16. MOONDANCE
The one about our cycles
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“Freedom is a luxury” the shirt read. It was a black crop top—the type of top I had seen so many of the Yoga Barn girls wearing with a sleek pair of high-waisted yoga pants that showed just enough of the midriff and were just soft enough to feel like an old boyfriend’s worn-in tee. I was at a new coffee shop that My Friend had suggested for our meeting. My Friend was a total Bali goddess, wearing her own sleek pair of nude yoga pants, a white tank top and a blush-colored kimono with angel wings painted on the back. Her blonde hair was pulled back sleekly into a ballerina bun and she arrived on her motor scooter, which was just as cute as it was cool.
I had met My Friend for the first time at the Modern Women's Festival in Ubud, Bali, back in November of 2019 when she was teaching a session called “The Self Love Journey”. This 90-minute workshop was all about attuning to the moon and looking at our period like the cycle of the seasons. She awoke the need in me to follow my flow. We hadn’t seen each other in person since then, but, over the first winter with Covid, in February of 2021, she had led an online course called “Sacred Moon,” where we spent five sessions during a moon cycle together in a sacred online container. As she told us, “The moon time wisdom is the birthright of every woman. My intention is that all women reconnect to the sacredness of their moon time and live in the right relationship with the earth and her seasons.”
The course helped me look at my monthly menstrual cycle like a gift from the Divine. It taught me to stop using tampons as a way of plugging up my period, and helped me feel my way into the flow of what it means to bleed every month. She had me track my cycle so I would know exactly when to hibernate in “winter” and let myself bleed, and also how to embrace the “summer” of my ovulation, and truly “innerstand” what it means physically, emotionally and spiritually to go through this process every twenty-eight days.