My love letter to the Bleeding Circle
Applications for The Bleeding Circle close Sept 2nd, Interplay Fest starts Sept 13
Content note: descriptions of menstrual pain and brief violent visions
For the last few years I have dangled myself inside of the practice of going directly into my severe menstrual pain, for as long as I can take it. The results have varied.
When I did this the first time, I was fresh out of a bath and had an ancestral transmission about movement; the liberated movement of everything. I squiggled out of the tub and onto the floor, and I dropped down, down, down...down. I became sediment, like sand and broken down particles settling at the bottom of a lake, except the lake had no bottom. I was soft, porous, subtle, sifting, dark, clay, quiet, full. I entered movement before it became movement, impulse before it became the pull to action, the dark of potential. And I said yes, tentatively, shakily.
What normally felt like rusting metal lines of tension hunching me over, so strong and so loud they consumed my entire attention, dissolved. DISSOLVED. I felt the space between and inside and around those lines of tension. And every moment I chose to relax enough to feel that space was a tiny journey of terror. At least at first. For years it has been like this, journeys of terror bringing me to space, bringing me to relief, bringing me through and out the combination of karmic patterns, ancestral, cultural, and personal imbalances that have made menstruating a field of dread.
I kept at it, reaching different states of the soft bottomless lake, various states of dissolve. My pain would be reduced significantly for an hour to a few hours. Sometimes I gave up this practice after only a few minutes of trying, popped the Tylenol and ate the chocolate.
Last month, I did something different.
The blood was just starting to come down and it felt like a cement truck that couldn’t turn. The pain was agony. This time the pain was too intense to relax into space directly, and I was too enraged to slink into a pain killer and dopamine haze.
I put myself in the shower, bent over, and gave the pain a voice. I started groaning, long, long groans, carrying me into what felt like “the heart” of the pain. The heart of the pain was a doorway, and on the other side the sounds got bigger, wilder. After a few minutes there was a momentum that I wasn’t in charge of, a robust moving forward trance vibration that I couldn’t interrupt, even as I had flashes of worrying about my neighbor hearing me through the walls, or someone hearing me through the open window. Worrying about the unacceptability of what I was doing, the “this-has-no-place” feeling. I was wailing, ragged, holding onto the sides of the tub, visions of bloodied torn people who had been stuck in limbo being birthed through my throat and my womb. Eventually I found words.
“I REFUSE TO BE A VESSEL FOR THAT WHICH YOU HAVE IGNORED OR ABUSED, TO BEAR THE CONSEQUENCES OF YOUR OWN SELF-BETRAYAL”
I demanded, to the ancestral realm, to humanity, to myself.
Dramatic, I know. But the best use of drama is skillful narrative and intensity to liberate ourselves. Sometimes this is the only thing that can meet and surf the necessary alchemy.
After about 20 minutes of this, I had the most mild first day menstrual pain that I can remember. No other intervention has come close to this type of relief.
In order to allow this process to unfold I had to let an old, non-rational, instinctual consciousness take over, and to follow that consciousness into something quite terrifying, yet utterly and completely supported. This is what lives in The Bleeding Circle.
In the days following this experience, I thought about how helpful it would have been if I had had human witnesses. Not so much because I needed a human witness (although it would have been real nice), but because I made a truth explicit. Undeniable. A truth that other people either don’t have to deal with or do not allow themselves to represent openly. It’s one of the original magics of theater, of seeing others channel what is possible. To witness the ecstasy of the “actor” (shapeshifter) and to have something light up in myself, a fuller recognition. Or in some cases, to become more informed of the experiences of an “other.”
I believe this medicinal technology of art making, storytelling, and witness to be one of our most valuable ancestral inheritances, and an inevitable essential player in our future reckonings within human communities.
To get there will require building conscious allyship with Spirit and Nature.
To get there will require repair and nurture of the cosmic principles associated with Blood and Menstruation (life/death/life, darkness, mystery, wildness, weirdness, play, embodiment, vulnerability, eros).
To get there will require investing in microcultures where what is learned through this embodied research has an actual chance of taking hold at a fundamental level.
If you feel drawn to being a part of something that helps us “get there” then maybe joining the third cycle of The Bleeding Circle is the thing. Or maybe you know someone, and can extend a personal invitation to them. Send them this newsletter, or send them the link to the website, and tell them why you thought of them.
Thank you for helping this project grow. Thank you for making it a little easier for the teachings of the Spirit of Blood and Menstruation to work their magic.
much love,
L
The Bleeding Circle Cycle 03
9 month apprenticeship to the Spirit of Blood and Menstruation
Applications close Sept 2nd
Join Larissa for a 9-month small group container to build creative collective ritual around the ongoing initiation of blood and culture-making, for people who bleed, have bled, or are in a changing dance with the monthly blood rite . Sept 2024 through May 2025.
Learn more here
Interplay Fest Sept 13-15 in Portland, OR
A weekend festival of queer community, belonging, and intimacy
Catch Larissa and Root at Interplay Fest for Bad Feeling Go Away and Tabooboo Play
BAD FEELING GO AWAY: A performance-workshop about the absurdities and beauties of humanity’s attempts to manage being alive. Explored through ancient cultural technologies as well as the sometimes (or often) ridiculous “magic bullets for healing” that the white, western- dominated wellness industry has produced in the last few decades. Informed by years of working with groups and individuals as a community organizer, performance artist, ritualist, and therapist. A foray into the nondual animist view of Feelings As Beings, and the "self" as a living labyrinth that responds to high integrity play.
TABOOBOO PLAY: is an introduction to the ongoing embodied research of consciously and creatively relating to individual and cultural qualities that are maligned, avoided, exiled, or craved. Loosely inspired by the art of Bouffon, but more aligned with benevolent primordial trickster energies in service to the wrathful feminine. This project incorporates “nondual animist ways of relating” to ALL phenomena. AKA, honoring Reality as it is: alive, intelligent, untameable. Tabooboo Play aims at training us to become skillful players that can apply social acupuncture to stale or toxic cultural beliefs and behaviors.