I could not see that my longing for union with Gaia and her natural wildness was also a longing for Woman; for union with her wild womb; and for the untamed, wild, feeling nature of my own feminine self. I desired to truly meet the feminine in all her wild and beautiful elements, and to remember how the masculine was an integral part of this vast,

am afraid of who I am really meant to be, who I really am, afraid of my own power, and understanding its source is something far vaster and greater than myself. I do not own this blood or this womb or this power. It does not empower me or guide me—it is a communal space, for everything. Its love, power, and wisdom is not limited to the boundaries

It is an abyss of deep darkness, it’s like looking into a Void that looks back at me, fully conscious. In fact, rather than me as a being looking at the blood as some smaller part of me, it is as if the blood is vast, and conscious, looking back at me, engulfing me, making me feel small and awestruck at the magnitude of its presence, power, and

At the peak of this experience, for two days we both communed with a being, a primordial mother, whom I will call Sophia, who gifted us with a taste of what original innocence might feel like. She desired so much to reach across the veil and assist us—and everyone—to rebirth ourselves. I “saw” and painted her during this experience and it was as if

The culmination of these experiences was a flood of wisdom or gnosis about menstruation. I felt deeply that our menstrual blood is our innocence. I was guided to share my menstrual blood with the earth and with my beloved.

Praying suggested we were separate from something and needed to connect or speak to it. But we were already in it. Praying would have been like making a telephone call to talk to yourself. We were already inside the Source.

devoted myself to the Divine Mother, praying to her for hours and hours at a time. I practiced womb breathing, meditated, fasted, cleansed, spent time in nature, used herbs and essences, and synchronized my rhythms with lunar cycles. I wrote a book on womb healing that I never released, exploring the spiritual and energetic practices to restore the

where a meeting with Kali plunged me into a Dark Night of the Womb. Discovering the dark face of the feminine took me into the crucible of my repressed shadow realms; like Persephone and Inanna, I took a journey to the underworld to be stripped to my psychic bones.

Allowing my blood to flow has been an act of freedom, of anarchy, a reclaiming of my womb power, a soul promise to not allow society to shame my nature. I called this free-flow menstruation—shamanic menstruation.