I have been present at each of the Seven Sisters Festivals. Each year of this journey deepened the desire to be with women more, to share the love of being a woman. Rare is that space in our culture, the space that celebrates all the beauty, power and wisdom of women.
I was there that first year, when quite spontaneously there was an epic dance in the kitchen. Each of us unleashed in that way women can when we truly dance for ourselves, without having to navigate the male gaze whilst we do so.
Watching the festival grow, become so much to so many women. For some women it is the very first time they have been allowed that totally women only state. For many of us that do work with women, it is a chance to share our love with women we would never be in front of, in any other circumstance.
Over the years, I have lost count of the amount of women that have recognized me from the festival, as the women that speaks to the blood. I have, each festival, held open a strong and important conversation about what the menstrual power can be in a woman’s life, when considered a sacred state. WHERE in our culture is that conversation?
This is why I show up and do the work.
This is why we need a safe and sacred space for women to gather.
The very first circle I held with women to focus upon the menstrual experience was in 1999 at a pagan festival. For nearly 3 hours we, as many of the women of that small 90 person gathering, shared in circle what the blood meant to us, what we could perceive of it’s purpose, the power beyond the taboo.
There was a man that couldn’t cope with idea that we had a created a space that was women only. He invaded it, with weak excuse, three times. Many of the women there were furious with him and after the circle finished they sought him out and told him so. When I finally saw him, he thought he would cop the same from me. But I didn’t. I asked what he learnt about himself, about women and how we can go about learning about menstruation.
The next year that gathering was held, I held open a menstrual conversation that men were invited to. It was ok, we learnt a few things. We learnt about what men thought of it. As a group though, we didn’t get anywhere near the sacred, deeply felt, shared experience that we had achieved the year before. The men being present, just present, not disparaging, or negative in any way, it felt like we couldn’t go there, get there with them in the room.
The next year, I returned to a women only format and again we were able to access what I now understand to be a collective blood mind. A red thread that connects us all as we share the story of our first menstrual experience. A curious and slightly apprehensive laugh as we pass around a menstrual cup and discuss the experience of using it for the first time. A shared knowing smile when we compare notes on “the blood horn”, a pre-menstrual sexual state that many women have discovered.
The validity of the female experience. In our bodies, uncensored, truly free to express what is actually happening in our women’s bodies that we may comprehend that reality so often ignored in a male centered world.
That is what we afford ourselves at the Seven Sisters Festival, a women’s festival.
I have no intention nor desire to exclude trans women from anywhere, but how do I include trans women in this conversation? Does your presence in that circle, by you not having shared experience, inhibit other women in accessing their menstrual understanding, often for the first time? This is an honest quest/question. Please allow for a learning experience.
POSTSCRIPT:
Upon a day of further exploring this conversation I now understand that “WE”, means any woman, in the body they are in… hopefully uncensored and truly free to express what is actually happening in their broadly experienced women’s bodies! I look forward to sharing Seven Sisters Festival with ALL the women that choose to join us there. Trusting that sharing experience ultimately inhibits no-one.
Living Circles 