Amber Adrian hosts a Cycle Show.
By Wendy Royston
“I can only protect what I value and respect.”
Those are the guiding words of the Cycle Show, a “total reframe of not just the period, but of what a woman’s body is created for and how amazing that is,” explained Amber Adrian, a member of Mitchell’s Holy Spirit Parish and one of just seven certified Cycle Show instructors nationwide.
Amber became intrigued by The Guiding Star Project’s work after a friend gifted her a copy of founder Leah Jacobson’s book, “Wholistic Feminism.” She researched the organization that brought the German-based Cycle Show to the United States as an early entry point for their pro-life, life-affirming, holistic care model for women throughout their life cycle. She knew the moment she first encountered the Cycle Show that it would hold an important place in her future.
“These topics around women’s health and wanting to make sure mothers have what they need is kind of my brand of feminism,” Amber, a former middle school teacher, said. “I thought, I can do this incredible work of helping girls learn about their bodies and their fertility, and not be embarrassed or ashamed but actually excited about it all. And do that while I’m mostly home caring for my own three daughters.”
“The Cycle Show is kind of their first offering,” Amber said of the body literacy program for girls ages 9-12. She described The Guiding Star Project as “an amazing pro-life network of holistic women’s health centers” offering fertility awareness, natural family planning, pregnancy care, birth support, postpartum support, breastfeeding and menopause services across the country. She said the selected age group is very intentional.
“The girls just eat it up, because, at this age, they haven’t been too jaded about this stuff,” Amber said. “They don’t have these negative feelings of shame or embarrassment yet. … They’re still curious and open-hearted, and we can still instill this sense of wonder and awe about being female.”
Amber, who said her own pre-pubescent education was so unremarkable that she cannot recall it, but that the menstrual cycle was portrayed by older women in her life as a burden or nuisance, said she’s been overjoyed by her students’ post-course surveys after providing three workshops.
“One of them wrote, ‘Without my period, I wouldn’t be able to have a baby,’” she shared. “Just making that connection that your period isn’t something to be embarrassed by; it’s a sign of your body’s richness and wealth and intelligence and its amazing ability to create new life.”
The hands-on, five-hour program aims to help girls overcome the stigma and fear that often can accompany entry into womanhood in a very unique way.
“It’s experiential, and it tugs at the girls’ emotions, so that they feel connected with what’s happening in their bodies. They aren’t just presented with a bunch of information that they’re probably not going to remember,” Amber explained. “It is completely different” than the hour-long, fact-filled presentation school nurses offer in academic settings. “The Cycle Show is very fact-filled—we tell them the names of everything—and combine that with story and symbolism and things that help them not just understand but really connect.”
To break the ice, Amber incorporates a well-known character from mainstream popular culture.
“It’s been either Taylor Swift or Anne Wilson so far,” Amber said. “I ask them, ‘What if you got a call that Swift was coming to visit? Would you do anything special?’ Yes, of course! You would make all kinds of preparations,” she continues, explaining that Swift represents a potential new life coming to “visit” the girl, so her body needs to make preparations to provide conditions that are welcoming and supportive of an unborn baby.
Unlike secular puberty talks, the Cycle Show is a full-spectrum look at a woman’s reproductive cycle.
“A lot of people, when they think about your ‘cycle,’ they think about your period, but they’re not the same thing,” Amber explained “It’s a lot about the hormones. We talk about what happens the entire month, from follicle-stimulating hormone in the brain waking up eggs in the ovaries, to estrogen increasing and all that does, to progesterone coming later in the cycle. We explain ovulation and cervical mucus. It’s really comprehensive education that honestly most grown women could benefit from.”
As the entry-level program of the Guiding Star Project, the Cycle Show lays a foundation that Amber believes could revolutionize the way women look at their reproductive health, from puberty through menopause, seeing their fertile female bodies as a gift to be cherished—a viewpoint that, in much of the industrialized world, is countercultural.
“We need to more routinely offer medical care to women that doesn’t view their body as a problem to solve,” Amber said. Hormonal contraception and medical intervention “are mostly what our medical system knows, but the body is just amazing if you work with it,” using tools like natural family planning and Natural Procreative (NaPro) Technology. “We have to educate the young people, so they don’t grow up like me and not know that a woman can only get pregnant a few days a month. I didn’t know that until I was like 30 years old. I literally learned about my own body when we were trying to have kids. We can’t let another generation of women experience this.”
The Cycle Show’s pro-life, life-affirming stance lays the groundwork for girls to choose pro-life fertility management when the time comes. While contraception is not covered during the Cycle Show curriculum, Amber said it sometimes comes up from the girls’ questions, because the majority of women and physicians believe it is the best solution for managing fertility and hormone-related issues.
“If questions are brought up, we do address them and tell the girls that that actually disrupts this incredible cycle of your body and tries to artificially control it, often with negative side effects,” she said. “We have that conversation, but then we also share that with the parents.”
Amber said she hopes educating young women before their first menstrual cycle will play a role in changing the narrative for women’s health in the future, empowering them to take approaches to managing their health that will preserve and protect their fertility.
“When we think of protection, we often think of contraception, that we should protect ourselves from our ‘dangerous’ fertility,” Amber said. “But it’s not that we need to protect ourselves from our fertility, but rather that we need to protect our fertility. We’re presenting fertility and pregnancy as something beautiful and worthy of protection. It’s not protection from, but protection of fertility.”
“The hope is that girls will advocate for themselves and mothers will advocate for their girls when they go to the doctor,” she said, adding that Cycle Show instructors direct them to life-affirming caregivers, including NaPro physicians.
The curriculum is enhanced by a 90-minute pre-event meeting for parents to get a taste of what their girls will learn during the workshop.
“That session is designed to both put parents’ minds at ease about what their girls will learn and empower them to have fruitful conversations with them going forward,” Amber explained.
As one of just seven Cycle Show instructors nationwide, Amber admitted that leading a mission to change the way the world views fertility can be a bit daunting, but she tries to keep it in focus by remembering that, just like Christianity, it takes just one changed heart and mind to affect the change.
“Any girl who learns to respect and care for her body better will hopefully share it with future daughters, daughters-in-law, friends, etc., and create a ripple effect,” Amber said.
And the Cycle Show is starting to have a ripple effect right here in the Sioux Falls Diocese. Meghan Krueger, a Natural Family Planning instructor from Sioux Falls, recently finished her training with four others across the country and will enter into a one-year internship to join Amber in spreading the message of the Cycle Show with young girls throughout the region.
“How awesome is it that we will have two of potentially 12 instructors in the U.S. right here in the diocese?” Amber said.
To learn more about the Cycle Show, visit guidingstarproject.com/cycle%20show.
Wendy Royston is a freelance writer and parishioner at Sacred Heart Parish in Parkston. She is married and has five daughters. She earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism/mass communication and sociology from South Dakota State. She owns Creative Content Solutions.
