“Is she crazy? ‘A new movement in bleeding?’ What is she thinking?” Surely some people must be rolling their eyes about me now (although no one has come straight out and confronted me yet, I suppose I have to be prepared for that).J It is a little unnerving going out on a limb with a new business.  If I wasn’t so passionate about this, I would never risk people’s criticism.  People also thought I was crazy when I told them I was going to open a rock store. Twenty years later, I am still selling rocks, both in downtown Portland and at www.fossilcartel.com, so I guess I’m not that off.

The “modern” woman has been encouraged to take advantage of all the conveniences available to minimize the impact of their periods: first sanitary napkins, then tampons and now?  Now you don’t even have to get your period!  Now you can get an injection every three months and miss your monthly cycle all together!

For me, women’s disconnection with their cycles stems from the underlying force of Western Civilization being primarily comprised of yang or male energy.  I am not judging this as a “bad” thing; it’s just an observation.  This is nothing new: the west being more masculine and the east more feminine.  I believe the United States epitomizes this identity: more, bigger, better, “Go west young man,” The American Dream, etc., always striving and asserting ourselves.

The Industrial Age amplified this male energy. We went from living off the land to the cities, and became more alienated. People lost family and community connections and rarely gained them back. This is still the case today. Many families split up after their kids went off to colleges in other states, often never to return to their hometowns except to visit.

Equally significant is when we moved forward, always striving with myopic focus to create more, bigger, better, we wound up minimizing physical needs that seemed to impede our efforts to achieve.  The truth is that there is always time for things that are a priority in our lives, but how many times have we used work as an excuse not to exercise?  “I’m too busy.  I don’t have time for that.” We’ve come up with all sorts of shortcuts to minimally satisfy our physical needs in order to maintain life while we work to build bigger and better: fast food, TV dinners, you name it.    Maybe it’s not a great quality of life, but we’re still breathing.  And then sometimes, we fail at that.  We eat too much fast food and don’t exercise – and bam! a heart attack.

Young women have more of an opportunity now, more than ever, to “achieve.”  The odds aren’t stacked against them as much as they were with their mothers and grandmothers.  First tampons were invented to make it easier for a woman to forget about her period.  Pharmaceutical companies are now promoting birth control pills and injections to stop or minimize periods.  Why allow your period to stop you, when you can take something that will almost completely get rid of the “problem?”  There seems to be something inherently wrong with stopping our natural cycles unless it is a medical necessity.  It has already been proven that women suffer a loss of bone density from one of the period suppression products marketed today.  Who knows what other side effects will come, as there hasn’t yet been enough time to tell.

Like diet and exercise, the monthly cycle that connects women to their physical bodies and this physical world is an important link to women’s overall health as well, for reasons that are not only physical, but emotional, spiritual, and psychological. Besides it being good exercise, there’s another reason it’s advantageous to take a hike in nature: it gives us a sense of connection with this earthly world and helps put things into perspective (not to mention the benefit of massive amounts of negative ions we get exposed to, which we are starved for in cities and offices).  I believe women connecting with their monthly cycles are graced with physical, emotional, spiritual, and psychological benefits. This is what I am striving for with Moondays -- to help women connect with and come to appreciate their natural cycles, bringing themselves and their world a mind/body/spirit healing.