Embrace your bleed for personal recovery and collective revolution.
Blood Rites, Cyclical Consciousness, and How To Work With Menstruation For Regenerative, Sustainable Activism...
If you have a menstrual cycle, you’re going to be a vastly different person when you’re bleeding, than you are when you’re ovulating.
You’re going to radically change energetically, emotionally, and physiologically too.
Giving yourself permission to lean into these changes will be enormously supportive in your decolonising practice, as well as your work for the movement for our shared liberation.
The world we live in is wholly incompatible with the cycles of Nature, both as they move within us, and as they are mirrored outside of us.
We’ve all been indoctrinated into a linear-focused, forward-momentum based way of living that assumes being cis and male (and obsessed with constant productivity and acquisition) is the only valid way to be.
For people with menstrual cycles, this is not only physically and emotionally damaging, it’s also robbing us of one of our most valuable teachers and allies in our decolonisation and liberation-centric work.
I’ve said many times that our cycles are the map to our recovery and to our specific roles in the revolution (in fact I’ve built out a whole body of work that lays this out for you - click here for more info on that), and learning to integrate our activism and anti-colonial self-inquiry with our cycles will radically transform our relationship to both.
Cyclical Consciousness and Revolution Work…
When we hold ourselves to colonial capitalist standards of so-called “consistency” - meaning we force ourselves to show up in exactly the same way day in and day out, regardless of how our bodies are responding (y’know, like a machine would do), we unknowingly perpetuate the very ideals we’re seeking to disrupt.
One of the foundational pillars of colonial capitalism is a total disregard for Nature as an entity in and of itself - only relating to it through a lens of extraction, exploitation, and “what can I GET from this”.
We too are Nature.
Our bodies too are Nature.
Our cycles, particularly, are often our strongest connection to Nature.
When we actively ignore them, override them, disregard them, or shame them - particularly when we’re doing all that for the purposes of “efficiency” or “productivity” - we are unintentionally relating to our bodies with the same extractive exploitation that colonial capitalism employs in its relationship to Nature.
This is particularly prevalent in our relationship to our bleed.
When we bleed, we are physiologically at our lowest point, energetically. For the first three days of a new menstrual cycle in particular, our bodies are vulnerable, primal, tender, and slow.
Everything’s turned all the way down for those three days.
Our bodies aren’t producing any oestrogen, or progesterone, or testosterone. They’re also at their lowest point of dopamine receptivity. Digestion moves slowly, and even our cognitive aptitude takes a dive during this time.
We are deeply somatic creatures, particularly during that little window.
Our primal instincts are sharper, our access to Void is clearer, and our ability to meet the truth of things is amped all the way up (with no energy to get up and get shit done and very low dopamine to let our brains run around in dizzying circles - we have very few distractions from the truth of ourselves here.)
In short, a menstruating person fully embodying and embracing their experience of bleeding represents basically everything colonial capitalist patriarchy indoctrinates us into fearing, shaming, loathing.
When we don’t honour the descent our bleed represents, we’re doing colonial patriarchy’s work for it.
We’re perpetuating the same dismissal of dignity against ourselves that we’re attempting to dismantle in the wider world.
This is not to say that a bleeding body and mind is “useless”. Absolutely not. It’s passive, yes. Much more internally focused, sure. Much slower, more primal, more body-focused, less logical-mind-oriented, more reflective. Only inside a paradigm where the only worthwhile way to be is constantly in motion and relentlessly producing would this be called “useless”.
Because of the physiological nature of our bleeding phase, it represents a precious invitation for us to courageously meet the Fullness of ourselves.
Bleeding is when our internalised colonial shadows can be fully met. We have nowhere to run, no distractions to take us away.
We have the opportunity while we’re bleeding to gain so much intimacy into our fundamental beliefs about who and why we are, and to interrupt any colonial capitalist patriarchal conditioning that snuck its way in there without our consent.
We can use our bleed to intentionally release them into the Void we’re hanging out in there. This way, when our new cycle begins again in full force, we are somewhat “reborn”.
Working with your menstrual phase for revolution purposes: practices and frameworks…
A note here before we begin: if you don’t have a menstrual cycle, or if you’re not cycling regularly right now for literally any reason, all of the poetry and mythic transmission of menstruation is mirrored precisely in the New Moon.
Whether or not you bleed, cyclical void work is for you.
1. INTERRUPT AND FULLY DIVEST FROM INHERITED SHAME.
This is step zero.
Notice yourself reacting to your bleeding body with disgust, or disapproval, or a desire to “fix” or “change” it in some way, or exasperation, or basically anything that isn’t radical open-hearted delight and approval… and interrupt those thoughts.
Remember that our bleeding phase is a primal and somatic metaphor for everything that white supremacist colonial capitalist patriarchy teaches us to hate in ourselves and in the wider world.
Remember that by agreeing to hate your bleeding self, you are doing colonial capitalist patriarchy’s work for it.
This might be tricky at first. That’s okay. We’re interrupting not just a lifetime of indoctrination but also thousands of years of dogma and conditioning.
If bringing love and radical delighted approval to your bleeding self feels like a stretch too far, start with simply bringing awareness to the shame or dissatisfaction around this version of you.
Often, that shame and dissatisfaction will be running in the background, feeding your self-concept and your understanding of the world.
(When it’s running in the background, or the unconscious, we have no agency over it. Simply making it conscious and giving it words - rather than just letting it be vibes in the fabric of your mind, is an enormously radical step to take.)
After a few cycles of making the shame and dissatisfaction conscious, you’ll start to feel yourself organically rewriting those beliefs.
2. Consciously attune yourself to the pace of Nature.
Your bleed is a beautiful time to disentangle yourself from patriarchy’s frenzied pace.
Our world is in a constant flurry of more more more more profit and productivity and momentum. It’s killing us. I mean that very literally.
Take time during your bleed to breathe into the womb, feel the dark softness of Void there, feel the organic pace of Nature.
Breathe down from your womb space, down past your tailbone, into the land beneath you.
Let yourself really feel the vast majesty of the land, the immutable pace of the many interwoven cycles of the earth. Let your body remember the power and the gravity of those cycles, until the frenzied falsely urgent pace of colonial capitalist society seems not only transparently unnatural and wrong… but also nonsensical.
Breathe into stillness and receptivity. Feel your body guiding you through the process of disrupting the addiction to action and constant productivity.
Your cycle is already organically at odds with colonial capitalist patriarchy. It’s already disentangled from it. All we need to do is attune ourselves to what our bodies are organically doing anyway, and pay attention.
3. Turn towards Death, Darkness, Void.
As we already know, our menstrual phase is a time of deep physiological stillness.
We are neurologically and hormonally a bit of a blank space during this time.
In fact, trying to push past that neurological and physiological imperative while we bleed tends to make us sick. Forcing ourselves into extroversion, productivity, mental rigour, hustle… it will be much, much more exhausting on our systems while we’re bleeding than during any other time in our cycles.
We simply don’t have the dopamine or adrenaline necessary to carry out a whole bunch of executive function during the first couple days of our cycles.
Meaning that when we try, we often get very very anxious, exhausted, depressed, crampy, achy, and with a gnarly pain in our lower back to boot.
Our bodies crave stillness and receptivity while we bleed.
This is the time for us to be sinking down into the truth of ourselves.
This is the time to guide yourself through the process of letting your colonised ego be dissolved into the Void that’s so present here.
Your body already wants to. All you have to do is attune yourself to it.
When you’re bleeding, let yourself let go.
Let go of your name, of your personality. Let go of the ambitions you have for your life (in all likelihood, a bunch of them were prescribed to you by the paradigm we live in anyway). Let go of your need to prove yourself, of your desire to shine, of your role in your own life. Let go of anything you feel like you want and need. Feel yourself sinking into the vast collective ecosystem that is existence. No “I” here. No individualism at all. Feel yourself becoming inseparable from the world around you.
When it’s all gone, and you’re sitting with just you and you, with no distractions left to run around into… meet yourself.
Notice who you are in this dark, blank space.
What’s important to you here?
What’s sacred?
What feels true?
What were you holding onto that now seems silly?
What were you believing about yourself or the world that you now see was always just colonial capitalist dogma?
What myths or frameworks of understanding simply don’t make sense anymore, now that you’re here in the voidy Dark?
This cyclical invitation into the Truth of ourselves is FUCKING CRUCIAL.
I urge you to accept your body’s invitation into stillness on a monthly basis.
This way, you’re able to step into the movement for all our liberation from colonial capitalist patriarchy from a place of GROUNDED TRUTH.
You are decolonising, not just in your efforts to build a world worth living in, but also in your very understanding of who and why you are.
Taking yourself into the Dark with your bleed once a month is how we make sure that our most closely cherished beliefs and values match up with the outward-focused activism we’re doing.
It’s how we stay in integrity.
It’s how we come into Right Relationship with ourselves, with the land we live on, with each other.
It’s how we continue to show up to the revolution from a place of unshakable congruence.
How fucking cool is it that our bodies call us into this work every month.