. As I learned to observe my "illness process" more
closely, watching what happened and when, I found myself expending a great
deal of mental energy on an attempt to discover a fixed set of correlations
between specific physical symptoms and specific thoughts and feelings I
considered "unhealthy" because they were products of an oppressive
culture. As it turned out, this was not a fruitful direction to take. My
period, I would soon find out, was trying to teach me about flow, not about
a neat and tidy set of correlations.
Christmas, 1989, brought the major turning point in my struggle. I was
visiting with my family; the illness came on as I was out shopping with
my sister. She managed to get me to my parents' home in time that I did
not vomit in her car. Inside, I staggered back and forth from a couch to
the toilet; on my lower back a crab seemed to hang on for dear life with
its pincers.
And that day, what needed to die finally did. I finally lay panting
and utterly exhausted, emptied of vomit, emptied of shit, but - filled with
light, with an overwhelming, ecstatic love. For hours I lay there, bleeding
and loving. Family members came in to visit, left again, I was too weak
to move, and had no will to move, had no will to do anything but to feel
the ecstatic love pouring through me. Finally I knew that a great gift had
been hidden from me, had been waiting all those years inside my periods,
finally I knew that my sex organs, my organs of love, had been waiting to
fill me with an ecstatic light, the light of bleeding. Their pain, my pain,
had been the pain of love denied.
I had only ever heard that bleeding was a necessary evil, a problem,
an inconvenience, a cause for shame, that it should be hidden, controlled
and blocked from entry into both personal and social space. But now, suddenly,
finally, my bleeding and I had met, and I knew nothing I had been taught
about it was the truth.
After that period, I also knew I would never be able to bleed in the
same way again. Intuiting my need, and inspired by my knowledge that many
First Nations women had done the same thing, I began, with my next period,
going into seclusion, staying in my bedroom without socializing or working.
I knew that my task was to open myself to the energy flowing from my ovaries
as I menstruated. I decided that at this time of the month everything I
did and when I did it, whether eating, sleeping, sounding, dancing or lying
quiet, would be dictated by the voice of my belly. I would surrender myself
wholly to my bleeding. It was very difficult going for the first eight months.
Journal Entry, February 9, 1990
The referentiality of language is, after all, vital.
Could I ever trust those who said otherwise?
I lay in bed this morning considering the similarities between sexual
bondage and spiritual experience.
My spiritual experience a priori is my period, when I give up all to
listen to my ovaries. They dictate my eating and sleeping, singing and dancing.
They journey me through the realms. I am in their hands.
It looks so close to being bound until I see that this is only
so if "I" am not my ovaries also. If "I" am not my ovaries,
"I" am not able to be as "I" wish during my period (if"I"
do, the pain becomes unbearable) and "I" think "I" am
bound.
Who is "I" ?, I ask.
The answer returns clearly, as a radiance of sensation. "I"
begins in that place on my spine just where the neck fans out into the shoulders,
and includes my head.
Thus my period is not bondage, but balance.
What is the appeal of bondage?
The reference it makes to this state of spiritual abandonment. The promise
it holds of silencing the "I." . . .
It was very difficult going for the first eight months I had to learn
to do what my illness had previously done, of necessity by force: allow
energy from the lower body to move freely through the upper body. When I
failed, which was often, I would experience, as before, extreme pain. I
had ingested my cultural conditioning well. I experienced my solar plexus
as a berserk watchdog standing guard between my upper self and my belly.
I found it necessary to lie in bed two or three days at a time, eating very
little. Eating was pretty well out of the question, because food re-energized
my defence mechanisms against my menstrual energy. Later I also concluded
that eating helped catalyze my anger, made me feel invaded, perhaps because
I still associated food with the invasive aspects of my mother's behaviour
towards me as a child. My anger in those days was more unconscious and uncontained
than today. It tended to take over my whole being, cutting off my openness
to everything and everyone, including myself. Then I would find myself ill
again. I did not really understand this as I began my work with my menstrual
periods. I just knew I had to "let go, let go, let go."
So I lay, I breathed, I did not eat. Sometimes I drummed and sang; but
often I could do no more than lay back again, needing to surrender to the
slow opening of heretofore unused channels, to feel my arms and head and
facial muscles twitching, unpredictably, sometimes with surprising power.
I was learning how to stop interfering with my ovaries, my uterus, my cunt,
my blood and my bleeding. I was learning how to let my upper body expose
my lower body (rather than try to hide and deny it), so it could share in
expressing freely the truth of my whole being. And as I dedicated myself
to this work, I came to ecstasy again and again, every period I came to
an ecstasy, to a liquid fire burning in my heart.
Experiencing my seclusion from the outside, some of my roommates at
the time thought I was sicker than ever and my period must be giving me
a incredibly hard time. At least one seemed unable to comprehend my seclusion.
After I explained to her what I was doing and why, she told me she hoped
I would be feeling better soon. I think she simply didn't have a category
in her mind for what I was trying to do.
Journal Entry, May 18, 1990
It is our ability to choose a heart that gives us our freedom.
Within a few months of beginning to go into seclusion, it became clear
to me that the central event in my experience of menstrual ecstasy was the
opening of my heart (the chakra in the centre of the chest, between the
breasts). Seeing the importance of this, it struck me that it was in the
heart that I should focus my efforts to open myself to menstruation. This
turned out to be my magic key. By opening my heart (simply by focusing my
attention there and intending the opening) I effectively overcame the blockages
that had created my vomiting, fainting and pain, energy struggling to be
recognized. I went so far as to make notes on my calendar to remind myself
to open my heart to myself at menstruation time, as I sometimes would forget
when I panicked over signs of possible oncoming pain. As I continued with
this practice, I began to be more mobile during my periods and also able
to eat. Today, I am able to engage in a wide variety of activities during
my period, for which I am thankful, as sometimes there's just no way around
working or socializing. But I stay committed to taking a block of time every
period to stay in solitude so I can listen carefully to my body and pay
respect and honour to the treasures my bleeding brings me.
As I learned to open my heart to my bleeding I became aware of another
function of menstruation I had not previously suspected: the bestowal of
information. My sexual organs had (and have!) tremendous amounts of practical
and insightful information to share with me! This was a real surprise to
me at first, but made sense as soon as I thought about it. Our sex organs,
after all, are a major locus of connection between us and the world and
a major source through which we are able to find love for ourselves.
The directness with which menstruation can bestow information can be
stunning. During my period of June, 1991, I was suffering fairly severe
cramps, by then an unusual occurrence. As has now become almost my instinctive
response to such a situation, I slowed down; I went and sat in the sun and
let myself be. Soon, a series of thoughts about a particular situation in
my life, thoughts that represented realizations I had been resisting, flowed
into my awareness, just as my blood was flowing into awareness. The instant
I accepted those thoughts, my cramps were gone. It was both as simple and
profound as that. Sometimes it has been precisely this opening to letting
myself know things that I am resisting that has also been the surrender
that has brought me to a new experience of menstrual ecstasy. I have come
to anticipate my monthly periods as a potent problem-solving period, when
I receive guidance that improves my life and provides me with ongoing direction.
As I began to realize the ecstatic/informative/transformative potential
of menstruation, I found myself searching for a way of explaining this unexpected
course of events to myself. I have found a way that satisfies me. I have
learned that my body speaks, all the tissues and cells and structures speak.
Holistic thinking translates this speech into verbal metaphors that bridge
the gap between two modes of communication. (Whether or not I listen or
respond to myself is another matter.)
Within this conceptual framework, the process of menstruation becomes
a powerful speaking to me. The content carried by the process depends on
my life circumstances at the time.
Blood is the vital tissue that flows through my entire being. The heart
and blood are at the centre of what makes my consciousness possible at the
same time as they, themselves, are conscious, interwoven into the circle
of my consciousness. The blood slowly pulsating out of my self is a vessel
of a previous month's consciousness, a record of a previous month's heartbeats.
It is a revelation, the liquid writing of my soul. To reveal itself, the
inner world must also empty itself. This makes way for another heart/blood/consciousness
structure to focus itself in the belly. Emptying (or death), revelation
and new growth this is the archetypal transformative cycle that will
reverberate monthly, if I allow it, through my whole being. And precisely
because the heart and blood are at the centre of life, it is critical for
me, whose life has often hung on a thread, to pay as great attention to
their transformative messages as possible.
Within the archetypal transformative cycle of menstruation I experience
a special case (the "menstrual case!") of the opportunity to find
the point of liquid fire in my heart. I let myself sink down to my cunt,
let myself rise to my eyes, let myself meet myself in my heart and be slain
by ecstasy.
It is when I am ecstatic that I know why I am alive.
Journal Entry, April 19, 1990
I see in my mind's eye
a series of poems
a flowering.
Begin with one flower.
From its centre emerges another flower
the way a butterfly
emerges from its pupa
and unfolds its wings
And from its centre emerges
another flower
they are all red
red as blood
and from its centre
another flower
this eternal flowering
this heart's blood
I spill upon the earth
my seeds of love
I sow
The transformative and ecstatic potentialities of menstruation have
been systematically excluded within English-speaking, white, western, historically
Judeo-Christian society, the only society of which I have extensive experience.
At the present time, this society places overwhelming value on the production
of material wealth and this is coupled, in paradoxical logic, with an equally
overwhelming refusal to admit that the physical world, including our bodies,
is truly valuable. (The environmental crisis, for instance, would not be
happening if we truly valued our physical existence.) Except insofar as
we can manipulate physicality to aggrandize or enrich ourselves, it is a
source of shame to us the butt of our jokes, the well from which we
draw our curse words, the scapegoat for our pain. We see the body not as
an essential tool in our spiritual evolution, but as a barrier to enlightenment.
This cultural pattern has created a situation in which menstruation is allowed
barely any social place. In my case, this led to a refusal to give myself
a place when bleeding, a place to bleed in. It took me enormous effort,
will and courage to live out my decision to stop mirroring my culture in
my bleeding process.
Thankfully, there are exceptions to this situation, in disciplines and
fields of endeavour to which I owe debts of gratitude for supporting me
in my search for menstrual health: body-inclusive psychotherapy, for teaching
me that I needed to make peace with the fact of my physical existence and
for encouraging me to value my unique personhood and experience of life;
feminism, for making it possible for me to gain economic independence and
thus also needed distance and perspective on my family's attitudes to menstruation,
and for giving me valuable analyses of the structures of social oppression;
the growing voices of Wiccan, Goddess and aboriginal religions, which affirm
the connection between everyday experience and spirituality and in many
cases corroborated my own experience of finding menstruation to be a powerful
instigator of growth; and to naturopathic, Chinese and chiropractic doctors
and dietary counselors whose understanding of how the human system functions
gave me important insights and "technical" support in my chosen
movement from blockage to flow. I hope these movements continue to grow
and foster change in our society.
In light of what I have learned since changing my way of being with
my period, I can only consider the socially sanctioned suppression of menstruation
to be an enormous, untold waste of our own resources as a species. Blood
is life, but we behave as though blind to that fact, pretending that a myriad
of dangerous and poisonous technologies can sustain us instead. When and
if we come to our senses, as I am hoping will happen due to the growing
influences of environmentalism, holistic health care modalities, feminism
and spiritual movements which honour and value physical reality, I believe
we will find ourselves needing to pass through grief, mourning and regret
over our attitudes to menstruation. We will never know what insights, what
solutions to personal and collective problems have been lost over the millennia
of patriarchy because the wisdom gained by women from their bleeding has
not been allowed a voice in society. This wisdom has been so rejected that
nowadays most women see their periods as a burden, even a shameful burden,
rather than as an awesome gift for all.
My challenge to this suppression has been my practice of seclusion during
menstruation, when I leave everyday life to a greater or lesser extent,
focusing instead on allowing the energies that fuel my bleeding process
their free play. This "challenge" has been an inadvertent one.
I have no desire to act against anybody, only for my own well-being and
authenticity. Paradoxically, it is my seclusion that has gone far in bringing
my period into social space, as I explain my absence to friends, co-workers
and roommates. To date I have received a generally supportive response.
The most common misconception has been that I do what I do because I am
ill. (In certain employment situations I have found it necessary to maintain
this misconception.) It is, however, a culture that attempts to suppress
or distort my healthy relationship to menstruation that I must regard as
ill.
My practice of seclusion has undergone changes over the past years due
to my increasing health. Nevertheless, I continue to make sacrifices, especially
economic sacrifices, in order to pursue this vital self-development. I pray
that one day our society will be organized so as to remove such conflicts
between doing what is necessary for oneself and doing what is economically
necessary. At bottom, these are artificial conflicts, as sound economic
systems cannot possibly be maintained by masses of unsound people
people forced by oppressive and exploitive economic structures and social
ideologies to forego the fulfillment of their biologically based growth
processes. Sound economic systems would value and respect the physical world
that we depend on.
Through much suffering, reflection and labour I have discovered that
menstruation can renew me, strengthen me and give me insight and ecstasy.
Through listening to my bleeding I have become healthier. I assume I cannot
be unique.
I wish to encourage all women who have not already done so to begin
valuing menstruation as we value our eyes, our hands, our digestion, our
lives. The decision to value can guide each one of us to our own methods
of establishing a fruitful relationship to menstruation. As we take whatever
time and means necessary to create our own space for menstruation, we can
create a world in which both our daughters and sons need no longer suffer
for the fact that they are whole creatures, body and consciousness in the
end inviolately inseparable. Let the "normalization" of ourselves,
the hiding of ourselves, even the "liberation" of ourselves
from ourselves! end. Let our lifeblood begin to flow.
Sibylle Preuschat, 1991
Addendum, February 1994
The night after the performance, I have a dream about filling the wastebasket
in my washroom with pads filled with blood I am menstruating
red, rich blood, ruby red-black, shimmering. The next morning I remember
the dream, and the meaning of the image hits me unusually swiftly and directly,
like a rock on the head! I see that the wastebasket has been transformed
by the blood into a gift basket . "I have to give my blood away. It's
not mine to keep. It is a gift to all." Contemplating the image later,
I realize also that not to treat my blood as a gift is to waste it. Most
profoundly, as I remember the dream, I also realize for the first time that
there is a part of me that has been resisting giving my blood away. It is
my blood after all, my lifeblood. And some part of me has been having a
hard time just giving that up, just saying, "here world, it's yours,
have it, use its life energy wherever it is needed." But as I feel
myself crying and surrendering, it is that great bliss again. The blood
belongs to all of us. It is not mine to keep.
Towards the Emergence of Menstruation appeared in slightly different
form in the Townsend Letter.
Sibylle Preuschat is a writer, editor,
reiki practitioner and student of music.
E-mail her!
Correspondence:
Sibylle Preuschat
32 Marchmount Rd.
Toronto, Ontario
Canada, M6G 2A9
She adds:
As I began to heal my menstrual illness and started finding space for
theorizing about my process, I found anger gave me much to ponder on. I
would like to chart some connections for interested readers. When I began
to encounter holistic interpretations of medical research from naturopaths,
and the ideas of Chinese doctors and St. Hildegard of Bingen, all agreed
that liver dysfunction was a primary cause of menstrual disorders. I had
already been working for some time with the idea, gained from macrobiotic
sources based on ancient Chinese medicine, and corroborated by my own experience,
that repressed and/or excessive anger blocks smooth liver functioning. Not
surprisingly, the liver is in the upper body, where I had to put all my
efforts at opening myself. I feel that my illness (the blockage of menstrual
energy) could be understood as being partially caused by the inappropriate
focusing of anger on myself, rather than on oppressive external forces.
I also had to learn to let go of a great deal of just plain inappropriate
anger. It took me time to learn that it is inappropriate to feel anger towards
energies/beings that refuse to come under my control: I felt anger at the
man who wouldn't love me, and at my own belly, sexuality, femininity. Though
a woman, I had learned to nurse macho, or patriarchal, rage. My challenge
became to navigate the stream of anger, discerning when it was a useful
guide to identifying the sources of oppression and when it was a defence
and control mechanism. No matter whether appropriate or not, anger closed
me down to menstrual energy if I didn't find a way to express what it taught
me .
Thinking about anger, I also realized that the foods I struck from my
diet in the early stages of my menstrual healing work were ones that, according
to the tenets of Chinese medicine, had the potential to block or tighten
my liver, thus increasing my propensity to anger.
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Towards Emergence of Menstruation, Copyright 1991 by Sibylle Preuschat