Invisible Power — Lessons our Culture could learn from Jazz, the Four Seasons and the Menstrual…
When I feel into the texture of the issues of our current times, the thread I see, despite all the differences, is the lack of out-breath.
When I feel into the texture of the issues of our current times, the thread I see, despite all the differences, is the lack of out-breath.
It seems that we, as a culture, have been inhaling continuously, accumulating air in the lungs, ignoring the fact that exhaling is also an instrumental part of breathing.
There is something about grasping for more, continuous movement, and lack of rhythm that feels detrimental to humanity on the level of the soul.
What I am hoping for, with this article, is to shed some light on how restoring life’s rhythm, the fullness of the inhale and the emptiness of the exhale, is a vital piece for creating a healthier and more peaceful society.
Let’s start with Jazz.
Imagine yourself sitting in a bar listening to an amazing jazz band. At some point, the band stops playing and you and your friends start having a conversation.
Slowly, through the noise, something starts pulling your attention towards the stage. It’s the bass. The bass, with its depth, gently invites the energy back towards the band. The noise of the conversation starts dying down and the field is now ready for the solo.
This is when the Saxophone starts playing. The crowd is mesmerized.
At that point, most people would have forgotten about the bass and that’s ok because she feels her irreplaceable role in that ensemble. That is enough.
Now imagine the same scene. The same bar. The band stops playing and the crowd starts talking. This time, however, there is no bass. This time there is nothing “holding space” or inviting the energy in.
The sax comes in with the solo and, even though it is still beautiful, there is something missing. No one knows exactly what, but that “invisible” thing makes a difference and the solo doesn’t quite have the same impact on the crowd.
The base has left the stage and we have barely noticed it.
The Menstrual Cycle and the Seasons.
All of us are aware, in one way or another, that birthing humans is an indispensable part of life.
Now, let’s stretch this a bit.
For a woman to be able to birth humans into the world she needs to have a menstrual cycle. That is part of the deal and wishing it away, as many still do, won’t solve the problem.
I want to invite you to reflect on what having a menstrual cycle actually means.
If you are a man, chances are that you haven’t thought much about it. If you are a woman, there is a likelihood that you either dislike or disregard your menstrual cycle.
If, like me, you have learned later in life to appreciate this aspect of yourself, even then, you are probably still immersed in a culture that doesn’t see or understand that part of you. And this, obviously, has consequences.
The menstrual cycle is not just what tells us that a woman menstruates. It is the pathway through which she feels and senses the world. It is her rhythm.
One way of looking at it is that the menstrual cycle is the concrete manifestation of the archetypal energy of the cycles.
I’ll explain it.
The cycles are the rhythm of life on Earth. Everything on Earth has a cycle.
The seasons are probably the best way to feel into the “flavour” of the energy of the cycles.
Nature births itself in spring, growing and expanding with colours and delight.
In summer, nature expresses itself most radiantly and expansively. In autumn, nature is saying “I need to slow down a bit”, the trees change colour and life in the garden is less busy. In winter, nature goes to sleep. She harnesses her power in invisible ways, so in spring, she can rebirth on a never-ending ebb and flow of energy.
It can be useful to use the dance between Yin and Yang (masculine and feminine) to better understand the seasons. Yang (masculine energy), is the force responsible for the new growth and expansion of spring and summer, Yin (feminine energy), is the power that tends to the letting go and resting that happens in autumn and winter.
The menstrual cycle follows the same rhythm as the seasons. It has both yin and yang contained within it.
Our pre-ovulation and ovulation phases being spring and summer (the phases that are appreciated by culture) and autumn and winter being the post-ovulation and premenstrual phases (these phases tend to not only be negated, but vilified by culture.)
We breathe in on our follicular phase (spring and summer) and we breathe out in our luteal phase (autumn and winter). Inhaling and exhaling continuously. Birthing ourselves with the inhale and dying to ourselves with the exhale.
The unconscious way our culture seems to relate to our female physiology supports the notion that inhaling without exhaling is even a possibility.
Maybe this is where I should say. It isn’t working.
Let’s put our curious “goggles” on for a moment. Isn’t it peculiar that most of the western world (and I’m pretty sure a big part of the east as well) lives in a construct where the menstrual cycle is perceived as an inconvenience?
Let’s unpack this because it feels important.
When a girl is born, her brain is already differently wired to a boy’s brain. This difference is real and there is already plenty of research to confirm it. When she has her first period (actually before, since her hormones start working on her before that) this difference increases.
This difference is quite dramatic and it is very dangerous to overlook it. I understand the reasons why we, as women, have unconsciously agreed to live our lives as if this wasn’t the case.
If the “rules of the game” are set by the ones that don’t see/feel or even understand the cycles as a lived experience, how could the menstrual cycle be “A Thing”?
It is important to say here that I am not implying in any way that men, or anyone, is doing anything to us women. What I am suggesting is that the majority of people that hold prominent positions in the public sphere are men and they are, for good reason, oblivious to the fact that women are cyclical. Therefore, the “rules” of engagement in these spheres of society have been designed as if the cycle didn’t exist. Because for men, it doesn’t. Not in the same way that it does for women.
Girls are, as a result, initiated into womanhood by a culture that doesn’t see the cycle and this, of course, will deeply impact how they will see themselves throughout their lives.
Teased by boys, confused by the ebb and flow of emotional energy in their bodies, embarrassed by the new smells and fluids they are producing, girls will often start living a life of quiet shame in regards to that aspect of themselves.
Quiet because they don’t know it’s a “thing”. Many girls feel constantly “off” and end up learning that to get positive attention from the world they need to show only a very sanitized portion of themselves. They learn from this feedback that they “should” spend their entire lives in “Spring and Summer” and that if they ever show signs of being in “Autumn or Winter” they will be disregarded or ridiculed.
These cyclical young women will divorce their minds from their bodies in an attempt to function in the world and the result of this split will perpetuate the very (incomplete) definition of what it means to be a woman.
Have you ever thought, for example, of the impact of being raised using words like PMT or PMS (premenstrual tension or syndrome) to define a very natural and powerful part of your experience of life?
This name, PMS, and all that it represents in our collective psyches tell us exactly what we, as a culture, value and what we push away.
If we learn how to listen, the voice of PMS has actually something important to say.
If PMS and our mainstream western culture were to have a conversation I imagine it would go a bit like this.
PMS (true name PMP, pre-menstrual power :-)) — You know this emotional turmoil you are feeling now? It is actually a good thing and it is pointing to real issues that you might need address at some point.
Culture — Are you serious? Does that mean that I actually need to stop and pay attention to this “annoying voice”?
PMS — Yep.
Culture — Sorry. No can do.
PMS — What?
Culture — As you can see I’m busy achieving. Something. Stopping is not really part of my vocab.
PMS — well, I guess I need to start shouting then.
Culture — Try me.
PMS — Oh I will. I’ll start gently with just erratic emotional impulses but if you still don’t hear I will have to add some physical discomfort.
Culture — Ha! I have painkillers and antidepressants.
PMS — Ok. You’ve asked for it. See you around menopause.
Without the humour, this would be just plain sad.
It is important to say here that I don’t see this as a conscious choice we are making. I sense that most people don’t recognize the depth of destruction that happens in this “simple act of casual shaming” and that, combined with our incapacity to be with our own discomfort and the pain of others, is a recipe for disaster.
To put it simply PMS, in my view (and here I am oversimplifying for the purpose of this article) is the distance between what a woman is actually feeling and how culture expects her to feel and act.
I am aware, at least in myself and in friends, that PMS can be experienced very differently when we don’t feel that we need to “keep pushing” or trying to be what we are not. PMS, when seen in this light, works as a barometer for a woman’s inner integrity.
Imagine Summer trying not to go into Autumn?
It sounds ridiculous when I put it like this, but the truth is that, unfortunately, this is a bit how most women will “express their feminine ways”. Their bodies telling them to act in one way, their heads (and culture) telling them they can’t (or shouldn’t, or that is weak, etc…)
If we recall the example of the sax and the bass, turning the very thing that shapes us as women into an inconvenience is like telling the bass she is not important and we don’t need her anymore.
We have become so divorced from this wisdom, that even if girls reach out to older women for support they will, most likely, get a reinforced message that menstruation is “not that big a deal” and so they will carry on, moving through life with their tampon or pad in place, at times feeling unbearable pain, at times feeling taken over by their emotional landscape, at times pushing through and becoming numb to themselves. All along feeling that they don’t quite belong. The glow and life force slowly and quietly fading away…
This is when the bass feels like there is no place for her in the ensemble and leaves the stage. (maybe she will even attempt sax).
One can say that there is nothing wrong with it, society seems to be doing pretty well living this way.
If “putting up” with something is the aim, then I agree that we have all been doing ok.
The problem, however, is much deeper than this. It lies in the danger of forgetting the sacred. Once we forget the sacred, and life is seen and dealt with as purely mechanical, then this world is a gloomy place to be in.
Ecstasy and joy are irreplaceable building blocks of life and characteristics of the Yin Element/the feminine principle according to ancient traditions, such as Taoism. This disconnection to the feminine principle (symbolised here by the way that we, as a culture, deal with the cycle) turns us into orphans looking for a “quick fix” and so we go for the “effortless” version of joy and ecstasy: drugs, TV, social media, porn, sugar, caffeine, alcohol, and the list goes on…
One of the meta-issues of negating the menstrual cycle is that as a civilization we forgot that life is actually cyclical. The wisdom of the menstrual cycle teaches us in an embodied way that if I am “in flow” with what is happening (pun intended), be it “summer” or “winter” then life can again be a magical holy journey that celebrates all things, including discomfort.
Our systems and individuals (that create the systems) honour the God of “unending growth” (also known as progress), something that our menstrual cycles and the cycles of the Earth have been telling us all along is a construct bound to fail.
Holding on to the “doing, doing, doing” phase of the menstrual cycle (Spring and Summer) without allowing time for the gifts available in the harvest, composting and dying phases (Autumn and Winter) means that we have created a civilization that sees linearity as truth.
Women, just like the Earth, are cyclical. This truth can only be felt, however, once we descend from the ivory tower of our abstract ideas of what it is to be a woman. In a world that seems to prefer abstraction over felt experience, this is a tough call.
If we use women’s physiological milestones as a barometer for how we are doing as a civilization, then things get pretty gloomy.
I’ll try to paint the picture of what our culture considers normal for women. Again, with your curious goggles on, see if you can notice why “the bass has left the stage”.
It starts with the shame of the menstrual cycle, it carries on with the shame that many of us feel as we are taught by medical doctors (many of them men) how to birth our babies. Then comes the shaming of “the baby brain”, which is an actual thing and serves a purpose (again, a bit inconvenient for our mainstream culture), all of that with sprinkles of PMS every now and again and the “Grand Finale” is menopause.
Menopause, as all other milestones, offers incredible gifts. However, as it seems to be the case with all female rites of passage, they don’t come without effort or “pain” of some sort.
The cramps in menstruation offer us an opportunity and invitation to “slow down”, to rest, to quieten our minds and bodies, in birth the pain and fear offer us the chance to see the power that lies just on the other side, and during menopause, the gifts available are also many. Hormonally, a woman stops being cyclical for the first time in her life since her teens. She has, in that sense, become more “linear” but with the benefit of having accumulated 40 years of embodied cyclical wisdom.
A post-menopausal woman, just like Autumn, is ready to harvest whatever has been planted in the earlier phases of her life. She has newfound confidence supported by the increase of testosterone, and with that, for many, comes the courage to “compost” what doesn’t serve her anymore. (this bit really scares our culture)
After menopause, more linear energy is available to her. This allows her to focus more time on the larger collective and not only on her immediate family/clan (as the mothering hormones available during the menstrual cycle years have now weaned).
This “new ruthlessness” is another source of power as she now feels ready to share her gifts with the world in an uncompromising way.
What we see, however, reflected in our mainstream culture is not that. We see the culture dictating (and I have to acknowledge here that we, women, are also the culture) who we are and have to be.
Without claiming our power as mature wise women, we sit silently (or angrily) in the corner, looking for ways to carry on having the approval of an existence that has never actually seen us. So again, we conform, we look for plastic surgery, or other ways to “stay young” so that we can, consciously or unconsciously, keep having some form of attention from the world.
It feels important to say that I don’t hold judgement or blame towards anyone that has made a different choice to me. What I am trying to point out with this article is that the bass has left the stage and we, all of us, are missing out on something powerful and beautiful, even if we don’t yet realize it.
What I am attempting to do here, is to start uncovering the murky waters of the unconscious agreements we all seem to be living by.
As you can probably see by now the whole trajectory for women (in relation to the feminine expression held in her cycle) doesn’t look very “happy go lucky” once we consider these factors that I am pointing to. This statement might surprise or even trigger some people and I believe that not knowing that this is actually informing us in some deep way perpetuates many of the pathologies I see expressed in the modern world. One of them being the bass wanting to become sax.
This imbalance, of course, doesn’t affect only women. If the denial of the feminine expression makes itself visible through the menstrual cycle, it also shapes what we consider “good” or “bad” in the subtle world (the world of thoughts and emotions). Darkness is bad, clarity is good, cyclical is bad, linearity is good, death is bad, life is good, premenstrual and menstrual phase is bad (the most yin part of the cycle), ovulation is good (the most yang/masculine phase of the cycle), the shadow is bad (the bits of my consciousness that are invisible to me), the “personality” is good (who I think I am)… and the list goes on.
This bias shapes and informs how we define health, how we see and treat “bad people” (people that act from the darker places in the psyche) and how we see and treat our “bad” (hidden) sides.
This holding on to linearity, ironically, keeps us trapped in a never-ending cycle of suffering, a delusional state that has us believe that not embracing the feminine is even an option and that the masculine is the one to be blamed, as if we were, somehow, separate like oil and water.
Progress, therefore, can be seen as the result of this delusional state where we are constantly pushing. Pushing for money, power and status, pushing to stay alive in ICU’s, pushing with fertilizers so the Earth carries on giving. Pushing ourselves with coffee (which I just did), pushing ourselves with cocaine and also, ironically, pushing ourselves to sleep with sleeping pills and antidepressants.
We push our shadows away through eating, drinking or any other numbing activity or worse, we push our shadows onto other people.
We get the dark parts of reality “away” from sight in refugee camps, prisons and hospices. All in an attempt to pretend that darkness doesn’t exist. We split ourselves from experience and as a result, we create a split reality where complementary polarities are felt as duality.
What I am proposing here is that darkness is a necessary part of the light. It is only because of the darkness that we can see and appreciate the light. We can’t have one without the other. Menstruation and ovulation are also part of this polarity. Both beautiful and necessary.
For the ones of us that are interested in health and healing, one thing we know. If we are not aware of the need for healing, healing can’t happen.
Yang, without Yin, is showing up in culture as a pathological agency. Yin, without Yang, shows up as inaction. Following this logic, this cycle of pain we are trapped in, ironically follows this pattern — excess Yang keeps pushing and asserting itself (through men and women) and the pathological excess Yin refrains from action, which again supports this cycle of imbalance.
It is not as black and white as I make it seem as people, and consequently the systems we are and belong to, act from a sliding scale of Yin and Yang. Overall though, we can see that our mainstream culture, the one that shapes a lot of our collective mindset, has a strong bias towards Yang/Masculine.
It is not hard to understand why, and this is an important piece of the puzzle we need to also consider.
Let’s make this even more black and white just for the purpose of understanding some of the ideas I am trying to convey. Let’s break Yin and Yang into separate parts as if that was actually possible.
If Yang/masculine represents (amongst other things) what is known, what we can measure and control, and Yin/feminine represents the unknown, immeasurable and uncontrollable parts of reality, which one of those two do you think we’d be more comfortable with?
Ha! You got it. (or so I hope!)
To a worldview that tries hard to relate to life as something predictable and controllable, no matter how much reality keeps inviting us into the mystery through love, death, pain and beauty, the feminine is the biggest threat.
Fully embracing the feminine means fully embracing the fact that we don’t know and that is a tough call. The masculine is wired to know and to problem solve. The masculine, alone, can’t “not know”. The part of the masculine that is missing IS the feminine. Together, dancing this life in companionship and not rivalry, Yin and Yang embrace Mystery AND Form, Life AND Death, Darkness AND Light, menstruation AND ovulation. It embraces control and letting go.
The bass wants to come back to the stage. She thought of quitting and becoming a Sax player but maybe now, if you help me call her back in, she will come.
Maybe she just needs to be recognized as an irreplaceable part of the ensemble.
She is back.
Can you hear her now?