ice plunges and maybe you need to stop doing everything men do
you're making the moon want to smoke a cigarette and pinch her forehead
Being sold the idea that very regular ice plunges all throughout the monthly cycle are healthy for a woman’s body is the most ignorant dumbfuckery I have encountered in the trendy wellness world, especially when the person selling you this service doesn’t even speak to incorporating awareness of how an ice plunge might fit into the four feminine cyclical phases. So many people in the mainstream business that is ‘wellness’ often don’t even consider how freezing cold is an adversary to womb health, nor do they understand how to wisely manage the stress of an ice plunge on women’s hormonal and biological realities.
I feel that it is so important to self-lead yourself through woman-specific research about endeavours that involve freezing cold (as well as all other health trends on social media), and consider the temperatures that it’s ok for a woman’s body to do an ice plunge in. Women are not little men. It upsets me how the mainstream approach to ‘health,’ more often than not, doesn’t even factor the feminine body as a unique system that operates in a completely different frequency from that of men. It breaks my heart to live in a world where I encounter every single day how women contort themselves into male body truths and rhythms as a ‘normal’ idea of what ‘Good, Productive and Healthy’ ought to be, and shame themselves as ‘not enough’ if they cannot function like men.
The ice plunge is not the same experience for men’s and women’s bodies, in absolutely any way.
Women’s stress resilience works completely differently to men. Men benefit from certain amounts of stress in ways that women simply do not. Women may not ‘benefit’ from the stress of an ice plunge, repeatedly, exactly as men do. A woman’s life and a woman’s human experience of reality is highly influenced every single day by the presence of her womb in her body, by her hormonal and cyclical nature.
We were never taught this. We grew up and figured it out on our own, if we’re lucky. Or, we live lives riddled by feminine reproductive disorders as though it is normal. We are so lucky to now live in a time where there is an accessible, increasing return to feminine wisdom.
If someone selling you an ice plunge says that it doesn’t matter if you’re on your period or in the last few days of your luteal phase, or worse, that it will ‘help’ your period, I am even more aghast.
It’s yet another disappointing example of how deeply most of the world simply ignores women’s bodies, women’s cycles and women’s unique systems.
People who want to sell you a trendy experience are not people who will educate you on what’s good for you as a woman.
People who don’t even comprehend how intrinsically different men’s and women’s bodies are should not be relied on for health advice as a woman.
There are a whole lot of things that we were sold and pushed into doing all our lives that are wonderful but not necessarily aligned to a woman’s body in particular, especially not in a rigid, regimented context of ‘consistency.’
We were never even taught that it’s okay to show up in this world as a woman, and to participate in this world from the reality of how women’s bodies work, even though we are women every second of every day.
Our blood, our milk, our 28 day cycles, our desires, our reproductive realities, they were always exiled. Shunned. Veiled. Erased. Diluted. Censored. Not to be spoken of. They shouldn’t dare to interrupt the running of a man’s world. A world in which every ‘normal’ is based on the male body as standard template. I cannot seem to form a sentence that can do justice to the impact with which this disturbing truth needs to be delivered.
In our current world, mainstream health advice simply doesn’t include women. Women are entirely responsible for educating themselves about cycles, hormones, fertility, menstruation and womb health - and these are all highly relevant to your health, mood, energy, creativity, wellbeing and experience of reality irrespective of whether you actually intend to conceive a baby.
Everything doesn’t have to be made into a ‘If men can do it, we can too’ pissing contest, and it’s shockingly juvenile how many people I observe unconsciously bringing this mentality into the realm of our body’s health and wellbeing.
And can we even blame them? Everything about our workforce, our productivity, our ‘normal’ systems, our workweek, our survival, and the expectations that a largely ignorant world has from us is based on the false assumption that women are indeed the same as men. This kind of mentality is sadly normal.
So many women were raised in the orientation of being versus men. We give away so much of our energy, our health and our vitality playing a sad game of proving ‘equality’ with men as though it was ever to be found in sameness.
In the modern world, “equality” between men and women is wrongly taken to mean developing an inhuman, neutered, spayed, sterilized, boring, stagnant, stinking sameness between the sexes, women are encouraged to abandon their delicious womanliness and go against biology in order to become everything that men are. The ‘normal’ world glorifies masculinity and exiles femininity, for all beings, not just for men.
And you know what? In the end, nobody wins. Women, especially, lose.
Our heart, our womb, our sensual aliveness, our capacity for pleasure, our libido, our vitality, our creativity, our sexual health, our feminine intuition, our feminine spirit, our juice, our aliveness, our homes, our relationships, our marriages, our families, all of them lose, from our constantly contorting and pushing ourselves into showing up exactly like men, even competing with them on a standard based entirely on them, in systems that tend to be designed in their favour.
This is not to say that ‘all men’ are evil creatures who are ‘doing this’ to us. I am deeply uninterested in living my life in that narrative, or being pitted against men, or hating men. I think that men and the masculine bring so many gifts to our existence as women, as do we for them. It is simply to state that male body and a male energy orientation is how too many of our ‘normal’ world systems and achievement cultures were built, they are relics of another time, and they have remained unchanged. They are incongruent to the ways in which women’s lives have shifted, as well as wholly incongruent with women’s bodies, women’s cycles and women’s wellbeing.
Our ability as women to work extremely hard, and to be Superwomen who Do it All, is not always a monument to one’s ambition. Sometimes, we lose sight of what we’re doing to ourselves, and we live in constant depletion, burnout and desecration of the sacred feminine.
So far, we can only dream of a society where men and women can honour each other, need each other, depend on each other, love each other as complements to the table and enjoy each other’s unique gifts.
Women’s biological realities are completely different from men’s, and no amount of delusional ‘equality’ chest-thumping will change this.
Not enough people talk about ‘health’ that actually applies to women in particular.
This is the root of most of our modern feminine illnesses. Our acne and our constant inflammation being ‘normal,’ our mental health distortions, our anxiety, our depression, our autoimmune disorders, our hormones weeping in syndromes, our dwindling fertility, our feminine disorders.
This is the root of how horrifyingly intense experiences of PMS every month is being considered ‘normal’ by so many modern women.
The only solution any ‘authority’ cared to give us? Painkillers. The period of menstruation is an energetic and physical detox in a woman’s body, a time during which the liver, too, participates. They tell you to it’s burdens with some paracetamol, instead of addressing the deeper cause of why you have unbearable period pain in the first place.
It is so easy to overcome even extreme cases of imbalance such as PMDD by making natural shifts (as in the example of Leeor Alexandra’s journey, that she generously shares on her YouTube that I’ve linked below). Women’s health blooms by working in slow, deep, holistic, wholesome, sensual and embodied endeavours with your body, instead of medicating against it.
Ancient systems, with their beautiful focus on menstrual wisdom, have always honoured women’s cycles so much more than the modern world of Western medicine that we feverishly worship has ever bothered to. Women now get told to consume birth control pills without a care for their ramifications, and they completely fuck themselves up hormonally for the long term - mentally, emotionally, energetically, intuitively, spiritually and physically - by disrupting the natural internal seasons they were meant to journey in as a woman.
An ice plunge is a wonderful practice to explore, but not if you aren’t informed on the four phases of the menstrual cycle, and not without making a decision coming from being mindful of the health of your womb and hormonal rhythms. It needs to be approached strategically, with what intuitively feels right from a knowledgeable place of being in tune with your cyclical feminine body. At the very least, it should be explored under the advice of wise women - who study, facilitate and work in the sphere of womb health and women’s holistic healing - that can teach you a feminine perspective on caring for the womb’s cycles while incorporating ice plunges.
A cold womb, a lack of warmth and ‘heat’ in the feminine reproductive system, is the root cause of so many feminine disorders, issues and misalignments. Ancient wellness systems across the world, such as TCM, Ayurveda and Daoist practices, always knew this. It was simple, intrinsic feminine wisdom in cultures across the world.
I am sharing below three resources that will offer very interesting insights on the concepts I’ve spoken to here. These are a beautiful toe-dip. I also highly encourage investing into working with women who offer slow, deep dives into women’s wellness at all levels.
Some of the women I have worked with again and again for the past few years - in offerings, memberships, circles, workshops and courses - are Emmie Rae and Miriam Ropschitz.
Simply beginning to eat, move, rest and live cyclically, incorporating even the smallest shifts in what you consume and how you move your body during each of the four cycles, will make a sweet, beautiful difference to your life, health, wellbeing, mood and your experience of menstruation.
You will begin to notice shifts even in just one moon cycle of honouring these phases. I’ve lived this. I used to have the most violent periods ever since I started bleeding. Now, my periods are sacred, aligned and gentle. Mind-altering but never debilitating. Psychedelic, even. In the best way.
I can’t remember the last time I had extreme hormonal acne, or needed to pop a paracetamol for unbearable cramps. I know so many women, my close friends, who have had the same experience, just from eating and exercising in a cyclically-attuned way. Just from exploring research into the four cycles at their own pace, and making their own rules, their own style and their own intuitive decisions as they go.
I wish so much for a world where women’s health and women’s cycles are no longer invisible. At the very least, not to women themselves.
I am healing my PMDD and ice plunges are a big no lmao. Medication has helped me a lot in my path but you can't stay on that forever, so treating my luteal and menstrual phase as sacred and a time of deep rest regardless of cramps and mood swings was the thing that really helped me to have better periods!
Saunas and salt/spiritual baths so much better for us🌹