BY: SYDNEY MCINNIS
It’s time to get your hands on a lunar calendar. Learn about the moon’s phases. Familiarize yourself with your organic cadences. Let the two cycles live symbiotically.
The moon has always been a symbol for the energy of a woman. Simply, both cycles last for 28 days and a woman’s menstrual cycle can be divvied up into clear phases just like those of the moon. It’s believed that the first calendars were based on women’s charts that they were making of their period cycles and the connection to the cycles of the moon. The first-ever calendar was based on the moon, but when general religious beliefs started shifting, we began to pay closer, more scientific attention to the sun and developed the calendar that we follow today.
Each moon phase has a name and an astrological meaning that goes along with it: the New Moon, the First Quarter Moon, the Gibbous Moon, the Full Moon, the Disseminating Moon, the Third Quarter Moon and the Balsamic Moon. You can look up the phases on Google or you can observe them for yourself – just by taking a peek up at the beautiful sky every night.
Women all over the world jumped for joy when they were granted the access to birth control pills to regulate our periods and potential for pregnancy. Now, 50 years into filling our bodies with synthetic hormones, it has become known that regulating your cycle with these hormones is not beneficial to your health. In fact, the pill comes with a myriad of risks and side effects.
According to Inga Muscio, the amazing author of the female liberation book, Cunt, “If you are on hormonal birth control products, you cannot educate yourself about your body because your body is not under your own Goddess-given jurisdiction.”
When you take birth control, your monthly natural cycle is interrupted by an illogical, big ol’ dosage of estrogen, which makes your body freak out and think, “Oh! I’m pregnant! Now I don’t need to ovulate. Yay.” Then it repeats.
Lining your cycle up with the rhythms of the moon means nothing needs to pass through your body except for newfound knowledge and lunar energy, if you believe in that stuff. Yet, you’re still able to monitor when you’ll be bleeding, when you’ll be ovulating, etc. This knowledge can be used as a weapon similar to that of the birth control pill or other forms of synthetic hormones that do the same jive. If the moon can tell you when you’re ovulating, then you know almost exactly when it’s possible for your egg to get fertilized.
Of course, the aligning process won’t be immediate. In Cunt, Inga outlines her experience of getting friendly with the lunar phases and emphasizes that patience is indeed a virtue. For years, her period caused her excruciating pain that she tried to keep at bay by abusing ibuprofen. After learning about the “psychic history with all the women who’ve ever bled on this planet” and the moon, she snagged a lunar calendar and started to pay attention to and mark down what the moon looked liked when she started to bleed. Eventually, she experienced the period peace that all ladies are searching for.
“I quit taking ibuprofen. My period mellowed out even more. For the first time in my life, I actually enjoyed bleeding. I gauged myself with the movements and rhythms of the moon. I still got cramps, but I didn’t faint or puke at all,” Inga stated. It’s amazing to think that eliminating something that disrupts the natural waves of the body can make you love your body in a whole new way.
There is so much beauty in being connected with a force that has always meant so much to the earth – and that isn’t just hippie shit. Women need to start commanding their own bodies. Women need to stop resenting their periods.
The simple action of loving that big guy in the sky can resolve so much body confusion and give you peace and love for a thing that has probably caused you trouble your entire life. So do it – stop being afraid and love that body of yours!
