I am not a numerologist, but I believe in the power of numbers. 2 and 4 were the numbers that catalyzed the change you now see in the world in regards to how men and women co-create.
I’ll tell you the whole story.
In 2024, the 24h of January to be precise, I came across an Essay Competition that marked the beginning of what you now call reality.
At that time, the balance between masculine and feminine values, that you now take for granted, was not present. The collaboration between the sexes, that your generation benefits from, has only come about in the past 20 years. You must know, from the stories your parents tell, that the balance between male and female power had been in disharmony for a long time. We were confused, and the gender wars was at its peak.
Let’s backtrack for a moment.
In many of the ancient tribal cultures, women’s and men’s business had been both held sacred. Just like now. Yet, they were also held separately, not together, like we do now. Men’s business was over here, and women’s business over there. Each responsible for a domain of power and they didn’t mix.
As we expanded and became one global tribe, we chucked the baby out with the bath water. Our growth happened quickly, over a few hundred years, and through the process we lost the capacity to see what was baby and what was bath water. Imagine the havoc this caused!
Love, nurturing, community, relationships, intimacy and trust, as you know, are not bathwater. But our systems had been created mostly by men that are quick to act, and for that reason had left out – initially as an oversight – the domains that are held sacred by women.
In 2024 humans were in the precarious position of having more power and technological development than our maturity could handle and not many wise women in the public domain to keep us in check.
Now, as you know, it is very clear that older women in our communities should be listened to. Our culture knows that they are the ones that make sure we are still connected to our core values and that whatever new technology we create needs to remain focused on the well being of all. That is their job.
But at that time, most of our older women were also had by culture. They believed more what gossip magazines told them about ageing than their own hearts. So instead of focusing their energies in keeping society, specially impulsive and creative young men, in line, they spent their time and resources trying to hold on to their youth. It was a difficult period of our history.
The cosmetic industry was extremely strong and women would line up to try to keep themselves young. Youth, culture told us, was the doorway to the appreciation for women.
This was just one of the symptoms of the disconnect of those days and we can’t blame women for that. They were, just like everyone else, trying to survive under those conditions.
We were in a pickle.
Feminism had come about long before that as an attempt to bring gender balance and put an end to women’s suffering and abuse. It was a very powerful and needed movement and it did great good but it also,with the best of intentions, ended up including women’s voice in a world that had barely any feminine input in its design and therefore lacked most of the qualities that women value.
Our systems were dry, devoid of connection, intimacy and play. In fact, even thinking that systems could include such attributes, as we now see, is the domain of female creativity. And that, was completely lacking in the public spheres. Specially in the way we engaged with the economy and politics.
Women did end up finding ways to be part of such systems but of course they didn’t thrive. Quite the opposite. Even if they achieved financial success and status many had become ill, depressed and anxious. Not to say, they were often misunderstood and underestimated.
To put it simply, to fit into the constructs that were valued back then, women had to give up their connection to their bodies and many became, just like the male leaders, talking heads!
This didn’t turn out well for our older women and society in general, as mentioned above, but it also had tremendous negative consequences in the lives of younger women that had been taught by culture to distrust their bodies. An example was that women’s bodies of that time forgot how to birth and breastfeed. It’s never been the head that births. It was always the domain of the body. But our culture subjugated the body to a lesser category and we all paid the price. In many countries, in those days, cezarean sections became more common than natural births and, whats worse, this fact was not even seen as a problem by our medical system.
Please don’t get me wrong, most women did attempt to give birth naturally, under the tight guidance of a doctor that rarely understood the timing of a birthing body. So she did try and, when she failed, she blamed herself and never the system.
Those were difficult times. There was Covid, climate change, political and economic uncertainties and there were wars, with hundreds of thousands of people dead. We had reached rock bottom with the type of solutions we had been seeking. We needed something else.
There were well meaning men asking good questions but they just couldn’t see that the key that was holding many of the solutions they were looking for, was a key they dared not touch. Or didn’t think of touching.
The menstrual cycle. And that’s where the story gets good!
Of course it would be too simplistic to say that the menstrual cycle gave us all the solutions we needed. It wasn’t as simple as that. The thing is, these were days in which women (and men) were living oblivious to the fact that the world of unlimited progress, that was destroying the planet, had been the product of the creativity generated by male bodies.
Male bodies, as you know, are powered by the super-strong and energetic hormone testosterone, and they move from the impulse to action very very quickly. They created skyscrapers, bridges, cities, the internet and so much more. But they lost the “why”.
The why, was the domain of women, hidden deep inside their embodied nature.
Women’s bodies, powered mostly by a very different cocktail of hormones, estrogen and progesterone (and a bit of testosterone), were designed to slow men (and themselves!) down half the month so we could make sure the projects we created together worked for us all and the planet at large.
But instead of women honouring their bodies and guiding men and their creations, men’s creations influenced women’s psyches and they would do anything to not slow down! Menstruation was something that many young women avoided by taking the pill (which would keep women from being cyclical) and the calming hormone progesterone had no chance in modernity! Our resistance to slowing down even got us angry, which culture nicknamed PMS.
Slowing down was what we all needed.
We needed to P-a-u-s-e.
The good news is that the mechanism for that pause was already inbuilt in the system. In our female body-system. We just needed to recognise it.
The menstrual cycle, just like all life cycles, follows a pattern. Birth, growth, full-bloom, harvest, decay, death, re-birth, over and over again. Just like the seasons. Spring (birth and growth), Summer (full-bloom), Autumn (harvest, decay), Winter (death). But we, as modern women, had only been taught to appreciate the birth, growth and full-bloom phases of our cycles, available only half the month! The luteal, and menstrual phases, the answer to what our society needed, we had been taught to push away.
So it became clear to me that reminding women of the wisdom of their body/minds was a worthy enough mission to undertake. It was also important to teach men about such wisdom, after all, we needed to create new culture together. We had already been living as the future of a disembodied past. To correct that we needed to bring the body with us.
This was the vision.
That’s when I created the C-Lab with the mission to dispel confusion about cycles and lines. It all started with conversations that involved both men and women around what it would mean to have a cyclicacly informed society.
The pillar of C-lab, was education through story telling. Women are oral storytellers and if the history books have kept us out of history it was time to create, in our own terms, herstory.
You have to remember that people were still living as if our deep physiological differences didn’t matter. But we now know that physiology trumps psychology and its crazy to think that smart people at that time didn’t acknowledge that.
A lot of our material was designed to bring clarity to such topics and make our assumptions more visible.
The sex hormones, that we now know deeply impact who we are and how we create, had been completely ignored from the field of psychology. Through our material we started showing how modernity had been designed by and for people fueled by testosterone and for women in the follicular and ovulation phases of their cycles. Imagine a year with only Spring and Summer! That’s how we lived.
The modern world hadn’t been designed for or by women in the luteal or menstrual phases. So the world we lived in was the result of only half the way a woman is meant to live and create. The other half had been unspoken for. The Autumn, and the Winter. The seasons our culture had been craving for.
There was a double bind, though, that we also needed to make visible. Estrogen is a hormone that makes women accommodating. So women were quick to accommodate to that reality and work with it. Many women found pseudo-excitement using their creativity towards being beautiful and getting followers on social media. Think of the beauty and excitement of Spring, that energy needs to go somewhere. The problem was that women were accommodating to culture unconsciously, whist imagining not be had by their hormones.
So the first step, obviously, was to make the unconscious conscious. You know the drill. From unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence.
The best way we found to do that was through conversations between trusted groups of people. So we started getting people together. Thinkers, philosophers, designers, artists, writers, stay-at-home mums, engineers, psychologists, doctors, teachers, nurses, fashion designers, etc We all came together to speak and to listen.
You have to remember that at that time technology was at its peak and humans had lost the capacity to trust and foster deep intimacy with one another. We thought we could actually create systems and solutions to the worlds most pressing issues without developing love for our fellow human beings. Again, a blindspot created by the male uber-efficient gaze.
C-Lab was working under a very different premise. It kept trust and intimacy as sacred pillars and it grew with it at the centre.
It was truly a simple concept but quite new at that time. C-Lab offered a more private space than youtube, but more public than regular unrecorded conversations. These dialogues worked as teaching method, but instead of having a teacher at the front, it was a group of people sharing vulnerably how they were affected by certain things and how they saw the world.
The recorded conversations, at the start, were shared only to members and offered people the opportunity to have a look inside intimate spaces and slowly start recognizing what they had been missing but didn’t yet know.
Some of the topics we started with were quite daring for the time, for example: stories of women’s first period. But remember, we had all sorts of people participating, that’s what made it groundbreaking! We had a series of such conversations. Through them, people had an insight of how it felt for many women to start having periods and live in the world as it was, with no role models. These conversations were disarming because they were not preaching anything. They were just disclosing how culture had impacted them.
For a while our topics had to bring the menstrual cycle to the foreground, as a counterpoint to the mechanistic culture, but soon they morphed into more open dialogues about the workplace, sex, pleasure, relationships, war, grief, politics, the economy, healing, education etc…It became a melting pot of interesting ideas and novel ways of executing them exactly because we included both male and female styles of engaging with problems.
There were some teachings too. The simple approach of mapping the menstrual cycle into the seasons and into other cycles to make it more visible to women and men, was a tool we used a lot in various contexts. Since our female lineage was so broken, we had to teach parents and educators, through videos and articles, about the importance of the physiological rites of passages for girls. We explained how the way a girl was initiated (or not) when she started menstruating would ripple through her entire life. The way she would birth and go through menopause, would be a direct result of such initiation (or lack thereof).
If she was ashamed of her cycle as a young woman and disregarded her body’s signals, it was more likely that she would have medical intervention when giving birth and that she would need HRT when going through menopause. HRT was nothing to be ashamed of, but it kept women in a rhythm that didn’t have her mind/body/spirit wellbeing as priority. It helped her to “keep calm and carry on”. But the world didn’t need more of that. We needed her on her game!
Because of that we started actively working with post-menopausal women. They were a very powerful demographic to work with because they didn’t have the hormones cycling in them anymore, so they were more forthright and sure of themselves then women that were still cycling. Most of these mature women, however, had also not been initiated (when young) in the wisdom contained in a female cyclical nature so they also had to be introduced to that wisdom in order to support the younger generations.
After winning the essay competition, C-Lab became more visible in various contexts and it started getting a lot of traction.
After five years, C-Lab had become a very inclusive platform that offered tools, resources and helped people initiate conversations in their own communities about how to include the cyclical nature of a woman in the wider culture. New policies came out, new ways of looking at psychology, new methods of education, a new and updated medical system, and a much deeper general understanding that both males and females grow and mature in different ways and need different types of support and environments to blossom.
C-Lab became a greenhouse where a new culture could be hashed out, where connections were made, and kinship was re-established.
The good thing is that a few years into C-Lab, new scientific research started coming through to prove exactly that, that female bodies and male bodies were very different and that the menstrual cycle changes a woman’s brain on purpose. This is all very well accepted today but you have to understand that it wasn’t back then.
I became a spokesperson for C-Lab and even though I was the one that initiated that process, C-Lab only became what it is today because it gave voice to the collective. What we soon found out through the growth of C-lab is that people had made really wrong assumptions about each other and by being able to listen to people disclosing their intimate journeys they could recognize how wrongly they had been interpreting their actions in the world.
One of the things that a cyclicacly informed culture knows, as you know by now, is that women are naturally made to be the matriarchs of the outer systems. That’s the role of post-menopausal women. Of course you know that, since you grew up in such environment.
So, my friends, that was the very beginning of what it is now so common to your eyes. It was the beginning of our collective re-membering. The time when we started putting our selves back together and working as a true team. But don’t get me wrong, this didn’t scale. It catalyzed small grassroots movements all over the world and not a coherent and simple movement as some people had thought was necessary. This scaling ideas was also the by-product of the way men think. Women are web weavers and that is what you now see, isn’t it? Webs of connection everywhere!
C-Lab went from a small group of people in one place to many small groups of people and then, just like a virus, it spread.
I hope you like this brief history class on how we went from a world in which the values and systems had been mostly generated by efficient and brilliant men that had lost their “why” to a world in which we, men and women, became equal co-creators, never losing track of the why.
The end is herstory. 😉
My essay speaks to what I see as a helpful new frame to understand the times we are living in. Many speak of the current times using frames such as a Metacrisis or VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity). Most people talk about this “crisis” as something that needs to be fixed. Even though I don’t articulate that in my piece, I see this as a mistaken frame to explain what’s happening with humanity. In the book I am writing, I’ll go deeper into what I call “Cycle Dysphoria”. Cycle dysphoria is a mismatch between how we think about where we are (in history, in our relationship with ourselves and the world). I even make a parallel in my book between the old belief on a flat Earth and our current belief in a “linear notion of progress/life”. Our culture’s relationship with the menstrual cycle is explored not only as a metaphor but as an embodied example of how removed we are from cycles. A woman’s mind, for example, is not linear. It is cyclical. It has an ascent pattern (that could resemble more the flavour of what we think progress is) and a descent pattern, that has the flavour of what we currently name as Meta-crisis, VUCA. The more we push our bodies and disrespect our rhythms, the more a woman will feel her PMS and the bleeding phase. Humans have lived disconnected lives and now, in this natural deconstruction phase we are currently in, we can see the symptoms of our disconnection. We are caught up trying to fix the symptoms as opposed to recognising that 1 – the deconstruction phase is necessary and vital, just like Autumn that comes after Summer, 2 – we are seeing how unconsciously we lived through the flavour of the crisis. My essay talks about reconnecting to the cycles as an embodied way to understand how we got ourselves in this pickle in the first place.
This essay was about something I’ve never heard talked about that I thought would make a great contribution to how to understand human life. It should be talked about!!!!
I want to pass along something you wrote to me:
It’s been wonderful to get to meet some new folks and hear about heart-mind-felt initiatives. If people resonated with some of my vision, shared on my essay, the good news is that is is already slowly happening. If you subscribe to C-Lab (https://theclab.substack.com/p/start-here) you will be helping get the lab out into the world. My hope is to create resources for all ages and communities free of charge so people can just re-member how to live in alignment with the rhythm of life (and death), the menstrual cycle being an important rhythm to remember. I’m all about collaboration so reach out!