The Sabbath of Women

I used to think that my period was a nuisance, a messy intrusion that increased laundry and caused a host of unpleasant symptoms including exhaustion and debilitating pain. Menstruation interfered with my sex life, with athletic activities, and with my energy level. It caused mood swings, irritability, and destructive, unstoppable bitchiness. It cost money-in pads and tampons to absorb the blood, in ruined clothes, in time away from work. It was a mean and sneaky saboteur that would always come at the most inconvenient time.

Despite this catechism of woe, when my period came there was always a part of me that was pleased. It meant I was healthy and fertile and that everything was working properly. There was a sense of pride about bleeding that I felt strongly with my first period, but in the absence of any external support, the feeling of pleasure dwindled away.

A Jewish friend of mine told me that when she had her first period her mother slapped her face. Reeling with shock, she said, "Why did you do that?" Her mother replied, "I don't know, it was done to me by my mother. It's tradition." To be hit on the face when first you become a woman-that is an interesting statement about how the state of womanliness is regarded. Perhaps it is intended to remove the feeling of pride that comes with the first blood.

Something else took away that feeling of pride for me, and I think it was the absence of ceremony. I felt that something truly amazing and magical was happening, and yet everyone around me treated it as a commonplace. I felt a sense of achievement, mingled with excitement, curiosity, and embarrassment; I also remember a vague awareness of a vast, unknown future. Intuitively, I knew it was a massive landmark in my life- and yet no one said anything about it, other than to give me some sanitary pads. I think my mother was pleased-after all, it meant I was healthy and growing up normally-but I needed a ceremony, a party, some joyful public recognition of this huge event in my development. But nothing happened. As the months went by I felt more and more the shame and embarrassment, and less and less the excitement and pride that had glimmered for a moment with the first blood.

At home, my period was something to be kept secret from my father and brothers. If I had to mention it, I would use a hushed voice and, preferably, talk only to my mother on her own. Shortly after my periods had begun, we were going on a family trip, and I had to ask my father to stop the car so that I could go to the pharmacy. Of course, he wanted to know what it was that I needed to buy. I remember this awful feeling as I told him I had to buy some sanitary pads. It was a peculiar mixture of shame, pride and total embarrassment. He was very nice about it and, as far as I can remember, never said anything to make me feel that there was anything to be ashamed of-but somehow there was always this shame in the background of my thoughts, and it colored my whole relationship with the outside world.

At school, menstruation was not a subject to be mentioned other than in the biology class. All the information I received about menstruation was purely physical. You had a period because you weren't pregnant, and the menstrual flow was simply the discarded lining of the womb provided for a possible fetus. My friends and I discussed it and, in the absence of further information, decided that the female body was poorly evolved-all that blood and fuss for years and years when you needed only to do it once or twice in order to have children.

The picture society gave me through advertising was a confusing one. Tampon ads showed lithe girls in bikinis running gleefully towards the ocean and girls in tight white jeans jumping onto horses. This didn't mesh very easily with my experience of lethargy and cramps. And I knew that no one in her right mind would trust a tampon so much that she would go out for the day in white jeans. Pah! It must have been men writing those ads.

Yet somehow I felt that I should be like the girls in the Tampax ads, and that the way my body and mind behaved was somehow wrong-that a normal girl wouldn't feel any different when she had her period. There's nothing she'd like more than to scramble onto a horse and gallop off for an adventure while that nice little tampon allowed her to forget that she was menstruating at all. The embarrassing reality was that I couldn't even get a tampon inside me. Not only was I not fitting the stereotype, I was also failing with the equipment. I felt decidedly inadequate until I eventually succeeded. Then the process of imagining I wasn't having a period at all began in earnest.

I saw my periods as an inconvenience and that was all. If they were painful I took painkillers-Feminax, they were called, and they had a powerful mixture of ingredients designed to clobber every menstrual symptom, including caffeine to offset depression and lethargy. When I had exams I would get drugs from the doctor to stave off my period until a more suitable time, when the rage of hormones could assail my left brain without affecting my academic future. No one ever said anything about there being something useful in experiencing a powerful state of diffuse awareness once a month, and that was because no one knew.

When I was eighteen I went on the pill; I was initially pleased that my periods became predictable and also much lighter. It took a few years for it to fully sink in that the reason they were so light was that they weren't really periods at all. I noticed that I was getting increasingly emotional and upset during my so called periods, so I decided to stop taking the pill. After a couple of months I felt like "myself" again, and I realized that despite the convenience of the pill, I had actually felt cheated because my periods were so light. This was when I began to realize that for me, menstruating was an important part of my life, a rhythm that I depended on for my psychic and physical health, and that I ignored or suppressed at my peril.

In other cultures, rather than being ignored, menstruation has been seen as a time that is special and sacred for women. The abundance of female-related symbols in excavations of ancient sites in Europe and the Near East strongly suggests that these cultures were matrifocal, and revered the Goddess and the processes of the female body. Ritual practices were connected to the monthly bleeding of women, and menstrual blood itself was highly valued as possessing magical power. The word ritual comes from rtu, Sanskrit for menses. In the days before the sacrifice of living beings, menstrual blood was offered in ceremonies. Menstrual blood was sacred to the Celts, the ancient Egyptians, the Maoris, the early Taoists, the Tantrists and the Gnostics.

The Native Americans understood the different feelings that women have when they menstruate-and for them, these feelings were part of something very meaningful about the cycles of the woman's body. The women would go to a menstrual hut or "moon lodge" to pass the time of their bleeding. It was considered to be the time that a woman was at the height of her spiritual power, during which the most appropriate activity was to rest and gather wisdom.

The people of the Yurok tribe of Northern California had a highly developed spiritual culture. In Blood Magic Thomas Buckley speculates that the rhythm of the menstrual cycle guided the spiritual practice not only of the women, but also of the men, who had extended periods of spiritual training that may well have coincided with the retreat of the women during their menses, probably at the time of the new moon. Belief in the value of retreat during menses has persisted among the Yurok to the present day, and a contemporary Yurok woman told Buckley that "A menstruating woman should isolate herself because this is the time when she is at the height of her powers...all of one's energies should be applied in concentrated meditation to find out the purpose of your life, and towards the accumulation of spiritual energy." The women were instructed to "feel all of your body exactly as it is, and pay attention."

The Nootka people of the Northwest held similar beliefs, but when white men came on the scene, "the world turned upside down." Attitudes toward menstruation changed and young girls were taught by the priests instead of by the elder women of the tribe. "Instead of learning that once a month their bodies would become sacred, they were taught that they would become filthy. Instead of going to the waiting house to meditate, pray, and celebrate...they were taught that they were sick." (Daughters of Copper Woman, Anne Cameron).

I first came across the ideas and practices of the Native Americans when I met a teacher of their traditions-Harley Swiftdeer Reagan. In the few days I spent at a workshop he was leading, I learned some crucial information about menstruation. He taught that a menstruating woman has the potential to be more psychically and spiritually powerful than anyone, male of female, at any other time. That turned my conditioned pictures of reality upside down. I'd always experienced my period as a time of weakness and difficulty-what on earth was the man talking about?

At the time I had cervical dysplasia and the cramps I had always had during my period were becoming quite severe. I was looking for ways to heal myself. I asked Swiftdeer if he had any suggestions and he told me that my problems were caused by negative images of the female in my unconscious. He told me to dig a hole in my garden every now and then and speak all the negative thoughts I could think of about the state of being female into the hole, then cover it up so that the earth could transform the energy. When I went home I tried this technique out. I felt pretty silly, and I was glad that no one overlooked my tiny garden. I didn't know that I had so many bad feelings about being a woman lurking in my highly educated feminist mind until I did this exercise. It was painful, and it was very effective.

I began to look at my blood with a tinge of awe rather than with fear, disgust or indifference. By that time I no longer used tampons, having figured out that they might be irritating my cervix, and wondering if my initial difficulty with them in my teens hadn't in fact been a wise instinct of my body. So I got to look at my blood properly every month instead of just seeing it on a yucky old tampon. I saw that it was clear and red, and sometimes darker and clotted. If I really freed up my vision then I could see that it was full of life, full of magic, full of potential. I began to experience a frisson of joy when I thought about bleeding, about being a woman, that there was something, after all, so extraordinarily magical and mysterious about inhabiting a female body. The resentment about being female that I had in my teens and early twenties, the feelings that boys had a better deal, faded away and were replaced by a growing sense of wonder at the intricacies and depths and possibilities offered by the monthly cycle.

I began to take time to rest and meditate and just be with myself when I had my period. I found out that it was a time when I was particularly able to find insight, and that this insight was of a timeless nature. I felt I was tapping into some ancient and vast wellspring of female wisdom-simply by sitting still and listening when I was bleeding. Taking this time out when I was bleeding created a very different relationship with my body. My health improved, and gradually the bad cramps I had had for most of my menstruating life eased up, and my period became a time of pleasure rather than pain.

I was beginning to really love myself. Of course, you can't make yourself do this, just as you can't make yourself love another person. It began to happen, very gradually, and many people came into my life who helped me see more clearly. But the big thing at the beginning was this knowledge that menstruation is a source of power. This priceless piece of information, coupled with a strong instinct I had about the power of the womb, transformed my deep and largely unconscious lack of self-respect.

To think of menstruation as a source of power for women completely went against my conditioning, and yet I knew in my heart that it was true. I realized that in the dichotomy between what our culture teaches us, and my gut reaction of "Yes! Of course!" to this ancient wisdom, there was a lot of energy. When you find the places where a culture splits from a natural truth you have found a key-a way inside the diseases of the culture. I began to understand that the split, between the wisdom and power of bleeding that I was perceiving (on the one hand) and modern society's attitudes to the womb (on the other), lay at the heart of the subjugation and denial of female reality and experience.

When the womb and menstruation are seen merely as uncomfortable biological necessity, women's self-esteem is correspondingly low. We are our bodies-and we can't really, deep down in the bottom of our hearts, love ourselves if we don't wholeheartedly love our bodies. And you don't love your body if you catch yourself saying "Oh no, I've got my period."

In the nineteenth century, menstruation was viewed by physicians as one more sign of the inferiority and weakness of the female. However, there is often a glimmer of truth in any ideology, and the physicians of the Victorian era were not completely wrong when they emphasized the importance of menstruation in women's overall health; of the relationship between the womb and the psyche; of the wisdom of rest during the period.

We have tended to reject all of this because it reminds us of the time when the lives of women were more controlled be men, and because it smacks of old arguments that kept women tied to the home and powerless in the outside world.

We have also, quite rightly, rejected the idea that the natural processes of being female are a sickness. But to say that something is not a sickness, and to ignore it altogether, are not the same thing. By ignoring menstruation, in reaction to the ideas of the Victorian era, perhaps we have lost touch with a lingering thread of awareness of its value in women's lives.

The changes that have taken place in the lives of women over the past thirty years may look like a revolution, but in many ways they have been an assimilation. Women seeking power in a male world have tended to do so by becoming pseudo-men. And, perhaps unwittingly, feminism has played a part in the suppression of menstruation.

One of the biggest fears that I have come across in successful and ambitious women when I discuss ancient ideas about the spiritual power of menstruation, is that this will in some way affect their myth of being "just as good as a man, and sometimes better."

Many women don't want to go deeper into menstruation; they are scared of what they will discover. It suits them better to suppress their feelings with tranquilizers, to spray with vaginal deodorants to disguise the smell of blood, to numb their pain with pain killers, to absorb their blood with tampons so they never have to actually see it. It's easier to be a successful woman in a man's world if you hardly acknowledge that you menstruate at all.

The technology of suppression-tampons, vaginal deodorants, sophisticated pain-killing and mood-altering drugs-has acted together with the myth of the superwoman to create a predominant cultural attitude that a menstruating woman is no different from one who is not bleeding. The trouble with this is that it simply isn't true. Any woman remotely in touch with her body knows that when she is menstruating, and usually for a few days before, she feels different. And this is a fact of nature that ultimately cannot be denied.

One of the aspects of menstruation that I now love and appreciate is its predictable unpredictability. You never know exactly when it is going to come, and sometimes it completely surprises you. And not only is it inconsiderate of timetables and schedules, it is also messy. Hooray! We try to sanitize and order modern life to the degree that we run into danger of there being no life left in us. Periods save us from this doom-they are a wild and basic, raw, bloody and eternal aspect of the female-and no amount of "civilization" will change that.

My period is a monthly occurrence in my life that I have in common with all women who have ever lived. Women living in caves twenty thousand years ago, priestesses in pyramids in ancient Egypt, seers in temples in Sumer, they all bled with the moon. The first woman who made fire might well have had her period at the time. Now that's a thought. If menstruation is a highly creative time for women psychically and spiritually, who knows what gifts humankind has been brought by women during their menses.

The value we place on menstruation had a direct correlation with the value we place on ourselves as women. And this affects men too. We think of the sexes as being separate and in a way they are. But in another way we are all part of the same big human soup, and how women view themselves and are viewed affects men too. It might look on the face of it as if men have had the upper hand for the past few thousand years-but that is only true from a certain perspective. Both men and women have gained and suffered from the imbalances of patriarchal society. Men have also been separated from their bodies and from their feelings, and from the pleasure and healing made possible by relationships based on cooperation rather than hierarchy and dominance.

Imagine a world in which men and women worked together to develop the sense of inner peace that comes from sitting still for a couple of days once a month. A world in which men supported women to spend a few days in peaceful quiet. A world in which menstrual blood was once again a magical fluid with the power to nurture new life. A world in which menstruation was understood to be the Sabbath of women- a natural space within one moon's cycle for retreat, introversion, and inner work. From which women emerge like the newborn moon itself, renewed, the old skin shed.

Lara Owen is 36 years old and lives in Portland, Oregon, where she is studying process-oriented psychology. She was an acupuncturist for several year before turning her main focus to writing, and to the study of women's mysteries, the ancient wisdom of the earth-centered religions, and the modern wisdom of psychotherapy. These experiences were the springboard for a book on menstruation, from which this article is an extract. The book is Entitled Her Blood is Gold: Celebrating the Power of Menstruation.

Resources:

Co-op America features a line of products in their catalog from New Cycle Products, an educational program of the Menstrual Health Foundation. Everything from cloth and cotton pads, to floral flannel pouches, moon panties, women's moon calendars, special pad soaking jars and numerous books on the subject of women's menstrual health including Period, a superb book for preadolescents. To get their free catalog call 202-223-1881.