Chantal Blake is a native New Yorker who took a long and winding path to starting her own business. Following the examples of her Jamaican parents, Chantal has been both a nurse and engineer, but later found her voice in writing and her passion in women’s wellness.
Convicted with a purpose to better the world, she has found that the most critical determinant of a healthy future is the health of the women and wombs that birth it. It is with this intention that she founded Honored Womb and self-published her first book, Peaceful Periods: Holistic Womb Care for Teens in 2023.
Why do you think there’s such a gap in honouring the female cycle in schools and the workplace?
Cycles are a reality of nature. Our environments and ecosystems are ever-changing, alternating between times of deep rest, sowing, growing, and reaping. But the dominant economic model is capitalist, which reduces everything, living or otherwise, into a commodity that can be quantified. As such, perpetual productivity is the goal. But nothing in nature is perpetually productive and no being is more humanly productive than the women who gestate, birth, and sustain actual human beings.
All that to say, honouring female cycles is inconvenient in a masculine framework that praises static, daily routines as the measure of discipline and success. Menstruating females physiologically and psychologically change throughout their menstrual cycle as our hormone levels fluctuate, which makes our output harder to predict and control, much like nature.
Can you imagine what education and work spaces would look like if you were evaluated by what you produced in a month or a year vs a day or week? Women would be able to leverage peak creativity in their follicular phase, peak energy in their ovulatory phase, deep analysis and critique in their luteal phase, and deep rest and intuition in their menstrual phase. What we could produce with and through the entirety of our menstrual cycles would have so much more breadth, joy, and meaning than what we produce when we’re expected to ‘push through’ times of the month when we are physiologically less energetic, focused, or available.
Why do you think it’s so important to educate teens about holistic womb care from puberty leading into pre-fertility?
Firstly, many teens have difficult periods and are given birth control to manage hormonal symptoms, even if they have no need for contraception. Instead of understanding why they experience cramping, acne, heavy bleeding, etc., they are told to deal with it because it’s normal or use synthetic hormones to suppress ovulation, so you don’t have a true menstrual cycle, just routine vaginal bleeding. We are still witnessing the harms of long-term birth control use like micronutrient deficiencies, gut imbalances, fertility challenges, etc.
Secondly, fertility is vitality that we can benefit from in our lives for our own benefit, not just to reproduce. When we understand how fertility benefits our health, energy, social intelligence, communication skills, etc., we can use that to our advantage at any age. To believe our wombs only have value when we want to have a baby discredits the fact that our menstrual cycles are protective of our health by design.
Thirdly, the menstrual cycle is considered to be our fifth vital sign. If pre-teens and teens knew that their period is an indicator of health, not just a nuisance to their lives, they would see the value of tracking it, observing it, and noticing key health concerns like pain, clots, absent periods, heavy bleeding, etc. We can intervene much earlier when these evident signs of hormonal imbalance show up instead of normalising them and waiting until a diagnosable condition arises that can no longer be ignored.
There is still such a lack of research out there about menopause and mature women are just meant to put up with it. What are your views on this?
Many years ago, I read that some mothers put their daughters on birth control and antidepressants before puberty to avoid dealing with teenage hormones. I think it says alot about how ill-equipped some are to handle change, transitions, and unpredictability. Interestingly, the years leading up to menopause (perimenopause) are considered a second puberty. We can see these transitions as a problem to fix or we can see them as rites of passage to grow, prepare, and uplevel for what the following stage of life demands of us.
We have to come to terms with the fact that our bodies are not going to be perpetually fertile, our skin perpetually plump, nor our bodies perpetually firm. This is the reality of ageing, if you’re blessed to live long enough to witness it. And with ageing comes the opportunity to really distill the experiences of life and youth into the wisdom needed for eldership. Imagine if we had ceremonies and rites of passage for menopausal women, so they can be held, witnessed, and guided through this threshold.
I once interviewed a writer who described menopause as “the shifting of tectonic plates”. It is a time of reckoning and having to confront what is coming to the surface and that’s hard to process all on your own. Oftentimes, there are decades of self-neglect, people pleasing, poor lifestyle habits, unfulfillment, lack of self-care, etc. that compounds to become a really challenging menopausal experience. However, the Traditional Chinese/Asian Medicine concept of menopause as a Second Spring is inspiring and indicative that there is alchemy and growth in this sacred time.
What were some of the challenges you’ve faced with self-publishing your book “Peaceful Periods: Holistic Womb Care for Teens” and how did you overcome them?
The biggest challenge for me was how to make my book available to customers without listing on Amazon. The publishing industry has become reliant on Amazon to sell books, and I have been critical of their business ethics as a consumer for years. It felt out of integrity to make my book available on a platform that I honestly avoid at all cost.
I independently sold books from my website and a print-on-demand service for about a year and sold over 700 books. However, to make my book available to booksellers, bookstores, and libraries, my book needed to be listed by a distributor who then sells to retailers, Amazon included, unfortunately. My heart sank seeing my book listed on Amazon, but I am asking customers to request my book in their local, independent bookstores and public libraries or buy my book from bookshop.org instead.
What legacy are you looking to leave behind with the work that you’re doing?
A legacy of women who love their bodies, love their wombs, and see their periods as an ally, not an enemy, to their goals and ambitions. Girls who don’t feel shame about their periods and aren’t afraid to ask for help when they’re having a hard time. Young women who don’t have to question their fertility when they want to have children because they have been in an understanding relationship with their menstrual cycle all along. I ultimately want to see women marvel at the design of their body as a sign of God and wonder of the universe.
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