As you may know, I am quite engrossed in writing my Bio-Mystical Womb Book. This book has taken on a life of its own, interweaving several story lines. The core of the book is a Womb Centered memoir of my life that is becoming more rich as I realize that central to my healing and growth process is my ability to travel back through time in visionary meditation, becoming a guardian angel to myself and my ancestors. This awareness has started weaving into my writing to delightful effect.
I have started to share excerpts of the book here and on social media. Here is a segment where I revisit my Menarche, the first blood of my womanhood. I feel Mother Earth is calling us to shift our relationship to menstruation and Menarche is a potent time to do so. It is the time when girls' self esteem plummets and I feel this is largely due to the inadequacy and sometimes complete lack of initiation into this potent transition from girl to womanhood.
I will share the first part here where I revisit my experience as I remember it. Later, I will share the next part in which I visit my Menarchal self as a guardian angel and offer her my version of a Womb Wise initiation I wish I and every bleeding woman could have had and will have.
If you would like to learn more about how we can heal our past experiences of Menarche, and/or explore how we can offer more to girls who are going through this transition, please feel free to reach out in the comments or in a private message.
Sama's Menarche Part 1
I had never seen this color in my underwear before. I knew I would one day, having listened carefully to the biological descriptions about how blood would build up inside of me and then release once a month. But when that red hourglass appeared in my underwear, it was still a surprise. I stared at it while sitting on the toilet, breathing a shallow breath, listening the the blood still inside me pulsing in my ears. Suddenly I could feel the redness of that blood too. As I stood up, and looked at the water in the toilet, there it was again, a red swirl dancing through the water, slipping down and away from me. Everything slowed down. There was more space between actions and movements. Red space.
I took this red hourglass stained underwear to my mother. I was 11 years old and my brain was reduced to a slow red swirl with no words. The redness pulsing in my ears muffled my mother’s words. She was giving me perfumed pads to capture this redness flowing out of me. The perfume was like a sickly greenness, a gangrene. I shriveled at the smell of it, my inner redness recoiling. She dropped me off at school that day in my red haze tinged with this gangrenous smell.
Though my red ears muffled all words spoken to me with their obsession with my heartbeat, my blood moving through my eardrums, beating the rhythms of life, they were keenly aware of any sounds of sniffing. I was certain the other kids in class could smell the gangrene I wore between my legs. I watched the redness grow on the pad all day long, smelling how this red life from within me was transformed by the sickness of hiding, masking, and shame. I felt my ears pulsing more with red fear, my blood curling in upon itself to hide from the green cruelty lurking in my classmates.
I had tasted this cruelty before when a boys fist split my lip over a dispute about who was next in line for handball. Red blood streamed into my mouth and down my chin. Red anger blazed out my eyes as the boy cowered before me, realizing his mistake. But what he did not know is that I had already been infected by the green sickness of fear, shame, and goodness. I marched away to tell a teacher about what he had done. All this resulted in was me spending the next recess in detention. Alone. He evaded his punishment and got away with it. But there I sat, red heat radiating out my eyes, out the window as I watched the other children play.
This dance of red life pulsing, building, releasing, staining, demanding attention, taking up space, radiating heat, mixed with the greenness of shame, jealousy, shrinking, hiding, trying to be good to receive an imaginary reward always out of reach, swirled through my life from early on. And now each month it was stronger, louder, began creating pain in my belly.
Sama Morningstar is the founder of the Womb Centered Healing Temple. You can learn more about her work here and get notified about upcoming events and offerings by subscribing to the newsletter in the form below.
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