Blood Rites - The Spiritual Practice of Menstruation

By Jane Hardwicke Collings and Freya Rose

Blood Rites – The Spiritual Practice of Menstruation

Blood Rites is a reclamation.
A re-wilding
A re-wiring
An education
A call to action
And a manual for the badass blood witch
The priestess of our sacred blood
An agent of the goddess
And all women – everyone who bleeds

We need to reclaim our Blood Rites to recreate and maintain our connection to the Earth. It is time!

The Blood Rites are your blood rights!

Written by Jane Hardwicke Collins with beautiful illustrations by Freya Rose

• Language: English
• Publisher: Apple Tree House
• Release date: Feb 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9780987346445

Book preview

Blood Rites - The Spiritual Practice of Menstruation

Jane Hardwicke Collings

Copyright © 2023 JANE HARDWICKE COLLINGS. All rights reserved.

Published by JANE HARDWICKE COLLINGS / APPLETREE HOUSE

ISBN 978-0-9873464-4-5

Blood Rites - the Spiritual Practice of Menstruation

by Jane Hardwicke Collings

Edited by Kari Hill

[e-mail]

Illustrations, Layout and Design by Freya Rose

[e-mail]

www.alchemyandrose.com | @ofalchemyandrose

Published by AppleTreeHouse

First edition 2021

Available in print and as an e-book

at www.janehardwickecollings.com

PO Box 3290 Robertson 2577 NSW Australia

Enquiries:

www.janehardwickecollings.com

[e-mail]

ISBN: 978-0-9873464-4-5

With great thanks to the beautiful women who helped me write this.

Also by Jane Hardwicke Collings:

Ten Moons – the inner journey of pregnancy, preparation for natural birth

Herstory – a womanifesto

Thirteen Moons – a how to chart your menstrual cycle handbook and journal

Spinning Wheels – a guide to the influence of the cycles of the Moon, Earth’s seasons, life seasons and the menstrual cycle on any given day

Becoming a Woman - a guide for girls approaching menstruation

Mother Nature’s Wisdom – a children’s book about the wisdom of the cycles

Waking the Witches Comic Book Series, Book One - Ruby’s First Blood

Printed on recycled paper, both paper and printing created using renewable energy.

Printed by Taylor Print Pty Ltd NSW Australia – solar powered printing

[phone] www.taylorprint.com.au

We call the Divine Feminine

The inner knowing within each of us

Feminine knowledge, wisdom and power.

We call the power of our blood

And the freedom to bleed shamelessly.

We give thanks for this for our Sisters,

everywhere.

So Mote it Be

(say these words and light a candle)

We live at a time

that calls for the very best of us.

The Women the Earth needs now

are strong, soft, resilient and adaptable,

Women who are wild, not tamed

embodying feminine power and knowledge,

operating at their full potential.

To be these Women

we must reclaim our bodies,

our menstrual cycle and our rites of passage

from their patriarchal treatment,

lick our wounds,

tell our stories,

and do our inner work for our healing.

Then we can be operating at our full potential.

The menstrual cycle is a portal to our reclamation of our body and our feminine power.

A Woman in her power is connected to her menstrual cycle,

working with the rhythms

embodying feminine power.

At another time she may have been called

Earth Priestess

Blood Witch

This is the level of magick required to tear down the patriarchy, within.

This is your birthright

and your responsibility

the Spiritual Practice of Menstruation

the Blood Rites.

Let us join together with this necessary work and co-create a

Positive Menstrual Culture

for all our relations.

This is Hope in Action.

Contents

Introduction

Chapter One

Reclaiming the Spiritual Practice of Menstruation

On Menarche

Menstrual Shame

Charting your cycle

Chapter Two

Menstrual Cycle Basics

Seasons of our Cycle

The Anatomy and Physiology of the Menstrual Cycle The Relationship with the Moon and our Cycle

Chapter Three

The Spiritual Practice of Menstruation:

Week One

Energies of daily, lunar, season and life cycle and super powers

Her-story

Spiritual practice

Journal

Her-story continues

Day 3 visioning

Menstrual products

More moonblood magick

Understanding somethings that contribute to menstrual pathology

Bio hacks for pathology

Moontime Magick Tea

Hormonal levels and functions

Summary

Chapter Four

The Spiritual Practice of Menstruation:

Week Two

Energies of daily, lunar, season and life cycle and super powers

Lunar Phase Return

Spiritual practice

Journal

Menstrual cycle and the moon

Her-story continued

Hormonal levels and functions

Summary

Chapter Five

The Spiritual Practice of Menstruation:

Week Three

Energies of daily, lunar, season and life cycle and super powers

Spiritual practice

Journal

Her-story continues

Everything not working shows up

The Pill

Her-story continues

Premenstrual Syndrome (PMS)

Hormonal levels and function

Summary

Chapter Six

The Spiritual Practice of Menstruation:

Week Four

Energies of daily, lunar, season and life cycle and super powers

Red Thread

Spiritual practice

Journal

Her-story continues

Hormonal levels and function

Summary

Her-story continues

Chapter Seven

Final Words

Appendix

Herstory - a womanifesto

Resources

Endnotes

NOTE - I have used the word woman throughout this book, if this term doesn’t suit you please replace it with the one that does.

If you haven’t read the Herstory¹ yet or it’s been a while, read it first, so you re-member…. You’ll find Herstory - a womanifesto in the Appendix.

By honouring the demands of our bleeding, our blood gives us something in return. The crazed bitch from irritation hell recedes. In her place arises a side of ourselves with whom we may not-at first- be comfortable. She is a vulnerable, highly perceptive genius who can ponder a given issue and take her world by storm. When we’re quiet and bleeding, we stumble upon solutions to dilemmas that’ve been bugging us all month. Inspiration hits and moments of epiphany rumba ‘cross de tundra’ of our senses. In this mode of existence one does not feel antipathy towards a bodily ritual that so profoundly reinforces our cuntpower.

Inga Muscio, Cunt: A Declaration of Independence²

We have lost our Rights and our Rites and once reclaimed, the healing will begin. As a culture we have been maintaining a state of disrespect and even abhorrence toward the female menstrual cycle. And this has been cross-cultural, in most, if not all cultures across the planet. Women’s cycles are at worst rejected, at the least ignored, and often denied.

We need to reclaim our Blood Rites to recreate and maintain our connection to our body and the Earth. It is time. When women return their blood to the Earth an energetic connection is created that is also physical and results in the woman caring deeply for that land. This magick holds a key to the much-needed global shift to respect our Mother Earth. If women return their blood to the Earth with consciousness, gratitude and letting go of all that no longer serves, the tides will turn. And the women will rise again as Earth Priestesses.

There is a First Nations People of America saying….

This book is about how to practice your power!

The Spiritual Practice of Menstruation

Rite = Ritual

Ritual honours, celebrates and marks as significant a particular event or experience. We conduct ritual all the time in the way we prepare or complete processes in our daily lives. Ritual with intention empowers the experience and makes it sacred.

The Sanskrit word root for ritual, R’tu, is the same as for menstruation.³

And first, let’s step back and up, and look at the potential ‘big picture’, Eagle Eye view …

At the Altar of Menarche a girl is transformed into a woman, and there is a transmission of information about what it means to be a woman. She has already had her introduction into the practice of how to care for self through the cycles by observing her mother as she negotiates her cycles. She feels an alignment with the interconnectedness of everything, especially the connection with all women. There is a gradual awakening to the power, role and responsibility of being a woman, of the spiritual practice of menstruation, the beauty and preciousness of her body and how to nurture and care for herself through her cycle and her blossoming sexuality. She becomes the Altar of the Feminine.

From years of engaging with the spiritual practice of menstruation, she is experienced at hearing and following her body’s messages, able to navigate her inner world and to rest deep within her womb. Aware of the innate transformative power and beauty of woman, from sacred sexual union with her beloved, she comes to the Altar of Childbirth ready for her shamanic experience of birthing. She uses the pain or strong sensations of labour as a portal into an altered state of consciousness, shamanic consciousness, where she feels the oneness of all things. In this place she connects with her baby and with her soul path. All that arises is what must on her journey to wholeness. She knows she will have the birth she needs to teach her what she needs to learn and to prepare her for mothering - soulcrafting. She travels to her inner birth temple, she lets go and she opens to be the clear vessel she can be for her baby’s journey earthside.

When her fertility wanes and her cycle pattern changes, she moves to the Altar of Menopause. This, like her birthings, takes as long as it takes, however long it needs to, as she labours to birth herself anew. She is reminded of all the lessons she learned about herself through her visits to the Birth Altar and she brings that wisdom to her own rebirth. She cannot forget what she learned because it is reflected back to her through her children. She gathers the pearls of wisdom for her basket as her harvest to share in her coming years as Maga, wise woman.

She withdraws from the busy-ness of life at the end of her sixth decade, maybe at around 70 something. Crone, she sits, knits and walks, slower. And she contemplates all she has seen and offers this wisdom to anyone who is lucky enough to hear. She is the Altar of Wisdom. She smells the roses, always.

Finally, when her time has come, she rests in her home with her loved ones close by and she remembers and gives thanks for her life. She passes when she is ready. Her passage is facilitated by the tears of her loved ones as they say goodbye.

So, back now to the work at hand …

Reclaiming the Spiritual Practice of Menstruation

Once we start to work with Feminine power we begin to see that it is not our minds that are in control of this power – it ebbs and flows with the movements of the planets, the procession of the seasons, the moons and tides, our own internal cycles of menstruality, anniversaries, the events around us. All these and more impact our experience and expressions of power. We learn to become aware of these various patterns and their impact on us and work more consciously with rather than against or in spite of them. We learn that they are all part of the same process. . We open towards the energy, rather than shut down to it. We learn to trust the flow. Lucy H. Pearce, Burning Woman

The Spiritual Practice of Menstruation is a practice of Deep Ecology - by holding deep reverence for both the Earth and our Blood and their intertwined reciprocal relationship.

The Spiritual Practice of Menstruation is a process of ‘rewilding’ the Feminine.

There is so much more to the menstrual cycle than the biology lesson given to explain it, in the same way that there is so much more to sex and childbirth than the mechanics.

The menstrual cycle is a cycle, it’s not just the bleeding time. However the bleeding time gets the most attention, and may be more well known as her period, or her moontime, or just her moon. When I was growing up we called it ‘Jo’ and I’m not sure why! …and there’s ‘Aunt Flo’ and ‘the crimson tide’. And the old names like ‘on the rags’ or just ‘rags’ herald from a time when that’s what women used to collect their blood, rags, and many women around the planet still do …

The menstrual cycle is a