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I’m happy to be introducing a new mini-series on the podcast. Here’s the story of how these episodes came to be…
During my pregnancy I first swelled to an unrecognisable size, my hormones dancing wildly. I laboured and gave birth, and then shrank again, milk flowing from breasts that were uncomfortably large.
My partner on the other hand, did not gain or lose an ounce. He looked his exact same handsome self throughout, maybe sprouting a few more grey hairs along the way.
Now, I know that he also went through big changes, including hormonal ones. But the enormous social, emotional and spiritual transformation that we were going through in becoming parents was much more obviously reflected in my body than in his. I carried and birthed and bled; my body sustained my baby completely, both inside and outside the womb; I was one and two people at the same time.
Maybe it’s not even enough to say my body reflected the changes I was going through. My body was the change; it is the change.
And as I write this, I think: “Maybe that’s true for all of us, all the time.”
But when we take women’s bodies as our departure point, it becomes so obvious; there’s just no way to sustain the illusion that the body and mind are separate.
As women come into adolescence, we have the arrival of our first period. Many of us become mothers, where we share our blood with our baby and bleed as we birth. And then as we reach the height of our powers, our periods stop coming, and we enter menopause.
We have this red thread made of blood, and its flows and absences stitch our life together. Our bodies are the receptacle for the alchemy of our rites of passage.
And this is a journey that can be both beautiful and difficult. Because the monthly bleeds, the childbearing, the menopause; they can be painful, difficult, even feel shameful.
It’s not simple. But I believe it is potentially sacred.
I think that I’ve previously been reluctant to talk about the importance of female biology, because it has been used so effectively to oppress women; to put us in boxes, where a woman’s primary role is to bear children and where her fierceness and anger was called hysteria or blamed on hormones. It’s also easy to slip into ideas about how women should be, or how they should relate to their bodies in order to be womanly. It’s understandable that in our efforts to work for equality, we felt the need to focus on how we are all similar, despite differing biologies. But I do think we’ve ignored our bodies to our peril.
During my pregnancy I became completely absorbed with these questions. I was in awe of my body, how it so skilfully could make a perfect new human. I thought of how we have all been carried – just as I was carrying my daughter then – by mothers and foremothers in an unbroken line back to when mammals first grew their babies inside the water of their bodies rather than the waters of the earth.
And now I have a daughter; the story continues with her. I felt the need to do something with the podcast, both to share what was on my mind, and also to honor those who came before, and those who are yet to come. And I was lucky enough to enlist some incredible women to help us in exploring these blood mysteries, including sex and trauma expert Kimberly Ann Johnson, mythologist Sharon Blackie, and more.
This is not a quest for universal truth, but it’s one exploration, one way to approach these topics in the Forest of Thought.
Also, even if you’re not a woman – actually, especially then – I hope you’ll listen with interest. First of all, because everyone has women in their lives. But also because, despite being centred on women’s bodies, this is more broadly an exploration of how the body and spirit are interwoven. And how we can embrace our corporeality in all its messiness, pains, and imperfections, and see what unknown possibilities that opens up for us.
TODAY’S EPISODE
When I was twenty-four I was shocked to learn that my menstrual cycle contained a whole world of knowledge that I had previously been completely ignorant of. In today’s episode I talk to tireless fertility awareness expert Jenny Koos (known to many as Vulverine) about what it might mean to embrace our cyclical nature.
She has been one of the strongest voices in Sweden advocating for body literacy as a path for women’s empowerment. In this conversation she takes us through the cycle, connecting its rhythmical patterns to those of life in general. We discuss the underlying reasons behind the lack of knowledge on women’s health and how difficult it is to live cyclically in modern societies, but also what possibilities open up as we come into deeper knowledge of our bodies.
I hope you enjoy it, and I look forward to sharing the rest of the series with you.
Ingrid