Dec 30, 2006 19:24
This is the best article I have ever read about menstruation! Ladies read this one (guys too I guess haha) it is a great reminder of what your period really is and how you should treat yourself when it comes!
Women have between 350 and 500 periods in a lifetime. If your monthly period is five days long, each year you spend 60 days menstruating. You spend one or more years out of every ten years of your life bleeding. If you bleed from the time you are twelve years old until 52 years of age, you can spend four to five years or more of your life shedding menstrual blood!
Menstruation is a sign of good health. Sometimes that is hard to believe when there are over one hundred different symptoms that are associated with PMS. Prior to and during menstruation, more than 70% of American women experience PMS symptoms at some time in their life. The medical research around PMS is inconclusive. Every woman is different and there is no decisive medical etiology of why women have PMS. There is not an agreed upon cause, treatment or theory and the standard medical approach of cause and cure is not working for women.
Nature did not create the menstrual cycle to be a sickness. The menstrual cycle is the nurturer and giver of life. Without menstruation there would be no human life. It was not meant to be riddled with suffering and trouble. There are many cultures where women don't experience the PMS symptoms that we do. Why then does our menstrual cycle cause us so much pain?
Menstruation has an inward and downward movement in the body. In a society obsessed with productivity and output, it can be difficult to honor and support the inward energetic nature of menstruation. I feel the PMS epidemic is the collective voice of the feminine speaking and trying to tell us something.
Each month the cycle of life waxes and wanes through the female physiology. Women are biological creatures and the menstrual cycle is related to other biological cycles such as the moon cycle, the ebb and flow of the tides and the seasons of the year. Menstruation is an embodied dance of life cycles that reminds us of our humanness and our connection to the cycles of the planet on which we live. We can cultivate our cycles as a gift that can help keep us in balance or we can shame it, drug it and try to ignore it.
The current primary practice in relation to menstruation is to plow through it as if nothing is happening. The changing rhythm of our body cycle is not reflected anywhere in the calendar or work schedule. Menstruation is a built in cycle that provides us with the opportunity to restore and rejuvenate each month. It is a time when the female body releases, regenerates and heals. Menstruation is a natural part of our cycle that can take us into the regenerative and contemplative aspects of the feminine.
U.S. statistics show that more than 60% of American women are sleep deprived. With the epidemic of chronic fatigue and exhaustion related illness, many women find that some of the problems around menstruation are the body letting them know that it would like to have a little down time during this monthly time of releasing and letting go. All cycles have a waning and waxing rhythm. When we are just constantly on the go, we forget that optimum health requires that we have time to rest and restore. The menstrual cycle is the perfect guide to help us find balance in our lives of over commitment and consumption. Let menstruation be a resource to help you move from the yang experience of outward expression and achievement to the yin experience of going inside and listening to the deep recesses of your soul. The menstrual cycle teaches us about harmony between yin and yang, dark and light, activity and rest.
There are many herbal remedies that can help a woman to work with instead of fight against the constantly changing rhythm of her body. Each month when you begin menstruation, take an herbal bath or footbath to mark the transition into the more yin part of your cycle. Take a little more rest time and drink a nourishing herbal tea or take an herbal tincture to support your menstrual time.
If you want any of these remidies let me know, I'll send you a link or post them!