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Sacred Moon Time

While this particular story is one that I imagined, many of the details could very well have been true. Many of the steps that Naila goes through in her initiation into womanhood are components of a traditional rite of passage. This is a ceremony or a ritual which serves as an initiation marking an important change in status for the individual — birth, menarche (the first menstrual period), marriage, and death are a few of the major ones.

Once a rite of passage has been completed, a woman can never go back to the girl she was before. That Naila is entering a community of women where the blood mysteries are honored makes her menarche a much more pleasurable and empowering experience. Not many girls in our day and age are lucky enough to have a menarche experience like Naila's. We have been taught to see our moon time as something to be ashamed of — something that should be hidden and disguised at all costs.

Throughout recent history, social and religious institutions, which are run almost exclusively by men, have reacted to women's monthly bleeding with fear and mass hysteria, claiming it was poisonous, evil, and unclean, and that menstruating women belonged to the "devil". For example, the Bible teaches that menstruation and pain during childbirth are the burden we women bear for Eve's sins. I'm here to tell you that none of this is true! Both your body and your moon time are sacred. It is a time of great power. In fact, many women report experiencing extraordinary visions, dreams, and heightened intuition and sensitivity during their monthly cycle. Menstruation is the one experience that unites all women across such socially constructed boundaries as race, class, age, and sexual preference. Perhaps this is why so many men fear it.

Our world today is very different from Naila's, which could have existed any time before 2,000 BC. In honoring the Goddess in all of Her aspects, Naila and her people were practicing a nature or earth-based religion. This was both a way of life and a form of spirituality that existed long before any of today's male-dominated organized religions. The very essence of nature religions is feminine because they honor the Earth, Her cycles and seasons, and all of Her living creatures, whether human, animal or plant.

This belief system creates an atmosphere where people treat each other and their environment with respect — one where humans do not see themselves as separate from (or having the right to control) nature, but as a part of it. Did you know that our first calendars were created around women's moon cycles? Sadly, attitudes towards the things that were sacred and special in Naila's world (menstruation, childbirth, child rearing, sexuality, women's ways of knowing, creativity, the healing arts, ritual, ceremony and rites of passage) have been completely reversed today. What once was honored and celebrated is now considered dirty, shameful, disgusting, and not even worthy of our attention and discussion.

Harvard professor Carol Gilligan has conducted many studies with young women on the brink of adolescence. Her research concludes that these young women are encouraged to give up their sense of self in favor of being in relationship. This means that, upon approaching adolescence, a girl is often forced to give up her own experience and accept one that has been determined for her by men. Girls experience pressure (from their friends, families and culture in general) to be "good," to be caregivers and nurturers, to put other peoples’ needs and desires before their own. They receive messages about what they are "supposed" to be, do, or look like. Often these messages contain values and ideals that are very different from what girls inherently feel about who they really are and what they truly dream or desire to be. I believe these values are in deep opposition to our inherent female nature.

As a young girl, I didn't have many reasons to question what I knew. I was a wild child, very independent, intelligent, creative, and opinionated. When I entered junior high school, however, it seemed like the rules had changed and somebody had forgotten to tell me. Instead of being about substance — the person who I really was — the priorities switched. Now, they were about who my friends were, my weight, whether I was wearing the right clothes and had the right hair style, and if I had a boyfriend. All of a sudden I became much more concerned with what other people thought as opposed to trusting myself and doing what I knew was right. I began to question my own reality. It seemed that everyone else was so desperate to create it for me, and I recall very clearly feeling like my sense of self was stolen from me. While I didn't know what was happening at the time, I do remember how overwhelmed I felt. It was an incredibly painful and confusing time. I had never doubted myself before, so why did it all of a sudden seem as though my self-confidence went flying out the window without any warning at all?

Much of this can be explained by the society that shaped me — that shapes us. Even if we are lucky enough to have parents, family, and friends who love and support us, we are still exposed to the misogynist (women hating) messages and situations that are an inescapable result of life in a patriarchal society. The dictionary defines patriarchy as a social organization marked by the supremacy of the father in the clan or family, the legal dependence of wives and children, and the reckoning of descent and inheritance in the male line; or broadly as control by men of a disproportionately large share of power. We have lived under this system for approximately the past 5,000 years.

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