Casting a New Spell — Moving from PMS to PMP.
Words have the power to elicit experience.
Words have the power to elicit experience.
If I say teapot you will most certainly have an image, a mental construct of a teapot come into your awareness.
If I say love or beauty, for example, you might not have a picture come into your mind but I imagine you will have some type of felt experience. If you don’t, it might be because you read the words too quickly without giving yourself time to feel into what they represent for you.
Let’s try this again. S-L-O-W-L-Y.
Beauty. Love. Connectedness. Empowerment.
Can you feel these words? What do they evoke in you?
Now, let’s try different words.
Pain. Frustration. Wrong. Shame.
Do you feel a difference, in your body, when you read these two sets of words?
Words have the power to create how we think, feel and therefore relate to an aspect of life. They truly are like magic spells that, when not diligently used, might create potions that we don’t want to ingest.
This is all very important, as the words we choose to describe certain objects or experiences, and the mental image that is evoked, can have profound and long-lasting destructive consequences in the individual and collective psyches as I’ll demonstrate below.
Let’s have a look at how some words have been used to define aspects of the female physiology and also the feminine psyche and how these words have shaped our thoughts in relation to these aspects of reality.
Think PMS. Or maybe for you is PMT. Premenstrual Syndrome or Premenstrual Tension. What does that mean to you? What is evoked in you when you read these words?
Syndrome means a group of signs or symptoms. The word syndrome is only ever used to describe pathologies or some type of problem. Without overcomplicating, what we know is that neither syndrome nor tension have been used to name the beauty and power available in different modes of intelligence. Therefore, when we use such words, we automatically collapse the infinite potential of experience that is available to us into a very narrow one.
Let’s explore these terms a bit deeper so they can lose their credibility. The acronyms PMS or PMT, as far as I can see, point to the fact that to a particular worldview that favours a certain way of being in the world (mostly rational and non-emotional), the potential surge of emotions that can be present at that time of the month for women is an inconvenience. When I have used these words and when I have heard them being used they bring a flavour of shame, “wrongdoing”, “quasi” apology or a “humorous” disregard. These words have been, unconsciously for most, casting a spell that has been teaching us, women and men, which mental construct we should assign to that aspect of “woman”.
Now let’s try “baby brain”. Have you heard this expression before? If so, what was the person, or maybe even you, trying to convey when you used these words?
What about…the question “when are you (or your wife/sister) due”? What does that evoke in you? What about overdue?
I used these words a lot when pregnant with my second child, born at 42 weeks.
The term “baby brain” is usually used by pregnant women and new mothers to apologize for their seeming “lack of capacity” in things like linear thinking, capacity to retain details from conversations or books, lessened capacity to remember dates or names, etc. In my case, that also showed up as a complete incapacity and lack of interest in doing anything that could potentially resemble an excel sheet.
I have been guilty of using this expression quite a lot when my babies were young to “excuse” myself from not being apt to function in the way that the “world” expected me to. When I close my eyes and feel what I was actually saying when I used this expression, sadness arises. What I was implicitly saying to the world is that a pregnant woman, that is making a baby, or a new mother, that is in sync with her baby, is not a “well-functioning human” during that time.
The baby brain is a pejorative term. It speaks to a lack of awareness and intelligence and NOT to an increased mental capacity. From the perspective of “LIFE” it is way more useful and intelligent for a woman to expand her capacity to sense, to “be in tune” and one with her baby, than to be able to speak linearly about anything. Her lack of — what some would call — coherence, is ONLY a lack of coherence from the perspective of a linear, mechanistic and over-simplified worldview.
Now let’s imagine for a moment that you have never heard these words before and your mind, in regards to these topics, is a blank slate (which to some of you, apart from PMS that is pretty widespread, might be the case). Let’s stretch this a bit. Imagine that you don’t live in a society that has any expectations of you apart from what is actually happening. If that was the case, if you are a woman and you are feeling a certain way as a result of a hormonal concoction, this is perfect and not a syndrome or tension. If your baby is not born at 39 or 40 weeks, this is also perfect. You are not “overdue”. If you notice that, as a young mother, certain capacities of your brain have been turned off so that other, more relevant capacities for that period of your and your baby’s life, can be turned on this is also perfect.
What kind of society would we co-create if this was the case?
Time to cast a new spell.
From now on, PMS and PMT are gone! I’ll be saying PMP — Pre-Menstrual-Power (the power that comes aided by a surge of hormones, to feel the emotions of experiences, situations or frames that are not working for you anymore).
As for baby brain, I’ll use Mum’s Super Mind. Doesn’t it feel better already? We truly don’t need to apologise for making humans. :-)
As for due, and overdue, these are hard terms to change. At least for now. They refer to how the medical system sees pregnancy and the “appropriate” length of it. It again speaks to the mechanistic, flatland concept we have of pregnancy, birth, death and everything in between.
Overdue, as you can imagine, brings the anxiety of a pregnancy that goes beyond the appropriate/correct amount of time. This, from other perspectives, is an impossibility. However, I also understand that these terms are used to communicate with the larger world of obstetrics, which has also not done much in the sense of empowering birthing women. But this, again, is for another post.
For now, at least in regards to these terms, you can think of them as very partial truths. They refer to the length of time that the medical system — that needs frames, structure and timelines — is comfortable to work with pregnant women. After all, doctors are not trained to just be present to a birthing woman. They are trained to intervene and this is important only in very few instances.
Maybe this article can also inspire you to reflect on other words that you, or others, use that are not “good spells” to cast. Let me know what you find.
Together we can create a whole new glossary for our experiences and use the spells with accuracy and discernment.
Let’s give future generations new words and create mental constructs that we are proud of.