Posts Tagged ‘menstruation’

The Taboo Power of Girls (Guest Post @ Family Guiding)

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September 21 marked the International Day of Peace, and now here we are shining a light on how to empower girls. How do these two topics relate? Closely and powerfully. Educated, empowered women bring peace to their communities in countless important ways, including reducing violence, poverty and sickness.

Personal empowerment, like world peace, doesn’t spring fully formed. It begins in the most intimate surroundings of the home and family. It begins in the inner sense of security, safety and rightness that a child develops from the earliest moments of existence. It begins as womb peace and birth peace, then Mommy-and-Daddy peace, teacher peace and so on, rippling outward.

And for girls, one of the dimensions of selfhood that is particularly vulnerable to feelings of less-than, shame, and disempowerment has to do with her… well, yes… “that.”  {Read more about “that”… and about empowering our daughters… at Family Guiding} 

Jeannine Parvati Baker at 65 ~ An Appreciation

Conscious Conception author Parvati BakerThe very word itself… yogini …sounds like the image of Jeannine Parvati Baker in full-flowering asana mastery: lithe stems curling around o-so-full center of heartful breath. At once elfin and elegant. A bold design, a weaver of words. Alive forever in our memory.

This pioneering activist for homebirth, unassisted childbirth and newborn rights would have turned sixty-five this week. Far from retiring, I’m guessing her tireless voice for eco-feminism and reproductive health would be dancing circles with social media. Our wise crone Jeannine Parvati Baker would just be hitting her stride. (more…)

Period Power: Rethinking Menstruation

Period Power: Rethinking Menstruation | Marcy Axness, PhDThe spring season is all about ripeness, fertility and the regeneration of life. These are also the qualities of  a woman’s menstrual cycle, and yet we’re not quite as breathlessly delighted for the arrival of our flow as we are for springtime!

But we’d do well to regard our cycle with at least a bit more friendliness: a  woman’s attitude toward her menstrual period impacts how she lives, labors and births. And it also helps shape her children’s attitudes about the intimate ecology of woman-power.

The Missing Vagina Monologue

{Read more about this intriguing idea at mothering.com}

I Got My Period…I Got My POWER!

I Got My Period...I Got My POWER!Okay, I’ll come out with it, finally, after all these years: I was desperately disappointed with The Vagina Monologues! I’m only now fessing up and lodging my opinion that the empress Eve Ensler has no new clothes on. In her supposedly ground-breaking play…two hours of dialogue and monologue dedicated (supposedly) to the sexual dimension of a woman’s psycho-anatomical makeup…there is not one single mention of <gasp> menstruation. No period, period.

Oh, there are plenty of other reasons to not embrace TVM (or as Camille Paglia calls it, “the perversion of feminism that Ensler represents”), but I’m focusing on this one. Period. A woman’s attitude toward her menstrual period impacts how she lives, labors and births. Let’s outgrow the tired cultural perversions about our creative power as women! (more…)