Women's Blood Mysteries: Healing the Body/Mind Split
To celebrate women's mysteries is to reclaim and to make sacred our journey through the five blood mysteries of womanhood: our birth, menarche, giving birth, menopause, and death. Although the blood mysteries are natural, physiological occurrences, these passages have been ignored, discounted, and shamed by a cultural denial of women's uterine blood and by oppressive, male-dominated religions. Many women do not even realize that we are being robbed of the opportunity for profound spiritual connection through the reverent celebration of our bodies' changes.
Under patriarchy, women are not permitted to live our womb-cycles consciously. We are forced by culture, religion, and economics to adopt an artificial structure for our lives; limiting and denying how we experience menstruation, pregnancy, birth, and menopause physically, emotionally, and psychically. In our patriarchal culture, the natural cycles of womb blood are defined as unclean, polluting, and shameful, if they are recognized at all. In other cultures and times when women menstruated they would take themselves away from their daily routines and expectations to immerse themselves in their menstrual experience. Fearing the power of women's blood, male-dominated cultures and religions have denied women this essential honoring of our cyclic nature or have reframed women's seclusion as necessary due to their "unclean" nature during this time. Mothers teach daughters to hide the evidence of their monthly cycle. After years of keeping this secret, most women experience menopause in silence, depression, and isolation. In breaking this pattern of lies and secrets, women are returning to the celebration of uniquely female passages. For women reclaiming our ancient goddess heritage and birthright, these transitions become the most sacred and spiritual part of our lives.
It is not convenient to be female in patriarchy. Time itself is measured according to male productivity, schedules, and sensibilities. Fitting into a linear workweek is simply not compatible with the lunar-based cycles of women's bodies. We become angry with ourselves for being female because it poses problems for us living in patriarchy. Every woman, and every female animal that has ever lived, bleeds according to her own cycle. This is part of the essence of being female. We bleed in accordance with the cycle of the moon; our inner tides ebb and flow. Yet many women experience this profound fact as a nuisance. Imagine what it might be like if women were supported in fully experiencing our natural cycles. What if we lived in a world where getting a spot of menstrual blood on your skirt or pants was not cause for embarrassment, humiliation, or shame? Imagine a world in which women would be supported, and even honored, for our ability to bleed regularly and copiously without becoming ill or dying--something that no man is capable of.
On a personal level, patriarchy perpetuates itself through body shame, addictions, internalized self-hatred, child abuse, battering, eroticized violence, pornography, and the sexual practices of sadomasochism, the eroticization of domination and subordination.
Patriarchy is the paradigm of our world, the filter through which we view and experience life as compartmentalized and disjointed, rather than whole and interdependent. Until we become aware that patriarchy is both an internal and external system, and work to heal from its effects, we will continue to think and behave out of this patriarchal paradigm. Contemporary women's rituals seek to change our consciousness from patriarchal conditioning by restoring value to women's lives and validating an egalitarian worldview based on a respectful and harmonious relationship with all people and nature.
Ruth Barrett, Women's Rites, Women's Mysteries: Intuitive Ritual Creation, excerpted from pp. 16-18.
