where is your inner maiden?

When you put your hands on your womb and connect to the person you were as a teenager or young adult, who do you find?

How did the experience of your first bleed impact your life? Were you welcomed across the threshold into womanhood by a circle of grandmothers?

What about your first sexual experiences? Did you grow up in a sex-positive culture, guided by the adults around you in a way that was sensitive and honouring?

Or was there silence…or shame….or fear...or uncertainty.

Did you grow up allowing your boundaries to be crossed again and again because you had no idea what they even were, let alone how to hold them?

Were you taught by the over-culture that to be a woman who enjoyed sex was to be a slut, or that nice girls didn’t, or that if you didn’t have sex you were frigid?

Were you presented with a model of marriage with a man, and happily ever after with no space for your own unique sexuality to blossom and a feeling that something must be horribly wrong with you?

Were you told to be quiet, not to get angry, to never say no, to always placate, to be kind, to put other people first?

Did you rebel and do all the things you weren’t meant to – have sex and take drugs, with little regard for your own safety, just to say FUCK YOU to everyone who tried to control you?

Were you confused or embarrassed or disgusted or annoyed with your inconvenient at best or excruciatingly painful at worst, menstrual cycle?

Did you have a feeling that you were too much, whilst also carrying a sense that you can never be enough?