The Healing Power Of Reclaiming Your First Period

Our First Period is a portal to our unique gifts, creative sovereignty and cyclical power, and how, as adults we can revisit our first blood, retrieve our Maiden self, restore our natural gifts and recalibrate our menstrual cycle!

Transcript

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Welcome to the Sacred Womb Podcast, womb-centred wisdom for the Ark of Womanhood. With me, your host, Melanie Swann. Hello, hello, hello, and a very warm welcome back to the Sacred Womb Podcast. I hope you're very well wherever you are, and whether in the storms, whether that be psychic, emotional, physical, the weather storms, I hope you're safe, I hope you're well. 2020 is certainly a year of unrest, of change, of lots of distress, lots of uh old wounds coming up, and yeah, it's it's been difficult for many of us. So I hope you're very well. I send you lots of love, and I hope this podcast helps in some way to help you connect with a part of you that maybe was fragmented, maybe was lost, shocked, disappointed, all of those things that can happen when our first period comes and we do not get met with a warm welcome. And that's what we really, really need. So yeah, today I'm talking about the healing power of reclaiming our first period as adults. So as adults, we can go back and reclaim, we can go back and repattern, we can go back and recalibrate. It's all possible. Before I get started, I would like to just highlight a couple of things for a couple of minutes. Yeah, I've been chilling, relaxing over the summer. I went on holiday to Cornwall, experienced a storm myself. Beautiful storm, but not in a tent. So my holiday was cut a little bit short by Stormellon. And yeah, I'll take another one just before the moon lodge starts. I've also been doing some advanced clinical training over the summer in something called CRM, that's the comprehensive resource model, which is a neurobiologically based trauma treatment model which facilitates the targeting of traumatic experiences by bridging the most primitive aspects of ourselves to the purest, healthiest parts of self. And this includes spiritual resources as well. So basically, if we resource ourselves enough, if we are resourced enough, the trauma, the distress, it will come out of the body. It's it's it tends to be bound up in the body, the self is fragmented, and what we can do is process that out, reclaim those parts, reintegrate them, ground them, and create new loops of being, new ways of being, new truths, and really connect to our core essence, our core self. It's very dynamic, uh, very effective. That's why I'm doing it. And my books will be open for one-to-one sessions from the 1st of October. I will give more information in uh the next podcast as well. There'll be more information coming up on my Facebook page, Instagram, and in the Facebook group. So uh do you watch out for that? But I'm very excited to bring that to you. And also the womb medicine woman training starts on the 23rd of September. The first year is called The Integrated Woman, and in its essence, it's about deeply healing the womb and operating, a return to operating from our seat of power, which is our womb centre, upward. So womb, heart, head, which makes a massive difference in daily life, to our intuition, to how we operate, to how we do our relationships. So there's lots of different aspects in it. Uh, take a look in the show notes, I've put the link there. And if you are interested, there are some places left, and I'm interviewing from the 3rd to the 10th of September for the final places. All right then. Well, that is everything I wanted to tell you. And so now we can get to the healing power of reclaiming our first period. Oh, I thought I'd introduce a little harp there to help set the tone for this podcast of gentleness, power, and real tenderness. Because, and I'm gonna start off with the potential that our first blood has. So, just to clarify, I call our first period our first blood. Uh, some people call it menoch or menarchy. I don't feel like that sounds like a very good, nice word when I say it, so I don't use it, but it was it is also known as that. It's a rite of passage, it's a major transition in our life from girl to young woman. And many traditions have different ways of celebrating this or welcoming a girl to woman into the world and honouring that transition. But as we live our modern lives, we've got disconnected from that, and there is some great work happening as well. There are ceremonies for girls happening, there are parties or celebrations for girls as they, you know, in the terms that they want them, and there is also some great work happening for adults to go back and revisit. But why would we do this as adults? Why would we go back to a time that for many women is either just a vacuum of experience or a sort of a fumbled chat for a couple of minutes or passing of a tampon or just feeling really either alone or shamed or just just you know not honored? So I just want you to imagine with me for a couple of minutes what could have happened if you had have felt welcomed, really genuinely welcomed, when you told someone that you'd started your period? What would have happened? So I'd invite you to put your hands on your womb as you do this. What would have happened if you'd have felt met really as you were? Maybe you were upset, maybe you were happy, maybe you've got all mixed emotions. But what would have happened if you'd have had somebody there that could have been with you without trying to change that or you know, could answer any of your questions and to really, really meet you where you were at? What would have happened? How would you have felt if you'd have actually felt valued, if your menstrual blood was met with oh wow, wow, now you're a young woman, wow, let's celebrate. How would you like to celebrate? What would you like to do? And how would you have felt if you had been honored at that stage for your cyclical nature, for your intuition? And maybe this would be stretching it with teenage girls a little bit, but ability to birth consciousness. So, you know, we all experience things in different ways. I'm not suggesting that modern teenage girls would want smudging and a conch blowing and some sort of new age ceremony because really most don't. They want to celebrate with their friends, they want a new dress, they want to do stuff. But in you know, really what's most important is the teenage girls, as teenage girls, we want attachment, we want attunement, we want to know we've got somebody there that knows what they're doing and can guide us with the space for us to discover ourselves as well. So I would ask you to really ask your womb and dig deep now and imagine how would your relationship with your menstrual cycle have been different if you'd have had that experience? What would you have done? Which which direction would your life have gone? Would that have taken your life in a different direction? Or your internal world, would you have come into the world and come out of the world in a different way? So, yeah, it it's so important this that I think it should be uh in every uh school, in every culture, uh, because when we don't have this, that part of us does not feel welcome in the world. We effectively generally, and this is a really subtle run-in, it's it's really a crucial point where we start to feel we are of less value, less value, and that's really important that we catch this point in our lives, this this part of ourselves, and recalibrate it because it's causing us distress, it's causing us to feel less valuable because we have a womb, a cyclical nature, and that we lead with our intuition and that we are sensitive beings. However, obviously we don't live in a perfect world and not everything happens as we would want it to happen. So we can go back and revisit our first blood in a way that doesn't re-traumatize us, but that helps us connect with that part of ourselves, that emerging lovely essence, and reintegrate that and and really process any distress out that is left bound up in the body, because we might go into freeze, we might go into flight, we might go into fight. It's a shock, it it is real shock when we are not welcomed and valued for what the function of our body and our psyche does for our very nature. This is how important it is. If you have a daughter uh celebrating her first blood in some way will make a real marked difference in her life. She won't know it if she's had it, or she might think you're making a big deal of it. You know, each team, each teenager wants it in their own way, but to actually mark it in some way as a transition is is going to have repercussions with uh her relationship with her menstrual cycle and for the rest of her life feeling welcomed, her place in the world. So let's have a look at what happens when we don't experience the version of this and how we actually recalibrate it. So if we don't experience our own version of this, uh like I said, we can experience shock, like a lasting disruption in our menstrual cycle. Shock is really, really hard on our organs. Um, and when we're dealing with our menstrual cycle, it's a sensitive system. It's really sensitive. It looks if it looks to our environment, the womb, the womb centre, the womb whole whole reproductive system looks for if it's safe to have babies. Is it safe to bring new life through into this reality? If that system is in shock, then of course we're gonna have trouble getting pregnant later in life, but we don't seem to match up the two when we have infertility issues. The first question I ask was, how was your first period if someone can't get pregnant or is struggling to get pregnant or gets pregnant and then then has uh a pregnancy loss? So, how was your first period? Because we check if there is a shock in the the whole reproductive system. Does that system know it's actually safe? It's actually a good environment. Um, so yeah, that's that's really important. There can also be shame of inhabiting a female body and the inconvenience that we uh can internalize of hormones, of menstrual blood, of the mess of it. And then of course, if that if our womb center is causing this um inconvenience, this messiness, this stuff that other beings don't have to deal with and seem to be able to function in a different way, um, then what we're going to do is pull away from this organ in our body. So we we actually lift our energy from that organ, the womb center, which of course we know that we need a lot of energy, a good vibration in there, good juice for our reproductive system to work, for our cycle to turn, and of course to get pregnant, and then birth new consciousness as well. So, what can also happen is that we have a distrust of our body, what's happening to me, why is this happening? Uh, what's its purpose rather than just getting pregnant and then I'm not pregnant and I bleed, and we disconnect, we don't know what our cyclical nature is. It just appears to be period, and then the rest of the cycle we're alright, and then I mean the repercussions are actually devastating throughout our collective consciousness. So this this maiden part of us, as I as I refer to her as, is full of potency. And when all those things happen, that part stays generally, not always, but generally, um at that age because there's a shock there, there's a feeling of non-welcome, so that part can fragment. Don't worry about this too much, it's not uh uh something that you're likely to notice, but uh we do fragment as we go through life if different parts of us do not feel welcomed or able to express or they feel shamed. And that's that's common with many, many, many, many of us and doesn't have to be classed as trauma or a mental health condition, it's just there, it happens. So, yeah, this part can fragment, can stay at that age, sort of frozen, and that's what like a shamanic soul retrieval would deal with, or a trauma processing, we'd connect with that part, find it, connect, and you connect with that part, and then process the distress out of the body because that's what's keeping the system in freeze, uh, and then and then bring that part of self back into the body, back into the present. By the way, that's a really rudimentary way of describing it, and there's a lot more nuance and detail when we do actually work with that. So there are two ways to work with this. Uh, firstly, and commonly, uh, it's in a group ceremony. So, this is something we do in the first year of the Wu Medicine Woman Training because it's so fundamental. This is something that you can probably Google is the uh a menar key first blood ceremony in your area, or you can do it yourself. I always like to give a version that you can do yourself for free. So you could get a group of friends together that you trust, maybe family members, just a group, a group that you trust that you want to witness you stepping into your maiden power somehow to represent that and to feel welcomed. So there's a few different ways you can do that. But yeah, we do that generally in a group ceremony, and that helps that part feel welcomed, feel celebrated. We do things like get you to buy a gift for yourself. Yeah, there's many creative things that you can do depending on your culture and your preference and what you like. But revisiting those parts is essential and reintegrating them. We can also do that one-to-one. And you know, a little exercise that you can do yourself after listening to the podcast is to just sit hands-on womb and tune in and ask, ask for an image of your maiden self. If you're not very visual, ask for a sound, a movement, some sort of expression to really see what's there. And over the years, working with a lot of these ceremonies and one-to-ones, what I've discovered is, and of course, my own process that's primary. What I've discovered is that that age our unique gifts are starting to shine, they're starting to come out. I think they're always there with us, and that they can be observed in play when we're younger. But when we're teenagers, they start to oh really start to come out as the light in us starts to shine out. So our ability to access these unique gifts and to trust them is key when we're looking at our first period. School system puts a lot of pressure on us to decide what we want to be, and it's it's basic a lot of schools are get the information in based rather than what is this individual developing and flowering to be. So these are unique gifts, and they're they want to come out, they want to express, you know, as young teenagers, we we can be quite fiery and quite soft and quite tender and quite everything, everything is sort of exploding. The hormones are helping drive that growth as well. So if we are if we're encouraged to trust that and we feel it, that is starting off our trust with our creative sovereignty that we are creative beings, that we can trust our body, and that we have these powers, these cyclical powers. I mean, if somebody said had said to me when I was 14, you have cyclical powers, I'd have been there dressed up in my witch's outfit, like bring it on, please, somebody tell me. And uh, I think things would have been would have been different. Uh, but having recalibrated that, that can come back, that part can come back. It it really, I mean, I can't emphasize enough how powerful this sort of work is. So, yeah, wow, okay. I really enjoyed explaining that because I'm so so passionate about it. I think every every person who uh wants to experience that should have that experience. I think it's our birthright actually. It is a rite of passage and absolutely essential if we are to heal individually, that heals us collectively and come back to living in harmony with what's happening within our body, our inner ecology, which has repercussions on our relationship with our earth, our home, our second home, bodies our first home, earth's our second home, too. So if we really, really genuinely are interested in having a better relationship with the earth, then we need a better relationship with ourselves, our parts, our body, the very functionality, the day-to-day stuff that happens as we live with a womb. So yeah, wow. Yes, I could talk about this all day. All right, so I do hope you enjoyed that. I would love to hear how that landed. Um, I'm keeping this quite short and sweet because there's so much more to it. I am putting together an audio course and a lovely workbook so that you can download it and go at your own pace. That's another thing. That's another thing that gets restored as we connect with the maiden and go at our own pace because a lot of experien of experiences with first periods have been feeling rushed. Going from being a girl, maybe playing with dolls one day to the next day, blood, uh sanitary towels as they used to be called, these big hunky things, and yeah, having to deal with uh this blood that you know, and this cycle that we don't know what we're doing. It'd be very, very upsetting. So, yeah, I hope this podcast. Has really ignited uh the maiden power within, and that it's inspired you to investigate further and to imagine a world where every girl felt welcomed in the world right from the first blood, felt valued, honored, educated about their cyclical nature, educated on their ability to birth consciousness and babies, and it's their choice, and really some solid guidance on using intuition, on utilizing emotions to guide life decisions. Right then, I'll leave you with that one. It can produce real, real, solid change. I'm very, very passionate about this. All right, sending you lots of love wherever you are. Hope you enjoyed this, and I will see you next time.