Building a Red Tent

• You may want to retreat during your monthly bleeding time to a quiet, meditative and peaceful place. If you have an extra room or garage space, you can turn it into a symbolic Red Tent, or you can pitch an actual tent outside. Once you have a sacred space, you can decorate it however you see fit. You may want to hang red material on the walls or cover the floors with soft crimson rugs or pillows. You can create an altar that contains Goddess figurines, red flowers, mirrors, red candles, incense or other sacred objects. If you have a group of women that you are close with, you can gather together once a month in your Red Tent space on the new or full moon.
  
  

Activities

• If you are alone or with a group of women, you can celebrate your menstruation by engaging in different activities in your sacred space. If you have drums or rattles, you can keep them in your Red Tent and create a women's drumming circle. You can use a blank notebook to write, draw or paint whatever images or ideas emerge during your menstruation. If you have a group of women gathered together, you can engage in ritual group song, dance or chant.
  
  

Rituals

• You can make your Red Tent the spiritual and physical location where young girls are initiated into womanhood. Menarche, or a young girl's first menstruation, is an important event in a young girl's life. You can honor this time by creating a menarche ritual with the girl. The girl's mother, grandmother and female relatives and close friends can all come to your sacred space for the ritual. You can find menstrual ritual ideas in Ruth Barrett's book, "Women's Rites, Women's Mysteries: Intuitive Ritual Creation."
  
  

Divination

• As you retreat to your Red Tent each month, you can use your sacred space as a vehicle to help you open your mind to the future and the unknown. Bring different divination tools to your Red Tent, such as Tarot cards or rune stones. You can use your divination tool during your bleeding time. If you have a group of women gathered with you, each woman can bring her own deck of Tarot cards. Let your Red Tent be a place to ask questions and divine the past, present or future. To inspire visionary dreams, you may want to make a dream pillow for each woman by adding a small pouch of the herb mugwort, a visioning herb, to the inside of a pillowcase.