A Thank You to the Heroines of The Red Tent on Rose Avenue (Originally published August 2012)

The Red Tent on Rose Avenue
Venice,  California    2006-2009

The red tent that I’ve been raising for women in the last seven years has served as both medic tent (in the battlefield of women vs. the female cultural “ideal”) and mystery school.  The general flow has been: women stumble to its shelter, they find and tend to the spark of authentic self, and when sufficiently healed they charge back out into the world eager to share the gift that they’ve recovered.  It is an experience that, without a doubt, is “the heroine’s journey”.

In 2005, before I knew what I was doing (in the truest sense of that saying) I had just a skeleton of a seasonally inspired curriculum and a fixer-upper studio space where I leapt into the experience of “build it and they will come”.  It took that first draft attempt to find out that what I was doing was actually playing with fire (a woman’s creative fire to be exact).  I saw this reflected back to me by the alchemy that happened under our humble tent as well as the reactions created outside of it.  We were incendiary.  We were into something powerful and taboo.  There was a naturally arising sense of mystery that both spooked and excited us.  We were finding that not only did we have the courage to speak our truths, but as Eve Ensler had reminded us at that time, we were finding the endurance to stand in it.  For two years we spoke and we stood.  And, through those two actions the vision embroidered itself into being around us.  

We found ourselves standing together under a red tent.

I remember the morning that I realized, “I now know what we are doing. We are resurrecting a menstrual hut in the middle of Los Angeles.”  I laughed out loud.  It was absurd.  It was too important.  It would cause problems in my life.  At that moment I took comfort in a story that I had once heard Eve Ensler tell at a book signing.  It was about the morning that she woke up and realized that she had to write a book.  She said that the feeling of gravity was profound, “Not only did I have to write a book, it was going to be a book about vaginas.”  Eve Ensler is one of the biggest heroines in my own life and at that moment she felt like an ally.  That was how I realized that I was on the path myself now.  I was entering the forest adventurous at my own unique point.  I told myself what I commonly told the women in my classes, “Buckle up.”

We fared pretty well in those first years.  Inside the tent women inquired, rested, tended, cried, meditated, moved, occasionally played dead, and eventually found themselves.  It was a sense of self that many had feared was lost forever and others still felt tethered to, yet watched go into hiding every time that they engaged the over-culture.  We called it “original self”, “True self”, “authentic self” and then we just started describing it in detail whenever we spotted it in our lives.  Like a muse we became enchanted by it and it inspired us.  Which was good, we needed the encouragement to deal with the reactions we were catalyzing in the outside world.  The list of offenses from those first years seems longer than it should have been and some were comical enough to treasure; the perimeter of piss left around our brick and mortar, and the half-eaten Kielbasa sausage in the mail box.  While others were dangerous enough to always remember; the monthly papering of hate literature about God’s alleged opinion of lesbians, and the stake that came through the window and landed inches from where I sat typing in the office one day.  Did they think we were vampires because we revered a woman’s bleeding?  If so, was that intended for my heart?  The reactions to our tent left me questioning just what cultural nerve (or maybe more appropriately what cultural vein) we were tapping into with our re-embrace of the female blood mysteries.  I started to foresee just what kind of trouble we would be getting into by celebrating a woman’s “wise wound” amidst a very wounded culture.

The tension was summed up best when Yogi Times Magazine headlined an article they wrote on us as, “The Red Tent, a place for troubled women.”  After the shock wore off, we were incensed.  How could they, a magazine devoted to enlightened living, perpetuate the idea that women who were embracing their bodies and its cycles were trouble(d)?  We raged a bit and after we burned enough copies of the article we finally saw the light as well as the humor.  We were all troubled women.  The headline was exactly right in that we were deeply troubled by what we saw around us and determined to gather and do it differently moving forward.  

Undoubtably, the women who were willing to come through the front flaps of our menstrual hut were ready for an adventure.  They wanted to tap the inner warrior.  They wanted their chance.  They were tired of waiting to be kissed awake.  I saw it in the skewing of class attendance towards our fall curriculum - the season we dedicated to exploring “the heroine”.  Women were ripe and ready for the fall and stepped right off the edge of comfort without a second thought.  I was awed by what I witnessed.  Women were daring the night sea journey, reclaiming their sense of authenticity, and to my greatest delight not stopping there, but rather charging back out onto dry land to try to be an agent of positive change.  Every autumn since those early years it remains my honor and fortune to play midwife to the birth of the brave one.  Again and again.

Through my calling to resurrect the red tent I’ve seen what happens to a woman and to her world when “the curse” is reclaimed into a blessing.  What I have witnessed has changed my life and will change the lives of my children.  I’ve seen women move from feeling awful to feeling awe-filled about their bodies and I tell you that the transformation is nothing short of miraculous.  They step into the most grounded power.  Divine feminine becomes a verb and they begin handcrafting a life with purpose guided from within rather than without.  In short, I’ve seen the mythic female blood mysteries at work in modern times and it is amazing.  And, probably should maintain its clandestined status, come to think of some of the things I’ve seen...

It was in exchange for raising a red tent, that I was given first hand experience of the blood mysteries.  As ridiculously mystical as it seems, the women in attendance seemed to channel the wisdom from some old place beyond my four walls and tell it through the lens of their current lives. It is from that experience I can attempt to capture the blood mysteries in essence: they are the old ways that deem a woman blessed by the very thing we’ve been mistakenly duped into thinking is her curse - that is her body’s affinity to cycle along with all of nature. 

Mythologist Joseph Campbell talks about women being the lucky ones because of this very phenomenon - he says women are fortunate because nature overtakes them.  It sounds scary and it is.  Menarche comes and so does menopause and they don’t care much what you think about them.  I’ve found it helpful to find scholars who frame that experience of no escape as a benefit.  Campbell points out that whereas men’s rites of passage traditionally came from the tribal culture, women’s have come from an inevitable embrace by nature. Women succumb and nature grows them up whether they feel ready or not.  The blood mysteries are an embrace by nature that initiates us into our personal power.  We have no a choice.  Period.  Through the onset of menarche nature begins pulling us towards maturity.  And the initiation is the true kind that leaves one saying breathlessly somewhere in its midst, “If this doesn’t kill me, it will certainly make me stronger.”  And, what most of us are able to say in the end is, it doesn’t kill you.  It does make you stronger.  You realize that you are a woman, and by nature, “she who bleeds but does not die.”  In fact, it is the other initiations, the one’s that come from the culture that in my experience prove much more fatal.  At just shy of forty years old I’ve already personally known two handfuls of women who have succumbed to disordered eating and chemical dependency.  It is my experience that the over-culture’s rites of passage are much more brutal and fatal than nature’s.  It is a wild ride, but where the mystery does leaves us with personal choice is: As initiates what do we do with the gift of such maturity and power?  How do we channel it, if we pick it up at all, or will we curse it and walk away? Will we celebrate it or dam(n) it?  Will it make us into a heroine or bring us to our knees?

In yoga, hero’s pose is done on one’s knees, often with a hand gesture that conveys deep reverence while directing one’s attention to the home of the True self.  Like other women I know, I spent much of my young womanhood on my knees.  I was subjugated.   I was praying, often begging, for things to be different.  I was tired out already at the start of life.  Patriarchy brought me to my knees at an early age.  So for me, hero’s pose as an adult woman, is a posture of standing on my own two feet.  I stand and I keep standing.  Come stakes, come kielbasa, come fear, come fatigue. That’s all I know to do, to endure, and to remember, “The hero is no braver than the average person, just braver 5 minutes longer.”

We are well past the five minute mark.  We are past 5 years.  And from where I stand under this tent, I am humbled, sometimes scared, and ever inspired by the women gathered together to do this work of celebrating the blood mysteries and living authentic lives against all the amazing odds and obstacles imbedded in patriarchy.    Every one of them is my heroine.