Today, I Bleed.
This means I’m starting back at the beginning of the Lunar Magic Wheel, in the Northeast with the Dark Moon, entering the Seeress phase of The East Corner.
Before I started cycle tracking with the Wheel, I had a varied history of feelings around my “first day.” For many of my adult years it was an awaited time of relief that meant I wasn’t unexpectedly pregnant. As a girl, it could mean a week or so of bedrest and missed school.
Now when I see my Blood come, I am full of all the joy an artist feels when she opens up a brand new box of paints! Now I am friends with my Blood and I know she is magic!
So I’ve spent the last few days, my Inner Balsamic Moon phase, listening within. This is a time of deep sight into the underworld just before our Dark Moon arrives, and because it is the deepest point of intuition in our cycle, the Balsamic Moon is an ideal time to receive our intention for the next go ’round.
The Balsamic Moon helps us not to *decide our intention, but to *divine our intention, so that we are choosing and directing our focus each cycle on an intention that is rooted in our deeper knowing place, rather than all the passing desires we may have as we move through our days.
So I’ve taken this time and I’ve divined an intention, and now that I am bleeding, I will use the 3C’s of Moon Blood Collection to prepare my harvest for this cycle’s spell. (Watch out for Part 3 of Traveling the Lunar Magic Wheel to learn about the 3Cs for safe, hygienic Moon Blood collection and storage practices.)
While all that is going on – collecting and storing and such, I will use the last of my previous harvest for some delicious cleansing and beautifying rituals, assisting alongside my uterus as she’s busy purging and releasing my body from within.
I like to take this time to make a Moon Blood clay mask for a nice deep pore cleanse and skin rejuvenator. I also like to whip up a sizzling detox for my locs, give them a good trim, get my eyebrows done, and pamper my cells with lotions and creams infused with my Moon Blood’s stem cell magic! (Subscribe to Lunar Living on Patreon to get the scoop on MoonTime beautifying recipes.)
I also take this time to listen to my “body report.” During our Bleeding Times, how we feel is our body reporting out to us about our health. If we’re experiencing intense cramping, headaches, lethargy, or other symptoms, this is a good time to take a look at our diet and see if it is supporting us through our Bleeding Time and throughout our entire cycle. Because of the denaturing of our food in developed countries, it is more common than not for women to experience hormonal imbalances that express during our Bleeding Times unless we are consciously choosing foods and supplements to support our feminine cycle. (Check out Part 1 of Traveling the Lunar Magic Wheel Series to find out the best foods to eat during your Bleeding Time – Patrons download free!)
Now about that MoonTime lethargy…. It’s normal to want to be more still, less mobile during our Bleeding Time. Curiously though, this is a Yang moon, a time of action and doing, rather than being and discerning. That said, we experience our Yin and Yang states on a spectrum of relativity, and energetically speaking, this is our “lullest” Yang, and it may not feel very Yang at all.
However, if you listen to your body, you may find that you do like “taking action” in ways like nesting, grooming, clearing your sacred spaces, or even some lowkey physical activities, like taking an easy walk on a fall day. 
That is why I love this time for all the nesty self-caring, beautifying things. As the Corner of the child self, this is a great time to focus on your personal care and maintenance. It is okay to go a bit underground during your Bleeding Time – in fact, once upon a time, the entire village went “underground” with us while we were all flowing with the feminine cycle as the anchor of our concept of time and experience on this planet with one another. And each cycle began here, in the Dark of the New Moon.
