Moontime
The bleeding phase of the menstrual cycle
Named such because of the connection between the lunar cycle and the waters of the body and of the earth.
the tides and the patterns of ebb and flow, proliferation and breaking down are a part of every aspect of the living world.
I share every word that follows with the greatest respect for the wisdom and experiences you as a reader may have with this theme. We all have much to learn from each other if we go on the journey of re membering our innate relationships with the cycles of life and the consciousness of creativity that they express.
I share these reflections and invitations to enquiry recognising that gender identity is fluid and this has always been the case in indigenous cultures. We tend this discussion of Moontime because there are features of our sexual structure that give us specific experiences of life if we are female bodied.
For more detail you can read articles on the blog, explore the linked resources (section- Women’s mysteries) or come and join an in person event where we can explore and unpack this topic with time and personal connection.
MOONTIME SHARING DAY FOR MEN AND WOMEN
9TH JULY 23 - BRIGHTON 1- 6PM
with Jill Kettle and Hans Schuldheis.
A warm invitation to come together to tend the cycles of the feminine and explore the ceremony of Moontime.
We will look at the of the menstrual cycle. We will explore how that pattern plays out in nature, inner life, and the life phases of people and how the menstruating years fit inside the bigger picture of a woman’s life.
We will focus on the Moontime phase of the cycle, the part where breakdown, composting and renewal is at it’s peak. We will look at the gifts and qualities of this phase and how we might orientate ourselves towards supporting and honouring it as men and women alike.
Our objective is to honour Moontime teachings from a few perspectives and come together as men and women to explore how we can integrate this knowledge and understanding into our lives and communities in good and healthy ways so that we can best serve life. We will look at what ceremony is and how we can learn from it and explore the differences between internal and external ceremonial formats.
The day will be a mixture of teaching and discussion.
For men our hope is that exploring the Moontime may help you to feel better resourced to honour and support the women in your life and deepen your internal relationship to the flow of energy through the cycles of creativity for your own nurturance.
This sharing space is open for all. However one of the motivations for holding this day is because Hans and I work with some ceremonial formats that have protocols around how the Moontime and the external ceremony relate to each other. We extend particular invite to those who have been working with us in ceremony and want to deepen understanding of the importance and impact of the energy of the moon and how to honour and work with it well.
To me, tending this topic feels like an integral part of cultural repair.
For men and women.
By suggested donation £50, concessions available.
For booking and questions please contact me here
We are aware of the complexities and highly charged feelings that can surround this topic and we open this discussion in the spirit of enquiry and service to life to ask questions and reflect on what is true for each of us. We fully recognise our own apprenticeship and ongoing learning journey with these themes.
Deeper reflections on the topic of Moontime -
I am gathering reflections, articles, art and poems to explore our relationship and experiences of moontime and our cycles.
Please see the link at the bottom of this page if you would like to contribute. You can read articles in the blog.
A warm invite to read this post about working with your moontime if you are new to these ideas and would like to find out more.
Over the last years there has been an exponential increase in interest towards tending the menstrual cycle and the bleeding phase of that (Moontime). There is greater recognition of its fundamental importance for women’s health mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually and how that connects to wider relationships and society.
This connects with a broader conversation about how the menstrual cycle fits into the wider cycles of a woman’s life and the journey she takes as she steps into her bleeding years, moves through them birthing children or projects in the world and ends her journey of cycling through the process of menopause entering a new phase of her life, growth and spiritual connectivity.
The whole of the menstrual cycle has wisdom and potency. It offers different points of view constantly. Often it is thought of as just the bleeding time, but from each phase of the cycle we can harvest, learn and deepen our relationship to ourselves, one another, nature and spirit.
We can choose to build our own relationship to our Moontime and cycles and discover what that means for us individually and collectively. In our personal and shared journeys we can find guidance from within and from the vast intelligence of the web of life, re membering aspects of ourselves that may be critical for our potential to find balance inwardly and outwardly at this time.
All life is born of woman. Women are sacred, connected and in close relationship to the great mystery of Life. The incredible potential to bring together spirit and physicality in the womb and to tend and nurture the life that is birthed exists within us. Whether we have babies or not we are capable of nourishing this creation and manifesting in so many ways. Through these innate gifts women are connected to Life and the process of creation in ways that deserve acknowledgment and tending.
There are different perspectives through which to view the menstrual cycle and its capacity to be a gateway to wisdom, healing and cultural repair. There are many modern writers who draw on ancient knowings and their inspiration and experiences to create hugely helpful resources.
I am informed in my work and practice by an earth based North American spiritual lineage. I value the precision and refinement of understanding it holds. Women’s teachings (or healthy cultural patterns in general) have not faired well through times of colonisation and genocide in any land. I am certain that historically we had our own healthy patterns in Europe and our journey right now is about relearning how to do life well. Through working with a lineage that predates patriarchal distortion and genocide I have reconnected with one of the most powerful spirit given ceremonies, the Moontime. Shifting viewpoint has given me access to what is already happening within me from a fresh perspective. It has allowed me to experience and value my cycles in a radically different way to the narratives my society laid out for me. This experience has been very connective and opened me up to truths and patterns I feel are universal and cross cultural, extending beyond one point of view or tradition.
Through this lineage lens Moontime is seen as a very powerful ceremony that is deeply respected. All true ceremony is concerned with gateways between this reality and the unseen aspects of life. It is there to teach us how to live.
The Moontime ceremony is one of purification, for ourselves and for all the things we are in connection with. For our environment, family and community.
If ceremony teaches how to live what is happening here and what can we learn?
Many ceremonies are spirit given in that people have gone deep into prayer or connection and found patterns of practice that support connection and help access or facilitate changes or shifts in awareness. There is typically an altar, a configuration of elements that form the focus of the ceremony and are interacted with. However the Moontime stands apart from these kinds of ceremonial formats. It is innate and generated internally. Women are naturally initiated into their bleeding times and go through initiation after initiation as they cycle through their years. This culminates in menopause which is it’s own rite of passage with a strong purpose.
In this understanding the woman herself is the altar. She is capable of having a very strong experience.
Moontime is the power of nature itself, pure, with no manipulation. Ceremonies created and orchestrated by even deeply connected individuals are still manipulations at some level, interactions with nature or spirit to create affect. Moontime is wholly and utterly an expression of the flow of life and the bleeding part a particular aspect of that.
To be in health the cycle of life goes through phases of growth and proliferation and dissolution and breaking down of material form. This flow is needed for life to be healthy, even though a part of it is composting and decay. It is destruction, breakdown or resting phase that is necessary for life. This composting serves life. It has so much to teach us.
All humans need to cleanse and purify, to clear away what no longer serves life and renew ourselves, seek or discover our deeper knowings. Historically men had external ceremonies to support them to find connection, vision, purpose and healing. In most traditional earth based contexts the women had less need for these outward forms because they lived in intimate relationship with their internal ceremonies of Moontime, birth, breastfeeding and intuitive capabilities.
Times are different now for most people in a modern context. We have largely forgotten these ways. As women maybe we need those external ceremonial forms more now, but we can also remember what we have within us. Internal or external the ceremonies take us to the same place of finding out about our own connections.
The Moontime invites us go into an internal process. To dive deep into the mystery. Women in their Moontime are more sensitive, open, porous, in a state of heightened connectivity, cleansing and renewal. They are able to be in strong prayer. Another way of expressing this is communication, the capacity to express inner need and longing into the web of life and be open to the responses. They are in an internal purification process. They may be connected or have insights into important things that need to be brought into manifestation or be guided to knowings or understanding that supports themselves and their communities.
A traditional understanding is that a woman in her Moontime is also processing the things that need to be moved for the collective, not just her own personal material.
Imagine a reality where all women were truly supported to carry this role for themselves and for the health, happiness and balance of all people, beings, land and the unseen aspects of life. Imagine a world in which we could really support the function of the moontime to be a part of the means to process the untended grief, wounding and pain that clogs the arteries of our modern world. Imagine the relief in the lives of those who are already doing this work but out of conscious awareness, the women of our world now who already support the movement of this stuckness. I believe so much ill health, depression and overwhelm in women is as a result of the unacknowledged processing that the Moontime naturally supports.
Moontime is a hugely potent female contribution to culture. I deeply believe our capacity to reframe how we hold this, acknowledge this and support men and women to really understand what is happening can be a powerful momentum for healing at this time. Women will cycle and bleed whether we acknowledge it or not. When it is not valued as important or purposeful but inconvenient, shameful or unimportant it perpetuates wounding, ill health and disconnection on so many levels. From this viewpoint we cannot access the potential it has to move what needs to be moved in a good way. To embrace this possibility takes acknowledgment, honouring and recognition of our value and connectedness. The fullest potential of the gifts of Moontime are accessed by woman’s willingness to surrender and deeply connect to her body wisdom.
All kinds of things can come up when we start to tend things that have been ignored or devalued for a long time including relief, wonder, grief, clunkiness and anger. We have been living in a power over paradigm for so long that grief may come for what hasn't been possible or what has been lost or harmed through not honouring the relevance and magnificence of the feminine. Many people have internalised that power over paradigm and live with self critical voices that deny our value or the importance of our cyclical nature. Working consciously with Moontime for men and women alike offers a roadmap and one pathway for healing for ourselves and all our relationships.
Some of the ceremonies we work with have specific protocols for the Moontime which we will explain fully in the appropriate contexts. Our hope is this writing offers a context for why we hold it in the ways we do. It is very common for a woman seeking to attend external ceremony to come into her Moontime as this is the most connected state she can be in. We would like to support your experience of this in a good way.
Moontime is a beautiful thing and a topic for men and women alike, to grow in our understanding, to give ourselves permission to tend Life in these ways, to grow in health and happiness.
We invite a deep exploration of moontime in our work and gatherings and offer support and mentoring for working with your moontime as a powerful ceremony one to one as well.
A MALE PERSPECTIVE ON MOONTIME - HANS SCHULDHEIS
As a man I feel that in a healthy culture men and women worked and lived together to hold balance and healthy relationships between each other, all living and non living beings. Only women are able to give birth. At the time of pregnancy, birthing and postnatally it is the role of the man to nurture and protect the woman. That is something that most people are still able to understand and support in our modern culture. When it comes to the moontime I feel we have lost that sense of value and the crucial role it holds to regulate, balance and inform society of healthy living. Through working with indigenous lineages I have regained and remembered a deep sense of what it might have been like in a fully connected earth based culture, as a man holding responsibility to nurture and protect women to be able to fully embrace the moontime as they bleed for themselves and their community, purging and cleansing impurities and imbalances and re emerging with desperately needed advice and instruction for us men on how to right the wrongs.
Nowadays our role might be to hold space to allow women to rediscover and experiment with this potential. To inspire and encourage them about how much we need and value this as men.
To conclude I share this quote and podcast from Pat Macabe. I feel it speaks eloquently to the challenges we face as we seek to find healthy ways to live at a time when we have been conditioned by disconnective narratives about masculine and feminine. This feels central to the topic and discussion around Moontime. I hope you enjoy if you choose to listen.
“You think you know what the masculine is, but you don’t. All you know is how they behave in a power over paradigm…… we think we know what it is to be human, but we don’t. All we know is how a human being behaves in a power-over paradigm. But what could a human being be in another paradigm?