What Our Menstrual Cycles Teach Us About…REWILDING & CONTROL
Transcribed and edited from my video series on Instagram: What Our Menstrual Cycles Teach Us About…Click here to watch on IG.
What is Rewilding?
You might have heard the word ‘rewilding’ used in the context of rewilding areas of land and environment, but I’m talking about a personal, individual human rewilding that you may have come across in women’s circles and in the spiritual-personal development world. What I share here, is from my own perspective of what rewilding means to me, how our menstruation process can support us to re-wild and why it’s an incredibly healthy thing to allow ourselves to ‘come undone’.
Rewilding means reconnecting with or reigniting the aspect of you that is an animal. We are a human species, who live alongside many other species on the planet. However, many people are living disconnected and removed from many of these other species, including the natural environments that they are found in. But that’s a whole other topic about connection and disconnection.
We are animals with animalistic natures, and the human-animal aspect of us needs physical connection; we need movement, we need food, we need sex to reproduce (or have lots of fun and pleasure with), we need physical contact, we need nature. We have lots of needs connected to our physical animalistic self, and to re-wild, is to remember and experience our animalistic nature. We can spend so much time in our heads and in front of technology these days, and that can easily disconnect us from the wild aspects of our nature. We all have that wild spark, but we can push it down, and our current society helps us to push it down. Rewilding reminds us that we are, at our very basic core, animals on the planet and that we are not in control of everything.
There are many ways that we can disassociate or disconnect from all the different aspects of ourselves, but today we’re talking about the wild aspects. The part that is wild. Rewilding is to remember the instinctual creatures that we are, aspects of us that are always present.
Your Relationship with Control
How does this relate to control and your relationship with control? When I talk about rewilding, it means to connect into the wilder aspects of who we are yet there always exists an opposite to every aspect. The opposite of wildness is control. Over-control is a desire to always be and therefore, feel ‘in control’ and potentially live a very controlled life. That can look like having a very rigid schedule, over-sanitization or over-domestication of the way that you live. That might look like not spending any time in nature, not giving yourself downtime, not supporting your physical needs, being in productivity mode too often, having your awareness in your head all the time. There are many ways that we suppress this wilder part of who we are and try to stay measured and in control.
So how do our periods help us to reconnect with and reignite this wild aspect of ourselves? Our periods, which are the bleeding phase of the whole menstrual cycle, are not tidy. They’re not neat and clean, and all packaged nicely in a little box. They’re messy, smelly, undoing, and oftentimes for some women, chaotic. And yet, in that phase of undoing, there is a real gem and a real gift.
There are so many reasons why people want to feel in control. Some people were brought up in environments when they were young, that were not safe. This can result in a need to control environments in order to feel safe. So, everyone’s in a different situation when it comes to their relationship with control. And that’s something for you to explore if you haven’t already.
When we go too far and become over-controlling, we’re squeezing out a part of us that contains a spark which makes us feel alive. Think about wild animals. What do you feel when you see an animal in the wild? Not an animal in a zoo, but an animal in its natural habitat, it’s wild environment. Maybe you’ve never seen one in reality, perhaps you’ve just seen one on TV. Nevertheless, notice what feelings and thoughts come up when you think about it. There’s something about a wild animal that ignites a sort of response of awe and wonderment and wow of its beauty (you can read more about the real meaning of ‘beauty’ in chapter 9 of my book, Language of the Feminine).
Or maybe it also brings up fear in you, because wildness can mean unpredictability, wildness is something you can’t control. And this brings us back to control.
Wild Things
Wild things, wild people, wild environments have always existed and hopefully always will do. And yet, because of a fear of the unknown, the unpredictability of that wildness, historically, people have tried to suppress or control what they consider to be wild.
We need to respect wildness, because that wildness represents the spark of aliveness intact within a wild creature. It’s the spark of wildness, of our instinctual connection with the intelligence of an ecosystem, and the intelligence of nature. This is something that we all have within us. And yet, it is something that has been suppressed in many of us.
Rewilding through your Period
Your period is an opportunity to allow yourself to be in the messiness and to allow yourself to come undone. That might seem scary for a lot of people as well, because there’s an unpredictability in that. But there’s also a gift and there’s a genius in the chaos of undoing, in that messy phase. What happens in the messy phase, is that there’s an unravelling. If you allow it, you unravel, and you release and let go of whatever you’ve been holding tightly onto. And then when everything has unravelled, you can see more clearly what’s around you. From that place, you can then realign with more clarity and direction to where you want to move, where you want to go, what you want to focus on next. There’s always a gift in chaos, there’s always a gift in unravelling. And there’s always a gift in undoing. It may not feel like it at the time, but our menstrual cycles teach us that gifts can emerge from these wild and messy places.
One gem in rewilding is the reconnection with and reigniting of this spark of aliveness that exists in you. You could relate to the things I’m talking about on a larger perspective with what’s happening in the world right now. You know what I’m talking about. The chaos, the undoing, the messiness. We’re surrounded by it, and yet that’s part of life. It’s part of existence, and it’s a part of us, of who we are as a species on this planet.
I will leave those thoughts with you to ponder. I would love to hear in the comments below what your relationship is with rewilding and the wild aspect of you, your relationship with control: are you over-controlling and feeling a sense of over-sanitization, and over-domestication? Do you suppress that wild aspect of you? How can you use your period to reconnect with that wild aspect of you?
I hope you enjoyed this video, and I look forward to hearing from you. And I’ll see you next time on What our Menstrual Cycles Teach Us About….
with love,
If you’d like to explore your connection with animals, try my guided audio visual journey to learn more about the Language of Animals and what they can teach us about ourselves >
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