congratulating the journey.

I will be honest here, crystalline honesty will sign my words. Some of what I might impart here may be seen as taboo or unspeakable, especially in my culture. However, when wounds are healed in love, there is nothing to fear anymore about expressing how it had evolved into the light.

I dedicate this post to women and girls since I will be congratulating the evolution of a journey I have made towards healing my feminine health. If you are a man, you may not receive many benefits from reading, perhaps only educational. I will speak it up anyway so that I seal my learning and share what has been with clarity.

I will be sharing how I’ve reclaimed my feminine health back throughout the years and how it was almost heart-shattering at times, and too, extremely empowering.

I will be discussing the dangers of modern medicine on feminine health and how it ought to be balanced by an intuitive knowing that we all behold in regards to what truly heals us.

In brief, when I was sixteen, I lost my menstrual cycle. It took me seven years to get it back in harmony with natural cycles. What inspired me to write this is the journey it took for me to be a girl so lost in terms of losing my health, to one who can harmonise her menstruation with the moon.

Twenty-eight days: bleeding with the full moon, ovulating along with the new moon. Each phase bringing about emotional and spiritual needs to be met and fulfilled intuitively.

I never imagined I would be here. I must share it with you, perhaps it would fill you with faith.

the break

I was filled with vigour when I was sixteen. Competitive, fearful, anxious and a perfectionist. I studied hard and aced my tests. I wanted to be perfect to heal what my imperfect childhood had done to me. I needed to take control of my life with everything I had, and so I disciplined myself to extremes: eating strictly, exercising four hours a day and everyday, stretching my muscles, studying excessively and not giving myself a moment of rest.

Eventually, I reached 41 kilograms. I lost my menstrual cycle the month I turned seventeen.

That month changed me completely. I felt betrayed— my body betrayed me. I was scared and in denial, tricking myself to believe it would come back soon. Every month that went by, I got more and more worried. I was a mess. I was infertile. Nightmares of never being able to conceive or get married or be a mother haunted me every moment of the day. I couldn’t stop being anxious, I couldn’t stop exercising and overthinking. I was more disciplined than ever and my fears came crashing down.

I used to be so poetic and creative— all of it was gone. I couldn’t write. I couldn’t dream anymore. My days were a bunch of checkboxes to tick on a to-do list. Every day was so dark— I was so empty and lifeless. I had no friends and no one to love.

There was no other way but to seek help outside of myself.

the pill

At the OBGYN’s office, I sat for hours. My mother and the doctor talked for hours about politics and hospital corruption. I wasn’t even given the chance to talk for five minutes.

I was prescribed the contraceptive pill— the stereotypical synthetic oestrogen. Also, I was recommended to be taken to a hospital for a few days.

Hospital? A few days? You might have pituitary gland defects, she said. I was horrified. I was only eighteen, and I knew something was terribly wrong. This wasn’t a pituitary gland defect, it wasn’t something wrong with my body. Something was wrong with me. Something deep in my heart. Something in my soul.

I didn’t go. I took the pills all summer.

The first bleed felt like a miracle. I hadn’t seen myself menstruate for more than a year and I thought it was over. The darkness was over! I was finally okay again. I couldn’t contain my happiness.

But the miracle only lasted a few days.

I started university and the gloom began. I woke up one day and there was a terrible fog in my head— I couldn’t think. I felt awful. My stomach which was flat last night was now bloated as if I was four months pregnant. Perhaps I’d eaten something bad? Maybe.

But that continued for twenty days every month. And then there were food allergies: I couldn’t eat legumes, seeds, bread and anything with sugar. I was extremely bloated and swollen. I couldn’t walk. Waking up with diarrhoea with normal. Purifying my body with anise, fennel and thyme exhausted me.

Nothing was working.

the chrysalis

In December 2016, I threw away the last box of pills. I just couldn’t take it anymore. That month, I didn’t bleed, so I started my research on how on Earth this was even possible.

The damage was done. The pills were synthetic hormones that tricked my body into ovulating when it wasn’t. I had several cysts in my ovaries, the synthetic oestrogen destroyed my gut flora causing heightened histamine sensitivity. My hormones were all over the place and I felt so low. So low.

I started this blog to write about how I felt, expressing myself fully, without restraints as I had no other outlet. Perhaps this blog saved me since it made me dream again. At least in my dreams, I was whole, healthy and fertile.

I dreamed of love.

In August 2017, I broke down in the airplane and faced my fears. Something had shifted afterwards— the surrendering to darkness, to the unknown, to the powerlessness of my heart in the face of fear of nothing every working again.

This moment changed everything.

the unfolding

After breaking down and releasing my pain which had been bottled up for so long, it seems it was a shedding. A death of the old. The dark night before the first ray of light.

I knew in my heart that this painful dis-ease could not go on forever. My cycle returned, but it was whacky and unsynchronised. It had no beginning or end, it was a whirlpool of fluctuations that never stopped.

Dreaming became a practice, and my research became more hopeful. All of my health problems shed a light on holistic healing, integrative and functional medicine and plant medicine. I also had to work on healing my emotions, and with that, a lot had changed. Gratitude, acceptance, forgiveness and true joy were blossoming— the anxiety subsided, there was more peace between the fluctuations.

I tried a lot of things— but it was not the food or the practices that started to heal me. It was love.

It was the unconditionality of it, its God-like ever-presence that gave a reason for everything. With love, my health stabilised bit by bit, but it would crash again with every moment of fear and untruth.

There were waves of trying to prove myself. Waves of fearsome accomplishments. Waves of pushing away the ones I love. Waves of being far from God’s love and grace. With those waves, I’d bloat painfully, retain water, lose hair and become a mess.

But the glimpse of love I had seen was enough to keep me holding on to faith and returning to hope after the darkness.

the light

Love was the answer all along.

It was not the food. Not the plants. Not the medicine.

And I do not know how to explain love. I never have the words.

Love and surrender to truth were what healed me. Surrendering and losing control of my life to divine truths and God’s foreordained destiny dissolved all dis-ease.

Awakening to God’s love in me, the beauty and authentic power He had planted in my soul healed all my pain. It became painful not to forgive, not to accept, not to see love abound, not to have the eyes to see. My whole body was replaced.

Needless to say, my menstrual cycle is healed, among many other uneases.

I look at the moon now and know where I am and what I need to do. With every full moon, I bleed and release and surrender to the flow of life. With every new moon, I ovulate and burn myself in vulnerability to nothingness. I wax and wane. I become the push and the pull. Young and old. Alive and dead. I honour myself and through my heart, I honour everyone and the totality of the Universe. My acceptance is limited and limitless. My forgiveness hurts and heals. My love roots me into the blossom and the fruit. 

I was so hopeless before. I was so afraid. But it was the truth I had to face, ultimately.

Life always finds ways to celebrate the completion of journeys, but it never hesitates to keep going and going.

And now I tune in, celebrating reverently, and moving on to begin again.