By Nikki Berridge
Learning about the Menstrual Cycle shouldn’t just be merely a short biology lesson in school, with no relation back to actually how it impacts your experience. Every single day-from menarche to menopause and beyond, it will impact your life.
Neither should it be merely be when you want to get pregnant, or when you do not want to get pregnant.
Nor should it only be explored only when faced with related health issues, or painful physical or emotional symptoms you cannot ignore.
It's so much more than that. And to negate this possibility is to live with tunnel vision, it is to see one object on the horizon rather than the beautiful expansive 360 degree panoramic view. It should be your axis, your self care Guru and impact how and when you show up in the world.
Engaging with our Menstrual Cycle is a huge tool for self awareness, growth and clarity. Through self ownership, bringing all it is to be a “Cycling Woman” is to empower oneself so that the cultural narrative doesn’t dictate who or how you should be in the world. You create a new narrative that makes sense to you. That treats you as important and valuable (be it small) and just as important as developing Our collective worldview.
We all need to take responsibility to stride out by loosening the reins of old and outdated ways of being a woman, with authenticity and a deep inward reflection. For millennia these have suppressed and bound our true authority in which to live our lives.
Why has it been suppressed, unshared, tabooed, shunned into the shadows? Why has it not been accessible, and integrated as the essential norm of basic Knowledge for so long?
Perhaps the empowered, free of control Woman is a threat?
Perhaps we are the perfect medicine the world needs so desperately right now.
This Biological process lives and moves within us daily, and the dance of hormones affects our psychological, emotional and physical states.
And just perhaps with the rise in Period Tracking Apps recently, we are carving out a new curiosity for the potential of Menstrual Awareness to inform us. We want it to be our greatest ally.
How does it personally navigate us directly in everyday life?
This is the story we at Howami invite you all to begin writing.
Awareness and understanding Menstruality is a Catalyst for great change in the world.
Growing and supporting a new generation of women who don’t label Intuition or Emotional extremes as weakness. To really Feel is perhaps what the world is in most desperate need of. We can care to make better decisions about our interdependent human existence on the planet, how we live with (not on) this planet.
It’s BIG.
Imagine if we could nurture young girls to bring their full selves up and out, and unashamedly speak up and out against injustice, and starting to make sustained radical change in the world; be it political, community growth, and of course the relationship to our precious Earth that thru climate awareness is crying out for shifts in Human behaviour.
