10/05/2026
“It’s just your hormones.” How often has that sentence ended a conversation that needed to begin?
A woman speaks about anger, exhaustion, pain, a change in desire. Her cycle becomes the explanation, and the life she’s living falls out of view: her relationships, the demands placed on her, her grief, her longing.
Her body has been accounted for. Has she been heard?
As I prepare to teach tomorrow, I’m also sitting with the reporting surrounding the Cornell 7, sexual violence, female rage, and institutional failure. I’ll speak more about this separately. Here, I want to hold a question it brings urgently forward: whose account of a woman’s embodied experience is allowed to carry authority?
In fifteen years of practice and my doctoral research into menstrual panic, I’ve listened to the ideological fantasies that crowd around the female body. Stories of malfunction, motherhood, purity, sacred femininity. Even promises of empowerment can prescribe who a woman should become before she has room to discover herself.
Try this: recall a menstrual or sexual experience someone else explained for you—or one you habitually explain to yourself.
Whose language does the explanation use? What does it allow you to feel? What becomes difficult to acknowledge?
Return to the experience. Notice a sensation, an image, a feeling, a memory. Give it room before deciding what it means.
What comes into view when the familiar explanation loosens?
Agency includes participating in the meaning we make of our own embodied lives.
Tomorrow, join me for Part 1 of Listening for Soul in Symptoms of Menstrual-Sexual Experience, hosted by The Healing Group Institute.
We’ll explore menstrual bias, the figures and fantasies shaping our responses to the cyclical body, and bodysoul awareness through a depth psychological lens.
For practitioners bringing this inquiry to clients, and women seeking a fuller relationship with their own menstrual-sexual experience.
Tuesday, October 6 · 4–5 p.m. Eastern · Live online
Register through the link in my bio. Part 2 follows November 3; I encourage you to join both, as the classes build on one another.
🌹Roxanne