Welcome to Trust Your Sacred Feminine Flow and the Divine Feminine Awakening Series.
Our creative power as women is intimately tied to our fertility and moon cycle. For millennia the overculture has used shame and control to disconnect us from this source of power.
In this 2018 re-release, I share my final passage with my Moon cycle. And I extend an invitation to shed internal or external misogyny experienced at any stage of our Moon time journey including first periods, PMS, bleeding, peri, and menopause.
Together we can call out the old stories, cultural messages, rejection, shame, and powerlessness and find the heart of our creative power in our cycle.
Discussed in the episode:
- How my early beliefs about my body affected my relationship with my cycle at an early age
- How viewing my Cycle or Moon Time an immense gift of creative power changed my relationship with it
- Why learning to partner with your cycle can lead to empowerment vs. disempowerment
- How I’ve come to understand the true meaning and purpose of PMS
Listen to Our Moon Cycle and Creative Power by clicking the play button on the audio player below.
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Read the Full Transcript Here:
Welcome to Trust your Sacred Feminine Flow. I’m your host, Joni Advent Maher spiritual midwife, mystic, and a transformational guide. Today. I want to talk with you about an anniversary that I’m approaching. So in a few days, it’s going to be the anniversary of my last moon cycle. The last time I bled as a woman in this life and it’s stirring up a lot of emotions and it has me reflecting on my journey with my moon time over these last 40 years. So I wanted to spend some time reflecting on that and to give you an opportunity to reflect for yourself on your own journey with your moon time, with your period, with the bleeding as a woman. So I don’t know what it was like for you when you first got your period. But for me, it really was shrouded with shame. I had so much contempt for my feminine body at that stage of life.
When I was a 12 year old, I had seen all around me how devalued the feminine was and how much contempt there was and denigration of the female form. And so when I started bleeding and I had my first period, I wanted to do everything I could to distance myself from it and to hide it. And I know I’m probably not the only one that’s had that kind of experience. I really saw my cycle, my bleeding, my moon time as something to be tolerated, something I had to put up with as a woman. So I really want to talk with you about this because to be honest, I’m feeling quite a bit of grief. I’m feeling grief about letting go of this central rhythm and cycle and defining experience of my life. And it surprises me some how much grief I’m feeling, but in other ways, it really doesn’t because my journey with my cycle, with my period, with my womb has been one of starting out with a lot of self-loathing and self-hatred, and seeing it has something I had to tolerate that whole idea or concept of the curse, just wanting to push it away and to distance it.
And now, as I’m saying goodbye to this part of my life as a woman, to my cycle, it is almost like that presence or that friend that I could partner with, that I have learned it’s possible to powerfully partner with our cycles and to go more deeply into our rhythm and our sacred nature. I see young women that I’m in circle with who now know the gift of both their womb and their moon time. They’re recognizing how it is a time to go inside. It is a time to replenish and to recharge. And I didn’t know that, I didn’t understand. And that may be true for you as well, that you didn’t understand the gift that you had that was operating in your body and in your life. And part of my journey of wanting to disown my feminine was about both disowning my body, but controlling it and using it as a means of gaining power in my life, through my relationships with men, that whole shtick that we have learned about using our sexuality and our sex appeal to be alluring and to have power, to have power over.
And I just recently was reading a post by someone I follow on Instagram, Marion Rose, and she was talking about the idea that powerlessness leads to power over. When we feel powerless, then we are seeking ways to have power over instead of rooting deeply in the power that we do possess. And it feels like that has been my journey with my cycle. That for so long in my life, I was feeling powerless. And I was blaming the fact that I was a woman for that and my cycle, which was coming each month was just a reminder of that. It was a reminder of the messiness of my nature, the messiness of the body, the messiness of the feminine. And I know I’ve said this before, but I wanted nothing to do with it. It really has only been in the last 10 to 15 years that I have come to be open and receptive to the gift of my nature, to the gift of the feminine, to the gift of having a cycle and a rhythm that is so powerfully connected to the other cycles in nature, the cycles of the seasons, the cycles of the moon and the tides and what an immense gift that is and how that plugs me in naturally to a state of empowerment, that when I lean in, when I root into that, that this womb matrix and the bleeding that goes with that is at the heart of my creative power.
So I am moving into a new exploration of creative power now that I have made this rite of passage. And I welcome that, and I am excited about that. And thankfully, I am not caught up in the trappings for the most part of the society around me, the talks about aging. I’m still growing into my new relationship with my body and it’s changing form. And I find it really fascinating how the womb space, the pelvis, the second and third chakra get more full and get bigger. At this time when we shift into menopause, when we’re holding our blood, we’re no longer bleeding, we’re holding that blood to use for our creative purposes. And I do feel that vitality and that creative power in ways I haven’t felt as strongly before. I feel like I could create like a mad scientist, but in the best possible way, like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia with my magic wand, there’s so much that I want to create.
And maybe you can relate to that. And that all comes with this new passage. And I am thrilled that I get the chance to receive it and to enter it with reverence, with honoring it, with seeing the wisdom and the gifts of this phase of the journey. Because for so long in my life, as a menstruating woman, I didn’t know that I didn’t understand that. And there was so much suffering and pain that went along with that. And that is just unfortunate and unnecessary. And I know that there are many women at various stages in the bleeding or in perimenopause who are struggling with that, probably eight or 10 years ago. I said, I want to know the spiritual significance of PMS. I want to understand what is the purpose of this, because certainly in my life, I did have some very intense emotional rollercoasters just prior to my period.
And now I can see, I’ve heard women talk about this being the phase of the truth telling, and this is the phase in our life. If we are out of alignment, if we are tolerating things that we best not be tolerating, that’s the time when we are not going to suffer and we are just going to be out with it. We are going to say what’s true. And because I lived for so many years in the good girl paradigm, in the ‘let’s not make waves’, in the ‘there’s something wrong with me’. If I’m getting overly emotional, then I didn’t, I didn’t know how to partner with that. And with that phase of my cycle, and it’s my sincere hope that changes, as it did for me, for every other woman out there who is seeing her cycle as the enemy who was seeing those phases and her body and its wisdom, trying to communicate to her as the enemy, learning to partner with our body, learning to partner with our cycle.
It is the way that we are empowered. Again, going back to the wisdom of Marion Rose. It is how we shift out of going from powerlessness and attempting to have power over to having power in our lives. There is a very easy path opening to our potency and our creative power. And it is by embracing and saying yes to the body saying yes, to our womb space saying yes, to our sacred feminine flow, the flow of our monthly cycle of our moon time. And that is another facet and aspect of the sacred feminine flow. So beloved, even as I considered sharing this episode, sharing this with you, I could feel the edginess and the taboo about talking about my moon time, about talking about bleeding as a woman, about talking about having a period. So coming out about this felt edgy for me as well, and it may be for you.
And I know that is layers and layers of societal shame. The paradigm of the patriarchy instills us with shame as a way to keep us from accessing our power. So this was important for me to name and perhaps it was important for you to receive. There are a couple of past episodes. You might be interested if you want to know more about how to partner with your cycle. And particularly if you’re having hormonal imbalances related to your cycle, episode 41 with Madeline McKinnon, Hormones, Health and Healing is a great resource. And if you’re interested in the power of your womb space and really accessing that and partnering with it, you can check out episode 17 Sacred Womb Awakening with Diana Beaulieu. So until next time beloved, offering you a deep bow and the reminder to always trust what your heart knows.