Why I LOVE my Menstrual Cup

I recently realised I’d forgotten about the decades of expertise and experience I have in helping you with your physical health and wellbeing!
So you will now find my weekly articles are diversifying.
Because we are made up of many bodies; Mental, Emotional, Physical, Energetic, Esoteric, focusing on only one of these bodies will never give us the joyful and whole wellbeing results we desire.
Remember this when you’re working out at the gym plenty, but over-thinking and mind reading!
So let’s kick off the articles about our Physical Bodies and allow me to rock your world by telling you why I LOVE my Menstrual Cup.

Why I LOVE my Menstrual Cup

• It’s environmentally friendly
  • Forget all that water and pesticides and petroleum required to farm the cotton that tampons and pads are made from. Go ahead and forget all that plastic they’re wrapped in too.
• It requires less intervention
  • Unless I’m experiencing really heavy flow, I can pop my Menstrual Cup in and leave it be for up to 12 hours, which not only means I can enjoy a carefree day out and about, it importantly makes for a fabulously uninterrupted sleep!
• It’s healthier for me
  • Because tampons absorb rather than holding, they put us at risk of a rare bacterial infection, Toxic Shock Syndrome (TSS). Most of them are also bleached and who wants to be absorbing that through our who-whos?!
• It feels cleaner – although it is a little messier.
  • I LOVE my Menstrual Cup because it just captures my flow until I empty it and rinse the cup under hot soapy water, fold and reinsert it. The process of emptying the cup is messier because it holds your flow, instead of absorbing it, so you can be dealing with up to 25ml of blood. But if you can manage to carry a cup of tea from the office kitchen to your desk, you’ll cope with a cup.
  • Choose to empty your cup in the shower. This is by far the easiest way.
  • The hardest way to empty and replace your cup? In a public toilet at the local footy ground. When it’s just me facing a row of cubicles without private access to a sink, I can do it. I empty my cup into the toilet, clean it with toilet paper, or a wet wipe if I’m particularly organised, and off I go.
  • Do forgive me, those of you who need accessible toilets, but that’s my preference when in public – because there’s a private sink in the cubicle for properly cleaning my cup.

Why reinvent the wheel?
Here’s what noone told me about Menstrual Cups

Up close and personal
If you’re used to using tampons, you’ll be completely fine with a Menstrual Cup.
You do need to be comfortable with reaching inside your vagina a little ways to grab the tail of the cup and then to pinch the base of the cup to release the vacuum seal it has created with the walls of your vagina.

Vacuum seal? What? 
Relax…you want a vacuum seal. That’s what holds the cup in place and prevents leakage.
Note well:
The instructions for your Menstrual Cup will tell you to ensure the cup has fully opened inside you and created this seal before getting on with your day. I have found that if the seal is not happening as quickly and easily as I would like, rather than keep poking inside myself, I just get on with getting on and the cup opens and seals naturally with the movement of my body. This is an unusual, but not unpleasant feeling.
This unusual feeling tells me the seal is good and off I go!

Your cup will discolour over time. 
Nothing crazy – we are dealing with blood right?
Any woman who’s done their own laundry knows how powerful blood is as a stain on cloth and the same goes, over time, with the latex or silicone the Menstrual Cup is made from.
As long as you are cleaning your cup with really hot water and soap before and after your period, the discolouration is just life – literally!
I chose a plain coloured cup, so maybe if you get a hot pink one your experience will be different?

My cup tells me when my flow is over.
At the end of my period, I often find my cup just won’t sit right, not high enough, leaving the end of the tail to annoy the highly innervated area at the entrance to my vagina. After giving it a few adjustments, I soon conclude that’s all she wrote. Sometimes I may require a mini tampon or panty liner at this stage, but not usually.

So go get ’em WILD WOMAN!

If you haven’t released yourself from Johnny Howard’s GST encumbered sanitary items yet, do yourself a favour. There’s lots of brands out there – probably too many to make choice easy!
I reckon Scandinavian folk have this sort of thing well sorted and are quite savvy about progressive ideas – despite the Menstrual Cup first being mooted in the 1800s! I simply chose from the Scandinavian brands. I bought mine online, but now I see Menstrual Cups in Woolies! Cool!

I am here for you and happy to answer any questions you may have, so just reach out.
And go for it!
I’ve never looked back.
And neither will you.

LOVE
Rachel x
Your Life Changing Coach
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