Crowned ‘the defender of female awesomeness’ by Cooler magazine, Lisa Lister is the author of Love Your Lady Landscape and Code Red. She’s a menstrual, fertility and reproductive health practitioner and founder of the SHE Flow system; a personal invite to celebrate the fiercely feminine, sensual pleasure of being a woman through movement, massage, mysteries and magic.  Lisa is dedicated to helping women crack their lady code, reconnect with their body wisdom and love their reproductive health.

Here, Lisa pens a letter to her ovaries for our #DearOvaries series.

Dear Ovaries,

So, you know that I talk about you a LOT to the women who gather in my circles, ceremonies + workshops, right?
I get them to place their hands on the space you hang out in + invite them to send big love to you through their breath.
I share with them that their ovaries are a powerhouse of creativity and that when they’re nurtured, fully charged + circulating with energy, they create SHE power, lady magic, creative juju. I share how they get to fully choose how to express that power in their body, through their body and then out into the world and that basically, when they connect with their ovaries, they connect with their ability to express themselves.
I bet you’re surprised that I’ve got big love for you, aren’t you?
I bet you’re thinking ‘how can she even consider sending us the big love after everything we’ve put her through? The pain, the trauma, the endless bleeding that made sofas, bed linen, bus seats look like a scene from the movie Carrie?’
It’s okay, I get it.
I didn’t at the time, in fact, at the time, I hated you.
I hated everything about you.

And when after years of misdiagnosis a dude in a white coat told me I had Endometriosis and PCOS and then in the next breath told me ‘obviously you won’t be able to have children so we might as well ‘whip it out’ referring to you and my reproductive health, I was tempted to let him.

Except, instead of feeling relief at finally having a name for all the pain you caused me, I was feeling a righteous anger where the pain had previously been. (I also realised thanks to the dude in the white coat’s five minute anatomy 101, at the age of 25, that my womb + my uterus were actually the same thing. Who knew? Clearly not me and this was NOT okay.)

So instead of allowing a dude with frankly no bedside manner to ‘whip it out’ I allowed the rage move me.

And it moved me to go on what’s been an 11 year exploration of my lady reproductive health.

We’ve had quite the adventure together, haven’t we?

We’ve experienced shamanic healing, earth based spirituality, breath work and body movement, ritual + ceremony, we released shame + guilt + blame that we’d been holding onto so tightly, discovered the sacred art of receiving pleasure – super grateful for THAT, we’ve learned how our menstrual cycle, the moon phases + mumma nature’s seasons are an an ever-unfolding map to reconnect us with the truth + potent power that lies between our thighs.

It’s been a wild ride.

And now, we work together. I no longer go against my flow, I go with it. I remember, reconnect + have total reverence for my SHE power because for the past 2000 years or more, the feminine reproductive health experience has been completely disregarded and this disconnect has caused an epidemic of stress emotional depletion + frustration, infertility + down there dis-ease in me and in millions of women in the western world.

The pain you caused was to wake me up. Was to shake me out of the 2000 year long ‘forgetting spell’ patriarchy has had us under + has taken me on a revelatory journey of what it is to be a woman so that I can now teach women across the globe how to navigate, explore, reclaim + love their lady reproductive health too.

So yeah, I get it.

Purchase Lisa’s new book and learn more about her work here. You can also check out an extract.

Holly Grigg-Spall is a fertility awareness and body literacy advocate and educator, a Daysy enthusiast, and excited to help more women come off the birth control pill and find a natural, effective alternative. holly.grigg-spall@valley-electronics.com