The pain hit just before my thirty-first birthday, a challenging gift from my body, and the beginning of my long journey of healing menstrual problems, fatigue and allergies. Although painful, this experience transformed my life and introduced me to a new passion and aspect of my career.
Fatigue was the only striking health problem during my twenties. I also suffered from allergies due to environmental factors but I had become so used to these I didn’t think of them as ill health. Having a fierce will, I would let nothing stand in my path. I kept pushing and pushing myself until, in January 1984, my body dreamed up “the menstrual pain from hell”. Now that made me stop and pay attention.
The pain each period was persistent, unrelenting. It could last for up to four days with varying intensity, the third and fourth days being the worst. All I could do was stop and journey with my body through the pain. This could take up to six hours and forced me to take to my bed. Over time, I was able to reduce the pain of the first and second days of the cycle—that general crampy, all over yuckiness, the heavy and aching feeling. The third and fourth day were another story altogether.
On day three I would wake feeling fairly clear of the general crampy stuff. And then suddenly around 10.30 in the morning—it was that precise—I would feel a faint shudder go through me, a slight heat. I knew the other pain had begun. It would take about two hours to build, coming in waves, small at first, but growing in a crescendo of agony. It felt as though something wanted to get out of my body, as if I was having labour pains. Between each wave there was a brief respite and then another mind numbing surge of it. They would come closer and closer together. Sometimes I would vomit. Other times I had diarrhoea. Although I have never given birth, I have it on good authority from women who have had children and experienced extreme menstrual pain that it can be as bad, or worse, than labour pains.
I felt as though I was being tossed around at sea in the wildest of storms only to be dumped unceremoniously on the ocean shore when the pain stopped. I chose, wherever possible, not to take painkillers. The pain at its worst actually made a mockery of any painkiller. This was a mega force I was dealing with, not to be silenced by a puny little tablet. I screamed and rocked because this seemed to ease things, if only psychologically.
There was a point at which the pain would peak and then start to diminish, the waves getting smaller and smaller until finally they eased at around 3.30pm. I would slip into what felt like a drugged sleep for an hour or so. During the worst times, in my early thirties, the pain could even revisit on the fourth day, if I was not meticulous about diet. But generally the end of this pain signalled the end of the agony for that month.
After the pain had passed I would feel extreme exhaustion. But also newly born and slightly euphoric, probably high on my own endorphins, the body’s natural painkillers, which get released when you’re in pain. But despite this renewal of spirit, my physical energy sometimes did not pick up again until I ovulated, so challenging to my body was the pain experience.
Like many women, I was given the loud and clear message that menstruation was something to ignore as much as possible—get on with life, nothing is different. To reveal any suffering or difference at “that time of the month” was a sign of weakness, even a betrayal of women.
Nevertheless, I consulted a doctor, who suspected endometriosis and arranged an ultrasound. This revealed nothing abnormal. The next step was a laparoscopy, which involves a general anaesthetic and making a small incision in the abdomen to allow the surgeon to view the pelvis through a camera (laparoscope). I was not keen to have any surgery however small the incision. When I asked my doctor, who was aware I would not take drugs, “If I get a name for what’s happening, will it make any difference to the treatment?” she said “No”.
So I said “No” to the surgery, skipped getting a name for my disease and decided to chart my own course of healing. I’m enormously grateful to this doctor, who respected my approach and made sensible suggestions, such as a particular type of stomach massage that increased peristalsis and gave me wonderful bowel movements, which in turn eased my pain. This was the first clue that the state of my digestive system was connected with my menstrual pain.
Living in Japan in my early twenties I had studied the beautiful, and sometimes physically demanding, movement discipline Shintaido, which has its roots in traditional martial arts but is equally at home within the arts, particularly with more avant garde forms of dance, theatre and music. I mixed with wonderful people, Japanese as well as foreigners, who exposed me to radical ways of viewing and experiencing the world.
Although it did exhaust my body, my training in Shintaido gave me a discipline and willingness to face difficult things without running away. Through this discipline I also experienced transcendent and ecstatic states—just remembering them now moves me. I learnt about altered realities and had deeply spiritual moments.
I took the Pill briefly, while in Japan, for contraceptive purposes. I thought it a Good Thing…women’s sexual freedom and all that. But it was a shallow victory. At the time I was blessed with an enlightened Japanese boyfriend who felt it was wrong to manipulate my body in that way. He wasn’t interested in getting me pregnant—he was simply concerned for my wellbeing and was willing to do his bit to prevent conception. To this day I am very grateful to him—it helped me realise that my body didn’t, and still doesn’t, tolerate drugs well.
My experiences in Japan helped me to step outside the traditional medical model to embrace a far wider story for my suffering body. I would never have achieved the wellbeing I experience today if I had stayed within the boundaries of Western medical orthodoxy.
But when my pain first erupted, there was little information on alternative approaches to menstrual health. I felt as though I was inventing the wheel with my healing. I began with shiatsu massage and a very strict macrobiotic diet, an oriental approach to food. Having been introduced to this in Japan six years before meant it didn’t feel strange to me.
Miraculously, after three cycles, suddenly no pain! But alas, this was not to last. Not because the diet didn’t work but because I found it impossible to continue to follow it so religiously. It was as if my body needed me to know more about menstruation.
Also, I had to deal with the real world—I didn’t do my healing in some mountain hut far removed from the vicissitudes of daily living. I was right in it. Living in a polluted city. Struggling to earn a living, studying, having relationships, dealing with the ending of those relationships. The usual wear and tear of daily life. Stress has an enormous impact on wellbeing and I had a fair dose of it. Diet alone wasn’t going to cure that.
Gradually I came to learn that the menstrual pain was a signal of overall ill health. And only dealing with the menstrual pain wasn’t going to fix things. I was constantly fatigued, had very poor digestion, suffered from allergies and frequently came down with colds and the flu. A classic story. My immune system was not a happy one.
I worked with an array of alternative therapies, in particular Traditional Chinese Medicine (acupuncture and Chinese herbs). I was so depleted it felt my acupuncturist brought me back from the dead. Healing takes time and I worked with him over a number of years—I am still grateful for his unending patience and care.
I discovered that no one health practitioner had all the answers. That was no failing on their part. No one has the whole story, this book included. The bedrock of my healing was attention to self–care. The acupuncture, herbs, or whatever else I used, complemented this self care. I don’t believe I would have overcome my health problems with the therapies alone. Initially my symptoms were so extreme, self–care alone would also not have been enough although now I do find it usually maintains my wellbeing.
Yet, in all the valuable support and useful information I received, no one could give me a positive model of menstruation. Because doctors are generally only trained in the biological aspects of menstruation I did not expect to hear a positive view from them. Yet, perhaps unfairly, I did expect more from alternative health practitioners. But alas, the general feeling was that menstruation was a liability, something we just have to live with. Or even worse, that my suffering was because I was not in touch with my feminine nature. I felt judged by remarks such as these.
The general feeling of negativity and judgment around menstruation bothered me. How could my body be well in such a climate? I needed an ally, so I began to see a psychotherapist to help me take a stand for these experiences. As a psychotherapist myself, I have always worked with psychotherapy models that embrace illness, or the problem, with curiosity and enormous respect rather than as an offending sickness to be removed. In a holistic approach the symptom is a signal you need to listen to and attend to, rather than something that should be cut out or removed without exploring the deeper story behind it. My psychotherapist helped me to look at my menstrual problems in this light.
We used imagination. We explored through my dreams, visualisation, play, poetry and metaphor. It was as though my menstrual process was peopled with characters. A turning point came when one day I turned up for my session in my premenstruum, about to bleed. By this time I had honed my skills in attention to myself and self–care at menstruation. Like a Zen Buddhist monk I could handle the solitude and focus required. My therapist looked me squarely in the eye, “You know all about this monk figure, you have no difficulty with the discipline of healing, I want to know about the figure at the heart of your pain”.
When I bled I slipped into another world…a primeval delirium, the wild chaos of my pain. I roared. I had the abandonment of someone loosened by one too many drinks. Everything about my life fell into sharper focus. It was as though for a brief moment I was allowed to “see into” things.
A moment of privileged access, a curtain being drawn back, only to close once the pain receded.
Through my pain I experienced such a strong force. This force was an ancient powerful woman who made me examine who I was, what I was doing and how I might be letting myself down. She was unremitting in her gaze. I felt naked. She was the kind of wild woman who in polite society is locked away. She has no care for social norms. Life ripples through her like an ecstatic force. I find her beautiful and terrifying all at once and I can only let her out in small doses. To understand and use her passion is a lifetime’s work.
While I was seeing my therapist, I had a dream of a very old “bag lady”, who had alighted on a bus. The passengers recoiled from her smell of poverty and street living. She was inured to this recoil and seemed in a state of bliss with an almost childlike smile on her face. She walked down the bus blowing a blue mist over the passengers so that the whole atmosphere of the bus took on a bluish glow.
Like the bag lady of my dream with her blue mist, I was blowing imagination back into my body. Restoring an important mystery, which helped to re-empower me in the face of continued suffering. My body became a challenging teacher rather than the enemy. I felt a dignity in my experience of illness and pain, realising that it might contain something useful after all. I felt myself being transformed. And this helped me ride the continuing suffering. This process of restoring imagination is at the heart of my work with women, as a psychotherapist and educator, today.
At the beginning the journey felt endless. Countless trips to the various natural therapists, a fierce discipline to diet, vigilant structuring of my time so that I was prepared for the disruption of menstruation—I couldn’t maintain my normal schedule at all. Being partly, and later fully, self–employed, gave me some degree of flexibility. I make no bones about the fact my life was greatly circumscribed. It was a lonely, humbling process. Dragged as I was into the very core of the darkest part of my being I learned patience and became a stronger and more resilient person.
The waves of pain I experienced on day three proved the most intractable. I could reduce their intensity but the action of the waves was always there. It was not until I did a particular type of bodywork that I had an incredible breakthrough—my “miracle” story. I worked with a woman called Zoee Crowley, a trained nurse and practitioner of a form of body work called orthobionomy. Zoee came to Australia twice a year from Hawaii to teach and offer private sessions. I had my first session with her when I was 40, nine years after I first experienced extreme pain.
Orthobionomy is very subtle work but deeply relaxing, and, like homoeopathy, treats like with like. The practitioner amplifies what the body is already doing and this releases the particular tension. The significant ingredient to my initial session was the very particular work Zoee did on my pelvic area, including an intravaginal process, during which she worked on the tissues, ligaments and muscles, allowing the uterus to rebalance. A health practitioner had already told me that I had a prolapsed uterus—a uterus not in the position it’s supposed to be. Zoee also sensed this as she worked with me.
This session occurred on the day my period was to begin, two days on I was to be sitting on a long haul flight to Tokyo. What had possessed me to book a flight on the third day of my cycle? I was horrified when I realised what I had done but it was too late to change. I, who was usually so organised around matters to do with my period, found myself on a plane anxiously looking at my watch acutely aware of the peculiar precision timing of this process. Nothing happened. Nothing kept happening all the way to Tokyo. Nothing kept happening on that third day for the next two cycles.
And then the pain began to creep back. Zoee was back in Australia six months after her last visit and I was lining up to see her. After my second session with her the same thing happened. I could maintain her “adjustments” for just so long—then the pain would return. A chiropractor later worked extensively on me and told me my flat feet were affecting the pelvic region, which was “jammed up”. So I got orthotics to address this and finally Zoee’s adjustments held. I feel an enormous physical strength in my pelvis now. I don’t even always wear the orthotics.
I also researched for months the negative health consequences of dental amalgam. The information was compelling yet I hesitated making the decision to have my amalgam fillings removed, a lengthy, very expensive and potentially dangerous procedure. Then in one-middle-of-the-night-alone-moment the absolute certainty that I must do it rose from my being. I couldn’t get started fast enough and six weeks later it was done. Before I made the decision I had very positive dreams about my dentist. In one dream he was providing a home for distressed wild animals. That was certainly me: distressed and definitely wild. After the work was complete I had another extraordinary dream depicting the amalgam as creating energy circuits in my body. Any healing I received would get locked into those circuits, unable to reach the whole of my body. With the amalgam removed healing could be total. I was left with no doubt that I had made the right decision.
After I had left the worst of the pain behind me I still felt a great deal of discomfort and tenderness with the bleeding. It felt like the pressure of wind trapped in my body, and indeed passing wind eased the discomfort. Until my mid forties I still felt an extraordinary fatigue following my period. Now, while I still need to be careful to conserve energy, I feel so much sturdier.
Throughout much of my healing I had the support of an enormously caring partner. He would just hold and rock with me when I was in the worst of the pain, even when I screamed and cursed. Sickness can feel extremely isolating and meaningless. His companionship was a healing salve and helped me to deal with the isolation. The way he conducted his own life encouraged me to follow my body processes, to question and probe them, rather than fight them.
Through my healing I have come to love my cycle. It’s like a secret activity in me which opens and shuts doors, gives fleeting glimpses of Other Worlds, sometimes allows me to flit through, takes me off somewhere else while to all the world I look perfectly normal!
Sometimes it reminds me of the seagulls riding the shifts in air currents on the seashore near my home. I’m aware of the shifting atmospheres inside myself and adjust accordingly. These inner movements help me appreciate subtleties, train me in complexity and remind me that life is change. If I lose touch with my cyclical nature I start to feel that life has a certain “sameness” about it.
Now, in the first half of my cycle I feel like a young girl, fresh, somewhat innocent and open. In the past I used to feel like a new born foal—all legs and jerky new life, darting off, losing balance. As I have become stronger this uncoordinated creature has been replaced by the more self–assured young woman. In the ovulatory space of the cycle she gives way to a competent woman, skilful at acting in the world and experiencing an easy happiness. It’s a good space— worthy and positive. Yet something is missing. If I were to remain in that world I would soon become an empty shell—beautifully formed on the outside, functional, but at the same time empty.
When I fully enter the second half of the cycle I find what I am looking for—a complexity and impassioned power. I become a more fully formed woman in touch with the dark as well as the light side of my personality. Layers and layers have been added to my being. I know too much and am unable to use it or don’t know how to use it. A force takes over, particularly as the period comes closer. Yet my will is stronger, I can get things done. I can tackle demanding tasks and take on difficult people. I cut to the chase. I’ll write this book assiduously. I can be picky, critical, less sensitive to others, more fully engaged. My naivete at ovulation becomes replaced by a hard boiled realism.
A dreamy meditative state also comes over me in the two or three days before I bleed. I am much more fascinated by everything around me. This becomes particularly acute into the first day or so of bleeding. If I have many tasks to do, particularly if they involve driving, I can get a headache unless I go slowly, allowing for the dreaminess.
I also feel an acute sensitivity. A sensitivity to something that I can’t name or see. It’s as though, metaphorically, the ground under me starts to give. I no longer feel solid. I feel seen through and self–conscious. Just before the blood is due, and if I am out socialising, I will suddenly become distracted, completely uninterested in what’s around me. I want to go home but have no “sensible” reason for leaving, I have nothing particular I have to do. But my psyche has its own requirements that my mind is not always privy to. I have learnt to honour and value these requirements. And without fail, the blood arrives next day. For me, menstruation demands solitude.
My cycle doesn’t always follow a neat order—it depends on what’s going on in my life. Some months are more intense than others, sometimes fractured, other times incredibly loving and complete. Sometimes the world conspires to give me a mountain of work that I must do while I dream of soft beds and drifting. Instead I must surrender to the work I have to do, but moving at a slower, more reflective, pace. What is always apparent is the contradictory and even unpredictable quality of the cycle. I like the charge and depth of the premenstrual world but perhaps would not want to remain there forever. What nourishes me is the very fact of my changing nature and what experiences it opens me to.
I’ve always felt a natural high as the blood flows, a glowingness. But in recent times this has been amplified and can begin 24 hours before I bleed. These days I slip into a very silent, resonant territory. Like going into a church or great cave. I’m sometimes flooded by deep feelings of love, as though I were in love with someone. It’s wonderful. Once the bleeding has begun I want to drop my bundle and drift. If I don’t need to work, I can really go with this, swimming in a sea of feeling and ideas. Not grabbing at anything. Time slows down and I feel plugged into the very centre of the earth, flooded with the numinous, and with countless inspirations. It’s vitally important I don’t feel pressured so that I can reap from the depths of this time. If I don’t experience these things I often feel incomplete, cheated of something.
Working doesn’t necessarily completely preclude me from entering this territory as long as I minimise things as much as possible. My particular type of work as a psychotherapist lends itself to the sense of the sacred and intimacy of menstruation. But wherever possible I do try to avoid being too public, such as running workshops, giving lectures or speaking to the media. I once had to do a small piece about menstruation for television which was to be prerecorded at my home, on the first day of my period, as it turned out. I feel super daggy when I bleed and dressing up is the last thing on my mind. But on this occasion I had to look gorgeous and entertain a mini TV crew of three men wanting 10 second snappy original grabs. My dreamy menstrual mind rebelled. While I could have happily yarned on about menstruation until the cows came home, I felt speechless in the face of the program’s demands. The men were very sweet and respectful and we played and laughed until we finally got something they were satisfied with. I was not less competent because I was bleeding, my psyche simply did not want to engage with what felt like superficial responses—the needs of my being and the needs of this program clashed.
As the bleeding draws to a close I enter a phase for a day or so of extraordinary clarity. It’s as though the release of the blood clears the cobwebs and blocked tensions, creating an open space. Then around day 5 or 6 I dip, as if momentarily grieving for the sweet intimacy and deep sense of connection with life that’s so intensely amplified as I bleed. Soon after I’m picked up by the movement toward ovulation that leads me outwards.
My experience of menstruation has evolved over time. Each month I continue my initiation. My cycle and my period, like life itself, is changeable. A highly sensitive monitor for my life. I could switch off to the subtleties by not changing the rhythm of my outer life. But I suspect I would be revisited by a terrible greyness, and the fatigue and ill health I used to experience.
To heal I needed to restore imagination to my body. I was deeply grateful to my therapist for being the catalyst to open me to my deep and, what felt to me, dangerous regions. My menstrual pain gave me a lesson in power, a power connected with the Deep Feminine. It taught me to trust the authority of my body/being through instinct, intuition and dream, critical for me in unfolding the appropriate path to health.
I also realised I had to leave the confines of my monk’s cell—I had to become a social activist. I learnt that my symptoms were an awakening, not a personal failing. They revealed to me something of the atmosphere of the society in which I lived. They demanded that I challenge those unsustainable ideas and practices.
My experience of pain stripped back the artificial elements in my life. It made me more honest. The qualities that I encountered through my pain are those least valued by my culture which loves order, logic, straight lines, setting goals, working hard and being productive. Through my pain I encountered myth, chaos, spirals, dreams, feelings and ecstasy.
My private healing became public. The more I researched menstruation, whether in mythology, ethnograpy, cultural studies or medically, the more convinced I became that menstruation wasn’t the core problem. My menstrual problems were in part the symptoms of a culture that had a limiting view of menstruation. A culture ill at ease with difference, in particular anything to do with women. I realised that if women could validate their experience of themselves and ride with their changing nature, their whole experience of menstruation could be changed. And, most importantly, their suffering decreased.
The influence of environmental pollution on health, the difficulty of accessing good quality food, clean air and water became increasingly clear to me. I realised that, despite a public health system in Australia, health is a privilege. Doctors and hospitals can do little to make sure you have a good enough income to afford quality food, live in a healthy environment and have clean water and air.
Each month I marvel at how my suffering has lifted. I’m left now only with the pleasures of menstruation. It has taken years for me to reach this point. It has felt like forever. Whether you are suffering or not, my hope is that through my own suffering I will teach you to value the language of your beautiful, powerful body.
This blog is an extract from Alexandra's book: The Wild Genie
