I will never understand what it’s like to have menstrual cramps, but I do understand how it feels to go through pain so sharp and yet somehow steady that I’d do anything to end it.
At the time, if someone had offered to ensure I never feel anything like that in exchange for my soul, I might not have one anymore.
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So yes, it’s not hard to see why women would be hunting for solutions to debilitating cramps and that search can sometimes lead to some unusual places.
It’s hard to think of a remedy more unusual than what one Australian woman has started doing, though.
It wasn’t so long ago that 26-year-old Yazmina Jade Adler from Melboune, Australia often suffered severe menstrual cramps.
As The Daily Mail reported , doctors told her to go on the pill, but neither this nor any other treatments she found seemed to do the trick.
That was until she met someone she described as a “shamanic womb woman.”
This person encouraged her to “connect” to her blood. Touching it was part of what she meant by that, but she seemed to imply that Adler should pursue a deep, personal connection with her blood.
She reported feeling positive results soon after giving it a try, and seeing a stigma fall away in front of her made that personal connection happen fairly soon.
As she put it , “I decided to give it a go, and as soon as I started doing that, it was like it had this profound healing effect of like ‘oh, I don’t need to be shameful of this anymore’. Because women, we are shamed for bleeding, it’s a sanitary thing.”
While letting go of these negative associations is great, Adler was looking for a solution to her menstrual cramps.
Fortunately for her, however, developing a meditation ritual that involves smearing her menstrual blood on herself apparently cleared those up for her too.
At least as she told it, the pain went away entirely.
So she’s since made this menstrual meditation a monthly ritual and collects her blood in menstrual cup to set aside for the ceremony.
She will then either put the blood on her hand or “anointing it on [her] third eye,” which means to smear it on her forehead and sometimes her face.
She then earmarks a space for ritual meditation and sits with one hand on her heart and the other on her womb.
As she said, “I’m connecting those spaces and I just breathe into the body. I would normally connect with the blood, just by doing that, it instantly does something to me. What I found is taking that time out, actually be with myself, and meditate, connect with my body, it’s like the pain has gone away.”
Since she’s apparently derived a lot of tranquility from her ritual, she’s looking to spread it to other women as well.
As she put it, “I just want every woman to feel it. I know what women go through, I know that pain and shame, I feel for the women who are struggling with this.”
It’s likely for this reason that she pitched her ritual on an Australian TV show called Myth or Medicine.
As you’ll see in the full video, one of the doctors she showed this to was grossed out at first, but soon found something profoundly beautiful in what she was doing.
Although neurosurgeon Dr Charlie Teo called her ceremony “very powerful,” he also expressed serious doubt that her results would necessarily work for others, at least not in a way that could translate to a clinical trial.
h/t: The Daily Mail
