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- Create a menstrual altar. Set up a special space in your home where you can honor and celebrate your menstrual cycle. This can include candles, crystals, or other objects that hold personal significance.
- Practice menstrual self-care. Self-care rituals tend to involve taking time to care for yourself during your period. This may look like taking a relaxing ritual bath with essential oils, practicing some gentle yin yoga or meditation, or simply taking some time to rest and reflect.
- Free bleed. Free bleeding is a practice where a woman chooses not to use any menstrual products, and instead allows her menstrual blood to flow freely and uncontained.
- Give your blood back to the earth. There’s an ancient Hopi prophecy that goes: “When the women give their blood back to the earth, men will come home from war, and Earth shall find peace.”
Jul 25, 2020 · In this chapter, I explore both historical and contemporary structures that undergird menstrual stereotypes and taboos. In the first section, I chart some religious foundations underlying widespread notions that menstruating women cause suffering both to themselves and others.
- Alma Gottlieb
- 2020/07/25
- 10.1007/978-981-15-0614-7_14
Embrace and honour your menstrual cycle with rituals that connect you to the divine feminine, fostering reflection, healing, and empowerment.
- How Different Cultures Honor & Celebrate Periods
- Ojibwe People: Isolation in A Moon Lodge
- Ambubachi Mela: A Four-Day Celebration For A Goddess’ Menstrual Cycle
- Filipino Superstition: Wiping Period Blood on Your Face to Prevent Breakouts
- The Tikuna Tribe, Brazil: The Pelazon Ceremony
- The Hupa Tribe: The Flower Dance
Periods can bring physical discomfort, but they can be even more painful if the community around you doesn’t celebrate them. Some of us just bide our time in silence, shaming ourselves for wanting to lay down and eat all the snacks. We spend time away from friends, family, or coworkers to spare them the wrath of unpredictable mood swings. And some ...
In some cultures, menstruating individuals are shunned and isolated due to deeply ingrained fear, religious beliefs, or superstition. While this pattern often manifests in oppression, for Ojibwe women, self-isolating during menstruation is seen as a restorative and valuable practice. The Ojibwe are indigenous peoples whose communities are scattered...
For four days during monsoon season, temples close and all agricultural work is forbidden in Assam, a state in northeastern India. It is believed that the goddess Kamakhya is menstruating during those four days – so the temple is closed as a sign of respect. 2 Kamakhya’s devotees wait patiently outside the temple doors while the rest of the town pu...
In the Philippines, it’s believed that wiping your face with your own period blood can prevent breakouts. 3Some people get tricked into doing this. While washing your period-stained underwear, for example, an elder might tell you that there’s a fly on your face so that you unintentionally wipe the blood all over yourself in the process. Is it total...
The Tikuna Tribe of Brazil – deep in the Amazon rainforest – has a unique way of commemorating first periods: When a young girl first menstruates, she is sent to live in a house alone for one year. She’s only allowed one visitor: her grandmother. In that time, her grandmother teaches her many traditional skills, including weaving, identifying medic...
In the land we know as northwestern California, the Hupa Tribe still upholds its coming of age traditions for young girls. The tribe believes that menarche (the first period) is incredibly powerful – so they celebrate it with the Flower Dance, or Ch’ilwa:l, which can last for several days. 8 The kinahldung — the girl whose menarche is being celebra...
Jul 28, 2021 · The Ojibwe people of North America have a ritual for a girl’s first menstrual cycle: she fasts from eating strawberries for a full year, marking their transition from childhood to adulthood. It’s a time to learn wisdom from older women in the community, and to connect to one’s ancestors.
Discover the diverse cultural practices surrounding menstruation across the globe. Learn how societies from India to Japan and Africa to Native American tribes view and practice menstruation. Explore the Western world's efforts to break menstrual taboos and promote menstrual equity.
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May 22, 2024 · The human species evolved under conditions that favored a menstrual cycle of 29.5 days, the same length of the lunar cycle. Our close relatives, chimps and bonobos, have menstrual cycles of ~36- and ~40-day cycles respectively. Other primates have 19-day and 28-day cycles.
