What was your experience of your First Bleed?

Were you like most young girls in today’s world when you got your first period? Were you simply given a tampon or a pad and left to figure out the rest?

Or perhaps you felt shame and embarrassment and didn’t even have the confidence to tell an adult around you? So you went along as if it were just any other day in your life. 

Or perhaps you had a mother or other female figure in your life who did take the time to acknowledge that something big just happened, but then it stopped there, leaving you with the feeling that there surely must be something more to this bleeding thing than just making sure you have pads in your backpack.

The majority of us did not have a proper initiatory experience that honored menarche (the first bleed) as the rite of passage that it truly is and perhaps we felt the repercussions of this years down the road, and maybe still do.

When our rites of passage are not honored for the immensity that they are, a seed of doubt or fear is often sown in our psyches. There’s a part of you within that knows something big and potentially magical took place inside of your mind/body/spirit but if the culture, family or society wasn’t able to properly reflect that back to you, it can leave you with a sense of abandonment. Often this doubt or fear is unconscious, but as we start to reflect and explore, we can see how it affects many areas of our lives.

The First Golden Opportunity

As menarche is the first “golden opportunity” in our life, it has the potential to shape us for many years to come. When seeds of doubt, fear, isolation or shame are sown in this formative passage, it can manifest as lack of confidence in how to care for our female bodies, insecurity in our fertility and femininity, and fear of natural processes like childbirth and breastfeeding that potentially await us in the future.  

On the contrary, when we take time to properly honor and recognize this magical and potent transition from girlhood to womanhood, we sow seeds of magic, wisdom, knowledge, and deep trust in the female experience. 

A sense of wonder and expansion in our female journeys is what we all want for ourselves and for the next generation. I would be honored to support you to accompany your daughter or another significant girl in your life through this important rite of passage. I’m here to tell you from my own experience that this transition can be meaningful, beautiful, special and incredibly powerful. 

Imagine feeling fully resourced with tools and guidance to be able to honor young women as they cross this momentous threshold. Imagine feeling proud and confident that you did everything you could to impart wisdom and reverence for this passage, setting the stage for a positive experience of womanhood that will reverberate far into the future.