“A Wild Cycle is flowing by its original design, dictated by the infradian rhythm, through a living pelvis. It is not chemically or mechanically interrupted by hormonal birth control, pharmaceuticals, IUDs, surgical intervention, hormone replacement, or unresolved trauma.”
I notice that women today are on a tremendous spiritual search, an embodied quest that is bringing them back home to their sacred cycles, and to their inarguable connection with the Earth. It seems novel to many of us today, because these essential rites have all but been forgotten, but deep in our hearts and wombs, we remember.
The Historical Reverence and Suppression of Wild Cycles
For most of civilized human culture, dating back to the very first artifacts of written word and art, people worshiped the goddess, the vulva, the womb, and the power of women to birth life.
For the last few hundred years (and continuing today), generations of women were demonized for practicing sacred women’s rites. This fear/envy of the power of women's bodies was so deeply rooted that men tried to control us any way they could. This included limiting our freedom, controlling our education, and preventing us from having control over our own reproductive systems. They crucified, hung, and burned women healers at the stake. They co-opted our spaces and fetishized our roles as women.
But in the larger view, matriarchal societies dominate our past, with many evolutions of Goddess worship spanning our history. Inanna, Ishtar, Anat, Ashtoreth, Aphrodite, Hathor, Isis, Durga, Sarasvati, Laksmi… just to name a few.
Since the Paleolithic, menstrual blood has been considered a powerful magical substance for invoking resurrection and rebirth. Modern science has since found stem cells in menstrual blood, the cells containing the blueprint for life with the ability to repair and resurrect as any cell in the body.
As a result of recent industrial interest and capitalism, the European/Western medical and pharmaceutical professions have managed to systematically tame women's cycles. I’d go so far to say, it was a calculated ruling-class campaign of terrorization and profiteering.
Traditionally, midwives, witches, and nurses provided women with health-related advice and expertise, based on millennia of empirical evidence and knowledge from the field. Through the rise of these professions and the gaslighting campaigns they ran to demonize women's traditional medicine and midwifery, men began to dictate women's healthcare choices, and women became increasingly powerless. We became fodder for experimentation of brand new surgeries and drugs, with well-documented deadly consequences (referenced here and here). This had a profound impact on women's health for generations to come.
Sadly, women today don’t recognize the folk medicine that has kept their cycles and births healthy for centuries. In this moment in history, women have to fight to keep our bodies from being altered. It’s a bold thing for a woman to reclaim and defend her wild cycle, yet most modern women don’t know to question the standard narratives in gynecology and obstetrics. In a medical culture without feminine wisdom, we have been forced to accept the malaise we feel in our wombs as 'normal'.
We’ve accepted hormonal birth control as a cure-all because there are no alternatives offered. We’ve allowed ourselves to be sterilized through surgeries that cut out our sacred organs at ever-increasing rates because again, few know better and the pressure is enormous.
Before anyone gets defensive about the place of emergency medicine, please don’t take my omission of these points as entirely damning. These industries are in near total control of the vast majority of births and gynecological care in America, and while some interventions are necessary, the profession as a whole is grossly violating the hippocratic oath to do no harm. It’s dominating the public consciousness with fear and micromanaging procedures and scans looking for (and often inventing) trouble. It does so for a PROFIT. It does not deserve defending.
So, how did we get here, if not by forgetting the power of our wild cycles and the ferocious female body? How do we prevent further harm and dissociation? How do we empower and foster embodiment in young women and girls? Keep reading.
What is a Wild Cycle?
A Wild Cycle is flowing by its original design, dictated by the infradian rhythm, through a living pelvis. It is not chemically or mechanically interrupted by hormonal birth control, pharmaceuticals, IUDs, surgical intervention, hormone replacement, or unresolved trauma.
In my practice at The Living Pelvis for the last decade, I have supported hundreds of women repair and reclaim their wild cycle. We employ different protocols using ancient, folk, and modern wisdom, depending on the imbalances she’s experiencing.
All women, after healing, return to a similar looking standard healthy cycle, regardless of what her cycles were like at menarche, in her teens, or before having children. This is a bold claim, but it’s backed by thousands of practitioners with innumerous case studies at the Peristeam Hydrotherapy Institute.
The Standard Healthy Wild Cycle.
A standard, healthy, and wild cycle lasts 28-30 days, with 4-5 days of bleeding only fresh red blood with a medium even flow, no painful cramping or PMS symptoms, nothing but clear odorless discharge, apparent healthy ovulation, and regular well-digested stool.
Outlining this is not meant to diminish any variations from this SHWC. It’s not meant to be a barometer to judge our rightness or wrongness.
I understand firsthand the ways women learn perfectionism and black and white thinking, especially about our bodies. It’s painful programming to disassemble. Before comparing your cycle to the standard healthy wild cycle, remember that we are living in strange times that assault our biology and constitutions daily. It’s not a natural world anymore, and therefore our cycles will not always reflect this.
The standard healthy wild cycle I outline is simply this: a standard to compare to, in order to understand how our cycles oscillate month by month, because tracking our imbalances gives us insight to our healing.
I’ve written extensively about the wisdoms woven into these imbalances, the fifth vital sign of the menstrual blueprint for overall female health, and the ways to heal.
It’s not my intention to imply that anything beyond this standard healthy isn’t ‘wild’. Essentially, I am saying that all the ways we are altered impact the cycle and psyche, and diminish our wild instincts.
Wild Cycles are Lunar Cycles
The Infradian Rhythm is a biological cycle influenced by the lunar cycle. It governs the movement of the waters of the earth, including menstrual blood or our heavenly waters as it’s called in Traditional Chinese Gynecology. It is a sister-rhythm to the Circadian rhythm, which is a solar cycle. Following infradian rhythm informs women how to operate on a 28-day cycle, rather than a 24-hour cycle, and to honor the unique phase-by-phase needs of her body and hormones.
It used to be that all Women had Wild Cycles, but today it is rare that I encounter them.
Why are women’s cycles so out of sync with nature and our innate biology? Just to name a few reasons:
Living in a modern culture designed for male biology
Living in wifi all day everyday
Not going outside and sitting on the earth enough
Endocrine disruptors in all our air, water, and food
Diet fads and starvation
Not enough animal protein & fat
Blocked elimination channels
Sluggish lymph
Toxin overloaded livers
Unhealed sexual trauma
Birth & gynecological trauma
Pharmaceuticals and HBC
Pelvic dysfunction and lack of fascial mobility
Un-remediated scar tissue
Resurrecting Our Wild Cycle
While this list seems daunting, one way to re-discover your cycling body is learn to follow your own Infradian Rhythm. This involves some simple reframes like 28-day lifestyle design, self-care boundaries, practices for womb health, and dedicated nature connection.
I have an upcoming 4 week mini-course called The Infradian Codes - this could be the perfect catalyst to getting your wild cycle back. It’s virtual, taught live on Sundays at 11am EST, beginning May 5th.
We used to be an undifferentiated part of the ecosystem. Our bodies evolved in sync with the seasons. Even if our minds today believe we belong more to virtual realities than to the Earth, our bodies remember.
In my opinion, all our malaise can be traced to this disconnect, especially for women, whose bodies are designed to be in rhythm with the Earth and Moon.
Tending to our Circadian and Infradian rhythms is a ritual of great importance, to take back our autonomous health, ignite embodied reproductive vitality, and to come home to our Living Pelvis - with results that are tangible in our hormones and blood.
I invite you to sync into the connection of your womb and the moon, and resurrect your original wild cycle blueprint alongside other inspiring women.
Safeguarding Embodiment
Embodiment matters immensely, in a world full of industries and ideologies bent on female erasure.
Embodiment is a radical act that underpins our capacity to sense reality. It acts as a guidance system to stay safe, to avoid pain, and to prioritize pleasure. Through our bodies, cycles, wombs, and intuition we know the world, and we know right from wrong.
We need to be inhabited fully in our senses, embodying our living pelvis, to access our bodies for truth-seeking and sensing. There has never been a more important time to claim this female superpower.
We need to make sure that we remember, as well as our daughters and nieces, where we come from and who we are. We are women with womb wisdom and we will win. We only need remember.
Yours, in body, cycle, and soul,
Sarah WolfMother