PMS and menstrual awareness as a conscious spiritual practice

Identifying the problem

My story with menstrual awareness as a conscious spiritual practice began in my twenties with a PMS diagnosis.

I had been experiencing two weeks of misery every month and I knew that I had to do something about it. The bloating, weeping, anger outbursts and constipation was one thing, but the increasing bouts of anxiety, paranoia, depression, acute self-criticism, self-loathing, discontentment with life and feeling uncomfortable in my own skin were another.

I loathed the menstrual cycle and the physical, emotional and mental discomfort that accompanied it. And while it was a relief when menstruation itself arrived and the inner pressure would ease, the bleeding was an inconvenience that needed to be managed, as life continued at its normal busy pace, working my way up the career ladder and playing competitive sport.

Eventually, the uncomfortable monthly feelings became so intense, I knew something needed to be done. I wasn’t sure exactly what could be changed as at the time I very much bought into the paradigm that we are the way we are and that is just our luck in life, but I was - thankfully - still open to options. This is often the case; it is not until our situation becomes critical that we begin to take responsibility.

Taking responsibility

Until that point, I had taken very little responsibility for my health and wellbeing, always looking to the doctor (as a god-figure on his/her pedestal) to give me a tablet to help manage any health concern. PMS is often misdiagnosed because doctors are more likely to look at the nature of symptoms rather than cause. It is no surprise perhaps that I was prescribed anti-depressants as an attempt to manage the depressive element of my monthly suffering.

However, I didn’t want to take anti-depressants. My short encounter with them previously had left me feeling woolly, so I was encouraged to find another way. My brief research led me to Carol Champion, a local nutritionist, who felt that I was experiencing PMS and was confident that she could help me. I was so relieved just to have a name to explain how I was feeling.  I was even more relieved when I read more widely on the subject, and realised that my hormonal imbalance was at the root of things.

It was Carol who also helped me to realise the value in taking responsibility and reaching out for holistic health. As she rightly said, people will spend more money on their car than they do on their own health and wellbeing. Certainly I have no qualms in paying for treatments and supplements/Ayurvedic medicine, which support my health and wellbeing and would much rather do this then pay the £65 or so to visit the doctor for 5-10 minutes to be given some pharma which treats only the symptoms.

While the healthier eating and supplements helped ease the symptoms of PMS, I kept overlooking the cyclical nature of what it means to be a woman, always trying to ‘fix’ the second half of my cycle to make it like the first half. I was ignorant to the fact that us women are not linear in nature. We are not supposed to feel the same all the time, that instead we need the yin and the yang, the ebb and the flow, the waning and the waxing, to feel whole.hy

Patriarchy

My whole life had been based on achievement, such is the nature of our patriarchal educational, cultural and societal framework. I always needed to achieve; either academically, in the work environment or on the netball and volleyball court. I was also a perfectionist, which didn’t help matters, because I would give myself a very hard time if I didn’t live up to my high ideals, which meant I was giving myself a hard time pretty much all of the time.

Being self-critical underpinned much of my life during this time. I was also very good at holding onto my emotions, to the extent that I didn’t express them, especially not in front of anyone else if I could avoid it. But these bottled up emotions expressed themselves through the menstrual cycle – that which we repress has to find a way to express. The menstrual cycle is a gift in many ways, not least because it allows us to release these pent up emotions (anger outbursts, weepiness, etc.) but because it also allows us to know more of our own truth in the process. But we have to pay attention and embrace it rather than reject it.

This was a significant perspective shift for me because I had not appreciated until then, the extent to which our conditioning, with its patriarchal underpinning and its emphasis on left brain logic and linear rationality, had caused me to live my life as if I was a man. I thought I had been living as an empowered woman, yet it became increasingly apparent to me that this was not the case.

While women’s true power comes from their intuitive, empathic and creative potential, I was using none of these facets. I was completely out of touch with my intuition, and although I might have considered myself empathic, the separation from my emotional body meant that I lacked a certain degree of compassion for myself and for others. I was also ignorant to my true creative potential, and while I longed to write, I did nothing about it, because it wasn’t part of the route to ‘success’ as it was sold to me at that time – as equaling financial gain.

Instead, I lived under the illusion of the empowered woman, but in reality I was a woman trying to make it in a man’s world, wearing suits and stepping increasingly into a rational and logical mind-set so that I could literally ‘make it’ like the men. I was continually trying to prove that my sex was in no way a limitation to me achieving success – that I could be as successful as the men, whatever that might mean. After all how do we evaluate success?

Well in this society success is judged on financial gain, the more money we appear to have, the more successful we are perceived by others. Of course this is ridiculous, many people might appear wealthy but live in constant debt, and at the end of the day, we all know that having money doesn’t equate to happiness. Sure, better to be rich and unhappy than poor and unhappy, but life is not just about money, albeit it is becoming increasingly the case as we settle more fully into this technological and scientific age. 

My attempts at ‘success’, as sold to me, came at a cost. My masculine/feminine energy was totally out of balance and my menstrual cycle and the various symptoms that accompanied it were highlighting this. My body showed it too in its athleticism and the manner in which I worked hard to keep fit and strengthen it, as if I was indeed a man. I saw weeping women as weak. Women needed to be strong, and to be strong, they needed to be like men. This is the illusion and I totally bought into it.

Embracing my menstrual cycle

As I woke up to my reality, it encouraged me to embrace my menstrual cycle, to use it as a form of spiritual practice and an opportunity for deeper healing. Inevitably, this took time. I slowly tried to let go of my conditioning around what it means to be a woman in these times, but also to begin to notice the subtleties of patriarchy and the impact this was having on the way I chose to live my life.

Women have been sold the story that to lead empowered lives, they need to have it all, the career, the children, the home, etc., but the reality is that they end up in a constant state of exhaustion, rushing around and feeling pressured into ‘being’ someone. There is another price to pay, not least to their health and vitality, but in their relationship with self.

There is a feeling of never being truly present to any one thing, rushing from children to business meetings, shopping to making dinner, play dates to time with partners, endless laundry to be done and packed lunches to be made, trying to squeeze in a yoga class or a swim, not even sure who they are anymore beyond all the various demands placed on them. The loss of sense of self is perhaps the greatest compromise in the quest to live an empowered life.

We should never underestimate the pain that arises from separation from self, from not knowing ourselves. We all come into this world as souls with a gift to share and a mission to complete, being in service to something greater than our ego self. But we forget this and get lost somewhere along the way, which takes us down a path that doesn’t always align with our deepest truth, leaving us feeling disconnected and alone, often in pain, which will show up in our lives in all sorts of ways.

With all the rushing to be someone other than who we truly are, many women have very little time to notice their menstrual cycle, beyond the pain and discomfort that it brings. Many who use certain contraceptive methods are numbed from their cycle completely. Some will be brought to it because they are trying to conceive, but even then, people often try all sorts of techniques to distance themselves from it, using allopathic and symptomatic approaches to healing, which do not necessarily get to the root cause of any imbalance and loss of wellbeing.

All the pain and tension, the anger and frustration, the discomfort and suffering, is a gift for women if they can turn to it rather than away from it. The body is constantly trying to get our attention, to make us aware of the parts of self that we reject and don’t want to look at. The gift comes in reclaiming those fragmented parts of self and allowing more of our beautiful wholeness, loving and accepting the self on a deeper level and embodying our potential in this lifetime.

Thus, rather than turning away from our physical, mental and emotional feelings, we might instead turn towards them and take ownership of them, be responsible for them, and allow ourselves the opportunity to heal and transform in the process.

Our conditioning

As mentioned earlier, this can take time though, because there are often layers to our conditioning and our denial. Like onions, we have to gently peel one layer after the other to access our core and come to know more of ourselves and our potential (this beyond the idea that potential means ‘success’ or monetary gain, instead, more about who we are in essence beyond ego demands) in the process.

I had a lot to learn, and in those earlier days, despite becoming more conscious of my menstrual cycle, I was still rejecting the part of it that I didn’t like, namely the second half of it, when I wouldn’t feel quite so chirpy as the first half. I was still trying to make myself consistent, to the extent that I was constantly trying to ‘fix’ it, without truly listening to it. I became obsessed about healthy eating for PMS, and had by then started practising yoga to also help, often to an extreme.

In fact, two years into ‘healing my PMS’ as I frequently called it, I spent five months in Australia training as a yoga teacher and practising up to six hours of yoga asana a day, while living on a fruit-only diet. This stemmed from my need for the ‘yoga body’ at that time, which again, played into my patterns of perfectionism and meeting ideals. As a result, my menstruation stopped altogether and I couldn’t have been happier. I had achieved what I had set out to achieve, in so much as I then felt the same every single day of the month; I didn’t experience PMS.

Self-criticism

But obviously this wasn’t healthy. Back home in Guernsey, hormone testing showed that my testosterone levels were much higher than they should have been and my progesterone was at an all-time low. I knew that one day I wanted children, so when scans showed I also now had cysts on my ovaries, I knew that I needed to dig deeper, allow more of my self and heal generally.

Herein lay another lesson; that our menstrual cycle and hormonal balance cannot be treated in isolation. We all contain seven main chakras, spinning wheels of energy, and each chakra underpins a hormonal gland. When we are attempting to heal ourselves hormonally, we need to be conscious of the underlying energy and the fact that what happens in one chakra will affect another, validating that a holistic approach to healing is required.

I was aware that my sacral chakra in particular was blocked, the home of the uterus, ovaries and reproductive glands, and that the majority of my chakras also needed some tender loving care, especially my heart and solar plexus. These chakras bore the brunt of my endless self-criticism, as if each time I criticised myself, I was stabbing my own heart and disempowering my solar plexus. I was a victim of my self-depreciating ego and I couldn’t hear the ever-loving voice of my soul.

Healing is not without its challenges. I had a lifetime of conditioning to let go of and this was challenging at times. The achievement and perfectionist aspect of myself, to say nothing of the self-critic, was a pattern that was so deeply ingrained that I wasn’t always aware how much it underpinned my decision-making, even in my attempts to be aware of it. Our thoughts can become such a part of us, that we don’t realise that they are essentially separate to us – that we are not our thoughts.

We are not our thoughts

However, we have become so used to identifying with our thoughts that we believe we are them. Just as we identify so much with our external achievements that we overlook our inner essence. We don’t always question how we are living our lives, because we are often living from a place of expectation, so ingrained in us that we don’t even question it. When someone asks us if we are truly happy, we might look at them blankly, “Happiness? I didn’t realise I have a choice!”, not appreciating that we have a choice about how we live our lives just as much as we have a choice about the thoughts we buy into.

It took me a long time to realise all this and it was menstrual awareness that helped considerably. As I explained earlier, our menstrual cycle is trying to get our attention for a reason. It highlights where we are out of balance with our essential truth, where we are holding on and where we are not listening to or expressing ourselves, soulfully and/or creatively. Ultimately, it reflects how we are living and our relationship to self – we can only put our head in the sand for so long before we have to pay attention.

Not feeling comfortable within my own skin those last two weeks of my cycle was indicative of my life at that time. I didn’t feel comfortable in my own skin because I was living a life that didn’t fit. I was working in a finance job I loathed and that didn’t allow any creative expression. I was in denial about an eating disorder, numbing out from my mental suffering with cannabis and wine and giving myself a very hard time about all of it, leaving me feeling depressed, anxious and full of self-hatred.

No fixing

As I paid attention to my menstrual cycle, my life changed and my relationship with myself improved. As this happened, the symptoms of PMS eased too. I became increasingly aware of the cyclical nature of the menstrual cycle and what it means to be a woman, and stopped trying to fix any part of it or indeed me. This is ‘fix’ both in terms of making myself better (because I recognised I was already whole) but also not being fixed in an opinion or perspective either, as this too is subject to change.

I felt as if I was awakening to a greater part of myself. I began questioning why women are told that they should take synthetic pills and potions to numb themselves from experiencing the wisdom of their menstrual cycle. I wondered about the extent of patriarchy and it’s attempt to limit women’s inherent power of intuition and empathy, which is extremely powerful during pre-menstruation and menstruation itself.

Many women take synthetic contraceptives through fear of conceiving when they are not ready to do so and because they have been sold the notion that it liberates them from the binds of the menstrual cycle with all its pain and discomfort. It’s also used as a form of pain relief from certain womb conditions. Yet it’s a paradox, because ultimately, it distances women from their natural cycle and from hearing their innate womb wisdom, which was likely the cause of the problem in the first place. Further, it also causes a decrease in sensation, sensual, orgasm or otherwise, and can also lead to fertility issues and a loss of wellbeing through certain cancers.

Shame of menstruation

I wondered why I had never been told any of this. The menstrual cycle is not talked about in school beyond reference to sanitary products. It’s not even talked about between friends. There is still so much shame accompanying menses and menstruation, as if it is something that can only be whispered about, and usually with negative connotations, rather than something to be celebrated. Many women don’t know how to be with it, how to listen to it, and how to rest, literally rest, into it.

When we take responsibility for our health and wellbeing, when we make a decision to take action in the direction of our wellbeing, then the universe and soul will draw to us experiences that will help us to learn more about ourselves. While we may label these experiences as ‘bad’ and ‘negative’, they may well come in to help us awaken to some aspect of self that has laid dormant, awaiting our awakening. Back then, I resented my menstrual cycle and PMS especially, but now I try to navigate my life by it, embracing the wisdom of my womb and honouring it.

I began paying attention to how I felt from one phase to another and learning which phase might be more aligned for various activities, for example, whether to be out in the world, or to rest and retreat instead, whether to write or to edit. In the process, I began to recognise more of my own truth by increasingly opening myself up to the insights and wisdom that various parts of the cycle brought with it. You can read more about this in my previous blog about the wisdom of the menstrual cycle.

The moon!

I also found myself connecting with the moon. I have always been drawn to the moon, but I didn’t know the reason for this. As my relationship with my menstrual cycle deepened, so too my relationship with the moon, and this continues to be an ongoing journey. There is a recognised connection between the menstrual cycle and the moon, because of the moon’s inherent feminine qualities, and women’s cycles will attune with the moon if we also begin to work with the moon’s energies.

In many cultures, the menstrual cycle is viewed as sacred and it has been seeing a revolution here in the western world. There is now increased menstrual awareness, with more women talking about it and an influx of women’s circles like the Red Tent movement, where women are encouraged to come together and talk about menstruation, celebrate it and all that the cycle can reveal to them.

It works two ways. Menstrual awareness took me to the moon, but the more I connected with the moon, the more I allowed the ebb and flow of my menstrual cycle and the inner journey this took me on to reclaim those denied aspects of self. Now I embrace the full range of emotions that I might feel during my cycle, the last two weeks especially, in an effort to better understand and absolutely allow them instead. This has been key.

I now know that the latter stages of the cycle can be extremely transformative, bringing insight and wisdom about our repressions and imbalance not only in the way we are living our life, but in our relationship to self – whether we are in our flow, allowing our the creative expression of the deep feminine, or resisting this and giving away or denying our power in the process.

Letting go of the rational brain

The problem for many is that the menstrual cycle does not speak the same language as the rational brain. The information that flows to us through the menstrual cycle is reflective and intuitive, arriving through emotions, dreams and insights gained from each. It comes from a source of darkness to enlighten us. We may not have been taught how to access this language, we have to learn this all by ourselves, which means getting our rational brain out of the way. For many, this is a stumbling block.

That which we ignore, the intuitive nudges and guidance available to us during the second half of our cycle, will have no choice but to keep attempting to get our attention. Whether it’s through PMS, menopausal tension or perceived lunacy, if ignored, in the same way as bodily symptoms, will often result in illness. The body is constantly trying to communicate to us, and if we wish to avoid illness and dis-ease, then we would do well to listen; the menstrual cycle is no different.

Free menstrual cycle and moon cycle practices

For more information on the menstrual cycle and the moon cycle and how you might work with both, please have a look at my FREE online course, here , which includes access to free yoga, mediation and relaxation practices to help you deepen your relationship with yourself and your cycle and the moon and her cycle too.

The benefits of Yoni Yoga

I can also highly recommend attending my drop-in Yoni Yoga classes on a Tuesday evening in St Martin’s Community Centre (upstairs) which incorporate and weave together a variety of Tantric practices to help heal and increase awareness of the sacral and heart chakras especially, but the other chakras too, as one cannot be treated in isolation.

Lots of women have experienced trauma in their sacral chakras whether that be from birth, sex, menstruation, rejection, abandonment, difficult relationships with mothers especially, and our inherent lack of love for self.

Our hearts too are often overlooked as we increasingly live from our heads as we have been taught. We can spend our whole lives then, living a life that is not bringing use any joy, until we take responsibility, take back our power and do something to heal and make positive changes in our lives. Certainly yoni yoga has helped me enormously over the years to free trauma and learn to love and accept myself as I am.

Often all we need is the time and space to be with ourselves in a loving and compassionate way, encouraging an inward reflection (eyes are generally closed) and an opportunity for much needed proper rest.

Reiki too for healing and flourishing

I hope this helps - do get in touch if you need more help as Reiki is also amazing at helping to get to the root cause of our loss of wellness, such as PMS etc. We can go deep into your body and release repressed emotions and the held effect of traumatic experiences. For me this has also been life changing, and you can read more about this in my books, Dancing with the Moon, about my journey with IVF, and From Darkness Comes Light, about my journey with depression. Go here to learn more about Reiki/to book.

Ayurveda

Ayurveda is a holistic approach to healing, which focuses on the root cause of any loss of wellbeing rather than merely treating the symptoms. Originating in India thousands of years ago, the word Ayurveda is made from two Sanskrit roots ‘Ayu’ which mean life and ‘Veda’ which means knowledge. Therefore, the term Ayurveda means the knowledge or science of life.

Ayurveda uses a combination of diet, herbal medicine and lifestyle choices to promote wholeness and vitality. This has helped me enormously with healing PMS. Please go here for more information and to book.

It’s definitely your birth right to flourish.

Love Emma x