The Red Cycle Blessing or Curse

It is my Red cycle. I am on day one.

I felt it coming yesterday and made the time to move things around to make space for the dreaming that comes through this spirit window.

As I come close to bleeding I sense the veils shifting and thinning. I’m aware I want to wear a cloak around me and be in natures embrace.

I bleed 3 days each cycle, it is a medium light to moderate flow and a beautiful blissful feeling that is very much like coming home.

It was not always like this and as I sit here on my first day of blood I feel to reflect and share my menstrual cycle story with you.

When I was a tween as they are called these days, I had a lesson in primary school for sex ed. We watched a video of a girl who got her 1st period. All I saw was an embarrassed girl who played shame and small really well. She went to the shop to buy a pack of pads and the shop assistant also embarrassed put it in a paper bag as big as my dad like it was something to hide.

I was horrified that this was what was coming for me. I wished mine as far away as it could be.

The video started a conversation with friends. They talked of rags and curses. I did not know what they were speaking of. After a while I got the gist. The word period popped in and I thought oh I know this!

The way the girls spoke about the red event was it being a nuisance. It was a change to their lives not for the good. They talked about cramps and pain. Making me even more determined to push away this dreaded period that was coming my way.

Menarche came to me at the age 15. I did well to delay it with my wishes. But when it came I did not find it all too bad. I did not find it a curse or a nuisance. Sure I was worried I would bleed through my school skirt or not have enough pads. But the actual cycle was not a problem for me. In a way it felt natural, it felt right, this I did not fully understand yet.

What did affect me was the way it was not received. I felt it was something tucked under the carpet as if to be ashamed. There was no celebration or acknowledgement of coming into womanhood.

It saddened me, but at that time it angered me more. I remember taking to my room and drawing with a pen all over my body, tattooing myself, as if initiating myself into something not yet known. I longed for women to show me the way to give me some information about myself. That first spotting of blood had power I cant explain, but I felt something land in me that needed to be honoured.

I was told that cramps were the norm. It was all just part of being a woman.

Well, I can tell you that comment hardly made me want to be a woman. That’s how it is was, the only explanation. And so I grew to deny a part of myself I did not know I was denying. I grew more manlike in my thinking, as the ‘wo’ was never really welcomed and I did not know how to join it on.

Later when I was 18, I had pain that made me very much wince. I went to the Dr and after an ultrasound I found out I had a pretty big ovarian cyst.

Off I went to the gynaecologist where he did a rectal exam on me and boy was it uncomfortable. I was embarrassed and confused about what was happening. I felt my body was against me and damn I thought "is this all just part of being a woman?".

I went to have surgery to have it removed. Before I entered the theatre I was told by my Dr if it was cancerous they would not go further with the surgery but wake me and talk about what was found. He said he would not take my ovary without asking.

Thank fully it was a plain old luteal cyst. I was relieved. But when I was told I had a 50/50 chance of reoccurrence I said to myself then and there that I would heal it myself.

And this seeded a road to healing. Where I started to become more aware of my cycle. I found books in my early twenties of Alexandra Pope and The Book of Natural Fertility. It was such a joy to have confirmed a knowingness inside.

Relief! to say the least, for this information on how to care for my cycle and that pain is not normal and something to put up with. Later in my twenties I experienced sudden period pain. I woke up in the night with knives in my belly. I had never experienced anything like it and goodness I prayed that it would leave me.

I was staying in a country town volunteering. That same day a girl of the same age had the same grief. I went to help her and gave her some Reiki. She too had never experienced period pain like this before. This brought my attention to energetic interference. Which will be another blog.

It was exhausting to go through this each month. I began to feel anxious as I approached my red cycle. I was studying naturopathy at the time but nothing seemed to get to the bottom of it. After time I healed this myself.

I have walked the bloody clotty painful period path and I have found the lighter brighter blissful way. There is so much grief held in Women’s bodies today around the loss of wisdom in how to caretake the red cycle and to know what it is to be in a female body.

Not all those born as a woman have been a woman before. There are many beings in a female body that feel them as foreign. Teachings for girls coming into womanhood are much needed and vital. For the new children to bring their consciousness in and the old children to heal from binds of old dogma that denied their wisdom.

We all can heal the she within and learn not to deny her roar, cry or heart song. We can all listen and receive what she has to say, it’s not man that has held her back, it is the misunderstanding of the masculine and feminine that is held in the collective consciousness.

It took me time to understand the portal of the womb. That being an empath can affect ones cycle. The simple techniques to keep the energetics clear and the gifts and illuminations the period brings.

I wish all girls, these maidens, budding women to look toward the cycle of woman as something of beauty and honour to walk with. I wish all girls have contact with mentors and elders who acknowledge and celebrate the feminine, a woman's love, power and wisdom. I wish all girls to have clean, natural, organic sanitary products that they feel good to wear. I wish that all blossoming women on their Menarche receive celebration and heart blessings.