As always, it started by returning me to myself.
For years, I believed I honored my cycle. When I bled, I would often clear three days in my calendar—allowing space for stillness, rest and retreat.
But this cycle asked more of me.
It brought me to a threshold. A quiet but undeniable invitation to reclaim another layer of my power.
This time, I decided to reserve an entire week around my bleed.
That felt radical.
Planning spaciousness doesn't come easily to me. There is always another person to help, another project to finish, another reason to push through.
Then life immediately reflected the lesson back to me.
A male friend didn't show up in the way I had hoped. We had plans, and when I shared that I was bleeding there was no offer to cook, no suggestion of dinner, no curiosity about what I needed—only the assumption that we would simply rearrange.
So I cancelled.
Unexpectedly, grief surfaced.
My former partner, Mark, had always rolled out the red carpet when I bled. He understood that this time mattered. He made space for it.
I found myself wondering:
Is this a standard I am willing to accept nothing less than?
The answer came quickly.
Of course it is.
But an even more important question followed.
How was I honouring this time?
How was I treating my own portal?
My own oracle?
For years I have travelled far in search of transformation.
Plant medicines.
Energy healing.
Sweat lodges.
Vipassana retreats.
If there was a doorway into healing, I was willing to walk through it.
Yet this bleed whispered something different.
The medicine was no longer somewhere else.
It wasn't waiting in another ceremony.
It wasn't hidden in another teacher.
Beginning with this cycle, I decided I would stop outsourcing my power.
The oracle was already here.
The portal was in my home.
In my body.
In my womb.
In me.
Around this time, I found myself thinking about Tina.
When we first began working together, her cycle was irregular, mirroring many other parts of her life that longed for rhythm and regulation.
During our work together I gave her a red altar cloth—one that had been infused through many ceremonies. She slept on it that night.
The next morning she bled.
This was not about ritual, nervous system regulation, energy work, intention, it was something beyond language.
That moment stayed with me. It deepened my curiosity about the wisdom of the womb.
It confirmed something I had quietly been feeling for a long time.
I was ready to work with more women who knew that real change begins at the womb. It begins by listening.
One morning, whilst it took every cell in my body to tend to my practice. I stood on my yoga mat, shaking, breathing and gently moving through the resistance in my body, my neighbour called over the fence.
Until then we had barely exchanged more than a few sentences.
Within minutes she was telling me she was preparing for surgery the following day for endometriosis.
Then, almost without hesitation, she said she was ready to explore the deeper layers of what her body had been carrying.
We spoke about pain.
About inherited patterns.
About being the woman in a lineage who sometimes becomes the one willing to feel what generations before could not.
Before we parted, I promised to bring her soup after her surgery.
And once again I was reminded that the work is always weaving itself through ordinary moments.
The magic doesn't only happen inside ceremony.
Sometimes it happens over a back fence.
Later that day, Penny called.
She hadn't bled in five months.
The day after a healing session focused on clearing and reconnecting with her womb, her cycle returned.
With it came memories connected to childhood sexual trauma.
For the first time, she felt ready to meet them—not with shame, but ready to begin handing back what had never belonged to her.
Again and again I am shown the same thing.
The womb is not simply a reproductive organ.
It is a place of intuition.
Memory.
Grief.
Pleasure.
Creation.
A place where stories are held until they are ready to be witnessed.
It is about remembering that our bodies often speak long before our minds are ready to listen.
When we create space to hear them, something begins to soften.
Something begins to return.
Bless the bleed.
Let it nourish you.
Let it slow you.
Let it teach you.
Your womb is not something to overcome.
It is one of your wisest teachers
Calling you home.