“Love one another.”
I don’t know it yet but I hear Perpetua’s dying words when I feel the pang in my womb.
Life in March 2020 has slowed down so much that I can feel, for the first time in perhaps lifetimes, the beginnings of my period.
I pause, mid-step, mid-thought, and let myself be swept up in wonder. I embrace the stirring sensation with an awe-expansive breath. I marvel at living in this intelligent micro-universe of a body.
My body. A body that instinctually knows truth by how it feels.
I soften into embodied being, into presence, into fully experiencing this subtle nudge that signals an end, a death that will dissolve into rebirth.
I am awake to my womb, to a feminine force that beckons me to return to my body, to my humanity, to existing and thriving in tune with the seasons reflected in nature, in the phases of the moon.
This quiet, vibrantly attentive moment, with bare feet pressing onto cold floorboards, morning sunlight streaming through the blinds, and a palm pressing into the lower abdomen, is my initiation.
I am still long enough to feel the current of the whisper through the wordless language of sensation and intuitive-painted visions.
I feel with the freedom of no thought or narrative, only an illuminated, intensified awareness that activates the shift, the moment that enlightens a movement that will continue in gradual waves toward my body, my humanity, my portal to embodying presence.
I don’t know it yet but when I feel the pang in my womb, the sign of death approaching, of a shedding and a releasing that is normal and can be one of resilient tenderness and a deepening peace, I am feeling the echo of Perpetua’s words.
“Love one another,” is the dying command of Perpetua, a Roman noblewoman in 203 A.D.
I am reintroduced to Perpetua, for I have always known her, when a kindred-spirited friend, a woman awake to the wisdom of her womb, recommends Meggan Watterson’s Mary Magdalene Revealed: The First Apostle, Her Feminist Gospel and The Christianity We Haven’t Tried Yet, and I read with tears of ecstatic relief; it’s a brilliant homecoming.
We know of Perpetua because of her prison diary. The Passion of Saint Perpetua, as its now revered, is one the earliest texts on Christianity, and the faith Perpetua claimed was far more radical in heart-centered teachings than the Christianity to come a century later. Perpetua chose to be aligned with Love at a time when women were barely above the status of slaves – property to the ruling men, to the Roman government. And that is why she was in prison, and at 22, after just giving birth to a son, she was sentenced for public execution. She believed in a faith that saw others with the gaze of unconditional love, with an egalitarianism that upset the strict Roman hierarchy governing society.
Perpetua understood that she was no slave to the external, she knew the truth of her essence was beyond society’s labels. Through the teachings of Christ, she had been inspired to feel the truth of her expansive spirit in her heart, and it must be emphasized that this recognition was felt, not thought, felt, for it’s through the miraculous vessel of the body that we can meet our divinity, and embody this felt-knowing with serenity.
This felt-knowing of love, this conscious state of interconnectedness is what made her a threat, and it’s the very rebellious gift she gave the crowd when she was publicly executed.
“Love one another,” she shouts to the crowd, and her words reach me when I am stopped, when I am still, when my hand is on my womb and I receive the summons to return. Perpetua leads me forward, back to my truth.
In the unraveling that follows, in the conscious choice to enter a two-year-long (and counting) inner winter, I become a bride to the subconscious and all the misinformation and lies lurking in frozen-flight patterns in my nervous system are witnessed and released. My healing is the felt-recognition that there was nothing wrong with me in the first place. I am healed and whole and complete. And so are you.
My healed self is seen in the medicinal circle of women who have walked before and walk with me.
I read their writings and re-remember the sacredness of my bleed, reigniting the power that is available when hormones are befriended and not fought against. When I choose to collaborate with my cycle, with my day-to-day changing nature that is my rhythm and pace, I am empowered in my communication, creativity, caretaking and replenishing rest.
I learn that periods are not supposed to be painful.
(Read that again. I needed to several times before the blaze of this freeing epiphany landed in my cells. And then read In The Flo by Alisa Vitti, or explore the treasure trove of her website.)
Periods are not supposed to be painful.
Periods, like the body, are truth-tellers.
A bleed is a like a monthly health check-up, informing us of our hormone levels, how we’re carrying and handling our stress. This time is a beautiful built-in summons to relinquish and restore.
In ancient times, when women would bleed, they were recognized to be at their most powerful. Women were seen as a direct vessel, a bridge between the cosmos and the earth, for they were bringers of life. Women would go inward, away from the cares and duties of everyday life to meditate with their flow, to receive fresh insights and channel the seeds of intuitive answers and visions that then would be birthed, enlivened and focused upon in the following cycle.
I learn that menstrual blood does not smell.
That specific scent is the reaction between blood and the chemicals used in mainstream pads and tampons.
(Let that truth snap a bright-eyed awakening, and then check out brandhannah to browse for natural hygienic alternatives.)
The labia is highly sensitive and easily absorbs the irritating additives and chemicals in mainstream feminine hygiene products right into the body, messing with the health and happy functioning of our period. Period blood is not gross. It’s perfected jelly.
A woman’s cycle is intricate and complex, with hormones lifting and sinking in glorious orchestration, but studying the impact a drug would have on this symphony would take time and money for the drug companies. This goes for most diets and eating and exercising trends boosted by the mainstream. A woman’s dietary and movement needs change from week-to-week, so a disciplined and strict routine with food and exercise (stellar for male hormones, not female!) can work against a woman’s metabolism (intense, over-exercising and under-eating in the later part of the cycle can push the body to put on weight).
The subtle and distinct nudge I felt in my womb in March 2020 becomes a red thread that I devotedly follow into the fruitful darkness of truths my body remembers but that I had forgotten, and the forgetfulness is enforced by a culture, a society that is anti-feminine, anti-soul, and anti-human.
As I come home to embodied sovereignty, as I fiercely trust the wisdom my body speaks to me, as my nervous system shows me that my people-pleasing is a maladaptive strategy to keep me safe and I can unfreeze these stagnated flight patterns and flow in authenticity, I witness the selfies flooding my Instagram feed. A parade of women pose with Rosie the Riveter arms, proudly showcasing a site of injection for experimental, (and still is experimental) gene transfer technology. This mRNA technology has never been tested before on humans, and like its pharmaceutical predecessors, this inoculation did not vigorously study the effects and impact on women’s reproductive wellbeing. The global experiment’s tag-line of “safe and effective” bullies aside the risks, the reactions, the deaths. The aggressive-hunt to censor and ridicule this critical conversation on the side-effects, especially the potential harm to reproductive health and menstruation vitality, violates the human right of voluntary, informed consent.
After the first roll out of shots, I witness outcries of concern – menstruating women kicked into menopause in their mid-thirties, postmenopausal women breaking out into bleeds, a global phenomenon of vaccinated -- and unvaccinated -- women who experience missing, painful and strangely behaving periods. The medical-industrial-complex, like it has for centuries, gaslights the innate knowing, the direct experience of women, and tides up their fears with sterile reassurances that what they are physically experiencing is not really happening.
We have forgotten that our bleeds tell us everything about our health, because we live in a world that does not want us to bleed. (Birth control produces a fake period because so many women were disturbed by not bleeding at all that the pill manufacturers made it create a synthetic one.) We live in a culture that does not want us in rhythmic tune with the natural cycles of birth and death and rebirth, because then we would be in our embodied power as holy human beings. We would be aligned with our internal governance.
And there are forces that do not want us in our power.
And I have denied living in my own power, too.
I didn’t know it yet but when I felt that tug in my womb in March 2020, when I first sensed the essence of Perpetua’s words swirling around in my startled and alerted ears, I would be propelled toward finally unmasking my bone-deepest fears. The fear is of being exposed as a spiritually empowered, embodied and expressive woman, and being persecuted for my untamed and unconditional authenticity.
This fear is fresh, a terror that I cannot rationalize my way out of, a nervous system that remembers when midwives, healers, herbalists were labeled as witches (wise earth women) and were tortured, burned alive and horrifically killed.
These “witches” were intelligent, strong and supportive women who knew how to live in harmony with their bodies and with the earth, and were skilled in natural medicines, contraception, easing birth and being a spiritual guide for the dying. They were essential members of their communities, energized and empowered by their sisterhoods, and because of their experience and expertise posed a major threat to the new doctors emerging out of universities.
In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII granted the Church authority to target women who were believed to be witches (based on assumptive tell-tale signs, such as knowing how to help deliver a baby and skillfully mixing herbal remedies) and persecute them without a fair trial. This left women vulnerable to diabolical acts of harm and horrific deaths.
It’s estimated that 500,000 to millions of women were drowned, burned and hung during the witch trials that plagued Europe and North America during the Renaissance, with a recent witch trial happening in the British courts as recently as the 1950s.
“Never in history have women been subjected to such a massive, internationally organized, legally approved, religiously blessed assault on their bodies,” writes feminist scholar, teacher and activist Silvia Federici, and their murders haunt us today.
Women who dared to practice their earthly wisdom, to express and share their sacred and practical knowledge of medicinal herbs with their beloved communities, who trusted their internal compass and their cyclical nature were a dangerous threat to people desiring to dominate.
Their murders have left us motherless, lost, chaotically confused as a collective. The open brutality inflicted upon women severed an innate connection between soul and body, and we are experiencing the catastrophic consequences of living in a disembodied culture.
I feel the persecution of these “witch-trials” tragically repeating. I hear her-story repeating.
Working with the body, bolstering natural immunity and nourishing health and wellbeing is the passionate practice of the modern-day healer, the holistic doctor, who is not the alternative but the original.
The mainstream medical-industrial-complex is the alternative.
The social media accounts of chiropractors, nutritionists, doctors with esteemed credentials and prodigious careers who have raised questions, concerns, cautioned the speed of this jab manufacturing and stressed the potential risks – all are at high risk for being silenced, censored, publicly attacked. It’s a witch trial for the naturopaths, a vicious craze to destroy the doctors who value lives over profit, who operate from integrity, wisdom and compassion – and not under dangerous influence of pharmaceutical companies.
And the people who make these attacks are the people who spent years rallying against Trump, becoming the very hate they so-called pitted themselves against.
I watch as a country that has been immersed in national conversations about segregation imposes vaccine passports. This medical mandate strips us of civil liberties, impoverishes economic prosperity, and threatens social belonging, which is the key ingredient for immunity: i.e. a recognition that the real danger is otherness. We are at risk of losing our connection to one another – our community.
Forced between surviving or maintaining their own embodied freedom, many are coerced blindly into taking a “silver bullet” that fails to prevent infection and does not stop transmission. The shot is grossly ineffective. The shot is lethally unsafe. There are severe and life-debilitating side-effects, and reports of deaths. And for those who are injured, there’s no legal recourse, no government assistance, because the pharmaceutical companies are not liable and because it’s not technically approved by the FDA (only operating under an emergency order), there are no government assistant programs to alleviate the burdening crush of medical bills.
It’s a game of Russian roulette that if survived is played to please Instagram followers, because in forgetting our nature, the truth that came with us out of the womb, we’re now striving to externally prove our goodness, our worth, our lovability based on our actions, and appease the parent of the government, who in this nightmare resembles the judgmental depictions of an iron-fist ruling, patriarchal God – obey and be rewarded with the privileges of a plastic society or disobey and suffer, slowly.
The wild woman in me howls, a growl that grows into a scream, up from my womb to gather and rally and lift up truth, to shatter the schemed silence masking the despair, the dying, the deaths of freedoms, innocents, children, the future health of our babies.
I watch videos of children and people with disabilities getting arrested for not having their vaccine passports on them in restaurants and museums in New York City.
I watch an online post of a four-year-old with leukemia being asked to leave a Ronald McDonald house because his family has chosen not to get the vaccine and therefore, they must leave.
I hear the relish in people’s voices, feel the charged energy behind their words written online and spoken out-loud, the smack of their labels to sever interconnectedness, to pollute the needed spaciousness for curiosity, inquisitiveness, peacefulness. The ego-driven mind will always feast on separation, seek ways to make someone else wrong because then they can be morally superior, a false and fragile ego will always need to be right, will always need to identify as a victim to life and therefore, will become the victimizer.
I listen to the stories of the vaccine injured, read a social media post of someone terribly sick from the vaccine and the comments.
“Die you sheep.”
“Stop spreading misinformation you, anti-vaxxer.”
As my heart breaks, Perpetua’s words rise from my womb.
“Love one another.”
And I hear her.
I hear you, Perpetua.
I hear her in the enlivened sensations speaking from my womb. No gain in consciousness is ever lost. No one who dies for freedom ever dies in vain because in the end, freedom always wins.
To love one another means to be in a state of unity consciousness, to dwell in the field, as the Sufi mystic Rumi brilliantly describes it, “beyond right and wrong.” And to continue forward in a quality of unity consciousness that promotes medical freedom and embodied sovereignty for all. Actions that stem from peace hold the energy of peace and that is what heals and shifts consciousness.
Because the loving decision unites and the wise decision includes. And the healthy decision nourishes the immune system with these honored truths.
We have forgotten, and I pray momentarily, what it is to be human. And we live in a culture, in a society, perhaps even raised in households where power and answers were always placed in the external authority figure, in out there, striving to keep us dismembered, disempowered, disconnected, disembodied.
And I forgot how to be human, too. Until my womb called me home to my body so I could befriend and then transcend my body.
This is beyond right and left. Stop looking to external to tell you what to do. Stop looking to belong to the left, to the right, and look within. You belong because you are here – you exist, your worth is inherent and there is nothing to prove when it comes to your goodness, and our medical freedom, our embodied sovereignty is our most basic human right.
Return to the body. Breathe into the oceanic depths to hear the soul speaking from within. The body’s brimming intelligence is a portal to witness and experience our enlivened consciousness, our essence of divinity – unity, peace, joy, love. States of consciousness that we can embody and exude. This is not about knowing; it must be felt.
Notice the space that surrounds you and inner spaciousness awakens within you.
Notice the silence underneath all things and inner stillness will bloom within.
Notice the observer to the thoughts, emotions, sensations and reunite with the beingness underneath the noise. And it’s this felt-connection to being that must remain as we move forward, so we respond from our conscience, so we respond from the innate sense of our interconnectedness and still take the action aligned with protecting, propelling and nurturing our basic freedoms.
As I write this, there’s a court case out of the U.K. filing to the International Criminal Court (ICC), accusing sixteen individuals (British authorities, president of the World Economic Forum, CEOs of the jab companies, Bill and Melinda Gates, and Dr. Anthony Fauci … to name a few) of crimes against humanity, genocide, war crimes and crimes of aggression. The compliant to the International Criminal Court offers evidence that these individuals violated the Nuremburg Code. The Nuremburg Code declares that people cannot be medically experimented upon without their informed consent, and the censorship and false labeling of “safe and effective” inoculations violates the Code, because potential health risks and possibility of deaths were not discussed and disclosed. Acts to destroy and purposefully harm reproductive health, such as enforced sterilization, fall under the definitions of genocide and crimes against humanity, both of which the sixteen accused will be tried for.
Hannah Rose is leading attorney on the case. I wonder if she heard Perpetua’s call, too.
It’s taken me two years to write this. I have been afraid. I have kept silent. I have been scared of what people will think of me … and I’ve needed to die, many times to that illusion, and will continue to die to every moment, so like the cosmic abyss of my womb, I can return refreshed and renewed and reborn.
I write this for Perpetua. I write this for the part of myself that is taking off the mask, the self that no longer needs to be small and quiet to stay safe. I am safe because nothing real can be threatened. I write this to breathe freely, and to breathe freely and make my own choices for my body is my right as a sovereign human being. And it is the right I am dedicated to preserving for the children and the daughters of Perpetua who will come after me.