‘The Menstrual Cycle process, when consciously engaged with, is a Spiritual Practice. The Original Spiritual Practice.‘
Alexandra Pope
This is a conversation I recorded with Alexandra Pope some years ago, around the time Wild Power was first published.
Alexandra has been working with the menstrual cycle for decades and co-authored Wild Power with Sjanie Hugo Wurlitzer — a book that covers the menstrual cycle as a psychological and spiritual process, from menarche to menopause.
The full transcript is below. The episode covers some significant ground, and I’m republishing it here so it can be found and returned to.
The Menstrual Cycle as a Spiritual Practice
The central claim of Wild Power is a clear one:
“The menstrual cycle process, when consciously engaged with, is a spiritual practice — and we dare to call it the original spiritual practice.”
The premise is that the cycle isn’t something to manage or push through. It is an initiatory process — one that begins at menarche and reaches its fulfilment at menopause. It runs every month, in every woman’s body, whether she’s conscious of it or not.
This is ground that womb healing work has always stood on. The cycle is not incidental to a woman’s life. It organises it.
What Is Wild Power?
Wild power, as Alexandra describes it, is the deep holy self — unencumbered by conditioning, society’s expectations, or the self we’ve been shaped into. It’s not something built or achieved. It’s something uncovered.
“Wild power is the home that we’re going towards in our spiritual practice.”
The menstrual cycle, consciously engaged, strips away what isn’t true and returns us to what is. The work isn’t to become something. It’s to come home to what was always already there.
The Inner Temple — Announcement, Void, and the Bleed
Alexandra describes the premenstrual phase as a preparation — the cycle preparing us for what happens at moontime. Then there’s a moment she calls the announcement:
“There is a distinct moment in our psyches where we will suddenly realise: I’ve got to down tools now and go. And if I don’t go, there’ll be trouble. And you just know that moment.”
That knowing is real. I’ve always called it the announcement day myself — and in this conversation I described it to Alexandra as hearing a trumpet on the ethers, feeling like a spaceship being pulled toward the void. The choice each cycle: let the ship be pulled in, or try to steer away. Steering away costs energy. It also creates pain.
What menstruation opens into — what Alexandra calls the inner temple — is something she describes this way:
“The void and the temple itself are the most extraordinary places of love, bliss, ecstasy, union with the beloved, and visioning. And all that is given to us. We do not have to sweat, do endless whatevers, prayers — all we have to do is follow the rhythm of our menstrual cycle.”
The spiritual practice most people spend a lifetime seeking is already encoded in the body. The only requirement is surrender.
This is what moontime is. Not a time to push through. Not a malfunction. The zero point. The void. The place where the nervous system resets, truth surfaces, and something essential is restored — every month, if we let it.
The Collective Dimension
Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Alexandra what she imagined would happen if women all over the world woke up to this.
“If women really dared to love their cycle, respect, love and work with the rhythm of the cycle, they would open up this extraordinary channel for restoring the feminine to the world. It’s like a great inflowing of something. A whole energetic field would expand immeasurably. And then this energetic field would start to organise the other energy fields that are out there — the energy fields hostile to the feminine, to the environment, full of hate for other people. It’s like a channel for love. It’s not that women are special — on the contrary, we’re all special. It’s just that this is a particular talent. A particular gift.”
This isn’t soft language. It’s a political statement. The menstrual cycle, consciously lived, is a restoration of something collective.
What we see in practice is exactly this. A woman becomes conscious of her cycle and it doesn’t stop at her. It ripples through her relationships, her family, her creative life. That’s not metaphor.
Where to Begin
Alexandra’s answer to how to begin:
“The moment women stop listening to this, they just go: what day of my cycle am I on? What am I noticing? And then the act of love begins. Because this act of paying attention to your cycle is an act of love.”
What day are you on? What do you notice? That’s enough.
If you don’t know where you are in your cycle, that too is information — it shows you where the disconnection lives, and therefore where the work begins.
The Womb Medicine Woman Training goes deep into the menstrual cycle as an initiatory pathway — the phases, the transitions, and the practice of attuning to your own undercurrent. If this conversation has opened something, that’s where to take it.
Womb Medicine Woman Training →
At thirty one Alexandra was seized by the most outrageous menstrual pain that was to return for 3-4 days each menstrual month. In an attempt to heal her body she decided to give space to menstruation whenever she could and feel into the pain rather than take drugs.
It was profoundly challenging but in the wake of that pain came revelation and importantly healing. Her perception of menstruation radically altered she began sharing with other women in workshops and her psychotherapy practice what she was discovering about the psychological and spiritual forces of the female body.
The more she taught the more she learnt. Women’s stories held the gold. When she stopped to listen, to follow the natural impulse of the cycle, it was as though a whole new world, a new cosmology revealed itself. The feminine cosmology, the power of menstruality.
