When the Body Starts Screaming: May, Beltane, and the Female Cost of Ignored Pain
For centuries women have been taught to distrust this connection. Female discomfort has long been trivialized, romanticized, or pathologized. A woman in pain was dramatic. A woman emotionally perceptive was unstable. A woman highly sensitive to her environment was irrational. A woman whose body reacted visibly to stress was hysterical. We know the historical language well because women who listened too closely - to cycles, herbs, dreams, blood, intuition, weather, and the unseen shifts in atmosphere - were often the women pushed to the margins and called witches. Photo by Leo Gilmant
Photo by Léo Gilmant
May arrives dressed as renewal. The flowers bloom, the light changes, the earth softens, and everywhere there is an expectation that life should begin to feel lighter. Astrologically, May is a month of acceleration and emergence. We move through the embodied steadiness of Taurus - a sign deeply connected to the senses, the physical body, pleasure, appetite, and material existence - while approaching the mental quickening of Gemini. It is a seasonal threshold when what has been dormant no longer wishes to remain underground. Things surface in May. Emotionally, spiritually, and physically, this is often the month when what we have successfully buried begins to make itself known.
That is part of why May can feel strangely confronting for women.
Within pagan tradition, May also carries Beltane, the ancient fire festival historically observed at the beginning of the month to mark fertility, passion, sensuality, and the full return of life force after winter. Beltane was a celebration of vitality, but it was also a crossing point - an acknowledgment that the bright half of the year had begun and that dormant energy was once again moving. Fire rituals, purification rites, and communal observances all centered around one essential idea: life cannot remain suppressed forever. Nature pushes outward. Desire returns. The body wakes up.
Yet many women move into May not feeling invigorated, but exhausted. Instead of bloom, there is inflammation. Instead of sensuality, there is numbness. Instead of vitality, there is adrenal fatigue, anxiety, sleeplessness, unexplained tears, panic, weight retention, chronic pain, or the deep and unnerving sensation that something internally is no longer cooperating.
This is not incidental.
On the three-dimensional plane, May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and this week specifically is National Women’s Health Week, a national observance intended to remind women to schedule the appointments, screenings, and checkups they routinely postpone. But these observances, while practical, point to something much larger than annual medical housekeeping. They reveal a long-standing truth about female conditioning: women have been trained, historically and culturally, to delay attention to their own suffering until suffering becomes impossible to manage.
Women are expected to continue functioning while uncomfortable. We are taught to normalize fatigue, to dismiss hormonal shifts, to explain away anxiety, to minimize pain, to work through burnout, and to place the body’s complaints somewhere behind the needs of children, spouses, work, money, caregiving, logistics, and emotional labor. By the time many women seek help, the body is no longer signaling politely. It is interrupting.
This is when the body starts screaming.
Sometimes that scream is medical: autoimmune flare, nervous system dysregulation, chronic migraines, gut dysfunction, hormonal collapse, unexplained inflammation, fertility struggles, or the kind of exhaustion that no amount of sleep seems capable of repairing. Sometimes the scream is psychological: panic attacks, rage, depression, emotional detachment, brain fog, or an inability to tolerate one more demand. More often than not, it is both. The body and the mind are not separate enough to suffer independently, no matter how modern medicine prefers to categorize them.
For centuries women have been taught to distrust this connection. Female discomfort has long been trivialized, romanticized, or pathologized. A woman in pain was dramatic. A woman emotionally perceptive was unstable. A woman highly sensitive to her environment was irrational. A woman whose body reacted visibly to stress was hysterical. We know the historical language well because women who listened too closely - to cycles, herbs, dreams, blood, intuition, weather, and the unseen shifts in atmosphere - were often the women pushed to the margins and called witches.
This is where the spiritual thread becomes impossible to ignore.
The witch archetype was never simply about occult aesthetics or ritual for ritual’s sake. At its oldest root, it was often the woman who understood that the body is not separate from intuition. She knew that symptoms arrive before collapse. She knew that grief lodges somewhere. She knew that anxiety changes breathing, that trauma changes digestion, that resentment changes hormones, that silence changes the nervous system, and that environments can make a body ill long before a physician can name why. Traditional women knew how to read the body symbolically and practically at once. The body was not just anatomy. It was messenger, warning system, weather vane, and archive.
Modern women, by contrast, are rewarded for severing that communication.
We are praised when we remain productive despite depletion. We are admired when we sacrifice sleep, appetite, boundaries, and emotional stability for everyone around us. We are considered strong when our suffering remains invisible. We wear overextension as discipline and dissociation as competence. Then we act surprised when the body eventually revolts.
But the body does revolt. It always does.
That is why May feels so symbolically appropriate for this conversation. Beltane asks us to look at life force. Mental Health Awareness Month asks us to look at what has been mentally buried. National Women’s Health Week asks us to look at what has been physically postponed. All three point to the same uncomfortable reality: women are often the last to grant themselves permission to investigate their own pain.
And pain, ignored long enough, does not disappear. It changes form.
It becomes insomnia. It becomes hormonal chaos. It becomes clenched jaws, inflamed guts, racing thoughts, sudden tears, sexual numbness, skin eruptions, migraines, shallow breathing, and a nervous system that never truly powers down. The body will continue translating what the conscious mind refuses to process until translation becomes disruption.
This is why so many women feel “off” in spring without understanding why. Spring is not only a season of blossoms. It is a season of emergence. The same earth that forces seeds upward also has a way of forcing buried truths to the surface. What winter allowed us to numb, spring often makes visible.
There is something deeply spiritual in recognizing that the scream is not the body betraying us. It is the body refusing to lie any longer.
Women have spent centuries being taught to ignore what is inside of us - instinct, intuition, fatigue, sadness, pain, resentment, and warning signs alike. We have been told to smile through it, organize through it, mother through it, work through it, and remain desirable through it. But there comes a point when the body stops negotiating with performance.
It raises its voice.
And perhaps that voice, however inconvenient, is not punishment.
Perhaps it is the first honest thing we have heard in years.
Real Life Integration: The Everyday Witch
There is a truth many of us avoid saying out loud.
We are all witches in one way or another.
Some of us live fully in the craft with candles, herbs, sigils, covens, moon charts, and altar rooms that look like museums of inherited magic. Some of us are wild witches who practice in the quiet and the unseen. And many of us fall somewhere along that spectrum, moving back and forth depending on the season of our lives.
Written by Epifania Arriagada Photo by Emily Underworld
