This month I am honored to share a guest post by Lucy Pearce. Lucy is the author of Moon Time: A Guide to Celebrating Your Menstrual Cycle.

To celebrate the launch of my first book, Moon Time: A Guide to Celebrating Your Menstrual Cycle, a friend gave me a card expressing her appreciation of my book, including the soul-searing words: “you are the bravest woman I know.”

I was deeply honoured. The taboo about discussing our cycles, about exploring our sexuality, our innermost thoughts still seems very strong. In writing this book I faced my own demons, and chose to discuss a topic which I would in reality share with few women face-to-face.

But I am so glad I have. To have the opportunity to touch women’s lives in such an integral and intimate way has been an unanticipated gift.

Time and again women say that they don’t know much about their cycles, or they are really struggling with PMS and don’t know what to do. Our menstrual cycles are our weather, and yet so many of us know so little about them, we are battered by their storms, living as victims of our own bodies in wide-eyed incomprehension.

I strongly believe that in a more civilized world we would each be initiated into the meaning and rhythm of our cycles on the cusp of womanhood. But instead it is a taboo – ignored, voiceless, invisible – and therefore by implication, unimportant.  We learn by trial and error throughout our menstrual lives, most women coming to the end of their bleeding with little more insight into their own bodies and natural rhythms than when they started.

How much needless suffering could be averted if we learned more about our cycles – their biological and archetypal impact on our lives, the weaving of our fertility and creativity, the influence of the moon and other women on us? How then might we find our power in our lives? How then might we learn to celebrate what is uniquely ours?

I have been studying the menstrual cycle and many aspects of what I call woman-craft for many years now. But in giving voice to it in the public sphere, I realized just how much the silence holds us all in its thrall. Whilst I have always been outspoken in my personal life, I was challenged to my very core in bringing these words out into the world.

It is a process of unfolding courage. When asked what my book is about, I still balk and take a deep breath before divulging the topic. But then, rather than the horror or embarrassment that I anticipate, the magic happens, without fail. With women aged 20, 40, 60, or 84 the silence is broken. They share stories and feelings about their own cycles. Both women who only five minutes before were strangers, and women who have known me since before I was born. In their responses to my book, I see just how much women are longing to have frank conversations about their bodies, their emotions, and the shockingly forbidden topic of their deepest selves.

I wrote the book as a conversation – sharing my journey and communicating with the reader on her journey. I have found without exception that every woman who reads it continues this conversation in real life with me with a distinct lack of self-consciousness. I would love to extend this conversation to you, dear woman.

Lucy’s book is available as a signed paperback or as an e-book from www.thehappywomb.com. It is also available from Amazon, The Book Depository, www.moontimes.co.uk and Susun Weed’s Wise Woman Bookstore. 

Lucy Pearce is a facilitator of creativity and woman-craft. She has led women’s yoga, holistic birth preparation, women’s circles, drama and creativity classes for over ten years. As a free-spirited freelance writer, she focuses on women’s health, mindfulness, birth and mothering. She has a passion for women’s work and has recently published her first book: ‘Moon Time: A Guide to Celebrating Your Menstrual Cycle’. She is a regular contributor to Modern Mum and Juno magazines, and The Irish Examiner and online to Rhythm of the Home, The Anti-Room and Wild Sister magazine. She blogs at www.dreamingaloud.net. Her website www.thehappywomb.com is a wonderful resource for Woman-craft and you can find her on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/thehappywomb.