Period-Powered Activism: Making Space for Menstruation
As a wellness practitioner and menstrual health educator, I spend a lot of time thinking about periods. Their frequency, quality, health, and imbalances significantly impact the lives of women, though little attention is given to them in our modern society. Usually, I’m contacted when a woman’s situation becomes unbearable. Bleeding that lasts for days. Difficulty conceiving. Or threats of surgery to remove fibroids, cysts, or the entire uterus. These challenges are alarming and might appear to be spontaneous. But in reality, they are the result of normalized menstrual dysfunction that we’ve been taught to ignore.
From puberty, most books, parents, and teachers prepare us to expect cramps, clots, heavy bleeding, and cycle irregularities as our womanly initiation. The messaging that “normal is whatever is normal for you” has left many of us doubled over in pain, passing out, and debilitated by our time of the month. We are taught to medicate our pain from early on, and particularly challenging periods are often met with another prescription—birth control—though used for non-contraceptive reasons.
But what if we saw period pain as any other type of pain—a red flag, a warning, a call for attention? What if we treated heavy period bleeding with the urgency of a hemorrhage?
How would we feel about our periods if we saw them as an indicator of our health instead of a nuisance to it?
My own period began unceremoniously. In my Jamaican household, periods are not a celebrated topic. Some cultures have rituals signifying menarche, the first period. Communities host elaborate parties, lavish young women with gifts, and train them in the ways of wisdom and womanhood. But in my family, this rite of passage goes unnoticed. Like others, I silently endured my monthly cycle without practices to mark the significance of menstruation nor the tools to understand and address my symptoms in a meaningful way. My peers and I felt the pressure to “bleed and carry on,” numbing our pain and ignoring any urge to slow down or rest.
As an adult, I experienced recurrent miscarriages after the birth of my first child and started to wonder why I was having difficulty staying pregnant. By all measures, I appeared to be in good health and was in a safe and loving marriage. I didn’t have unresolved fears about mothering or problematic lifestyle habits. However, I sensed deeply that the irregular periods that my gynecologist dismissed as insignificant were trying to communicate something much deeper. This instinct led me to reeducate myself on the menstrual cycle, hormones, and the physiology of fertility and train in peristeam hydrotherapy.
In 2019, I started a womb wellness practice called Honored Womb, where I teach women practical and empowering ways to understand how their bodies function and how to improve their reproductive health. After serving and teaching for several years, I started to connect the threads between the health challenges my clients were facing and decades of ignoring, hating, and suppressing their periods. Taboos around menstruation are transmitted through culture or inadequate education and, as a result, women suffer in silence.
Contrary to conventional medical framing, women are not smaller men who can have babies. Reproductive hormonal cycles impact our day-to-day life, including our mental focus, mood, metabolism, immunity, physical strength, digestion, energy, sleep, libido, and more. Therefore, it is no stretch of the imagination to consider that awareness of our menstrual cycles and hormones can impact how we show up in our home, worship, work, service, and relationships. Our cycles are not just the days we bleed but also the monthly ebb and flow that prepares our body for ovulation and reproduction.
Growing up, most women I knew had nothing good to say about their periods. But I believe that Islam offers a framing of menstruation that can change how women see their bodies and the gift of womanhood.
1. Embrace the gift of menstruation
Our beloved Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) was no stranger to menstruation, and we see examples of gift-giving, honoring, and offering tender care as he interacted with menstruating women. When his wife Aisha (Allah be pleased with her) was saddened by having her period during Hajj, he comforted her. While she menstruated, he would rest his head in her lap reciting Qur’an to her.
When a young girl, Ummayyah bint Qays (Allah be pleased with her), had her first period while riding on the Prophet Muhammad’s camel to battle, her first bleed soiled his luggage. She was embarrassed and shifted in her seat to conceal the stain, but Prophet Muhammad acknowledged her first period, instructed her in how to clean herself and the luggage, and gifted her with a necklace won from battle that she wore to her grave.
2. Intend rest as worship
Muslim women are excused from the rites of ritual prayer, fasting, and circumambulation during menstruation, which provides an opportunity to intend our periods as times of deep reflection, rest, and rejuvenation. We can revive more subtle, though no less significant, forms of worship such as introspection, remembrance, supplication, and service. Rest can also slow down heavy bleeding and reduce period pain.
3. Seek comprehensive knowledge
If we received any period education at all, it was likely lacking. Other than learning about pads, tampons, and the possibility of pregnancy, most women have little understanding about fertility, ovulation, menstrual phases, and feminine hygiene. Along the way, many of us learned to accept menstrual discomfort, pain, irregularity, and hormonal chaos as normal. Even if our care providers belittle our concerns or have no helpful solutions to offer, it is important that we not accept their inaction nor normalize our suffering.
Press healthcare providers to document our complaints, including their refusal to prescribe further testing upon request. Your period matters even when you’re not trying to conceive, which is usually when doctors are most proactive in recommending advanced hormonal testing. Pain is never normal, not even period pain. We should also know that we have allies in prophetic medicine, acupuncture, functional medicine, peristeam hydrotherapy, naturopathy, homeopathy, herbalism, etc.
4. Honor the womb
Prioritize period education before introducing the legal rulings of purity as they relate to menstruation. Muslim girls would be served well to know that they are bearers of life, carrying the very womb that Allah addresses and names after one of His Beautiful Names, ar-Rahman. By deepening the connection with our Divine design, young women need not feel shame or embarrassment that their Creator has destined menstruation uniquely for them as ‘daughters of Adam.’
5. Don’t be shy to educate men
Period education needs to include Muslim boys and men. To be allies and supporters of women in their lives, men need to know fundamental truths about their female counterparts, so they can become compassionate partners in shared spaces. While the modern world may not cater to the cycling nature of women, we have an opportunity to create organizations and communities where women have space to honor their monthly bleed. The availability of free menstrual products in schools, offices, places of worship, and community spaces communicates that girls and women are welcomed in all spaces, even while menstruating. And adopting menstrual leave policies gives women the opportunity to tend to their personal needs instead of being expected to medicate and ignore their female design.
My vision for women worldwide is that we understand that our menstrual cycle is a gift, with each phase of our cycle amplifying certain physiologic and socio-emotional strengths.
After learning this information for myself and teaching other women, it became evident that girls and young women need to know how amazing menstruation is from the start. After several years of offering workshops for pre-teens and teens, I completed my first book, Peaceful Periods: Holistic Womb Care for Teens, so women of all ages have an easy-to-read, informative guide on how they can experience healthy, pain-free periods throughout their lives.
To now witness girls blossoming into womanhood—including my own teen daughter—with a positive outlook and empowering information has been a source of healing for me and the women in my lineage. Seeing pictures of their period parties and menarche celebrations floods me with happy/sad feelings—grieving what I missed but grateful for what others have gained. My mother and grandmother also celebrate a more promising future for their descendants where period pain and shame no longer reside.
When we understand that our bodies are physically not the same every day of the week and week of the month, we have an opportunity to lean into the shifts of our biology and play to our strengths. For too long, too many of us have done the exact opposite—beating ourselves up for not feeling the same way every day and pushing ourselves when our body’s tides naturally pull us to slow down and rest.
When women see that they too are signs of Allah—capable of ebbing and flowing through different phases like the moon, shedding and shifting like the seasons of the year—perhaps then we can create communities where women can fully bring all aspects of who they are to their life’s work, including their menstrual cycles.
If you want to learn more about how to care for your womb and improve the health of your menstrual cycle, you can download a free Womb Health Checklist here. Additional reading material can be found here.
Chantal Blake is a holistic menstrual health educator and author, with a professional background in Nursing, Environmental Engineering, and Peristeam Hydrotherapy. She currently lives in Morocco and published her first book, Peaceful Periods: Holistic Womb Care for Teens, in 2023. You can follow her work at honoredwomb.com and on Instagram, Facebook, and Threads at @honoredwomb.