I NEVER KNEW MY PERIOD COULD BE CONSIDERED SACRED 🌕

# I NEVER KNEW MY PERIOD COULD BE CONSIDERED SACRED 🌕

Something was shared with me at our Wellbriety meeting at Pechanga that I haven't stopped thinking about. We were talking about women, our Moon Time, our menstrual cycle, and ceremony. What struck me most was that it was the MEN, Native men from Pechanga and other tribes, who were explaining to us just how powerful a woman is during this time.

I grew up thinking of a period as just that, a period. Something inconvenient. Something women deal with every month. Cramps, bleeding, hormones, and then we move on. I had never been taught to look at it as sacred.

They explained that in some of their traditions, when a woman is on her Moon Time, she does not participate in certain ceremonies. At first, someone hearing that might think, “Why? Is she considered unclean?” But what they were teaching us was almost the complete opposite.

They explained that a woman is already going through her own cleansing. Her body is releasing blood naturally, not because she is wounded, but because this is part of the cycle her body was created to carry. During this time, they spoke of women as being incredibly powerful spiritually.

One of the men explained that they actually have a separate space or circle for their women during this time. Then he said something that really stayed with me:

**“This is when our women are the most powerful.”**

Not dirty, not less than, and not pushed aside because something is wrong with her. **Powerful.** She is already going through her own sacred process of cleansing and release, and there is a space specifically for her during that time.

That fascinated me. There are traditions where women have their own space or circle during their Moon Time, a place for women, rest, reflection, prayer, cleansing, and connection. Think about how different that is from the way many of us were raised. Instead of being taught to honor it, respect it, and recognize the power in it, many of us learned to hide it, not talk about it, and even feel embarrassed by it.

I was raised Catholic, and the message I grew up with around a woman's period was very different. Somewhere in those old religious and cultural ideas, menstruation became associated with being “unclean.” It was private. It was embarrassing. It was something you did not talk about openly.

And now, as a woman of a significant age, I am sitting here thinking, **LIKE, WHAT MAN SAID THIS?! 😂**

Who looked at a woman's body doing exactly what it was created to do and decided this was something women should feel ashamed of?

Because then I sit in a Wellbriety circle at Pechanga and hear Native men speak about the exact same thing completely differently. They were not calling their women dirty. They were not embarrassed to talk about menstruation. They spoke about their women with **respect**.

The very thing I grew up understanding as something embarrassing and “unclean,” these men were describing as **powerful, sacred, and connected to cleansing.**

And then I started thinking about Mother Nature and Mother Earth.

Nature is constantly teaching us about cycles. Trees do not apologize when they release their leaves. The Earth is not considered broken when winter comes and the land becomes still. The sky releases rain. The ocean moves with its tides. The Moon moves from darkness to fullness and begins again. Seeds rest beneath the earth before new life emerges.

Mother Nature **creates, carries, nourishes, releases, rests, and renews. And so do women.**

Our bodies have their own rhythm of preparing for life, carrying the possibility of life, and releasing what is no longer needed when that life is not created. That release is not failure. It is part of the cycle.

Suddenly, I understood the teaching differently. **A woman's body reflects something we see everywhere in Mother Nature. Life does not only happen through holding on. Life also requires releasing.**

Mother Earth does not hold onto every season. Trees do not hold every leaf. The sky does not hold every drop of rain. A woman's body does not hold what it no longer needs.

There is cleansing in release. There is renewal after release. **There is power in both.**

They also talked about the connection between women, Grandmother Moon, and Mother Earth. Mother Earth moves in cycles. The Moon moves in cycles. Women move in cycles. There is a time to create, a time to hold, a time to release, a time to rest, and a time to begin again.

And I thought, **how beautiful is that?**

What also stayed with me was hearing men speak about women this way. There was such respect in the way they explained it. They were not embarrassed by a woman's blood. They were not making it something shameful that should not be spoken about. They were teaching us that this natural process carries **power**.

It made me wonder how differently women might see ourselves if we had been taught from the beginning that our bodies were not something to be ashamed of.

I am still learning these teachings. I would never claim to speak for every Native Nation or tribe. I am simply sharing what Native men from Pechanga and other tribes taught us in our Wellbriety circle and how deeply it made me think differently about being a woman.

As a woman of a significant age, I am still learning things about womanhood that nobody ever taught me.

Maybe something we were taught to be embarrassed about was never something to be ashamed of at all. Maybe there is power in the release. Maybe there is wisdom in our cycles. Maybe cleansing is not only about getting rid of something.

**Maybe cleansing is how we make room for what comes next.**

**Maybe our bodies were never something to be ashamed of. Maybe we were simply taught to look at them through the wrong eyes.**

And maybe Mother Earth has been showing us that all along. 🌕🌎

**Recover • Reinvent • Rise ✨**

#Wellbriety #NativeTeachings #MoonTime #GrandmotherMoon #MotherEarth #MotherNature #WomenArePowerful #SacredWoman #WomenSupportingWomen #Healing #RecoverReinventRise