Most people are using zoom to stay connected. It has been essential to me - my life, work and relationships have been traversing zoom-land since lockdown began. There was an idea to bring rituals with my menstrual blood directly into the domestic sphere - as all my previous rituals have been enacted outside in nature. I asked a friend to be my accomplice, my witness, my co-creator. I wanted to bring my menstrual blood out from the shadows - I wanted to bring it into relationship with another, and find new ways to relate with it myself.
I had no idea what to expect. We engaged in an embodied dialogue practice that speaks present-tense, present time only - naming feelings, sensations, thoughts happening now - with the main focus on body. There is space not to know, to let life happen, to let movement happen and the body to respond. There was a potency in our connection from the beginning, we were meeting with each other but also with my blood. I wanted to slow the process down so that I could inhabit the ritual of pouring menstrual blood over me and stay attuned, stay intimate - stay in the immediacy of relationship. What transpired was a very powerful and sensual recognition of my aloneness and my unique place on the earth. My blood is very much a rooting force, it pulls me down to the earth to incarnate. It connects me to 'other', to nature in that my aloneness is not a statement of individualism in opposition to 'other' but that intimacy and solitude are balanced with interdependence. Aloneness is a deeply connected position, it implicitly includes 'otherness' whilst staying absolutely close and inside embodied responses and receptivity.
I recorded this session on zoom and will edit it into a film piece - this is apart of a series of rituals that use my menstrual blood. I would love to open these rituals
out so that they become a collaboration between women. As a means to bring women together, but also to reclaim the power of our blood - that has been denied and repressed by Western culture.
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