Dancing With Goddesses Through The Menstrual Cycle — with Agnieszka Drabek-Prime

Agnieszka Drabek-Prime weaves the cyclical wisdom of goddess archetypes into a rich map for navigating life’s transitions — from menstruation to motherhood, through perimenopause and beyond. 

Her new book, Dancing With Goddesses: An Archetypal Journey Through The Menstrual Cycle, offers women a way to embrace their natural rhythms and seasons with reverence.

The book arrived in a single, luminous moment of inspiration while Agnieszka was camping — a fully-formed vision blending her work as a doula, womb medicine woman, and celebrant with deep archetypal goddess wisdom.

In our conversation, we explore:
• How goddess archetypes can act as mirrors for women’s lived experiences
• A five-season approach to understanding the menstrual cycle
• Why each woman’s cycle has its own unique nature and rhythm
• How life transitions can be fertile ground for growth and transformation
• The wisdom encoded in women’s bodies and experiences
• Agnieszka’s personal perimenopause journey
• The healing power of being heard without judgment

You can find Agnieszka at primetherapy.co.uk on Instagram and Substack, and her book is available at all good bookshops and Amazon.

Chapters

• 0:00 Meeting Agnieszka Drabbek-Prime
• 3:36 The Birth of a Book
• 6:56 Working with Goddess Archetypes
• 13:45 Embracing Cyclical Living
• 21:01 The Wisdom of Transitions
• 27:48 Sharing Perimenopause Experiences
• 29:27 Closing and Contact Details

Transcript

Melanie: 0:26

Hey, hey, hey. Welcome to the podcast everyone. Today I am talking to the lovely Agnieszka Drabek-Prime.

Melanie: 0:56

So, Agnieszka, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me here. So I first met Agnieszka seven, eight years ago. You came to do the Wound Medicine Woman training, and can you just give?

Melanie: 1:14

us a brief summary of what you're doing now in your work.

Agnieszka: 1:15

So I do many things.

Melanie: 1:17

Many, many, many

Agnieszka: 1:17

. I am a doula.

Agnieszka: 1:19

Many, many, many. Yes, I am. Well, I'm working mainly with women during the transition period. So I work as a doula, I work as a celebrant. I mean a celebrant in the way that I do celebrations and rituals and ceremonies and, yes, I see clients, I do workshops and an interesting thing that I just thought about is that on this beautiful womb medicine woman workshop that we've met on, I also met lovely Jamie and Isha that I'm still. You know, they are my womb sisters and actually they shared their practices in my book.

Melanie: 1:59

I saw that, yeah. So yeah, yeah, fab, and it's. I mean, I know you said you do workshops and rituals and stuff, but it's all around like transitions and the womb for women.

Agnieszka: 2:10

Yes, transitions, womb women and what we're going through and who we are and who we are becoming.

Melanie: 2:17

Fantastic, fantastic work, and you're based in Cambridge in the UK.

Agnieszka: 2:21

Yes, I am Okay.

Melanie: 2:23

And I think you're one of those unique people that do not work online at all. It's just in person, isn't it?

Agnieszka: 2:30

No, no. This is something that I am trying to open myself to, so yeah, I'm spreading and opening and coming out of my comfort zone.

Melanie: 2:42

Okay, fair enough, but it sounds like your work is mainly in Cambridge and you're in the country. Yes, okay, good, it's good to give a bit of context, and so people know where you are as well. Yes, okay, good, it's good to give a bit of context, and so people know where you are as well. So could you tell us how this book first came to you? Was it an idea or a spark, or is it something you've been crafting for years, like mine, in the background, every single day? But, yeah, do tell us.

Agnieszka: 3:08

Well, it's always, you know, something that you kind of craft for a very long time, in a way that I leave the cyclicity and I embodied it within myself first, but the idea of the book itself came to me in its wholeness, just all at once.

Melanie: 3:26

What? Can someone put a word in for me? Please Do carry on. Yes, tell me.

Agnieszka: 3:32

Yes, I got up, you know, I was just going to bed when the idea I just it feels to me and I really think it's like the idea was the book, the spirit of the book was just floating in the air by me and I managed to open myself and I caught it just in time and I channeled it. So I just said to my husband I sat in bed and I put the light on and I said that's it. I'm going to write a book. Be quiet, I have to write it all down. So I grabbed a piece of paper and I just wrote the title, the chapters. I just had like a clear idea of what it's going to be, where it's going. I had an idea why I want to do it. Just like everything, everything came in this one perfect moment and of course you know that was one perfect moment. But after that there were months of work and channeling and putting it onto paper and typing it.

Melanie: 4:23

Yes, it does. Yes, wonderful, I'm genuinely pleased for you. And also sitting here like, oh my God, it just doesn't always come like that does.

Agnieszka: 4:35

It didn't know when it's going to go. I kind of started and it was the flow and from one chapter to the next I really didn't know what next chapter is going to be, and when I finished the chapter I was writing it, just the next one just naturally came in. So it's a different process and I think creative process is something really amazing and it's very, very individual to every single one of us and absolutely we just need to open ourselves to it and embrace it and see where it will lead us and it will you know what it will teach us and what gifts it has in store for us yeah, I completely get it.

Melanie: 5:23

Some things I get like, oh yes, done, and I've got the title and the structure and I can feel it and it's there and it takes me two days to put on my website or something. Then other things are like a sniff, a little whisper, a cultivation, something that comes and then goes again. It's very personal and it's very unique to each sort of creative project in it as well.

Agnieszka: 5:49

Yes, it is.

Melanie: 5:50

But that's what's lovely, that's what's juicy and alive about it, so you look like you enjoy it anyway. I do?

Agnieszka: 5:58

I do love writing. This is how I understand the world. This is how I can translate everything that is happening on the outside into my within, how I can perceive it and process it and learn from it.

Melanie: 6:12

Yeah, lovely, okay. So I know you've obviously done lots of womb work, lots of cycle work. You're a doula, you work with women a lot. So I'm curious how did the goddess energy or how did you weave the goddesses in and why really how?

Agnieszka: 6:30

did you weave the goddesses in and why really? So I've been always working with the archetypes because I find archetypes very helpful for me personally in understanding those ideas that have been passed to us from a very, very long time ago, from our ancestors, and they are still active and alive in our field, in our subconscious, and there's something that we can tap into and understand very quickly what is being said, what is happening. It's just like when somebody will say mother, we bring the meaning of this word and of course it will be different for me and you, because we had different mothers and we understand motherhood in a different way, but the essence will be very, very similar, or it will begin in the similar place, but it will take us on a slightly different adventure, and I believe in the embodied work. So everything that I teach or write about is something that I embodied first. So when I was working on my cyclicity and I was trying to find my way around it, I started to reach into the goddesses, and I do work with goddesses in the archetypal way, but also they are divinities, so they are some powers that we can call on and the power of great feminine. This is the great power that I'm working with and believe in deeply.

Agnieszka: 8:15

The goddesses are really the mirror of mother-woman, and whatever is happening to us right now already happened to them in the past, and be it 500 years ago or 1,000 years ago, you know, women went through birth, they went through death, they went through monarchy, they were raped, they were sold, they went through everything and really we're going through that as well, and I found that, relating to the goddess and to what happened to them and how they dealt with it is teaching me and helping me how I can go through the processes in my life right now, especially that sometimes, when we are stuck in the situation, in something that is traumatic or scary or unknown, and when we're stuck in that place, we cannot see the way out and we cannot see, first of all, how it can pass, and sometimes we cannot see if we have tools within us to help ourselves with it.

Agnieszka: 9:14

And I think this is another lesson that goddesses are teaching us, because they went through it already. They did something to help themselves, they embraced something or they had tools that they used to help themselves through it, and we can call on those tools right now and help ourselves. And you know the great lesson of the menstrual cycle and on cyclicity in general that is I gained is that nothing is forever, everything is in constant flow and everything is in constant change, and this is the lesson of my cycle and the lesson of goddesses that everything passes, be it good or bad, everything will pass, and just knowing that sometimes can help us through difficult situations and traumas and, yeah, the situations that we're stuck in and think that it will never end.

Melanie: 10:14

Yes, which is how it feels at the moment in perimenopause. It's not necessarily a traumatic situation, but these goddesses have already been through it and they can show us the way a little bit, because it's as you say, it's hard to see the end. We're both completely in it right now and it's yeah, it's a thing.

Agnieszka: 10:35

It is indeed, and they really have the tools and they have so much to teach us and we can approach them from many, many perspectives. And I'm not saying that we have to straight ahead believe in them, you know, and worship them. It's not about that. It's about seeing the women in them and the mirror reflection of our womanhood as well.

Melanie: 10:57

It doesn't feel subservient or giving our power to them. It's like, hey, how did you do this? How did you go through it? How did you cope? What was the other side for you? And, yeah, it's good to have role models, because we don't have many positive role models.

Agnieszka: 11:18

No, this is very true, and it's such a shame because, you see, I deeply believe when women come together they really can learn so much, and when we come together we really stand strongly in our power. And I think in today's world there's such strong sisterhood wound and we are in constant competition with one another, why it's very difficult for me to understand, because there is so much we could do if we just come together and put our resources together, put our strength together and create something beautiful.

Melanie: 11:57

Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think if we all just downed tools to be honest and just said no more fuckery, things would change. But we don't, we don't, some of us do, some of us don't. But that's the planet we live on. I was also curious about you've structured the book in a certain way. So I'm just reading through the contents here and it starts in the menstrual cycle phase not the menstrual cycle phase, oh my head, the bleeding phase of the menstrual cycle. And then it goes to maiden let's have a look. Journey from lover to mother and enchantress and shapeshifter. So yeah, I'm just curious why you structured it that way and how it felt to write it that way. Or did you kind of jump around or did you write it in a kind of cyclical order?

Agnieszka: 12:54

I did write it in a cyclical order because this is a very important order for me. You see, in our life today, in our modern society, we kind of believe that everything is linear and we have to run, sometimes like a headless chickens, and just gather the goals and then when we get to the goal that there's another, you know line that we have to quickly follow to get to another goal, to get followers and likes, and well, I don't know, just fill in the blank whatever. But this is not really the way that we have been created to live. We are cyclical beings and I cannot be productive 24-7, whole year round.

Melanie: 13:35

Really what's going on?

Agnieszka: 13:39

I'm not agreeing to it, you know.

Melanie: 13:41

You said no. You said no, you've unsubscribed.

Agnieszka: 13:43

Good, exactly, I am productive when I'm productive, and that's it. And then I can do a lot, but there's time when I just want to retreat, when I want to go within and I want to be just by myself in my cave and, you know, brew my wisdom and that's it. And everything in our life is cyclical. You know, men and women, we both are. It's not that it's just a women's thing. What's happened with women is that we have this physical menstrual cycle that helps us understand and see our cyclicity. And this is why I wanted to start the book in the void, so in this dark place, which is both the end and the beginning, which can be a contraction and expansion. This is the place where everything begins, and we have many voids in our lives. It's not only menstruation, but I believe this is the place where we always begin from. And then the book follows the cycle of growth, of peak, and then of winding down back into this void, into this darkness, into this end that is, at the same time, a beginning. So we can begin a new cycle, and each cycle will be different, but each cycle can have this archetypal guide that can help us through it, and we have so many cycles in our life. You know this menstrual cycle. We have a moon cycle and the sun cycle, we have our life cycle and it all creates this beautiful medicine world that we are living because this is our living map, that we are living because this is our living map and we're following that map and often we're just kind of lost because we don't know what's going on, we don't listen to our bodies, we just want to push, push, push for whatever cost, and we're paying a really big price for it, I believe.

Agnieszka: 15:41

So cyclical living is very important for me and that's why I wanted this book to be like a little cycle that can begin again. You know, when you finish reading this book, you can start it all over again and see what new you know lessons you'll pick up, what new archetypes you can work with, what new practices you'd like to discover, what archetypes you can work with, what new practices you'd like to discover. Because every single cycle is different, in a way that I feel different in my void when we are in the winter and I feel different in my void when we're in the summer. I felt different in my void or ovulation when I was 20 and I feel so much different now. Oh yes, so we are changing and we're growing and our cycles are changing, and that was so different when I had my baby and when I became a mother. You know, for me that was such an eye-opener and I could really understand my mom, what was happening to her when she was becoming a mother. So we're kind of learning all the time lovely that.

Melanie: 16:52

Yeah, I was kind of lost in the cycle. They're not lost, but just entranced by it and following it. I could feel the energy of it if you, as you were talking about it. It's got a certain rhythm to it but it's an individual.

Agnieszka: 17:06

Each of us have an individual rhythm that we should follow.

Melanie: 17:09

Yeah, yeah, I think that's a really good point. Actually, there is a lot of cycle work. Well, there's more and more cycle work in the world, and what I've noticed anyway and I wanted to hear your experience because of your work with women is there's a kind of map for the cycle of these four seasons, and I don't particularly follow it, but it's. We need to tune into our bodies, but what I'm seeing anyway is women trying to match their cycle and this four season thing becoming an ideal, another thing to sort of beat ourselves with a stick with and try and do so. I just wondered if you'd seen that too.

Agnieszka: 17:52

I have and, to be perfectly honest, it just drives me absolutely mad because Completely up the wall. Yes, I talk about five cycles and five seasons in my book, but in Polish language, we have this little season that is between winter and spring, and there's no equivalent in English. We call it przedwiośnie, but this is the time, you know, when winter has finished and spring hasn't begun yet. It's this tiny little thing and we have so many seasons within us and when I hear, oh, throughout the ages, women always bled at dark moon and you know, and always ovulated at the full moon, I'm just like no, they bled when they bled and they ovulated where they ovulated, and that's just it.

Agnieszka: 18:43

I don't like ovulating in the full moon. I find this is just too much. I love ovulating when the moon is dark and I love bleed when the moon is full. It's just the energies of the outside really help, the energies of what's happening within me, and I think this is so important to. Okay, you can acknowledge. Okay, we can talk about seasons, we can talk about the energies of the cycle and take the archetypes of the cycle, but look within. How is your cycle? How does it look like? Do you have four seasons or do you have eight seasons, because sometimes in the cycle I have eight seasons, absolutely.

Agnieszka: 19:23

Eight seasons and I just go through them and some of them don't even have a name because they're just so unexpected and weird and maybe last for an hour or two or two days, but they are there and if you're curious to notice what is happening within your body, then you can learn so much and you can embody all the changes that are happening and it helps you not only grow. You can embody all the changes that are happening and it helps you not only grow, but it helps you generally in your life.

Melanie: 19:52

Wonderful. It brings me on to my last question actually is. When I first got your book, which you kindly posted to me in Thailand, I was looking through the contents and what I was drawn to straight away is chapter four, the wisdom of transitions. And thank you so much for putting that in, because they're so potent and so skimmed over and we don't know they're there a lot of the time, unless we're going slow enough or we're looking or we've read it in a book, say, and we're like, yeah, I didn't even know about that. So you're all about transitions. You are, agnieszka, transitions drive by, and I see you've included in your book like potions for transitions and essential oils for transitions, and I haven't read this bit but I'm looking forward to reading it. But can you talk about the potency or the potential of transitions and how you've experienced them?

Agnieszka: 20:53

Of course. So actually, the first time when I heard about transitions within the menstrual cycle was on your workshop, and for me that was such an eye-opener because I've never really before understood how important they are. The transitions are just really the quintessence of and the magic. This is the place where magic happens, when we're going from one place to the other and we're not the person that we've just been, but we're not the new that is coming. We're in between, but we're not the new that is coming. We're in between and you know, as women, I think we are living very, very often in those in-between places and we are walking the liminal throughout our life and we don't want to acknowledge it because sometimes it's scary and sometimes it's an unknown and it's mysterious and sometimes dangerous and hard. You know, transitions are not walking the park. They are a hard piece of cake to you know, bite onto. But if you are curious and if you listen to your body, I think transitions are the places where most of the learning and most of discovery happens and the biggest growth and the biggest change. And we're talking about transitions, you know, as transitions in life and transitions in our menstrual cycle, just as women, you know, we have so many transitions. Just look at the menarche, for example. This is a huge transition when a girl becomes a woman, and yet in our culture today it's not acknowledged at all at all. So how come we can celebrate our menstruality, how come we can celebrate all the other phases in our life when we cannot acknowledge the first one, the one when it all began, when that girl who was just a child stopped being a child and become a woman, and the same, you know, with transition to become a mother.

Agnieszka: 22:59

In our society, you know, we kind of have this idea of this perfect mother. You know you give birth to your child and you love them straight ahead. You know what to do because it all comes naturally to you. It's not true, it didn't come naturally to me at all. It was a bloody hard work and it took me a while to even start loving my son, because that was this just like strange little thing that came out of me and I didn't know what to do. I wasn't prepared for it.

Agnieszka: 23:30

And you know we have so many transitions like that in our life and we try to kind of put them under the carpet and not talk about it and just hush it, because you know everybody else is doing it and we don't learn anything from it because we are pretending, we're just putting plasters on and thinking, yeah, it's okay, you know it will be better or not, and you know this is also, you know, when you work with the archetype and I'm kind of like thinking about this mother archetype, where you have this good mother but you also have a terrible mother and we have those archetypes within us and we have them all the time and you see, working in transition time can bring all of that wisdom that is within us forth and can help us, because I can connect to the archetype of the mother within me and when I'm struggling with something that was triggered, for example, from my childhood, I can mother myself to help myself through it.

Agnieszka: 24:33

What is more, although I'm not a grandmother yet, I have the archetype of the grandmother within me already and I can connect to that archetype and I can ask her to come and hold mother and this inner child within me to help me through very difficult places in my life and help me through every single transition. And that wisdom is within us, it's embodied in our DNA, it's embodied in our tissues, it's in our blood, it's there, ready for the taking. We just have to open ourselves and connect to it, and, of course, we don't have to do it alone. This is why it's so important to have you know the relationships with other women that can help you. This is you know why I give the potions for transitions that you can call the plant allies and you can ask them to help you through this difficult time. You can relax your nervous system and reset it so your body can actually cope with what is happening, and that's why I think it's so important.

Melanie: 25:38

Fantastic. Thank you for sharing that. Thank you for putting it in the book. It's really important. Oh, we made it. We did the whole podcast on the front of the tent. Oh my gosh, the storm is still going so strong outside as well, but we did it, and thank you so much for being so generous.

Agnieszka: 25:59

If I may just say so, it is such a beautiful illustration. You know, we are in perimenopause. We're kind of getting to that like stormy season, you know and the storm is out there, everything is breaking, everything is like working against us.

Agnieszka: 26:25

You know, in the quotation marks we are end of this podcast and we went through it. We could have that conversation. But you see, also in between we've had so many beautiful chats that were so healing for me and so filled with wisdom that you know I'm going to take them as a healing from this experience.

Melanie: 26:42

Yeah, it was lovely for me too. I feel my heart open and just a lovely vibe between us. And what was really lovely for me to connect with you on is just sharing the energy of perimenopause, and we were chatting for 40 minutes before we did our first attempt at the recording and it was so lovely. Neither of us gave advice to the other, we both just shared this almost indescribable difficulty or presence or thing that is going on, and it kind of formed the basis of the conversation really.

Agnieszka: 27:23

Yeah, thank you for that, I appreciate you, yes, and I thank you as well, and I think this is also very important to remember, because I think in the patriarchal world, we are very focused on fixing. If somebody comes to you and say something, you feel this deep urge of fixing it. I have to do something to help, I have to give an advice. I have to. You know I have to have to have to, but the truth is that often we share something just to be heard, and just in this process of being heard, that's where the healing happens, because somebody is holding you through the moment of difficulty that you are going through and you can share it together and you can open yourself and become vulnerable, and there's nobody there to judge you, nobody there to tell you oh, you're doing it wrong, you should do it this way.

Melanie: 28:14

No, God forbid. Someone should tell a perimenopausal woman you should do it a different way.

Agnieszka: 28:22

Well, we invite you to try. Try us.

Melanie: 28:25

Off with their heads, or they try and eat popcorn near us in the cinema or chew near us or something. Um, anyway, yeah, thank you, it's been really really lovely to speak to you and hopefully many more conversations ahead. Actually, I have a few ideas, once we've hung up the call, we can chat about.

Agnieszka: 28:45

but thank you. Thank you for having me. It's been really precious to me.

Melanie: 28:50

Yeah, and I hope everyone listening. Really, I think everyone got something from that as well, so can you just tell everyone where to find you? Like your website address? Yeah.

Agnieszka: 29:03

So you can find me on wwwprimetherapycouk, and I'm also on Instagram, ioniwise, and I've just started my sub stack, so that's also Ioni Wise. If you're interested in my writing, you can find me there as well.

Melanie: 29:24

Okay, well, I'll put all the links in the show notes so you can just get those easily. But otherwise, thank you so much, agnieszka, and thank you for writing the book. That sounded very, very easy. I'm sure it wasn't a different point, but it sounded very, very easy and, yes, lots of love. Thank you, thank you very much Thank you.