<h4>An Initiation into Womanhood</h4>
<em>by Delphyne Jodie Platner, PhD, MFT</em>

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<strong>We Begin With a Story</strong>

Naila perched on the edge of a sharp cliff overlooking the sea. On this momentous day the sun shone even brighter than usual, causing the water beneath her to sparkle a clear azure blue. During the last moon, Naila's blood had come down, the fateful sign that it was time for her to become a woman and leave her life as a girl behind.

From then on, she would be permitted to dive with the women and men to provide food and other gifts from the sea for her village. She had looked forward to this day for as long as she could remember. Her people believed that a menstruating woman was at the peak of her power during this time, and the women in her community were especially respected for their magic and their wisdom. Her female elders were skilled in the healing arts, midwifery, and herbal medicine; the women were revered because they bled every month with the cycles of the moon yet did not die. They were revered for their ability to bring both female and male children into the world.

Those who had passed the bleeding years were even wiser, it was said, because they stored the magical blood inside of them instead of releasing it with each moon. As far as Naila knew, her people had always existed in harmony with, and built their lives around, the sacred cycles of the Great Mother Goddess. Today marked the final stage in Naila's initiation into womanhood, which included the much-anticipated great leap of faith - a test of her strength and endurance, and more importantly, of her ability to move beyond her fear into a trusting of the universe to support her.

All of the women in her village sat around a bonfire, watching from the beach below. Naila knew that when she emerged from the water and stepped upon the shore where the elder women awaited her, she would be welcomed into their fold as a grown woman. There would be much feasting, drumming, dancing, and celebration.

Although she had practiced holding her breath for the past year in preparation for this moment, Naila still felt a twinge of fear and hesitation as she peered over the cliff's edge. The ocean seemed very far away. She took some deep breaths and went to that place of great strength inside herself, which usually resided in her belly. "Trust yourself and the Goddess," her mother had told her - just words before - but now, as she flew through the air like a bird, Naila understood them in an entirely different way. As she hit the surface and plunged into the depths, she felt the salty water washing away the traces of the girl she had once been. Her fear was gone and she fell into a peaceful and trance-like state. Time seemed to stand still. She marveled at the idea of her new-found ability to bring forth life into the world through her own body. Suddenly she felt connected to all life, even the fishes she swam past on her way down. As she moved deeper into the belly of the ocean mother, Naila reflected on the whirlwind of the past week.

As soon as she had discovered her first blood, her situation had been entirely in the hands of the female elders. She was not allowed to be in control of her own rite of passage. From that moment up until this morning, Naila had been isolated for what seemed like a long time in a hut some distance from the village. Her golden-brown body had been painted with red ochre to symbolize her initiation into the blood mysteries. It was always dark in the hut, like a womb, so she hadn't been able to keep track of the days. Though many of the women's cycles were synchronized so that they bled together, it was important that a young woman spend her first moon time alone. There she had nothing to do but offer her blood back to Mother Earth and embark upon an internal journey. She had been fasting to purify herself and induce visions and dreams which, according to the High Priestess, contained messages from the spirit world for both herself and her community.

Naila came back to her present surroundings as the ocean's sandy floor drew near. She began to search for a treasure to bring back as an offering for the High Priestess. Her eyes were drawn to a magnificent conch shell. Reaching for it, she gave thanks to the spirit of the ocean for providing such an exquisite gift. With that she put both feet on the bottom and pushed off, kicking as hard as she could towards the light that shone through the surface of the water.

When Naila's head emerged from the waves, all of the women cheered and sang her praises. She swam to shore. Her heart was racing with the excitement of her accomplishment as she stepped onto the beach, and she felt more alive than ever before. She drew the giant shell to her lips, and triumphantly blew a deep and resonant tune from the ocean's watery depths before presenting it to the High Priestess. After embracing her warmly, the High Priestess adorned her with a necklace of red flowers, then placed a red cape over her shoulders. "Welcome, brave Naila," she smiled. "It is an honor to welcome you to the society of women."

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<strong>Sacred Moon Time</strong>

While this particular story is one that I imagined, many of the details could very well have been true. Many of the steps that Naila goes through in her initiation into womanhood are components of a traditional rite of passage. This is a ceremony or a ritual which serves as an initiation marking an important change in status for the individual — birth, menarche (the first menstrual period), marriage, and death are a few of the major ones.

Once a rite of passage has been completed, a woman can never go back to the girl she was before. That Naila is entering a community of women where the blood mysteries are honored makes her menarche a much more pleasurable and empowering experience. Not many girls in our day and age are lucky enough to have a menarche experience like Naila's. We have been taught to see our moon time as something to be ashamed of — something that should be hidden and disguised at all costs.

Throughout recent history, social and religious institutions, which are run almost exclusively by men, have reacted to women's monthly bleeding with fear and mass hysteria, claiming it was poisonous, evil, and unclean, and that menstruating women belonged to the "devil". For example, the Bible teaches that menstruation and pain during childbirth are the burden we women bear for Eve's sins. I'm here to tell you that none of this is true! Both your body and your moon time are sacred. It is a time of great power. In fact, many women report experiencing extraordinary visions, dreams, and heightened intuition and sensitivity during their monthly cycle. Menstruation is the one experience that unites all women across such socially constructed boundaries as race, class, age, and sexual preference. Perhaps this is why so many men fear it.

Our world today is very different from Naila's, which could have existed any time before 2,000 BC. In honoring the Goddess in all of Her aspects, Naila and her people were practicing a nature or earth-based religion. This was both a way of life and a form of spirituality that existed long before any of today's male-dominated organized religions. The very essence of nature religions is feminine because they honor the Earth, Her cycles and seasons, and all of Her living creatures, whether human, animal or plant.

This belief system creates an atmosphere where people treat each other and their environment with respect — one where humans do not see themselves as separate from (or having the right to control) nature, but as a part of it. Did you know that our first calendars were created around women's moon cycles? Sadly, attitudes towards the things that were sacred and special in Naila's world (menstruation, childbirth, child rearing, sexuality, women's ways of knowing, creativity, the healing arts, ritual, ceremony and rites of passage) have been completely reversed today. What once was honored and celebrated is now considered dirty, shameful, disgusting, and not even worthy of our attention and discussion.

Harvard professor Carol Gilligan has conducted many studies with young women on the brink of adolescence. Her research concludes that these young women are encouraged to give up their sense of self in favor of being in relationship. This means that, upon approaching adolescence, a girl is often forced to give up her own experience and accept one that has been determined for her by men. Girls experience pressure (from their friends, families and culture in general) to be "good," to be caregivers and nurturers, to put other peoples’ needs and desires before their own. They receive messages about what they are "supposed" to be, do, or look like. Often these messages contain values and ideals that are very different from what girls inherently feel about who they really are and what they truly dream or desire to be. I believe these values are in deep opposition to our inherent female nature.

As a young girl, I didn't have many reasons to question what I knew. I was a wild child, very independent, intelligent, creative, and opinionated. When I entered junior high school, however, it seemed like the rules had changed and somebody had forgotten to tell me. Instead of being about substance — the person who I really was — the priorities switched. Now, they were about who my friends were, my weight, whether I was wearing the right clothes and had the right hair style, and if I had a boyfriend. All of a sudden I became much more concerned with what other people thought as opposed to trusting myself and doing what I knew was right. I began to question my own reality. It seemed that everyone else was so desperate to create it for me, and I recall very clearly feeling like my sense of self was stolen from me. While I didn't know what was happening at the time, I do remember how overwhelmed I felt. It was an incredibly painful and confusing time. I had never doubted myself before, so why did it all of a sudden seem as though my self-confidence went flying out the window without any warning at all?

Much of this can be explained by the society that shaped me — that shapes us. Even if we are lucky enough to have parents, family, and friends who love and support us, we are still exposed to the misogynist (women hating) messages and situations that are an inescapable result of life in a patriarchal society. The dictionary defines patriarchy as a social organization marked by the supremacy of the father in the clan or family, the legal dependence of wives and children, and the reckoning of descent and inheritance in the male line; or broadly as control by men of a disproportionately large share of power. We have lived under this system for approximately the past 5,000 years.

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<strong>The Great Legacy of our Female Ancestors</strong>

I feel like if I had known about prehistory when I was 13, I would have had more strength to resist all the forces that were trying to change or steal my identity. I believe this knowledge would have helped me to continue to trust myself, despite all the confusing and often negative and misogynistic messages girls are bombarded with upon reaching adolescence.

Prehistory — the time before recorded history — is much longer than documented history. Most scholars believe that history as we know it began with the written word. Our earliest writing comes from ancient Sumer (modern-day Iraq). It tells a story that dates back to around 1750 BCE (Before the Common Era) about the Goddess Inanna, who was hailed as Queen of Heaven and Earth. Fortunately, we have other ways of learning about prehistory besides the written word. Art, pottery, tools, cave paintings, temples, statues, ritual objects, and graves, for example, all have much to say about life thousands of years ago. These artifacts tell us that their makers were not violent and warlike, but a peaceful people who saw the female as divine — a people whose lives revolved around agriculture, the arts, and spirituality.

You may have heard the phrase,"History is written by the winners". The people who are writing the history textbooks that are most likely to be used in schools are in a powerful position to mold young minds to support and justify their point of view. They have had an agenda, a vested interest in having young people learn and believe their version of how things happened. You will find that many people (women, people of color, gays and lesbians, etc.) have literally been left out of these textbooks, except in the capacity of stereotypical roles that have been defined for them by the dominant culture. For the most part, our patriarchal system shows these marginalized groups no respect. It is important to remember to question, especially if things don't feel right, or it seems like something or someone is missing. Just because something’s written in a book doesn't mean it’s true.

Women have not always been second-class citizens. In fact, recent discoveries by archeologist and anthropologist Marija Gimbutas reveal that women and men once lived in primarily peaceful and egalitarian societies for at least 30,000 years. Many of these civilizations, like in Naila's story, were matrifocal, and in some cases it is possible that lines of descent were traced through the female - producing matriarchal cultures. It is important to mention that matriarchal is not the opposite of patriarchal. While women were highly respected and in positions of power, it was not at the expense of men. There was no domination but rather what appears to have been a relative sharing of power and responsibility. And because their monies and physical energies weren’t spent in preparing for, or going to, war, they were able to spend their time making art, concentrating on spirituality and ritual, and raising children.

Though we can't return to the past, we can certainly learn from it. If people were able to live together peacefully for at least 30,000 years, they must have been doing something right. Also, it is very empowering for girls and women (and men, too) to understand that society hasn’t always been violent and oppressive. The 5,000 years we have lived under a patriarchal system that promotes hatred and bloodshed seems relatively short when compared to our total time on this earth.

A few years ago, I took a trip to Greece with a group of women in search of ancient Goddess sites. The museums we visited were filled with hundreds of statues of Goddesses, queens, priestesses and women in sacred and ritual contexts. We explored caves, hilltop shrines, ancient altars to the Goddesses Artemis, Hera, Athena, and Ilithyia, and visited the site of the Pythia (the ancient oracles, who were priestesses the deities spoke through to provide hidden knowledge and predict the future) at Delphi. What I found there confirmed what I have always known in my body on a cellular level. I am referring to a way of knowing that is often difficult to explain in words because is feels far deeper and much older than language. This sort of intuitive knowing was likely very highly valued in prehistoric cultures.

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<strong>Conclusion</strong>

Perhaps the most significant gift I can offer a young woman is the wealth of information and knowledge I have acquired over the past several years. This information is empowering; I can only hope that it will be of use towards helping others make informed choices on what to believe in and what feels right. I have been blessed to be able to study with some amazing women who are teachers, priestesses, shamans, healers, and visionaries. This knowledge is not easily available to most young women, so I have included a list of books I might recommend for further study and exploration.

Knowledge can take many forms. There are many things one can’t learn from a book. Young women, and women in general, are the authority on their own experience. Yet everyone else wants to claim or define it for us, tell us how to look, who we are, what we need to be beautiful, how to act to be popular and well-liked.

Our body, however, remembers another way of defining what it means to be a woman. Many people believe that it holds certain memories going back to ancient times. Have you ever known something with all your heart, yet you hadn’t learned it in school, from a book, or from another person? Maybe it came to you in a dream? Spend some time listening to the memories that are stored in your body. You may find it helps if you are very quiet, or you may prefer to dance or do something physical. What do your body memories say? What sort of stories do they have to tell? What do you "know " that you couldn't possibly have learned anywhere else?

We've all been brainwashed to believe that patriarchy is natural — that male domination is the way it always has been, and always will be. This is simply not the truth. Patriarchal religions substantiate their positions by referring to scriptures written by men that say that man shall have domain over women, children, animals, and the Earth — that he has a God-given right to control everyone and everything simply because he is "man." Think about this for a minute. Isn't it interesting that all men are brought into this world and raised by women, but they tend to assign us inferior status and show us no respect? Trust your gut. Listen for the voices of your female ancestors. Make your own decisions about your body and how you want to be in the world.

<strong>Questions for Reflection</strong>

What follows are some things to think about; there are no right or wrong answers. I encourage you to keep track of your dreams during your moon cycle. Be sure to pay close attention to any visions or strong intuitions you experience during this time. You may want to have a special notebook or journal where you write down some of your feelings and personal stories. Note the following questions and your answers to them:

What does it mean to you to be a woman?
Who teaches you, or has taught you, to be a woman and how have they done so?
How did you or will you know when you finally become a woman?
Would the world be different if men bled every month? How?
What sort of ritual would you prepare (if any) to honor your daughter's or your own menarche?
How do you talk about sexuality with your daughter; or how would you like your mother to talk to you about it?
What might be some other important times in life where we could celebrate rites of passage?
If you have any comments you'd like to share, please e-mail me! I'd love to hear what you have to say.

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<em><strong>Delphyne Jodie Platner, PhD, MFT</strong>, is member of SHARANYA's community who has written, lectured and priestessed ritual in the realm of women's spirituality. She recently opened an office in San Francisco where she practices psychotherapy and integrative healing. She can be reached for private work at (415) 262-0205.</em>