Tag Archives: blood rites

The Sacred Wound of Childbirth is a Time Travel Machine

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My eldest child just turned 17. Born during Pride weekend, and via emergency C-section, this kiddo who made me a mother also initiated me into a new life and path as a woman, therapist, and mystic in general.

I had other plans with how they would come into the world. I had really wanted a home birth and thought i did everything i could to manifest it. It was this birth that taught me how little i was in control of this process, even if it was via my body. My body became the vessel and portal for my child to emerge. I spoke about it in a very early journal article here, if you want more of a summary of the birth story.

Little did i know then that my newborn babe, whose birth was supported by medical intervention and surgery, would also rely on modern medicine to become more of themselves years later. If being born on Pride Sunday (while the medical team shared their Pride festivities’ plans no less) was an oracular hint at all, it comes to no surprise that my kiddo is once again relying on medicine to become fully herself. They also like to be on time and have a singular focus, coming home to themselves as the Cancer Sun they are.

It all makes so much more sense now.

In my studies about menstrual rites of passage called Blood Rites, i have learned from Jane Hardwicke Collings that how we are born sets the stage for how we move through the world and how we make decisions. When we are initiated by menarche, it creates a blueprint for how we care for ourselves and listen to our body’s wisdom. Our first sexual experiences pave the way for how we view sex and our own pleasure. Each blood rite is a stage of the spiral called life and sets the stage for the next iteration.

Our Blood Rites:
1) Birth is the model of who we become
Be it a home birth, free birth, supported by midwives or a c-section, they all are an initiatory portal that paves the way
2) Menarche
We know that our menstrual cycle is a vital sign for our overall health. But did you know that how it is received and honoured is also a key part of the iniation?
3) Sexual awakening and Eventual Union
Initiation of sexual experience is our sex code. For instance, even in a consensual experience, did we learn to centre his pleasure. This can have a hold on our embodiment of love moving forward.
4) Conception and Birth
The conception and birth of our own children also play a role in our story, namely how we experience postpartum connects to our own birth story as we as sets the course for our child’s journey through life.
5)Menopause
The way in which we navigate menopause is a testament to our earlier blood rites. It is also a reflection of the trauma we may have endured earlier in our life and did not heal.

No pressure. And also, thank-you for this map that was unfolding all along. The linear path of life we were taught never made sense to me. I’m so grateful for the reframe of a spiral instead. It was hidden in plain site but needed me to unseen the lies that were repeated until they felt like truth. In her informative article called From Womb to Tomb, Jasmine Alicia Carter unpacks these stages more.

I like this reframe from a popular book – “the body keeps the lore.” It’s not just that the body holds memories or keeps the score of what happened, but also our body is the site of our own mytho-poetic saga.

I shared recently the story of Vasalisa and Baba Yaga. In that folktale, we see how Vasalisa has to learn to trust herself in order to be fully initiated by the rite of passage of becoming her Self. Maybe Baba Yaga was a real human. Maybe she was the dark psyche of Vasalisa. Maybe her doll truly was magical. Maybe it was her own self-sufficientness that she didn’t know she had.

In the birth portal, we can look at the story of Inanna, and the gates she goes through in order to strip down and become whole unto herself. In Pam England’s body of work, Birthing from Within, we pull from Inanna’s lore to understand the process of becoming a mother. Those of us that birthed our child via Cesarean can also relate to this story.

The C-Section that birthed your child into being is no different than the seven gates Inanna had to cross in order to become her full self. Receiving a Cesarean is major abdominal surgery that cuts through seven layers of skin. The initiation our body experiences mirrors the descent into the cave.

The process takes us through a journey that requires a descent through the darkness, and then emerging on the other side of it a mother. I can’t help but notice the similarity to Inanna’s journey through the seven gates of descent as she went to meet her sister in the underworld. She had to sacrifice herself, her body, and die in order to be reborn even stronger. Maybe I’m reaching, but a C-section is a major abdominal surgery that cuts through seven layers of skin.

Maybe I’m reaching but the stages of healing include the states of mourning – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance; as the body heals in stages, so does this practice of acceptance. It can take time to heal from each stage and level of scarring. Being in relationship with the scar is part of the growth and healing and takes time.

Maybe I’m reaching, but I can’t help but notice that this is a very similar experience to our own rite of passage journey. Not in the surgery itself, but in the reclamation that we too give birth to new life – ourselves and our child – even if we have a C-section. Most importantly, we also need to entrust our care to others as we just had major surgery. We need the support of others to feed and nourish us, tend to our wounds, warm our bodies, and do the work that is needed so that we can rest and heal. The wound that is the site of our child’s birth needs to become a scar that heals, in order for us to become whole.

Becoming a mother is an initiation. Pregnancy is the separation from our old self and so is a threshold. Birth is the transition threshold that offers a portal that we push our baby into the world, and therefore our new identity. Postpartum is the becoming of what has emerged, and so our adjustment time becomes the integration. It is the initiation that comes with the invitation to expand.

Similar to the chrysalis that hosts the goo that becomes a butterfly, we are the vessel of our child’s emergence. It is one thing to emerge, and another thing all together to become. That is a process that takes time. This is why having a ceremony on the other side can be really empowering, like Closing the Bones or a women’s circle.

Marion Woodman shares in her pivotal book The Pregnant Virgin that how you are born predicts your way of making decisions. I was born via c-section and so was my eldest daughter. According to this theory, that means we actively avoid conflict. I had to admit it, but there is some truth to this for me. The original conflict is the push to come into the world. Not that surgically assisted birth is simple, but the coming into the world at that exact moment can be more easeful.

“In the womb, we marinate in the energy that becomes the foundation of our beginnings, our sense of self.” ~ Iyanla Vanzant

Raising our own children now has a way of playing a game with time. It brings back our own childhood in the present as parts of us become activated. Is my melancholy or loneliness related to my mother? Is our PMS a trait or an example of luteal rage? Am I repeating an inherited intergenerational trauma trait?

I’ve come to believe that we are born at a time when what we have to offer the world is what is needed. Or maybe it’s the healing that my line needed and wasn’t able to do before me. I believe that we are here now for a reason. What I’m learning and unlearning for myself and others is part of the alchemy that needs to happen for change to be manifested. This is especially true for those of us who have children in our lives (in whatever way) because they are the change that we need to keep this momentum going.

“The perinatal portal establishes a spiritual, psychological, and energetic connection from Mom’s present to her implicit, embodied past.” Jessica Tomich Sorci and Rebecca Geshuri, When Good Moms Feel Bad. Our early attachments add to our blueprint and this blueprint maps out the details of our attachment wounds and sense of belong. We know that anything that doesn’t get processed or healed in our childhood can materialize again when our children are the same age we were when we were hurt.

Maybe our children are not our legacy, but our initiation to live more fully and mindfully so that we can step into our purpose. That may be motherhood and it may not. Having discernment is what allows us to trust what is our calling. Otherwise we martyr ourselves and call motherhood our service.

“All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries when she is a four-month old fetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent 5 months in our grandmother’s womb, and she in turn formed within the womb of her grandmother. We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother’s blood before she herself is born.“ ~ Layne Redmound, When the Women Were Drummers

We also now know that egg that formed us was first created in our grandmother’s womb. It might sound witchy, and while it is just that, it is also scientific. Think of your own maternal grandmother. Do you know her story? When was she born, where was she born? It might play a role in your own story as it is all connected.

So it’s not just how we were born and lived our life, but also how our mothers experience it is a model for us. If your mother didn’t know to embrace postpartum (or menopause) or resented it or didn’t understand it, this is something to intentionally unpack and of course correct now in your own timeline.

Take a moment and think back to your own birth. Do you know the story? How did your mother experience it and the early postpartum period?

The care a woman receives in the first 40 days after birth shapes the next 40 years of her and her child’s life. It’s no wonder that there has been a re-awakening towards the care we receive after becoming parents. It is not in fact enough to focus on the newborn’s needs. Newborn parents also need care and support as they too are being born into this new identity.

Birth is the catalyst of transformation. It is not just how we give birth. It is a rebirth of ourselves in this new identity.

All births are a Rite of Passage. We become something new, birthing a new reality into being. How it happens does not matter as much as the fact that it happened. The initiation that is becoming a mother and parent needs the transition stage of birthing a new being into life.

“Becoming a mother leaves no woman as it found her. It unravels and rebuilds her. It cracks her open, takes her to her edges. It’s both beautiful and brutal, often at the same time.” ~ Nikki McCahon

This means we need to be intentional about stepping into being who you have never been before. A mother is becoming something new so we need community, and being seen, as well as resources, rituals and ceremony.

Birthing your baby is the part we focus on, and yet birthing yourself into this new identity of motherhood is an initiation of a lifetime. To be a mother is not just a role but a sacred spiritual transformation and responsibility. To be entrusted with creating new life for this world is no small task and deserves more reverence and respect. The physical, emotional, spiritual and mental healing process that comes after the surgery are a part of our ascent. We need to be held and deserved to be witnessed in this process.

Birth is not just a moment. It’s the ongoing initiation that leads to transformation. Becoming a mother is a sacrifice of who we were and becomes a portal to something new that’s being born, and it not just our child.

The Veil of Perimenopause

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October hosts a number of key dates, namely World Mental Health Day on October 10, and World Menopause Day on October 18. For me, a feminist therapist who specializes in reproductive mental health, these two days could not be more fitting together, like two puzzle pieces that go together perfectly. The season of Autumn is also known as the Perimenopause Season for all that we are starting to shed, release, and let go of. To really saturate this analogy, perimenopause is also the equivalent to the Luteal stage in the monthly menstrual cycle. So, we are in the Luteal stage of this month as the moon phase is also luteal (the New Moon of October lands on the 21).

As we get closer to November, the veil is thinning between our world and the dearly departed. I find this time of year to be so resonant for me, and i can feel in my bones how it truly is the Season of the Witch. The veil between our present and past life is also thin, as a way to remind us that our whole life is a series of deaths and rebirths.

Take our monthly menstrual cycle as an example. Each month, or about 28 days, we go through a cycle of creation, fertility and also cyclical ending. New life comes from death, we are death doulas of our own body, offering life where an ending was shed.

Marion Woodman viewed menopause as another chrysalis period of transformation. The shift in hormones offers a new type of goo in the spiritual chrysalis so that we can accept the death of our old life by stepping through the threshold of a new one. This creation is a form of Alchemy: the transformation that comes with menopause.

We are our own personal duet of being a Death doula of old life at the same time as a new life midlife rebirth midwife.

“In that experience of being formed anew, I may often feel torn asunder; old aspects of my self-conception must die in order for my new transformation into selfhood to take place,” writes feminist professor Penelope Washburn. Much like the leaves, plants, and flowers, we too go through a death of our former Self at this time of year. I’m dancing under a Veil Of Knowing this more, that our life is an endless flow of unveilings. As the mystic Hazrat Inayat Khan shared in the early 1900s, “the soul is covered by a thousand veils.”

The veils i wear are connected to feminine mystique and the delicate balance between what is seen and cannot be seen. Autumn and its mirror season, Spring are known to be in balance because the scale of day and night is more even. And yet, as October itself is such a transitional month, it’s hard not to notice how much descent we go through from September to December.

“What if midlife isn’t the beginning of the end? What if it’s a call to adventure to shed even more conditioned layers, a journey to reveal an even more authentic self, the dawn of a new life from an even deeper place of—dare I say, wisdom?” ~ Valerie Rein

Midlife Awakening of the Mature Conscious Woman
I am stepping into my Queen Era, my Virgin time, and my Magehood: NOT the acronym but the archetype of a woman in midlife who is whole onto herself. Marion Woodman coined this stage of initiating into the Conscious Woman as the “Virgin” – whole onto herself; The archetype of the Sovereign Woman, Queen, Mystic or Mage is fitting here. I also love to channel my inner Warrior or Wild Woman here as a way to get closer to the life i want for myself.

We are literally experiencing the end of something (our fertile years) and that also becomes a threshold of our becoming something new. We are meant to evolve and shift, change and grow. The fact that our monthly blood stops and we continue to be very much alive, is a testament to this new phase. Our blood remains for us, to nurture what our inner life is meant to birth, and not the caretaking we give others. This is not being taught in the bigger menopause discussions, where the focus is on the remedy for symptoms.
We are living longer and now have this 4th archetype. Our ageist society hates getting old, and has demonized women’s rage and anger, making menstruation a dirty word. Learning more about the possible blessing and definite spiritual transformation that is menopause has been inspiring and also a remembering for me. Learning from teachers like Jane Hardwicke Collings and the Red School’s Alexandra Pope and Sjanie Hugo Wurlitzer has provided with a stronger foundation as well as lens to see this stage of life. It is a portal to better and more, not a decline and slow death of invisibility.

For instance, i love how the reframed the 5 stages of menopause as capabilities that get born or developed at this time of life. Sure, our body does change drastically, but maybe the betrayal is not just our own body but also the story we have been taught about menopause. This propaganda and trope is to keep us distracted from the bigger truth – that our power comes with age. I share more on my instagram reel here. After we acknowledge this descent journey, we go through gates of repair, surrender and eventually emerge a a mature butterfly and Wise Woman Self. The book Wise Power unpacks this process beautifully.

We call midlife a crisis because we have been conditioned for so long to follow along, be productive and traditional. When we enter our virgin and queen era, it is a direct threat to patriarchy so we are taught it’s a crisis.

We (women and folks with wombs) are not in a crisis, they are (the patriarchy) because they are afraid of the veil being taken off. We are reclaiming our rightful place of rest and pleasure, of not dressing for the male gaze, of doing things with herbs and knowing what our bodies need. We are prioritizing our own sovereignty and not the caretaking role we have been placed in.

Blood Rites
Let’s recognize the midlife transition as an initiation. Of the power and magnitude I had not experienced before. It is the 40s decade that we come into our own, and also integrate the soul seed that has been dormant for many of us. This could not be more true for me.

“Initiation is a rite of passage, a crossing over, a movement between two worlds. For women on a journey such as this one, initiation is the Great Transition,” writes Sue Monk Kidd in her book The Dance of the Dissident Daughter. She goes on to share that “Initiation is a sacred disintegration. Despite its pain, we carry the conviction (often only faintly) that even though we don’t know where we’ll end up, we’re following a soul-path of immense richness, that we’re supposed to be on this path, that it’s required of us somehow. We move in a sense of rightness, of lure, of following a flute that pipes irresistible music.” Sue Monk Kidd

If you’re feeling stuck with your life and you need an update, start with yourself first and what is in your control for instance it might be a hobby or our class or a way that you take care of your body and health. Ask yourself what lights you up! And then move out from there maybe your job needs to change, or maybe your friendships need an update or change. When you start to notice that maybe your partner might also be inspired in that interdependence could be a catalyst for them to change and evolve as well. If they don’t, it might mean that it’s time to sit with that hard question around this relationship you have with them. Is it still serving you and aligned with your life?

Maybe it’s time to take the mask of comfort and familiarity off. In order to find what you want you have to know what you are. You need to take off the mask of fitting in, of the uninitiated.

“That ‘Mask Crack’ actually has to happen in your Midlife Passage. Carl Jung calls the first half of our life the Accommodation Phase. You accommodate others to please them, you accommodate to survive. The mask is the Persona. But by midlife – the Person, the truth of us, once buried, begins to rise, and demands its time in the light. Often after a lifetime of lies. I often say Midlife Women are like volcanoes, there comes a time when they must let the white hot lavic truth flow. Anything and everyone who holds them back from that truth, has to go.” ~ Sarah Durham Wilson.

So many of us are aching for more, a better, a more full life. Because that ache has not been fulfilled, we start to numb this pain and instead turn our focus outwards in order to not feel as hurt in our unmet needs. We start to over identify with the roles and labels of how we give to others so that we don’t feel the hurt and not also being on the receiving end.

We are not just cups or vessels, but the wellspring of flow and feminine energy. Our womb is in fact the site of all creation, a chalice that is meant to birth new life, ideas, and purpose into life.

My Body is My Home
My body is a safe home (haven) for my soul and sanctuary for my mind. My mind is my body, they are not separate. My body is a sacred vessel. When we reconnect with our bodies, especially their womb and menstrual cycle, it offers the gift of reclaiming our full life knowing more about our cycle and the various moves energies and helps us be more intentional and alive, and have a care for herself and live in this broken world.

It is time to come home to yourself. It is time to reclaim being in the body – Embodied. I am bodied.

A big reason i’m sharing my own dance with perimenopause so much is that i want body literacy and knowledge about our menstruality to be the norm for all women, and folks in general. It serves us all to carry this wisdom. This knowledge is not meant to be kept in the shadows or the fringe of our society.

For those of us born with wombs, a female reproductive system, and female physiology embodiment, it is still a challenge to trust what our body’s wisdom is. We live in a world designed for male bodies which is out of alignment with our female body’s natural rhythms, and how we as women are ultimately meant to thrive.

One of my teachers, Kimberley Ann Johnson lead us through a hands-on the pelvis class when i went to her in-person retreat. It was a reparative experience for me – to be touched by my peer and hold her bones as well. As a psychotherapist, it is not something i get to do. As a woman, it is very much what i want to do. As Kimberely shares, “when we hold each other’s bones, we call home and call forth whatever is in our pelvis, from all the thresholds we experience as women.”

Being initiated into motherhood was a catalysing moment for me. What radicalized me was learning about why my mother died (i shared more about this in my last journal article). What i now see in my full being is what is my soul’s calling – a shift in my work towards the blood rights. What is my service – body literacy, reproductive mental health in its fullness, and centreing blood rite ceremonies.

As i get closer to turning 50 in December, i can feel i’m entering late-stage perimenopause, the portal that shifts the goo of the chrysalis to the mature butterfly i’m becoming.