As you can imagine, talking to grown people about the menstrual cycle is an interesting endeavor. Not because of the subject itself but due to the lack of curiosity that most people have about it.
I am not a teacher (at least not in the way that most of us think of the word) but I know one thing: if we believe we know something, we don’t learn. It’s truly that simple.
About 14 years ago I was introduced to a new frame around the menstrual cycle. Up to that point I had lived as most modern-day young women do. Wishing my cycle to not be there.
This new knowledge impacted me in various ways. One, it showed me how much I had been shaped by culture.
So, even though what I was being told by women’s mysteries teacher Jane Collings intuitively made sense, culture had ingressed in me so deeply, that my relationship with myself and my body/mind was (unconsciously) fragmented.
Being curious about this new wisdom wasn’t hard for me as what I had learned was more interesting and generous to my nature than all the constructs that I had been swimming in up to that point.
The real change came, as it does, with life experience. With this new wisdom available to me, my two pregnancies and the birth of my kids offered the perfect opportunity to fully immerse myself in what it means to have a female physiology in modernity. I could see clearly what the natural impulses were, and how modernity responded to them. Sad, yet fascinating.
Maybe this is the time that I should tell you that my background is in journalism. What drove me to study journalism was my insatiable curiosity. So, once I had been initiated in this old wisdom, I became an investigator, a scientist of sorts, who was constantly looking at the chasm between the intelligence generated from a woman’s body - that I was experiencing firsthand - and how the world was naming/responding to my increased capacities. At times, the world would give these capacities names such as “baby brain”, which not only would undermine my intelligence but also render it invisible and unreliable to the eyes of others.
The female body is at odds with modernity. I’m not going to sugarcoat that one. It is just at odds. From the beginning of the journey of being a young woman, at around 12, 13, to the end of the fertile phase, at around 50. For about 40 years of a woman’s life, her creative impulses will be either fighting with culture or being subdued by it.
Unfortunately, unless you were raised in the middle of the jungle by hippie parents, modernity would have shaped you. Sadly, not in a good way.
The rhythm of the female body and the way it moves through the world generates a different type of awareness than the less rhythmic male impulse to create.
I am not attempting, with this single article, to explore this difference with the nuance it requires. I am writing a book for that and I’ll be sharing my thoughts here along the way. What I want to invite, however, is your curiosity.
Chances are, if you have never contemplated this topic, all you have learned is wrong, simplistic, or decontextualized. So if you are to get any benefit from reading this substack and engaging with the Lab (once it’s up and running) is through being open and cultivating your “beginner mind”.
This applies to both men and women. Women have proven, over the years, to be a “tougher audience”. Understandably so.
We have this physiology that moves us in the world in pulses. The beauty about cycles is that they repeat themselves so it is easy to understand the pattern once you see it. Just like the seasons, that repeat themselves every year, the “flavor” of a woman’s awareness and her relationship with the world will shift in patterns during her 28-day cycle (and during her life cycle). Most women, in the modern-day world, live completely oblivious to this.
They judge their pattern change as if there is something wrong with them and don’t recognize that the “seasonal shift” is a feature and not a bug in their system.
Chaos is only chaos when judged by a perspective that doesn’t see the pattern. A woman’s psyche is not chaotic, it is cyclical but it surely would feel chaotic if we expect linearity.
So the invitation here is to be curious and open. If you do that, I can guarantee that you might start understanding men, women, trans, and non-binary people in a whole different light. But you might need to drop your immediate impulse to judge.
To make it even more relevant to you and your life, I’d say that by understanding the menstrual cycle and the impact on a woman’s body/mind and the contrast of what is promoted by modernity, you will probably start understanding yourself better (no matter your gender, as we are all contextual beings) the people around you, and the systems we have co-created.
If I tickled your curiosity (hopefully I did!), have a look at this 15-minute presentation I did to illustrate the cyclical pattern in a woman’s body (and beyond). Especially important for parents and educators.
I happen to believe that our civilization needs to course-correct. Just like a plane that has noticed it is going to the wrong destination, we need to change the way we engage in conversations about gender and sex. These conversations are fundamental to the creation of culture and the values we instill in our young.
If we don’t understand the basic difference between male and female physiology (that impacts and shapes all we do and how we engage/shape the world) we’ll keep having fundamentally flawed conversations and generating flawed/partial solutions in return.
One of the most interesting things for me in this 14-year journey since reconnecting with the wisdom of the cycles was the observation of how hard it was to explore this subject with others. The resistance certainly diminished in the past few years. We might have just become collectively slightly more open.
Part of the resistance comes from what we think we know, as I mentioned at the start of this article. Men believe they know just what they need to know about the topic through the women in their lives. Women think they know about it because they have the cycle in them (or had, depending on their age). What most people don’t recognize is that we are all shaped by our culture and that we don’t live in isolation.
A person can only fully express “their art” if there are people that recognize it. No matter how incredible an artist you are, if there is no one to appreciate and buy your art you will never fully blossom. We can’t blossom in isolation. We are contextual beings.
This is the main impulse for the creation of this lab. The impulse comes from the recognition that no matter where we are in our lives, we probably weren’t raised with a deep understanding of women’s cycles. Ancient culture had the wisdom but not the need to talk about the wisdom. Our culture has lost this wisdom entirely.
If we believe that we all have a small piece of the puzzle to offer towards the betterment of our lives as humans, and hopefully the lives of all earthly creatures, we need to learn not only how to offer our gifts but also how to notice when they offered by others.
Modern-day culture has lost its receptors for the type of intelligence generated by female physiology. In return, in a cycle of reciprocal narrowing (as John Vervake would say), women have also lost the capacity to recognize their cyclical intelligence as such.
We need, therefore, to learn to recognize this wisdom when we see it, and the more we do that, the more the wisdom will pour forth. This time, in a cycle of reciprocal opening, instead of narrowing. The more I learn to see you, the more you open yourself to me.
To explore this further, we’ll start having monthly calls at the C-lab (and more surprises to come). Your genius, your input, and your creativity are the seeds of this new cyclically informed culture.
But before we jump into the deep end, we need to get to know one another. In the olden days, kinship was where women’s power resided. This didn’t serve only women. It served the collective.
So, in the spirit of kinship, join us at our first C-Lab call this week and help us shape the culture you want to participate in. No previous knowledge is required. Just bring yourself and your curiosity.
The call will be on January 26, 9:30 am Sydney time zone. Check your time zone here.
Thank you for this. I have to say I have never really thought about it, despite being married for 44 years through early adulthood, child bearing and menopause, nor has she really talked about it, except a little for menopause. I am curious and will follow along. Unfortunately she is in hospital with a broken hip and I'm at home with Covid and hope to be back at the hospital by Friday, so I won't be able to join the call. I'll follow though.
"A woman’s psyche is not chaotic, it is cyclical but it surely would feel chaotic if we expect linearity." This sentence is clarifying. Very dope.