This Is My Blood
28 days of Reclaiming Your Period
Are you ready to reclaim the sacred mysteries of your cycle?
Are you ready to conjure courage and wonder from the monthly surprise you endure?
Are you ready to lead with the wisdom of the soul that runs through your blood?
Step into your holiness with me:
Through myth, science, and meditation, I will guide you into deeper relationship with your body, your play, your power, and the divine.
Two Journeys
Reclaim
28 short audios (around 5 minutes a day), one for each day of your cycle.
Your audio journey unfolds with the science of what your body is doing that day.
We alchemize your biology into symbolic wisdom.
You will encounter myths that mirror your embodied experience, and illuminate the timeless and unseen within your flesh.
Each day closes with a somatic practice to integrate this ancient wisdom into your life.
The audios drop on December 1. You do not need to start on day 1, or wait for your period. You can start on the day of your cycle you are on. Lifetime access for repeated practice.
Co-create
28 short audios (around 5 minutes a day), a Discord community, plus a ritual journey.
Collect your period blood in November.
In December, we make sacred art in community, over four Zoom rituals at four phases of the moon. All recordings are included.
Painting and writing calligraphy with my period blood is my spiritual and artistic medicine. It awakens and restores intimacy and insight.
Whether you are an anxious adult who hasn’t touched paint since childhood, an artist, or someone who has always made things but struggles to call yourself an artist, I will guide you to care for the soul through making, with no skill to prove and no one to impress.
We paint.
We meditate on the images as a circle.
We journal, and attend to our soul’s instinct to care for itself.
We smear the sap of life on paper, and pass that life to one another.
Material list will be provided upon registration
Why Blood Work
Most of us manage our periods.
We may have scrolled through the carousels with intrigue and pride at how scientifically miraculous our periods are.
For a moment, we feel awe for our bodies.
But information alone doesn’t change a relationship. So we go back to our old practice: we track it, medicate it, plan around it, get through it.
This Is My Blood is a new practice that reshapes your habitual life.
We work with our blood on purpose to build a ritual with the body that will continue revealing new meanings each time we bleed.
For centuries, only a man at an altar was allowed to pour from the cup and say this is my blood.
This winter, those holy words are yours.
Lunar Lectionary
Both journeys move through the four phases of the cycle.
The live rituals follow the moon.
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New moon in Sagittarius · December 8
The Descent of Inanna
Nüwa Mends the Sky
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First quarter moon · December 15
Demeter and Persephone
Isis and Osiris
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The winter solstice, toward the full moon in Cancer · December 21
The Song of Songs
The courtship songs of Inanna and Dumuzi
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Last quarter moon · December 29
Lilith
Medusa
The Selkie
What You Will Inherit
A deep understanding of how your body is rooted, physically, emotionally, and spiritually, and a practice of attunement with the Self and the world.
Delight. Wonder. Play.
A community that affirms the life of the soul, which so often goes unseen and unacknowledged.
Clad yourself with the old stories of blood, and pass them down and around, such that any insult to menstruating bodies sound like 1+1=5 and cannot stir you.
The ability to take out your tampon with reverence.
Authority you carry out of the circle: your desire, your rest, your no, on your body’s own calendar.
Who This Is For
Whether you bleed every month, sometimes, once did, or never have, this rite is for anyone who wants a deeper relationship with the cycle, the body, and the divine.
Reclaim (Audio Journey) is for everyone. It follows your own cycle, or the moon if you don’t bleed.
Co-Create is a blood ritual. You will work with your own menstrual blood, or, with red ochre (the oldest ritual pigment we know) if you don’t bleed, or want to remember what it was to bleed.
Choose the journey that calls to you.
If your periods bring real pain, as mine do, this rite will not romanticize it. Nothing here asks you to call pain a gift, or make it mean something. The science, the myths, the ritual keep pain company. So will we.
If your blood carries grief, for a pregnancy loss, a child not conceived, a diagnosis, years of pain, it is welcomed here. You don’t have to perform joy. A gentle note: I will speak openly about fertility, ovulation, and implantation, because they are part of the cycle’s story. You can pause any audio, step away from any moment in the circle, and return when you are ready.
If you are trans or nonbinary, this rite is yours. I think of you in my preparation for the audio and ritual journeys. Your body is holy here. I use “women” where history was and is gendered, to say it in solidarity with those the church called unclean. It is not a line around who belongs.
Your Guide
I am Connie Chen, a writer, artist, and theology witch.
I hold a Master of Divinity from Harvard, and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Iowa. I am a Master Penman, with more than 20 years of experience in Chinese and Western Calligraphy.
I am a student of my queer and disabled body.
My work lives between ancient texts and the lab.
I read scientific research on menstruation and translate it, alongside scriptures and myths, into language you can feel.
I treat incarnation as a serious practice, which is why every part of this rite moves through the body.
I want to teach people to read the scripture the church fears most, the body, and find themselves touching the holy there.
This Is My Blood brings everything I know into one place: the texts, the body, the making.
Come to play with your blood,
and root deeply in who you are, just as you are.
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Our blood work is not about complicated procedures and techniques, and individual heroics. I am interested in unplanned correspondence, and spontaneous emanation.
Do you see how this answers your question but cannot reach you? I want to hold the freedom and spontaneity of your lines and ask: what does it mean to you to be a child? why can’t you accept the play of your child? Your lines have feelings and they exist. Would you come with me and speak to them and get to know them better? I’d be honored to get to know them better.
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Reclaim is about 5-7 minutes a day, or approximately 2.5hr+ total. Co-create adds four live rituals of about 2hrs each.
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No. I will provide sources for you if you’d like to read further but you will only need your body and some curiosity.
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The making is built on art therapy principles: process over product, the image as a way to say what words can’t reach, and witnessing without judgment. It is not clinical therapy and not a substitute for care from a licensed therapist.
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A menstrual cup or disc is easiest. Pour what you collect in a small lidded container and freeze it. Start with your November period so you arrive at the first moon with blood on hand.
If you’ve never used a menstrual cup, is fearful of the concept/don’t want to, you will have the option of collecting your blood from your tampons.
This is not sponsored but this is the period cup I use after much trial and error, because the handle makes it so much easier to retrieve. If you are fearful / have wrestled with period cups without a handle to pull (just a nob), I highly recommend trying this one for your collection.
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No. Blood dries brown as it meets the air.
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No. The daily audios follow your own cycle. If you join the Co-Create ritual circle, we are following the moon.
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Co-Create members will have access to replay.
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This experience is non-refundable.
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Feel free to email me at connie@connie-chen.com