The first day usually arrives in the morning, and I know it before I know it. There is a particular tenderness in the lower belly — the kind that asks you to put down the kettle, to forget the email, to sit. I light a candle now when I feel it coming. It is the smallest acknowledgment I can offer my body, and it is enough.
For most of my life I treated the bleed as an inconvenience. Something to manage. Something to push through with caffeine and ibuprofen and a tight smile in meetings. I was taught, like most of us, that the body is something to overcome. That softness is a kind of failure. That a woman who slows down is a woman who is falling behind.
Then I began to teach yoga, and the women who came to me — fertile, exhausted, brilliant women — kept arriving with the same complaint. I cannot rest. Even when my body begs me, I cannot rest. And I realised I had nothing to offer them that I had not first refused myself.
The pause that arrives
In the old traditions, the bleed is treated as a kind of withdrawal. Not in the clinical sense — but a sacred withdrawal. A turning inward. The Cherokee called it moontime. In Morocco we have a word my grandmother used — l'ḥnan — which is closer to tenderness than to anything English can hold. She said women were closer to God on those days. I did not understand what she meant until I stopped resisting.
The body knows things the mind cannot follow. It always has. The bleed is one of the ways it speaks.
What I notice, when I let the day be what it wants to be: I dream more vividly the night before. My senses arrive in a different order — smell first, then touch, sight last. I cry easily and the crying does not feel like sadness, only release. The truths I have been postponing surface without my permission. People who have hurt me return to me, softer and farther away. I forgive things I did not know I was holding.
What the practice looks like
I do not teach menstrual yoga. I do not believe in branding the body. But I will tell you what I do, on those days, in case it is useful.
I take the morning slowly. No phone for the first hour. I make a tea — sage and rose, sometimes nettles. I sit on the floor, knees wide, and place both hands on the lower belly. I let the warmth pass through. I do not ask anything of the body. I ask only that I stay.
If I move at all, it is gently. Supta baddha konasana, the reclined butterfly, with bolsters under the knees. Balasana, child's pose, with a folded blanket under the hips. Long, slow exhales — twice as long as the inhale. I avoid inversions, twists, and anything that requires holding. The body is already holding.
And I write. A few sentences in a notebook I keep only for these days. The page is a witness. It does not ask me to perform.
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A small request
If you have been treating the bleed as an interruption — please consider that it might be the prayer itself. The body does not waste an entire week of every month on something that does not matter. We do. We waste it.
You do not need a teacher to begin. You only need a candle, an hour, and the willingness to listen to whatever arrives. The wisdom is already there. It always was.
— Ghizlan