is Doula, anthropologist and writer, specialized in female rites and cycles. It facilitates workshops and retreats for women who want to reconnect with the female deep, and has created three online courses that it offers from a . Text:

Imagine you are a thirteen -year -old girl. We will take a brief tour of different cultures in the world to know some ways to celebrate your first menstruation.

Imagine you are an Apache girl. The day of your first menstruation, you feel very proud because you know that all the people will celebrate it with you. You go to your godmother’s cabin with an eagle pen to give him the news. She will teach you everything you need to know to become a woman. First you go to a special cabin, and you stay alone for a while. You fast to clean your body. When you are ready, your godmother explains that your rule has lowered because you are now fertile and you can have your own children. He teaches you many things about menstruation, fertility, sexuality, contraception and female rituals. While you are learning with her, women make you a special dress. Your godmother prepares you for your ceremony, showing you a special dance. Finally, there is a great celebration with your entire community. You receive many gifts and blessings, and then, as a «life maker», give your blessings to the tribe.

Now we go to the Aaryry tribe, in Brazil. When you announce the arrival of your first menstruation, your whole family and friends come together with you. Your symbolically short mother your braids as a child, and everyone is asked for a hair for good luck. For a month, up to your next menstruation, you can only eat bread and fish, to purify your body and mind. When your second rule arrives, your father gets up at dawn and sings a special song, inviting all the town to a party where you can eat everything you want!

We continue our trip, crossing the Atlantic Ocean. We arrived in Nigeria, to the TIV tribe. On the day of your first menstruation, your community sees you as a fertility giver and bearer of good luck. You walk on all the fields of your town, blessing the ground and promoting a great harvest. During a ceremony in your honor you receive a fertility tattoo under your navel. From now on you proudly teach everyone, showing that you are no longer a girl.

Now we cross the Indian Ocean and end our tour in Sri Lanka. Here you take a special bath the day your first menstruation arrives. With this you stop being a girl and salts of the bathroom as a young woman. You wear a white dress, the color of the initiation. Your family prepares a celebration in which you receive many gifts and desires for a happy, healthy and prosperous life.

We return to Western culture. Although we live in a completely different context, we can find in these stories ideas and inspiration for this important moment in the life of a girl. Some of these rites are still practiced today, others have been lost. It would be easy to romantize them, and we don’t even know exactly how these girls have lived these events. But the truth is that in modern society we begin menstruation with very different budgets and attitudes.

Through several groups of women from England, Canada, the United States and the Spanish State interested in rediscovering women, we have shared our first experiences of the first menstruation. Except for some parents who opened a bottle of cava, everyone around us responded with a mixture of shame, secret and triviality – the less talk about it better, except to give you some sanitary wipes. We feel a great lack of information, and a great lack of recognition of the change that was happening within our bodies and emotions. At the same time we feel illusion, curiosity, excitement, pride, confusion, fear, sadness and grief. We all knew intuitively that something was dying – which somehow was the end of childhood and opened a new and unknown world. In moments of transition in life, such as birth and death, human beings always need to recognize and honor these changes in a social environment with some kind of rite.

In the case of the first menstruation, it is an event that in our society we live in a very lonely way, especially since the menstruation itself looks as something unpleasant, inconvenient and that we would prefer that it did not exist. At the same time, there is a growing will for our daughters, that the next generation girls live it in a different way – which feel more prepared and more accompanied. The value we assign to the first menstruation is related to the value we assign as women. We always carry the memory of this experience with us, and influences in a deep way about our self -esteem and our health.

Keys to improve the relationship with menstruation

By transmitting the value and gifts of the menstrual cycle to girls, we have a great opportunity to reconcile with menstruation and discover their hidden treasure. I want to share and recommend two changes that have helped me during the last seven years to deeply transform my relationship with my own menstruation, and therefore, with my feminine nature. The first was to observe and write down the different stages of my menstrual cycle through a «lunar diagram.» The second was to stop using disposable tampons and compresses, replacing them with reusable products.

When a friend gave me a lunar calendar and suggested that he start aiming the first day of each rule to see in which phase the moon was, I did not see what relationship there could be. But it seemed more than a coincidence when I realized that the average cycle of each woman is 29.5 days, exactly the same time that it takes the moon to turn around the earth. The word menstruation comes from the Latin Mens, «month», word in turn derived from the Indo-European root, related to «moon» and «month» (in English moon and mount) and also with «measure» (because the cycles of the moon were the first way of measuring time). When a group of women live and work together, they usually menstruate at the same time, be it with the new moon (the most common) or with the full moon.

At first, I was only aware of feeling very irritable and sensitive a few days before menstruation, and I noticed the rule, which was for me a great discomfort, because it was very painful for two or three days. Little by little I began to be more aware of my mood, my desires, my dreams, my energy level, and my sexuality during all the different phases of my menstrual cycle, and, at the same time, of its connection with the moon. This is very tangible, for example, when the principle of a new cycle, after the rule, coincides with the growing moon: I feel a renovating and fresh energy, inspiration and mental clarity, at the same time that the moon is being renewed. When I approach ovulation, many times I feel more sociable, sexual, open and creative, very explicitly if the moon is full, and in an internal way if the moon is new. After ovulation, I begin to perceive my internal side more and I usually have less energy. The famous bad moods of the pre-mestrual stage arise, which now more and more as an opportunity to face imbalances in my life, shadows and wounds that from my unconscious ask for my attention, to heal and transfer them.

Now when the rule comes, whenever possible, I believe a cozy space to withdraw from the world, to dream, write, paint or be silent, reflecting the waning and dark moon that also hides from the world. In many tribes when women menstruated at the same time, they retired to a special enclosure to pass their bleeding, while the men and the elderly did their tasks. He was considered the time when a woman is at the highest level of her spiritual power, so the most appropriate activity was to rest and accumulate wisdom. If we create such space, it can be a very creative, intuitive and transformative moment, in which we leave the last cycle, we clean our uterus and prepare for another.

However, we live in a highly masculine and linear society, in which the labor and individualistic reality makes women very difficult for a few days a month as their bodies ask. As much as possible, it is an opportunity to support us among women and receive the support of our families, so that we can retire once a month and follow the rhythm of our bodies, or at least go slower, and recognize and honor it as a special state.

For many women I know, the experience of menstruation has also changed significantly since they no longer use conventional buffers and compresses. Only the fact of throwing them in the trash reflects the deep contempt of our culture towards menstrual blood, which is seen as something basically dirty and unpleasant. When I realized that these products contain dioxins and synthetic materials that damage at the same time my health and that of the planet, I saw that I could reuse a special marine sponge and a menstrual silicone cup to collect my blood. Having direct contact with your blood when washing the cup or sponge in water made me face many prejudices and negative thoughts. But with the simple act of pouring this red liquid into the land of plants, I understood that the cells that die in my uterus and are transported in the menstrual blood are a food for the earth, full of iron and other nutrients. The same cycles of nature – the stations, the moon, the sun – are reflected within my own body. What dies gives birth. Now it is not something disgusting, but a symbol of my fertility, my female essence, and my connection with the earth. The more the menstruation is normal and appreciated in our family life, the more prepared our daughters will feel, and also our sons, for the day the first rule arrives.

Celebrate the first rule of our daughters

Today there is a lot of variation between the ages of the first menstruation of a girl – from eight to fifteen – and his experience and what he will want to do will depend a lot on his age and character. It goes without saying that the important thing is that it is as she decides, and that we must avoid unconsciously imposing what has missed us. There are ideas in the stories of the beginning and in many other cultures that we can adapt to the reality of girls today. You can put into practice the same day of the first period, during the first month, or with the next new moon. If it is possible to tell you about it in advance they will be more prepared.

Something very simple and very beautiful that we see in all tribal celebrations is the simple fact of offering a gift to the girl, or that chooses one – for example a bouquet of …