The womb and the drum belong together

The womb and the drum belong together.

Last night I held a womb healing session for one of my returning clients, and soon after the beat began we were drawn into the sleepy, honey dream world of the womb.

It isn't always this way, but for the woman who has grown comfortable with journeying she slips into womb consciousness and takes me with her.

When I work one to one with women, you can get a sense of where they are in their journey. Much like the sacred triangle of the birth space - mother, partner, doula. In womb healing we have the woman, the healer and the drum. The drum responds to moments of hesitation, cathartic releases, it can support them to move through difficult feelings that may arise.

Drumming is and has always been a woman's modality and we need it now more than ever. As our brains take in more information every day than they ever have. We don't need to develop a meditation practice before we can find healing.

The drumbeat fills the busy mind so the spirit and the body can find respite and receive messages from the womb. Messages from the lineage of our motherline, from lives past, as Perdita Finn calls it "the long story of our soul".

We are brought back into womb consciousness like the baby hearing the rushing of the mother's blood, the inflating of her lungs, her heartbeat.

I offer my shamanic womb healing sessions virtually and you are also able to access my online courses Sacred Womb Journeys and The Medicine Wheel of the Womb.

Menstrual traditions and wellbeing

Did you know that women's makeup and fashion are derived from menstruation traditions? Have you ever wondered why humans are one of the few species where the female is more beautiful than the male?

Ancient society was structured around the needs of bleeding women, in direct opposition to what we experience today. And yet women are bleeding with more frequency and longer duration than ever, due to our better diets and less time spent pregnant and breastfeeding.

This is incredibly potent - as our cycles of creation and shedding come with greater frequency.

We long for ritualised menstruation because it is a huge part of our collective consciousness. When women give themselves permission to just be with the shedding, their spiritual, physical and emotional wellbeing significantly improves.

We used to understand that how a woman was treated during her bleed had impact on the whole culture. For primitive societies they thought interrupting, looking at or touching the woman would bring a natural disaster. This is a natural step in the process of understanding the devastating impacts of women's physiology not being respected.

For a woman emerging from her bleeding time, elaborate makeup and clothes would be used in celebration to signal her completion of the ritual and that she was now considered "safe". Like the new moon emerging from the period of three days darkness, which was also celebrated.

This is where the feminine desire for adornment comes from, from this seclusion and emergence ritual that naturally echoes the moon cycle.

To my third child

To my third child

This fledgling life

Cupped in the body like a goblet I dare not spill

A fresh egg poised on fingertips

A seed nurtured in the dark soil

A slow seduction of the soul

across time and space.

I feel the strength of your body now 

As the sun that blazes on my pale winter skin

The celandine shines in the grass

And the lady's mantle peeks through last year's dead growth

My green shoot

The first visible evidence of winter's labour

Your form now fills the dresses I wore last summer

When you were no more than a dream and a hope

And I roamed the hills

The forest and the streams

Calling your name.

Invoking the allies of trees, flower and fairy

Drinking deep of the bluebell waters 

Soon, this could all be yours, I said

When the time is right

For you to jump in.