Embracing Your Menstrual Cycle

Our menstrual cycle is absolutely fantastic, but most of us have not been taught from an early stage how incredible it is.

For us women our menstrual cycle is like an inner guidance system that is letting us know our sexual, emotional and overall health. So it’s so much more than a cocktail of hormones that is flowing through our bodies throughout the month.

There are some deep spiritual and psychological aspects in our menstrual cycle and connecting with it and harnessing its power is going to support us to have a much more embodied relationship with ourselves and with our feminine essence.

My personal story

To share a little bit about my own story, when I received my menstruation at the age of 13 years old I was first excited about it as I was one of the last of my girlfriends to get it.

But after a day or two with the extreme pains that came with it, I very soon started to hate it.

It took me a while to understand exactly how bad it would turn out to be every time I had it, and how I could deal with it. After having had it for about 6 months I had figured out that the only solution to ease the cramps (at least to a degree where I could stand it) was to take painkillers in the same moment as I started to bleed.

So basically that’s what I did. For years. If for some reason I forgot to have my painkillers with me, and I had my menstruation in a place where I couldn't get new ones, I would be screwed.

I would lay down on the floor in extreme cramps, I would cry and scream in pain and often run to the toilet to throw up. It was dreadful.

Menstruation for me corresponded to extreme pain and disgust and I saw it as a curse. I didn't understand why I had to go through the same painful experience every single month. I remember saying to myself “I’m 14 years old, I’m not gonna have children for at least another 10 years. Why, WHY do I have to live with this terror for so many years? What’s the point?! Nature must have done a mistake here”

I went to a gynecologist and she prescribed me birth control pills which is very common for young girls who asks for help with period pain. The thing though, is that birth control pills can have incredible negative side effects, and they had on me. The birth control pills affected my mental and emotional state of being. I went through a depression as a teenager and I believe that part of the depression was because of the birth control pills. My body simply didn't correspond well with the synthetic hormones and it made me unstable.

For many years I always carried painkillers with me in my bag wherever I went, and I continued to take them every time I would bleed. But then one day I decided to try to stop taking them and see how I would feel. At the time I had started to learn a bit about detoxing my body and started to tune into eating differently and I felt that I wanted to try to stop taking the pain killers every time I was menstruating as I knew that they were full of toxic chemicals. When I stopped I had incredible painful cramps again but I remember tuning into my body and for the first time I received a message; my body told me to stop using tampons because they were making the cramps worse. I was like “What?!”

And then I started to think about it and researched it and soon I understood that tampons are actually full of bleach and chemicals, so I decide to stop using tampons and switched to using a menstrual cup instead.

So over a period of time I did small changes in my lifestyle and around my menstruation. I started a healthier diet and I did my first detox. And I did begin to experience less cramps, less PMS and feeling overall better about myself. That was of course amazing, considering my past experienced around my monthly bleed!

But it wasn't until I began to heal my sexuality a few years later that I experienced my biggest breakthrough around healing my menstrual cycle. I started to do womb healing practices & healing sexual trauma, I practiced with a jade egg, did regular breast massage and connected with my feminine sexual essence for the first time in my life.

As I did all of this healing work on myself around my sexuality my relationship to my period truly changed. My cramps would disappear, the sore breasts I normally experienced every month dissolved because of the breast massage I gave myself, and the jade egg practice had a huge benefit not only for healing the cramps, but it would make me feel more orgasmic and generally more alive and creative as I was learning how to circulate the sexual energy throughout my body.

As time went by I started to learn more about the spiritual side of our menstrual cycle. I read books about it, I started to connect more deeply with it and I noticed that I would in most cases start to bleed either on the full moon or on the new moon or very close.

The more I was healing my womb and the relationship I had with body and my sexuality, and the more I awakened to the divine feminine I started to view my menstrual cycle with new eyes. I understood that the extreme pain I had felt during those years every time I had my menstruations was all signs from my body that I wasn't living a healthy life and that I carried a lot of unprocessed emotions inside my womb, as well as suppressed sexual energy.

Fast forward until today; now I see my menstrual cycle as an amazing inner compass that is showing me so much about myself! If I'm not taking good care about myself during my cycle, if I've been stressed a lot or eaten poorly I will start to experience more heavy flow and more PMS. Then I know that I'm out of alignment and that I need to do some self enquiry around where I might need to adjust and give myself more self-care & nourishment.

And when I take excellent care of myself during my cycle, receiving my red flow can be a sensuous experience where I feel more connected to my innate feminine wisdom, more intuitive, psychic and even more orgasmic!

Connects us with the larger cycles

Our menstrual cycle links us directly to the great mother and that is so fascinating and amazing to think about and to allow to really sink in. By connecting with our own inner cycle & learning about the seasons and phases it moves through, we can start to embody and learn about the larger cycles in nature; the cycles of the earth and the cycles of the moon. And when we physically release the blood from our womb every month, we can even gain a deeper understanding of the the cycles of life and death.

Instead of feeling shameful and hate such a big part of ourselves and our lives that our menstrual cycles is, we can become more empowered & connected to creation and feel gratitude for this gift.

Think about it; without this amazing red flow that is our menstruation, you wouldn't be here. None of us humans would be here... Our monthly bleeding equals LIFE!

So let’s make the best out of our monthly bleed, let's really learn all that we can about our menstrual cycle, let’s heal it, let’s reclaim the power of it and let’s honour it.

And for Goddess sake, let’s celebrate it!

Let’s come together as women and honour our red flow as we have done in the past. It’s only since the beginning of the industrial times that we have had this deep shameful and negative perception about menstruation. Back in the days it was seen as a great power of the feminine, and that is what it is in it’s true essence.

Healing our sexuality and our menstrual cycle in combination is so powerful.

It’s not only going to give you much lighter menstrual flow, less PMS, cramps and discomfort, but also going to make you feel much more vital, rejuvenated, embodied & feeling connected to your own inner Goddess.

I’ve been offering Sacred Menstruation workshops for the past 3.5 years and I'm in awe over the transformation I have seen taking place in the women that have participated.

Loving our menstrual cycle truly is the missing link for us women to heal the collective feminine consciousness and step into our feminine power!

I have a Sacred Menstruation workshop coming up on the 9th of November in Sandvika close to Oslo. I will offer a one day temple immersion into the feminine arts of connecting with the power of our wombs, harnessing our feminine sexual essence and learning about the 4 phases and seasons of our cycle.

You are welcome to join us, it will be a beautiful and deep journey into the feminine mysteries that is our menstrual cycle.

You can find more information about the workshop here.

Photo by Henrikke Haavas