The Menstruality Podcast - 161. The Power of Premenstrual Truth Telling (Maya Luna)

Episode Date: August 29, 2024

Have you ever noticed that your intuitive sense of knowing is heightened when you are premenstrual? Today we’re exploring the radical honesty that can be invoked in inner autumn, asking the question: what if our unadulterated, fierce, premenstrual truth speaking is actually exactly the medicine our world needs at this time? My guest is Maya Luna, an artist, channel and creator of The Venus Path™, a modern adaptation of an ancient Fertility Goddess Spiritual Path that works with Sensuality, The Body, The Deep Heart, Passionate Energy and the Incarnate Human Experience. Today she shares how she navigates what she calls the 'dark goddess truth serum' that pulses through her in her premenstrual phase, and how she is learning to skillfully and artfully share it in the world. We explore:How we can feel truth or untruth in our bodies and somehow “smell dishonesty” when we’re in premenstrual truth-telling mode.The 40s as the inner autumn of our menstruating years, where our premenstrual powers can come online even more, and how the world can react when women stop playing nice and being “good girls” and start bringing the power of our sacred truth in this life phaseThe toxic femininity we see in our culture and ourselves today; the fawning, people pleasing, being a doormat, not speaking up, letting people use and abuse us, and how our premenstrual capacity to see through bullshit is a powerful antidote.---Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love---The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [e-mail]---Social media:Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.schoolSophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardyMaya Luna: @thevenuspath - https://www.instagram.com/thevenuspath

Welcome to the Menstruality Podcast, where we share inspiring conversations about the power of menstrual cycle awareness and conscious menopause. This podcast is brought to you by Red School, where we're training the menstruality leaders of the future. I'm your host, Sophie Jane Hardy, and I'll be joined often by Red School's founders, Alexandra and Sharni, as well as an inspiring group of pioneers, activists, changemakers and creatives to explore how you can unashamedly claim the power of the menstrual cycle to activate your unique form of leadership for yourself, your community and the world. Hey, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today. I hope you're doing well. I'm curious, have you ever noticed that your intuitive sense of knowing is heightened

when you're premenstrual? Today we're exploring the radical honesty that can be invoked in inner autumn and asking the provocative question, what if our unadulterated, fierce, premenstrual truth speaking is actually exactly the medicine our world needs at this time? My guest and conversation partner is Maya Luna, who describes herself as an artist, a channel, an oracle, and the creator of the Venus Path, a modern adaptation of ancient fertility goddess spiritual path that works with sensuality, the body, the deep heart, passionate energy, and the incarnate human experience. She's very well known for her work around sacred rage and one of my favourite quotes of hers is, feminine rage will save this world and we will snarl, bite, hiss and roar for what is good and true, for the protection of innocence, for the

sovereignty of our bodies, for love. Today Maya shares how she navigates what she calls the dark goddess truth serum that pulses through her in her premenstrual phase and how she's learning to skillfully and artfully share it in the world and unsurprisingly given the topic we dropped quite a lot of f-bombs in this conversation so please wear headphones if you're around little people and make sure you stay listening until at least halfway through where Maya almost has to call me out on my own bullshit. So let's get started with the power of premenstrual truth-telling with Maya Luna. Well interestingly you know I was feeling into this talk and, you know, my work doesn't really get into menstruation stuff. But I have been having such a profound experience the last few months of my cycle of this really deep, dark goddess truth serum that comes online before I bleed. It's very powerful.

It feels like I just have owl vision and I can just see bullshit. And I'm just like, and I was speaking to another friend who reached out to me for support because whenever she's about to bleed, she gets really, like, she falls out of love with her partner. And so I've just been thinking a lot lately about this kind of psychedelic journey of how we kind of like, we really go into the underworld

where things get turned inside out, and we sort of see the other side of things, the dark side reveals itself. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. You know? Yes, I I'm in it right now yeah I know you know yeah yeah that's really up for me right now like I don't usually get cranky when I'm you know premenstrual but the last couple months I've just been like, just like, and I have to be really careful because it's just like, like that's the energy

is I'm just like, truth, truth or get the fuck out. Maya had like a sword in her hand that she is striking through the air, like cutting through the bullshit. Yeah, it's just like how to wield that you know and and all the ways that our society shames that you know calls it like a syndrome right and just like what happens when we recontextualize it out of the pathologizing potentially misogynistic kind of paradigms of PMS. Yeah. Well, yeah, let's go into it because you and I are both in that place in the cycle. I'm on day 24, but I'm going to have a really short cycle because I ovulated early.

So it's kind of day 27, how day 27 would normally feel. So I've been taken on that ride over the last five days. And this podcast might come out a little bit later but what's just happened in the world is Kamala Harris might be up as the democratic nominee and that's been a big part of my premenstrual journey this month it's been I've been learning a lot from black women around what this might mean for black women over the next hundred days in the US. And it's just been, it's been one of those moments of premenstrual wake up and premenstrual truth seeing and, but also just feeling the mess and the pain of the world. So

that's what I've been with in the, over the past few days. And I'm just looking forward to being able to drop out of the world for a couple of days when I bleed and then come back ready for action. And it sounds like you're in a similar place. You said you're on day 30. I'm very, very, very late. Yeah. Yeah. Very, very late. Very unusual for me to be late. I'm like 35. And how, how has it been over the past few days? Tell us more about the truth telling serum. Well, this has been happening the last couple of months for me. I'm someone who historically before I bleed, I tend to get more kind of weepy, like I'll usually have a really big cry within the 24 hours before I bleed and the last couple of months it's been a very very very different energy that comes online last three months and it's very strong and it just feels like I have no tolerance for people lying to themselves or lying to me.

And where I would normally be able to see with a more kind of gentle, oh, yeah, they're hiding from themselves or they're not being totally honest about this. They're delusional about that, you know, all these little things that we kind of notice in people and you just kind of go huh it's like my whole system feels first of all like I have x-ray owl vision I can see through everyone's bullshit I can see where they're being dishonest with themselves. I can see where they're delusional. I can see where they're lying to themselves. And I have no tolerance for it. It it obviously challenges, you know, where I tend to lead in my personality, which is being kind and, you know, like accepting people as they are, right? It's just like, you know and and it's so intense though it's like it and it really feels physical in my body it's it's an absolute revulsion to anything that feels dissonant in people and and there's a really strong impulse to name it you know not in a cruel or shaming way but just to name it I see you right and then that's also confronting because um should I name it you know like is that even appropriate or responsible um and you know and then it's interesting because often I'll find myself you know going but don't

name that and don't say that you know it's not ever you know keep that to yourself but it just like oh it's just it's like it's just I can barely stand the the the elephant in the room and and it is it's like that owl vision you know this like dark god oh I can just see through like x-ray vision right and so it's really interesting because I think you know culturally we don't have a space for the dark goddess and the dark goddess truth serum we don't know how to hold it in. We don't know how to hold it in ourselves. We don't know how to hold it in community. We don't know how to hold it with other people. We, we, you know, the blood right mysteries, the crone, you know, the hag, all these different kinds of what I would say actually is it is an expression of love it's a very particular radical form of feminine

love but we don't have context for it right yes and so what it can seem like from the dominant paradigm and thankfully i've liberated myself from those paradigms enough that i don't really get hooked but i do notice them because it's just kind of like wow this is like bitchy energy right and and it's easy to kind of you know I don't really get hooked by it but I can definitely sense it like you know that there's something taboo about this state as a woman right there's something taboo about it and I had to really sit with it because it's been so strong. I mean, so unbelievably strong. And I actually have a medicine story about one of the things that unfolded in it that taught me a lot. I'll tell that story, actually, that's probably a really good place to go.

That would be great. Yeah, so I was just kind of noticing my own relationship to it and like how willing am I to step into it and how obviously questions of ethics and integrity come up but interestingly what I started finding was anytime I would silence it it actually fell out of integrity yes how could you tell it fell out of integrity well interestingly it was like the dissonance I'm seeing in the other person now I'm feeling the dissonance in me so there's like a new kind of permeability just a sense of dissonance like um like i've abandoned something very sacred which is this deep truth that i can smell my my sniffer my sniffer is so highly tuned in so the story i have to tell is um like i said this has been happening the last three months um and it's new for me it's not

usually what happens in my premenstrual phase and i was having it so strongly come up with a friend of mine a man who's a really really close friend of mine he's like one of my closest friends and I just you know it was so intense and like like and it would start manifesting as irritation when I wouldn't say anything it was just like oh okay you know like and by the way this has nothing to do with our personal relationship. This is just witnessing him talk about himself and his life. And I can just see that's bullshit. Like that is bullshit. What you're saying. And I can see exactly what's going on for you. And I know, and I, I just,

I see what's going on. Right. And I'm just like, Oh, okay. And, you know, like I said, I'm in this process of is it ethical to say is it not you know where are those boundaries right and and then it feels off to not say and so finally one day I said something and in my felt experience if the energy of the truth of what I was sensing and the power of the energy of what I was sensing was like this big, I gave him that much. I gave him a microdose. So for our listeners, Maya's arms were spread right out at the beginning and then they came into a tiny little droplet. So this is a droplet. Oh, yeah, it's a truth serum.

Right, right, right. So huge. And then I went, whoop, here's a little tiny microdose sacrament of truth just place it on your tongue and just see that was my experience his experience was so intense receiving that it like blew him out of the water. It was intensely confronting. Yes. He was a little bit defensive. He just basically went into a very intense psychological emotional process reacting to what I had said and chewing on it. But it just, the impact was so big. So there was defensiveness, but there was also seeing it and also being like, oh my God, I can't believe I didn't see that. And he just had a massive experience, right? And I was like, whoa, okay.

And that showed me, you know, this is stronger than I thought, because, again, in my experience, it was so gentle and so small what I offered. And it just blasted him like a rocket. Right. OK, so here's where things got interesting. I wouldn't say he was totally defensive, but there was a little sense of bitterness in the space when we got off the phone. Like there was a little bit of a sense of like, kind of, or he was just kind of like, I'm not okay right now, you know, as a result of what I had brought. And so then what does that bring up for me? We get off the phone and he texts me the next day and he's basically like unraveling he's like i'm not okay right now what does that bring up for me guilt of course right i'm like oh fuck you know shit right and then there's all the cultural programming again, was that just my bitchy PMS thing? Right? Like, I'm not being a

nice woman. Right? I did something wrong. Maybe he wasn't. He wasn't blaming me or anything. He just was like, I'm falling apart right now. You know? And but what is so interesting, because again, he's a really good friend of mine. So we speak probably almost every day. What's so interesting is that that kind of unraveling that was the result of, you know, having this really big experience for about two to three days. Then we didn't talk for a couple days. We kind of took some space. And since that time, he basically emerged out of that and made the decision that he was essentially recognizing that he had been striving to live inside of an idealized false construct. There were all these things he was doing in his life that were this kind of way that he was trying to make himself important. Right? Through different career things and like trying to become significant and that it was actually abandoning his essence

this was exactly the thing that I had been seeing the whole time that I was just like oh I can't and you know and but like he got it and since then I have watched him in like the most beautiful journey of self-reclamation and like really coming back to his just humble human essence beautiful self that he had kind of abandoned in this attempt you know as as many of us do it's a very common thing we kind of try to create these special i'm important and you know and we abandon ourselves in the process so and then that was really interesting because i was like okay right actually something profoundly beautiful and healing and redemptive and life-giving came out of this but the initial period was like, you know, and like, oh, like, wow, why are you doing, you know?

Yes, yes, yes. So that taught me a lot about this particular phenomena, which I guess I would say is the the um the crone hag sorceress dark goddess truth serum that can become available in the the premenstrual zone yes i think our listeners will be nodding and roaring and like with you like that like that feeling of I can see the bullshit out here and it wants to pour out of my body and end the bullshit and the energy it takes to hold Alexandra and Shani who created Red School they talk about holding the tension you know there's this charge that's surging through us learning how to grow the muscles of holding the tension there so that you masterfully like you did we can take the one drop

and land it rather than just burning the whole thing down right there is a there is an artfulness to it for sure there is a skillfulness i would say skillfulness is probably the word and I think I'm still learning that skillfulness yeah I'm curious what you how you feel about this context that Alexandra and Sharni lay down is in their book wise power which is actually about menopause but they speak about how the 40s I'm not sure how old you are 39 okay so maybe this is the portal I'm in 42 but they speak about like the 20s as the spring of our menstruating years the 30s is the summer of the menstruating years and the 40s as the autumn the fall of the menstruating is and how the 40s then can become kind of a macrocosm of the microcosm of the premenstruum so the powers of the premenstruum can come online much more oh wow that makes so

much sense doesn't it and we see women in their 40s and then particularly amping up as they get into their 50s and towards menopause. They get called, like you said, hags and crones and witches and bitches and for simply saying this is not OK, this must change. And I just wonder if like I'd love to hear how that lands for you. Well, I mean, gosh, I love this conversation so much. And I just, you know, the first thing that comes to me is just in a world where, you know, we have basically patriarchal femininity conditioning, which is, you know, to be nice and be sweet and be kind and be loving and be gentle. And, you know, to be nice and be sweet and be kind and be loving and be gentle. And, you know, which is what I had to face when I when my friend had that reaction.

Right. It was like, oh, I was like not being a nice lady. Right. I was being a bitch. It's like it's very interesting to turn it on its head and and explore you know how are we as women when we hold this power back of our sacred truth in this dark goddess truth serum how are we enabling the destruction on our planet how are we enabling holy yes yes yes yes yes systems of harm you know all the fucking bullshit that's happening in the world how are we actually enabling it by trying to play nice and how much is the premenstruum calling us like you said the dark goddess and i really want to hear you speak more about that term but it's like she's calling to us from the premenstruum come on you're needed the world needs you the world needs this fierceness well the the fierceness and also it's interesting because it doesn't um the way it manifests for me doesn't feel like anger or cruelty it feels like and this is this is really what I feel the dark goddess is it's it's what's underneath

you know it's underneath all the layers this is what happens when Inanna descends into the underworld to meet Arishkigal the dark goddess it's the stripping right of all the layers, all her accoutrements of power, all her, right? So all of the external layers, the dark goddess medicine is like, what's underneath, right? You can see the core, you can see the essence. And that's another interesting thing because I think that when women are not trusting of their own perception, they can often gaslight themselves and feel like they are crazy or

something's wrong with them something must be wrong with me yeah because like with a friend you could have said oh I'm I'm out of alignment here oh there we go yeah you could have gone all the way into that okay so that's such a good point because that's another thing that mostly spiritual women and women that are into personal development will do. They'll go, oh, I'm triggered. So something's going, you know, I'm, something's being touched in me here and what is this about me?

And then we just miss the whole thing. But I think there's this other piece, which is just, you know, know when you sense when you have this kind of sensitivity and you basically sense dissonance in the world or other people you sense where there isn't truth happening where there's distortion I think often if a woman isn't really trusting herself and trusting what she knows she'll think that she's mistaken she'll think she must not be seen clearly yeah all the time yeah second guessing doubting imposter syndrome feeling like a fraud yes exactly you know and this is something that like before this really

deep dark goddess truth serum thing started to come online a few months ago it's so interesting what you said about the 40s because maybe that's what it is because it's new for me actually it's not how I'm used to experiencing my my premenstruation time how was it before well like I said I would get very weepy like I would definitely feel just very like tender and sensitive I'd usually cry right before yeah and but one of the other things that would happen that does feel kind of related to this and I think is common for a lot of women is it becomes like a psychedelic journey where it's like all of a sudden you just see everything that is not working in your life like that's not working that is not working in your life. Like, that's not working. That's not working. I don't like that.

I don't like that. Like, it becomes very negative, you know, which there's nothing wrong with that, you know, it's, and I would just always hold it as like a psychedelic journey. I'd be like, okay, I'm not going to make any major life decisions right now. I'm going to wait until I bleed, but I'm going to take the information that I got during that like deep time of negativity and apply it to the holistic vision of my life you know see the dark side basically yeah which needs to be seen it's a part of life but as you said before it's not a part of life that we embrace collectively as a culture so it can feel terrifying it can feel like everything is wrong catastrophizing can happen really quickly I mean I've been with my guy for eight years now and I'm

it's taken me a freaking long time but I'm I feel like I'm finally in a place now where I can hear the barrage of insults at him that is coming through me like all of the things that's wrong with him and I can hold that and part of me can go uh-huh I hear you I can track that a lot of it's coming from my trauma with a protective part of me that wants to protect me and keep me safe away from man so I can track that and then like you said I can take it into the bleed and I can hear what I mean this is a perfect situation it often doesn't look like this it often looks much messier but when when I'm going well I can go through the bleed and then hear hear what the course correction is like hey this is off a little in our relationship yeah I mean I've got to be honest

it doesn't often play out like that this is my practice I need I need to I need your honesty yeah see were you about to call me call me you're like you're like I better not I'll be really clear here usually it's coming out with some fire on like day 26 but when I can hold it and be with the well usually then I touch some pain I get to feel the pain underneath the rage and then I can find the course correction yeah rather than raising the whole thing down with the fire yeah it makes me think of what you were saying about the dark goddess it's like being with the descent the underworld descent enough not trying to run away not trying to escape not trying to numb out being with that enough so that

I can feel the medicine yes exactly exactly. And that there's that skillfulness again, you know, like it really is like a psychedelic journey. It's like taking a sacrament, you know, and there's a there to like freak out. You want to, you want to really, you know, use the medicine well. And maybe that's part of what happens in the forties too, is kind of like, whereas maybe in the twenties, you know, our hormonal cycles are just like, oh my God, it's like so intense. You like don't even know how to handle it and by the time you're 40 you're kind of like okay like you're starting to get more skillful with how to work with all these different um yeah the cycle and i i it's different for everybody but i think estrogen starts to to fluctuate more and estrogen is like the people pleasing uh-huh yeah over these three months i just do curious day maybe there's just a little bit less estrogen system

you know something too that i've always felt so fascinated with particularly because like I said, my experience of the premenstrual phase has always been just really tender and kind of weepy and like just so sensitive. And just, I feel like oftentimes when we are bleeding, especially that first day, you know, or right before the bleed, what's happening is that as women, we are touching the pink, tender core that is inside of all human beings, men and women, underneath, underneath, underneath all the defense mechanisms underneath all the coping strategies we are just these tender pink vulnerable sensitive feeling beings and that's often what happens too is like you just you just literally don't have access to the defense mechanisms that you normally do in other parts of your cycle and that has always fascinated me how that state gets really

pathologized you know as like something's wrong when actually it feels to me like it's a very very pure like touching the core of the human experience you know underneath all the armor underneath all the coping strategies underneath all the defense mechanisms and just landing at that just raw, sensitive, tender, pink, fleshy feeling being that we are, that we all are underneath, you know, there's something about that, that I just, I see how sacred that is. And, you know, obviously the legacy of the rejection

of menstruation and the hiding of menstruation and the hatred of menstruation that has been going on for so long on this planet is a reflection of, yeah, our hatred of the dark goddess, our hatred of the dark goddess, our hatred of, you know, seeing the real, real, true, true, seeing the dark side and that pink, vulnerable, tender, fleshy feeling core that we all are underneath. I'm going to pause this conversation just for a moment.

We have an invitation for you if you'd love to step into the premenstrual power that I'm exploring with Maya Luna today please consider joining our new self-paced cycle power course for the whole of August you can receive 33% off using the code summer and I wanted to share a few of the things that people have been sharing about the course so far. One woman said, it's richer than any other work or spiritual practice I've encountered. Another said, a total game changer. Another said, I feel I've cracked some new coding and I love it. And there's a beautiful story from one woman who says, for the first time in my entire life, age 45, I get the magic of the bleed.

So this course is for you wherever you're at in your cycle awareness journey, whether you're month one or month 100, the course will help you find your way to live, love and lead from your cyclical intelligence you can take your seat on the course at redschool.net forward slash cycle power and remember to use the code summer to get 33% off for the few remaining days in August I'm curious I'm thinking of the word oracle because I feel like it comes up quite a lot in your work and how the relationship plays out for you between both the truth seeing serum, but also that tender, vulnerable, defenseless. And your work in the world as an oracle or you know your way of being as an oracle yeah how that plays out cyclically yeah that's so interesting um i feel like the most true thing i can say right now is just that as i've been getting initiated into this pre-menstrual dark goddess truth serum what I keep noticing is I I have this deep hunger to to be in the presence of someone who's like hungry for it who's just like give it to me i want it strip me down show me which is basically the or the oracle you know

template that you know they would travel to the the oracle temple and have to go through a whole process you know the oracle of delphi the pithia um i have a pithia quote on the back of my neck that I got when I was 23. Wow. You know, and they would come with one question. And she would basically go into a liminal state of channeling. She would actually be huffing these like hallucinogenic psychedelic gases coming up from cracks in the earth. And then she would give an answer. And the answer was often in this kind of poetic riddle form. But I can really feel that and I can feel, I think it's just because in the course of my

initiation, it's only been like three months, so it still feels very kind of new for me. You know, navigating all the ways that I see that this energy in me is not welcome and is seen as a failure on my part or a bad thing and just how profound it's been for me to journey through the little places where I had to kind of check those stories and be like is that and then just like no this is so beautiful and sacred and pure and it's love actually it's a. It's a very fierce kind of love, but it's love to see through bullshit. It's love to see through distortion. It's love to see the core. It's transformative.

Yes, exactly. Yeah, look what happened to my friend. He's having such a beautiful return to what he's calling his human self you know and we've all had those truth-telling moments where we're a good friend or someone in our lives has named something that was so painful like back to my relationship one of my mentors said look you just need to choose you need to choose are you going to lean into aid how he is or are you going to just keep trying to fix him for the rest of your life and change him into who you want

to be oh and people had said it before but it was something about the energetic that was coming through and she's she's a post-menopausal woman she she has been practicing with wielding this truth for like a decade and it just it came it hit me and it changed me wow and it's changed the way I've been for the last year that's it sometimes the truth hurts and sometimes um that hurts so good and it's what we need you know but like it does it does have a little ouch inside of it but that's the whole thing is that it's it's so contrary to um you know in my sacred rage body of work which was the first kind of thing that you reached out to me you know I have a whole I have a whole kind of um I mean maybe other people talk about this I don't know i haven't heard anyone

else talk about it but i call it like you know we talk about um toxic masculinity which unfortunately a lot of people seem to be i don't know confused or defensive like thinking that that's like anti-masculine or something like that what i I see it as is it's a form of conditioning that happens to men through culture around what being a real man is and what masculinity is. And it's a set of rules. And those rules are toxic to men themselves and the people around them, but also to themselves, right? It's don't cry, suck it up, don't be a pussy, be a real man, you know, be dominant, be on top, be in control, right? That's toxic masculinity. It's a set of cultural conditioning that tells men what they're allowed to be and what they're not

allowed to be as men, as masculine beings. So toxic femininity then is the way that women are conditioned culturally of how they're supposed to be as women and what being a feminine being is, which is smile. Why don't you smile more? Be pretty. Be beautiful. Focus on your appearance. Be nice to other people. Be accommodating. Don't have too many boundaries. Don't say no, right? So just like toxic masculinity those cultural constructs are toxic to women themselves but here's the other piece and people around them yes that's the piece we were talking about with the enabling yeah like how we actually are inadvertently contributing to the systems of distortion or harm because we're playing nice. Yes. Because with toxic masculinity, it's very easy to see how that causes harm to other people.

A lot of people are, I think, don't pay much attention to how it harms men themselves, which it absolutely does, right? Because both toxic masculinity and toxic femininity are basically dehumanizing because right they don't allow for a person to be a whole human being a full spectrum human being it's just saying you you're allowed to be this but not that right and there's the uprooting from the authentic self that we were talking about yeah can't be your authentic self when you're trying to play by all of these rules that exactly and so with toxic femininity I think it's easy to see how those constructs are harmful for women you know fawning and people pleasing and not advocating for yourself and being a doormat and not speaking up and letting people use and abuse you and um but I don't think we see how it can actually be toxic for the people and the world around us.

So back to the premenstrual power or the power of the 40s, because those qualities that you were describing are very much kind of maiden era qualities with a bit of mother in there as well like which are really the only like two acceptable ways to be a woman in our culture is like be like 20 years old and running around in a white dress through a meadow or be a mother like nourishing everybody and sacrificing everything for other people incomes boom boom 40 years three months like no I want pleasure for myself because I deserve it because I'm a I'm a being that exists on this earth or no I see truth I see bullshit there and I'm gonna call it the pre-menstrual is calling us to just cut through the toxic femininity yeah totally a hundred percent a hundred percent and the estrogen thing that you were talking about, too, right? I suppose that the shift in estrogen. Yeah, I totally see that. And I think there's actually a similar thing for men,

actually, which is, I think, as testosterone shifts later in age, men oftentimes like start entering their heart more, and, you know, they're kind of become softer and more sensitive and um so it's interesting yeah it feels like midlife and later in life really supports us in stepping outside of the toxic masculinity femininity paradigms yeah i'm really excited for my 40s i'm like i'm into it and you know what else is really interesting? I feel like this is just connected to the whole thing, right? Because from within those maiden fetish ideas of femininity and womanhood, right? Ovulation, right, is obviously, I don't, have you, you you know what you've probably seen this

but if you haven't you should and everyone here should maybe you can go like in the show notes there's some kind of art project where someone they did this with multiple women but they took a picture of their face every day of their cycle. And then you can watch it in fast time motion, right, as they're changing. And literally what you see is like during ovulation, like the face comes out. It's like the flower blooming. The cheeks get pink. The eye, the color of the eyes gets bright.

Wow. And then during premenstrual, everything kind of, you know, right. So, so amazing. I mean, like, so amazing. Like, if you want to just like worship, like what woman and the goddess and the cycles of creation is like, look this up and find it. It's unbelievable to find find it and I'll put it in the show notes right so what I wanted to speak to was just like um you know being 39 and entering my 40s right it's like this journey of watching the maiden beauty fade you know and like really starting to see that happen in bigger and bigger ways now like my um the particular beauty that I had as a maiden which is the more culturally kind of sanctioned idea of what beauty is yes it's fading it's dying I'm watching it die slowly. Right. And I know every year it's just going to fade more and more. And I'm connecting that because right. There's that whole part of

rejecting the premenstrual and the menstrual because it's just, you know, that's kind of, it's the, it's the ugly quote unquote time of our cycle, right? we're bloated yeah you have pimples and you're like you know and then ovulation is like ah so that that's really interesting to me too and I feel like it's connected right I mean I guess yeah because it's it has to do with menopause and everything but it's just because I'm watching myself be like should I get Botox you know like all these things that I never thought I would like it's just like coming in like should I and I'm just like I don't think so but like yeah wow it's it's a real I guess I just feel very inspired like as I step into my 40s, I've always loved crones.

You know, one of the first viral pieces I wrote on the internet was about the crone. I'm very excited to be a crone. I feel like I've always had crone energy, even when I was really young. Like I think crones are the coolest. But still watching my maiden beauty fade is showing me my own, you know, hooks into patriarchal beauty standards. Yeah. You know, it just seems like it's so, even the most radical feminist, like badass women,

it's just really, really common for us to cling, right? Cling. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Don't go. Don't go. Yeah. Yeah. And there's something that I'm just really turned on by is like,

I just want to create spaces. I think in the future for women to intentionally fucking let go. You're not supposed to look 30 when you're 45. There's nothing wrong with you. There's a different kind of beauty that emerges, but it's not the maiden beauty. It's not. And what I'm thinking of as you're speaking is the invisibility that can descend in the 40s where there's this subtle sense of okay people people just aren't noticing me or

aren't looking like I went I was um in a shopping center and I went to order a juice from the juice bar and and and the guy like he's probably in his 21 22 he really didn't see me as I was ordering this juice I could feel that he it's like he was looking through me because I I'm a woman in my 40s and I just don't exist to him that experience I and I and I I've heard this many many many times the the sense of invisibility that happens for women particularly as they enter like 50s and 60s what do you feel like if you could rewind 10 years ago his how would he have seen you and interacted with you well the first thing that comes up for me is as a human okay so like Okay. So like back to the denial of humanity. What I'm really with is just when our truth is coming out is when the world turns away from us. What a coincidence. So I guess there's double, double obstacle to getting this truth in the world because we have to get past ourselves and all that toxic, toxic femininity.

Then we have to get past the world that doesn't want to hear. But the good news, I think, is like we potentially have the inner transformation and initiation at that point, if we choose to step through it and not cling to the maiden beauty, maiden past, to not give a fuck. It's like, I don't give a fuck if you think I'm invisible. I'm not, I'm, I will, I will get this truth out. You can see me as the crazy old bitch. I don't, I don't give a fuck right that's what turns me on is like being able to be like oh you oh you think I'm invisible I'm

like a crazy old bitch like great I don't give a fuck you know that's hot to me that's hot I'm having I'm having a little bit of a different experience which is that I am really enjoying being more invisible I'm really enjoying being less of a patriarchal sex object when I move into the world I'm really enjoying that I'm not being noticed by men I I quite like it um and it's wild, too, because I remember back to being like 19. And just how many, like when I would walk out into the world, how many men would like really predatorily, like creepily, like try to like get in my, you know. And I mean, it really was a problem for a long time and and it and it created I think a lot of like subtle trauma in my system where I just kind of had like a lot of guards up because walking out into the world just I, I mean, I can remember walking in San Francisco and having met like yell thing,

like vulgar things at me, you know, as I'm walking down the street, just like in normal clothes, like being a person, you know? And I really like that less of that is happening now. I'm like, I am stoked to not be the patriarchal sex object anymore. Like more of your energy can be with you, not having to defend or like figure this shit out. Yeah. Not having to manage all that yuckiness.

And we just go back to the Oracle for a minute, because I'm really wondering if she holds such a key for everything that we're talking about here because she I don't know much about the oracle so I want to ask you but from what you've said it sounds like she is sitting in her temple she is sitting in her her in life, within herself. And whether people come or not, she will tell truth. I feel like she's holding a wisdom key for us here in the pre-Munster and in the 40s. Yeah, let me feel into that. I think what's coming to me is something about that radical trust.

Because the Oracle, the Delphic Oracle, the Pythia, was considered to be the word of God. That's how serious what she said was taken. What she said was the truth. And, you know, Socrates went to the Delphic Oracle. The Trojan horse was built because of something the Oracle said. so but if you can imagine that level of trust I mean I'm sure you and many of your listeners probably do tarot cards right a tarot reading is really only powerful it's not very powerful if you're just kind of like and like oh I don't like that card. Let's just do another one. And like, what makes it such a powerful ceremony is to relate to it, you know, experimentally as this is the truth. And then to, you know, play with that. So that's sort of what's coming to me is we get these instincts as women and perhaps those instincts come more online in the 40s because of the hormonal shifts and the kind of um caretaking

that starts to fall away we get instincts we see shit we smell shit we know shit and we've lived enough to see it we've lived enough to see it yeah and so maybe i think there's something about like am i willing to just completely surrender to what i know that i know no like oh here's what the Oracle says, but like, yeah, but like also this and, and maybe it's me and maybe I like, what would it feel like? You know, when you know something is true, when you get that little sparkle of truth, that deep instinctual knowing to fully surrender to that. I know I'm seeing clearly. I feel like there's a direct relationship there

with the pink tender place that you were describing. I feel like the more that we can allow that, the more that we can hear the truth the more I can let all of the world fall away and just be with that skinless feeling more I know who I am the more I can hear that truth I really am like a at heart I'm like philosopher. I'm like a heretical heretic philosopher. Yeah. That's kind of my thing is like, I see, I see distortions in the sort of dominant paradigms of all these different

things. And I'm kind of like dismantle it. So I guess I'm always in that dark goddess truth serum premenstrual state in a way. Yeah. Or it's a, it's a big part of like the medicine I have for the world but um watch out world with Maya Luna in her fourth yeah yeah I mean it's just kind of I don't know I don't really try it's just like that's that's what I find myself drawn to being kind of obsessed with and interested in. And so one of the things that I see a lot is in the kind of personal development, new age spirituality world, there is just a really big emphasis on like, this kind of empowerment paradigm of like creating your reality and being

in your power and being in your, you know, really turning away from the soft, pink, tender, vulnerable core. And possibly even relating to the soft, pink, tender, vulnerable, I don't know, core inside of us as a wound, as like something I need to work through, as like, oh, this is my trauma coming up, you know, rather than a sacred place you know that that actually yeah in my experience in my personal life the more I have been willing to kneel before that place inside of myself the more not only wisdom but love and tenderness has come to me but I think that's very I think that goes against even a lot of the kind of women's empowerment narratives you know it's one of the things

I most appreciate about cycle awareness um because I feel like the empowerment piece is there in the first half of the cycle we're built up our ego structure is sort of built up and then in the second half after ovulation we dissolve into the plate into the soup that you and I are in right now isn't it's just so unbelievable that unbelievable that we do that every month? We build up our ego structure and our identity and we like get on the surfboard. Like, yeah, I know what I'm doing. Like I'm doing life.

I got it. And then we just get knocked off. I mean, it's wild. It really truly is. Like just being a woman is like being in a psychedelic experience all the time. Yeah. I could talk to you for years, but we have reached the top of our time. But, you know, it would be amazing if in like a year or two's time we could come back and we could hear more about how this premenstrual truth serum is,

how it's working in you. And it's been such a delight to be with you, to feel how you exist and the way you move your body and where your truth is coming from. It's just delightful to encounter. Thank you. And thank you for everything that you're doing in the world. Thank you so much. It was really, really, really fun to be here. Come back anytime. So I've got one more question. If listeners are loving you and what you're sharing, how can they find out more about you and your work and connect with you? I would honestly recommend to just go on Spotify or iTunes or Bandcamp and type in Maya Luna and you will find my poetry albums and my embodiment practices album. And I think that's a really great place. I mean, I could say all kinds of other things, books, classes, website, but I think that's always the place I like to send people first to like feel where I'm coming

from so look me up on Spotify iTunes Bandcamp or wherever you stream music beautiful thank you so much love have a beautiful rest of your day thank you bye hey thank you so much for being with us all the way through to the end if you know someone who has been channeling some of this premenstrual truth-telling serum and it's been uncomfortable and messy and challenging in their life please forward this episode to them to share some affirmation and some support and some companionship on this wild journey to embody the powers of the premenstruum of the inner autumn. If you haven't already, please follow the podcast, subscribe, and it'd be awesome if you could leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. That really helps the podcast to reach more people. And that's it for this week. I'll be

with you again next week. And until then, keep living life according to your own brilliant rhythm.