Her Blood is Gold: Awakening to the Wisdom of Menstruation

This book was first published as

Her Blood Is Gold: Celebrating the Power of Menstruation

(HarperSanFrancisco 1993) and

Her Blood Is Gold: Reclaiming the Power of Menstruation

(Aquarian/Thorsons 1993).

A revised and expanded version was published as Honoring Menstruation: A Time of Self-Renewal (The Crossing Press 1998).

This edition by Archive Publishing

includes all of the second edition, with the addition of previously deleted material from the first edition.

www.archivepublishing.co.uk

Text © Lara Owen 2008

The rights of Lara Owen as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP Record for this book is available from the British Cataloguing in Publication data office

ISBN 978-1-906289-07-2 Hardback

ISBN 978-1-906289-06-5 Paperback

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the prior written permission of the publisher.

To contact the author, please visit her website,

http:// laraowen.com

eBook Conversion by Bluewave Publishing

The information contained in this book is not intended as a substitute for consulting with your physician or other healthcare provider. The diagnosis and treatment of a medical condition should be done under the direction of a healthcare professional. The author and publisher assume no responsibility for how you use the information in this book.

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to those indigenous people of the world who have kept alive the ancient knowledge of the power of the menstrual cycle. I am very grateful for their persistence, tenacity and courage in maintaining these teachings.

A NOTE ON THE TITLE

The phrase, Her blood is gold, comes from the creation myth of the Kogi Indians, the only known surviving and intact pre- Columbian society, who live in a secret part of the Sierra mountains of South America. The Kogi say that the world was created by the Great Mother during her period. Her blood is gold, it remains in the earth, it is fertility.

The Kogi are a mysterious, mystical people who consider themselves to be the guardians of the planet, and constantly perform rituals for the balancing of the world from their mountain home in the Heart of the World. Their observations of the recent changes in the natural world around them trouble them deeply, and they warn that the planet faces imminent destruction due to environmental damage.

Many thanks to Alan Ereira for his book on the Kogi, The Heart of the World, and for the documentary of the same name, which happened to be on the television as I was writing the last sentence of this book, and from which I took the title.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Preface To The 1998 Edition

Introduction

Part One

A Brief History of Bleeding : Menstruation in Western Culture

Moon, Blood, Earth and Snake : Eternal Archetypes of Menstruation

Sacred Power : Beliefs of Menstrual-Positive Cultures

PART TWO

Healing the Wounded Woman

Menstrual Power and Menstrual Symptoms

The Sabbath of Women: Spirituality and Menstruation

PART THREE

Conscious Menstruation: First Steps

Going Deeper: Rituals, Practices and Meditations

Natural Remedies for Menstrual Symptoms

PART FOUR

The Scientist: Wendy Alter

The Educator : Tamara Slayton

The Priestess : Hallie Iglehart Austen

PART FIVE

Menstruation, Relationships and the Family

Bleeding with the World

APPENDICES

Appendix i

Appendix ii

Selected Bibliography

About The Author

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has been published in three different editions over a period of fifteen years. As a result, many people have helped to make this work manifest in each of its incarnations, and my heartfelt thanks go to them all.

For various contributions of support, advice, wisdom, and encouragement, my thanks go to David Brown, Howard Rheingold, Hazel van Wijnan, Karie Brown, Leba Wine, Charlotte Pauli, Sara Halprin, Nisha Zenoff, Arny and Amy Mindell, Max Shupbach, Rhea, Paul Giancarlo, Andrew Murray, Gemma Summers, Jackie Redner, Noelle Imparato, Alyson MacGregor, Debi West, Chris Knight, Joanne Leslie, Nalini Chilkov, Kathleen Pouls, and David Garbacz.

Thanks to Swiftdeer for giving me the initial teaching on the power of menstruation that sparked my research, and to the women and men of the Navajo nation who shared their knowledge of the Kinaalda ceremony with me. Thanks to Tsultrim Allione for introducing me to the wisdom of the dakinis. Thanks to my good friend and spiritual sister, Victoria Cresswell, for being such an inspiring and constant companion on the journey. Thanks to the women who allowed me to include their stories in the book: Wendy Alter, Hallie Iglehart Austen, and the late Tamara Slayton, much missed in the world of menstrual wisdom. Thanks to Dr. Christiane Northrup for writing the foreword and for her work in taking awareness of women’s innate wisdom into the mainstream. Thanks to all the women who have communicated with me over the years about their menstrual experiences: they have heartened me and encouraged my work.

Marion Russell, Marian Young, Barbara Moulton, Liz Puttick, Elaine Gill, Jill Schettler and the staffs of HarperSanFrancisco, Aquarian/Thorson’s and The Crossing Press all contributed to the publishing of the first two editions, and I thank all of them for their enthusiasm and expertise. Thanks to Ian Thorp at Archive Publishing for creating this beautiful third edition.

FOREWORD

By Christiane Northrup, Md

In medical school, I learned how to manipulate and regulate the natural female cycle with powerful synthetic hormones. I learned, albeit indirectly, that the menstrual cycle is inherently untrustworthy, and responsible for all kinds of female woes. I learned how to be prepared when women came in to be cured from the effects of this female adaptation. I learned every possible thing that could go wrong with this cycle, and a corresponding way to stop the symptoms, usually with drugs or surgery such as hysterectomy.

But I never learned in medical school or residency training what I really needed to know if I were ever going to help women truly heal their menstrual woes at the deepest level. What I needed to know is the subject of this extraordinary book, Her Blood Is Gold, which eloquently shows us why the monthly cycle of menstruation is a microcosm through which we can understand – physically, emotionally, spiritually – our connection with nature and with the process of creation itself. Nature did not make a mistake when it comes to menstruation. We forget that without the female menstrual cycle there would be no human life on Earth. When you stop fighting your period and stop considering it a nuisance and a pain, a whole new world opens up… and the pain begins to abate.

When we stop fighting our natural monthly cycles, we realize that our periods contain magic and mystery that plays out in an incredibly fine-tuned dance each month. Then we are ready to begin to heal ourselves and our female heritage at the deepest possible levels. We come to see that any imbalance in our cycles is signaling an imbalance in our lives. And we become grateful for the message of healing that our bodies – and nature – are sending us. Through the work of courageous women like Lara Owen, who have dared to address the culturally taboo subject of menstruation so gracefully, I personally reclaimed the wisdom of my own cycle, and was able to recover from years of debilitating menstrual cramps as well as health-destroying ideas about the menstrual cycle. As I healed myself, I was able to pass this information on to my patients and as a result have seen hundreds of other women heal from a wide variety of menstrual problems, a process which starts with rethinking menstruaton. Together we are all breaking the chain of pain and silence about this vital cycle that has been handed down to women for generations.

The first step towards healing yourself is being open to the idea that menstruation is an inherently worthy process. From there you’ll soon discover the magic in your own cyclic wisdom. Through the beautifully written Her Blood Is Gold, Lara Owen has provided women everywhere, and those who love them, with a gentle guide through the tender process of reclaiming menstrual wisdom and the power of this creative process. May the healing message in Lara’s graceful prose reach women the world over with its message of hope, wholeness, and celebration.

Christiane Northrup, MD FACOG author, Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom (Bantam 1994) website: drnorthrup.com

PREFACE TO THE 1998 EDITION

This book has been a work-in-progress for the last decade. My first writing on menstruation was published as an article in Whole Earth Review in 1991, and two years later a book entitled Her Blood Is Gold was published. Both of these works have been incorporated into the book you are reading now.

In the past few years there have been some gradual but perceptible changes in our collective attitude to menstruation, perhaps shown most obviously in television commercials and magazine advertising, which are less coy and more realistic and explicit in their portrayal of the menstruating woman.

People seem less affronted by the subject matter than they were when I began doing research. They are more willing to examine the possibility that in Western materialist culture our commonly held notions about the menstrual cycle have been infected by centuries of misogyny. The taboo about discussing menstruation still exists, but it appears to be gradually dissolving, along with other prejudices about the body and sexuality and gender.

I hope that these subtle changes in attitudes to menstruation presage a greater shift in how we collectively value, affirm, and accept female experience. The relationship between menstruation and power is still held very much under the surface of mainstream awareness, and most cultural references to menstruation continue to be couched in the terminology of pathology.

Reintegrating a truly feminist, woman-honoring perspective on menstruation means turning a whole system of thought upside down. It means saying that a cyclical change in feelings and body sensations is valuable and interesting; it means saying that the emotions women experience premenstrually carry useful information and should be paid attention to; it means acknowledging that a menstruating woman has access to sacred energy, and that if she wishes, she should have space and time to explore this dimension of experience.

The ramifications of such a shift would be truly radical. For many reasons, including ecological and cultural survival, I believe the system of thought which has caused women to adapt to a non-cyclical reality needs to be turned upside down, for the good of us all.

We menstruate more now than at any time in human history. Girls are starting to menstruate earlier due to protein-rich diets and hormones in food; women are less likely to die young; we have fewer children and therefore spend less time not menstruating. Increased work and family stresses, in addition to more periods, mean that women are more physically and psychologically vulnerable to negative attitudes to menstruation. So it is more important than ever that we investigate ways to make our periods physically, emotionally, and spiritually healthy. Lack of recognition of menarche (the first period) is gradually being acknowledged as a source of self-esteem problems in adolescent girls. That the self-esteem of girls plummets at puberty has been well-documented in recent years, and is implicated as a cause of the terrifying epidemic of eating disorders among young women. There is also a link between school absenteeism and menstruation, strongest in the first year after menarche and caused as much by embarrassment, depression, and fear of blood showing on clothing as by any physiological symptomatology.

In the majority of cases, menarche remains an un-ritualized, uncelebrated non-event, and as a society we have a long way to go toward making the first period a time which supports a young girl and ushers her successfully into her adolescent years and indeed, her womanhood.

Although it might seem a daunting task to remedy so many centuries of female belittlement and misunderstanding, there is much we can do. By drawing from pro-feminine traditions, and by creating rituals and behavioral changes appropriate to our time and culture, we can foster an atmosphere in which women feel empowered to respect, value, and enjoy the many gifts of the menstrual cycle. There is potentially an enormous ripple effect from such behavioral and attitudinal changes: by examining our prejudices and becoming more conscious about the ways our behavior perpetuates distrust and disdain for the natural processes of the female body, we can generate an increased respect for all matters feminine. To that end, I have used the opportunity of enlarging my original work to add more information about concrete steps women can take to get into better relationship with their periods. This information is based on my own experiences and on the correspondence and teaching contact I have had with women all over the world. Some of these women had been quietly doing their own informal research and having their own experiences, and were very willing to share this information with me. Some of them had never thought about the matter consciously before reading my work, but once given the impetus were overjoyed to realize that there was more to being a woman than they had been taught. Over and over again I have been told, I always had this feeling there was more going on with my period, and I just never heard anyone talk about it.

This book also includes a lengthy section on self-help for menstrual symptoms, and more detail in areas that I have studied further – chiefly cross-cultural perspectives and menarche rituals. Studying menstruation is a reminder of the paradoxical human truth that just as we are tribal beings who all behave pretty much the same, so we are unique individuals with our own particular perceptions of reality. With that essential paradox in mind, this book comes with the following caveat: while certain aspects of my experiences with menstruation, and those of the other women included in this book, are universal, you will have your own unique reality and experience. The recommendations I make in this book are not rules; they are suggestions and

guidelines based on many years of observation.

In this field, as in so much of life, we have to be careful about getting too rigid. While it is crucial for the well-being not only of women, but also of society, that we reincorporate ancient wisdom about the power of menstruation, we have to make it work for us in the present. This is a complex issue: for most of us, finding out what we genuinely want to do when we menstruate is very hard, because our thoughts are so overlaid with centuries of patriarchy and misogyny that have been integrated deeply into our collective psyche. For a woman to be spiritually awake, at home in her body, and psychically whole (a virgin in the true sense of the word: entire unto herself), she has to grow out of being primarily guided by principles of accommodation to others when these are not in her best interest.

The essential message of this book is this: if you take some time out to center yourself during your period, you will meet the genuine core of your being. From that authenticity you will naturally make choices in life that strengthen your spirit, heal your body, and honor the needs of your soul.

Lara Owen Topanga Canyon, November 1997

INTRODUCTION

The assumption that lies behind this book is that life is, on balance, a Good Thing, and that the processes of being female are likewise essentially a Good Thing. For the past few thousand years, certainly in Judeo-Christian culture (and in many others), being female has been seen as a Bad Thing. We have had a lineage of descent that honors the male over the female, and a preference for giving birth to sons. Consequently that which is special to the female has tended to be denigrated, whereas that which pertains to the male has been prized and respected.

Imagine how the world would be if men had periods and gave birth. The alchemy of producing blood every month would be recognized as a sign of the fertility that would be every man’s pride and joy. Instead, what we have is a world in which menstruation is commonly referred to as the curse and where women do everything they can to disguise the fact that they are bleeding, often to the detriment of their health and well-being.

This book is the story of my journey into the menstrual mysteries, which I undertook unconsciously in the beginning, and later, as I began to realize what was happening to me, with more intent. It also includes the stories of several other women who, like me, tumbled down the rabbit-hole into the center of the earth, and found that their blood was a key into the heart of the Goddess.

Some years ago I began to understand the relationship between my thoughts and my physical health, and I realized that my sense of myself as a woman was warped and distressed by my thoughts, many of which were so automatic as to be unconscious. Even though I had been raised in a family that was relatively non- sexist, and had had many educational opportunities, I lived in a society that, even today, gives women the sometimes subtle, sometimes overt, message that they are inferior.

I began to have a fantasy of living at a time when there was not a thought in the collective that women were in any way lesser than men; a time when the processes of the female body were revered and respected. As I dreamed into this other reality, I realized that my whole body would be affected, and that not a cell in my being would have been formed out of ideas of female inferiority. This was a radical thought. Imagine not having a trace, a smidgen, hiding anywhere in your cells or your thoughts, that would ever imply that there was anything to be ashamed of about being female. That’s what I want, I thought. I want to live like that. I want to really honor and discover the richness of my femininity, and I want to glory in it, revel in it. I want to dance with the mystery of my wondrous alchemical womb.

As a result of this journey – which I am still, of course, on – I now have a very different experience of being a woman, of menstruating, of the moon and the earth, of my body, my psyche, and my spirit. On the way I have learned how to get in touch with the wounded woman within, who bears the wounds that we all carry from growing up in a patriarchal culture. I have learned some ways to heal those wounds, and to begin to access the enormous strength that has been obscured by our ignorance of the power and beauty of the monthly cycle. I have learned that if I take time out for myself when I am bleeding I can access a centeredness and a wisdom within that feel eternal. Recognizing the value and pleasure of my periods has been a real opening for me into a deep appreciation of being a woman. The whole process has shifted from being something that I found mildly disgusting and certainly inconvenient, to being an natural time for assessment, clearing, and preparation. It has become a time when I process the last month and prepare for the one coming. I look forward to my period as a time when I am most likely to be able to seek creative solutions to difficulties in my life – provided I make the space for it. This process has been so transformative for me that I am excited by its potential for the healing of other women.

* * *

The book is divided into five parts. The first, Beliefs and Attitudes, begins with an exploration of our current perspective on menstruation in the Western industrialized world, seen from the personal angle of my own initiation (or rather lack of) into menstruation and fertility, and then from the collective angle of the development of patriarchal culture, the subsequent diminishment of female reality, and the role of industrialization in severing us from our cycles. Then I take a look at the eternal archetypes that underlie our conditioning, and are associated with menstruation throughout time and in cultures the world over, in particular the Moon and Blood, the Earth and Snakes. Chapter Three discusses the behavior and attitudes of societies that have a positive view of menstruation: cultures that see woman’s monthly blood as a form of gold, a source of richness with the potential to nourish both physical and spiritual life.