Posted 12:58 AM by heather
PMS: Diet Research
Eating starchy food every three hours will stabilize the blood sugar level, Dr. Dalton says. "To obtain and maintain a steady blood sugar level, women prone to PMS need to eat small snacks of starchy food every three hours." This allows for the progesterone to be metabolized fully.

The starches she recommends are "complex carbohydrates" such as whole grain breads, crackers, pasta, popcorn, pizza, pancakes, cereals, potatoes, and rice dishes.

Posted 12:29 AM by heather
The Sabbath of Women by Lara Owen
I used to think that my period was a nuisance, a messy intrusion that increased laundry and caused a host of unpleasant symptoms including exhaustion and debilitating pain. Menstruation interfered with my sex life, with athletic activities, and with my energy level. It caused mood swings, irritability, and destructive, unstoppable bitchiness. It cost money-in pads and tampons to absorb the blood, in ruined clothes, in time away from work. It was a mean and sneaky saboteur that would always come at the most inconvenient time.

Despite this catechism of woe, when my period came there was always a part of me that was pleased. It meant I was healthy and fertile and that everything was working properly. There was a sense of pride about bleeding that I felt strongly with my first period, but in the absence of any external support, the feeling of pleasure dwindled away.

A Jewish friend of mine told me that when she had her first period her mother slapped her face. Reeling with shock, she said, "Why did you do that?" Her mother replied, "I don't know, it was done to me by my mother. It's tradition." To be hit on the face when first you become a woman-that is an interesting statement about how the state of womanliness is regarded. Perhaps it is intended to remove the feeling of pride that comes with the first blood.

Something else took away that feeling of pride for me, and I think it was the absence of ceremony. I felt that something truly amazing and magical was happening, and yet everyone around me treated it as a commonplace. I felt a sense of achievement, mingled with excitement, curiosity, and embarrassment; I also remember a vague awareness of a vast, unknown future. Intuitively, I knew it was a massive landmark in my life- and yet no one said anything about it, other than to give me some sanitary pads. I think my mother was pleased-after all, it meant I was healthy and growing up normally-but I needed a ceremony, a party, some joyful public recognition of this huge event in my development. But nothing happened. As the months went by I felt more and more the shame and embarrassment, and less and less the excitement and pride that had glimmered for a moment with the first blood.

At home, my period was something to be kept secret from my father and brothers. If I had to mention it, I would use a hushed voice and, preferably, talk only to my mother on her own. Shortly after my periods had begun, we were going on a family trip, and I had to ask my father to stop the car so that I could go to the pharmacy. Of course, he wanted to know what it was that I needed to buy. I remember this awful feeling as I told him I had to buy some sanitary pads. It was a peculiar mixture of shame, pride and total embarrassment. He was very nice about it and, as far as I can remember, never said anything to make me feel that there was anything to be ashamed of-but somehow there was always this shame in the background of my thoughts, and it colored my whole relationship with the outside world.

At school, menstruation was not a subject to be mentioned other than in the biology class. All the information I received about menstruation was purely physical. You had a period because you weren't pregnant, and the menstrual flow was simply the discarded lining of the womb provided for a possible fetus. My friends and I discussed it and, in the absence of further information, decided that the female body was poorly evolved-all that blood and fuss for years and years when you needed only to do it once or twice in order to have children.

The picture society gave me through advertising was a confusing one. Tampon ads showed lithe girls in bikinis running gleefully towards the ocean and girls in tight white jeans jumping onto horses. This didn't mesh very easily with my experience of lethargy and cramps. And I knew that no one in her right mind would trust a tampon so much that she would go out for the day in white jeans. Pah! It must have been men writing those ads.

Yet somehow I felt that I should be like the girls in the Tampax ads, and that the way my body and mind behaved was somehow wrong-that a normal girl wouldn't feel any different when she had her period. There's nothing she'd like more than to scramble onto a horse and gallop off for an adventure while that nice little tampon allowed her to forget that she was menstruating at all. The embarrassing reality was that I couldn't even get a tampon inside me. Not only was I not fitting the stereotype, I was also failing with the equipment. I felt decidedly inadequate until I eventually succeeded. Then the process of imagining I wasn't having a period at all began in earnest.

I saw my periods as an inconvenience and that was all. If they were painful I took painkillers-Feminax, they were called, and they had a powerful mixture of ingredients designed to clobber every menstrual symptom, including caffeine to offset depression and lethargy. When I had exams I would get drugs from the doctor to stave off my period until a more suitable time, when the rage of hormones could assail my left brain without affecting my academic future. No one ever said anything about there being something useful in experiencing a powerful state of diffuse awareness once a month, and that was because no one knew.

When I was eighteen I went on the pill; I was initially pleased that my periods became predictable and also much lighter. It took a few years for it to fully sink in that the reason they were so light was that they weren't really periods at all. I noticed that I was getting increasingly emotional and upset during my so called periods, so I decided to stop taking the pill. After a couple of months I felt like "myself" again, and I realized that despite the convenience of the pill, I had actually felt cheated because my periods were so light. This was when I began to realize that for me, menstruating was an important part of my life, a rhythm that I depended on for my psychic and physical health, and that I ignored or suppressed at my peril.

In other cultures, rather than being ignored, menstruation has been seen as a time that is special and sacred for women. The abundance of female-related symbols in excavations of ancient sites in Europe and the Near East strongly suggests that these cultures were matrifocal, and revered the Goddess and the processes of the female body. Ritual practices were connected to the monthly bleeding of women, and menstrual blood itself was highly valued as possessing magical power. The word ritual comes from rtu, Sanskrit for menses. In the days before the sacrifice of living beings, menstrual blood was offered in ceremonies. Menstrual blood was sacred to the Celts, the ancient Egyptians, the Maoris, the early Taoists, the Tantrists and the Gnostics.

The Native Americans understood the different feelings that women have when they menstruate-and for them, these feelings were part of something very meaningful about the cycles of the woman's body. The women would go to a menstrual hut or "moon lodge" to pass the time of their bleeding. It was considered to be the time that a woman was at the height of her spiritual power, during which the most appropriate activity was to rest and gather wisdom.

The people of the Yurok tribe of Northern California had a highly developed spiritual culture. In Blood Magic Thomas Buckley speculates that the rhythm of the menstrual cycle guided the spiritual practice not only of the women, but also of the men, who had extended periods of spiritual training that may well have coincided with the retreat of the women during their menses, probably at the time of the new moon. Belief in the value of retreat during menses has persisted among the Yurok to the present day, and a contemporary Yurok woman told Buckley that "A menstruating woman should isolate herself because this is the time when she is at the height of her powers...all of one's energies should be applied in concentrated meditation to find out the purpose of your life, and towards the accumulation of spiritual energy." The women were instructed to "feel all of your body exactly as it is, and pay attention."

The Nootka people of the Northwest held similar beliefs, but when white men came on the scene, "the world turned upside down." Attitudes toward menstruation changed and young girls were taught by the priests instead of by the elder women of the tribe. "Instead of learning that once a month their bodies would become sacred, they were taught that they would become filthy. Instead of going to the waiting house to meditate, pray, and celebrate...they were taught that they were sick." (Daughters of Copper Woman, Anne Cameron).

I first came across the ideas and practices of the Native Americans when I met a teacher of their traditions-Harley Swiftdeer Reagan. In the few days I spent at a workshop he was leading, I learned some crucial information about menstruation. He taught that a menstruating woman has the potential to be more psychically and spiritually powerful than anyone, male of female, at any other time. That turned my conditioned pictures of reality upside down. I'd always experienced my period as a time of weakness and difficulty-what on earth was the man talking about?

At the time I had cervical dysplasia and the cramps I had always had during my period were becoming quite severe. I was looking for ways to heal myself. I asked Swiftdeer if he had any suggestions and he told me that my problems were caused by negative images of the female in my unconscious. He told me to dig a hole in my garden every now and then and speak all the negative thoughts I could think of about the state of being female into the hole, then cover it up so that the earth could transform the energy. When I went home I tried this technique out. I felt pretty silly, and I was glad that no one overlooked my tiny garden. I didn't know that I had so many bad feelings about being a woman lurking in my highly educated feminist mind until I did this exercise. It was painful, and it was very effective.

I began to look at my blood with a tinge of awe rather than with fear, disgust or indifference. By that time I no longer used tampons, having figured out that they might be irritating my cervix, and wondering if my initial difficulty with them in my teens hadn't in fact been a wise instinct of my body. So I got to look at my blood properly every month instead of just seeing it on a yucky old tampon. I saw that it was clear and red, and sometimes darker and clotted. If I really freed up my vision then I could see that it was full of life, full of magic, full of potential. I began to experience a frisson of joy when I thought about bleeding, about being a woman, that there was something, after all, so extraordinarily magical and mysterious about inhabiting a female body. The resentment about being female that I had in my teens and early twenties, the feelings that boys had a better deal, faded away and were replaced by a growing sense of wonder at the intricacies and depths and possibilities offered by the monthly cycle.

I began to take time to rest and meditate and just be with myself when I had my period. I found out that it was a time when I was particularly able to find insight, and that this insight was of a timeless nature. I felt I was tapping into some ancient and vast wellspring of female wisdom-simply by sitting still and listening when I was bleeding.

READ MORE

Posted 12:25 AM by heather
The Red Spot: Menstrual Culture
I like this web site. It has a good section about Periods Around The World.

Posted 12:22 AM by heather
Caculate Menstrual Cycle Period
I don't know what to think of this. It's kind of a neat idea but looks like it's gearing up for heavy advertisements.

Posted 12:15 AM by heather
Menstruation Survey
Do you think we should come up with a basic form we can send to people? It would not replace the interviews but might it be a good mix to read some anonymous responses.

Posted 12:08 AM by heather
Exercises to Relieve Cramps from tlounge.com
If you exercise all month, you will help your body keep from having cramps. Light exercise during your period will help to ease the heavy, bloated (puffy) feeling. Workouts that stretch your body are best. Here are a few exercises that are great for relieving cramps:

Sit on the floor, legs as far apart as you can get them. Hold your toes if you can, or clasp your ankles lightly. Keep your back straight and breathe in, holding your diaphragm (the muscle under your ribs) up and in. Holding this position, take a few deep breaths. As you breathe out for the last time, bend forward towards the floor and exhale.

Sit with your knees open and bent at the sides, with the soles of your feet together in front of your crotch. Clasp your hands under your toes, or hold your ankles. Press the soles of your feet together and breathe in, deeply expanding your chest and lifting your diaphragm, as described above. Raise your head a little, and feel your stomach expand. Breathe in and out deeply into your stomach four or five times.

Lie on your back with one leg stretched out, and pull the other knee up to your chin. Clasp your knee with your arms to ease the strain and then hold the posture, relaxing for a few minutes.

Posted 12:04 AM by heather
Google Directory - Health > Women's Health > Menstruation
Good collection of links about menstruation.

Posted 5:38 PM by heather
Menstruation its meaning and place in todays world.
The following material is blogged from Menstruation.com.au, located in Australia. Their aim is to "provide information, products, and an alternative viewpoint about menstruation so that you can feel great about being a woman every day of the month." I like this site the best of all the ones I visited tonight.



Why Menstruation?

Good Question...

Basically it is a major part of the fundamental difference between men and women. We are physically different, women bleed.., somehow, magically, usually like clockwork once a month from puberty to menopause unless we are pregnant or ill. And sometimes because of the fact that we bleed, it has been used against us to make us lesser than our male counterparts.

In our society (and most western societies), menstruation has been given a bad name for hundreds if not thousands of years, often being the subject of strict taboo, shame and revulsion. Whereas once, menstruation was considered a powerful and healing tool for women and their communities, now it is pretty much kept strictly in the bathroom!

This shift from the sacred to profane came hand in hand with the decline of women's status and rights and the rise of the patriarchal movement. As warring menfolk started to expand their colonies, Goddess or mother-based cultures were either decimated or went into hiding. With them went the reverence, knowledge and power inherent in the menstrual cycle.

The religious focus shifted from earth-based, nature laws promoting harmony and wholeness on all levels to new laws that emphasised the spirit of a person only. Whilst pagans viewed different manifestations of energy, whether they be physical or emotional or spiritual as sacred and essential to the wholeness of life, the newer Christian religions decided that only the spirit was sacred and that all else was lesser, baser and for some inherently evil.

If spirit or the masculine mode of being was the ideal then by logic(!) the feminine or body/matter mode was to be shunned, avoided and sometimes destroyed. The split between spirit and matter, male and female once viewed as a complimentary polarity of equal sides became a chasm of separation.

This new way of thinking contributed to many atrocities against women and the earth. Respect and reverence that was once given to the bodies that gave and sustained life turned to hatred, and these same bodies became viewed as worthless of themselves, objects to be used and abused. Connection and relationship between spirit and matter as complimentary states on the continuum was lost. Instead of the wholeness and universality promoted by ancient spiritual laws, duality was now espoused. There became no wholeness internally or externally for humankind, only separation, good and evil, right and wrong, and a moral desire to destroy that which did not fit the new social order. As spirit became separate, God became separate and no longer freely accessible to the masses. A person could no longer commune with their God personally but rather needed a clerical intermediary.

The truth is all beings are trapped in matter. We may be free floating soul or spirit in heaven or before we are born, or whatever your preference is, but when we choose to be born we are incarnated into a physical body… man and woman alike. Our physical body is our vehicle for this lifetime, and although it may be noble to strive to transcend some of its instinctual drives at certain times, ultimately it is a gift and a limitation that we need to live with and nurture. Our physical body is a conduit for the expression of the divine in the manifest world.

As women this gift and limitation seems to go beyond that of the male of the species. We seem to be more "trapped" in matter. Because we bleed, and ovulate, carry, bear and feed children, we are reminded on a regular basis that we have a body. We carry the magic of creation and death in our cyclic rhythms. We have the ability to more easily connect matter to spirit. We can innately contact God or soul through our cycles without the need for a cleric.

We must remember that in ancient times woman was the natural conduit to the spirit realms. She was not banished from the community at bleeding because she was unclean as some of us have been taught. But rather she chose to seclude herself and remove herself from daily routine in order to cleanse, regenerate and commune with God/Spirit, and to receive guidance for herself and for community. This is the true spiritual purpose of the gift of menstruation that has been distorted and perverted during patriarchal times.

So what are we left with in the 21st century?
I personally think it's time to bring menstruation out of the bathroom. It is time to examine our thoughts and feelings about menstruating and to discover our own taboos. Cultural convention and belief runs so deep, that each of us need to question where the baggage has come from and to release it if it is no longer relevant to who and where we are at this point in time. There is such a wealth of healing that we can bring to ourselves, the earth and the split between the sexes, when we begin to consciously be aware of our body and it's processes. A fundamental law of the universe is The principle of Correspondence "As above, so below". Everything is relative and everything affects everything else. As an individual heals their life, that healing ripples across the universe. As each woman heals her relationship to her femininity, of which menstruation is an integral facet, then the feminine as a whole will be healed on an universal level.

Posted 5:30 PM by heather
Words and expressions for menstruation around the world
Common expressions and slang for the menstrual cycle from http://www.mum.org/, the museum for menstruation and women's health - devoted to menstruation and selected topics of women's health.