I recently found this article and thought it was a beautiful insight into how we think about our menstrual cycles:

Imagine living in a culture that honoured women’s bleeding time (moon time) as sacred. There used to be a time when women’s sexuality was not separated from spirituality. These cultures understood that a woman’s bleeding time was a sacred time, a time of deep introspection, a time for her to shed her outward responsibilities, to retreat to the moon lodge where women would reflect and reconnect with themselves. Their resulting dreams and visions would be shared for the benefit of the whole tribe.

This withdrawal into the moon lodge has been misinterpreted as a time when women were ‘dirty’ and might ‘contaminate’ anything they come into contact with – therefore they were not ‘allowed’ to perform their usual household chores. In fact it was a choice. I think this misunderstanding has been the source of a lot (more…)