This Yogi Bled Through Her White Pants to Prove a Strong Point About Periods

From those awkward adolescent bathroom trips all the way through adulthood, periods have remained an unnecessarily taboo topic, and now, one woman is confronting all those hush-hush menstrual moments while bleeding through her white yoga pants. Stephanie Góngora is a 30-year-old yogi who, just like most women, fears her heavy flow and the possibility of bleeding through her pants. But in an effort to face those fears, Stephanie decided to record herself doing what she does best, a yoga sequence, but she did so while bleeding through her *gasp* white pants.

"I am a woman, therefore, I bleed," she wrote alongside the video above. "It's messy, it's painful, it's terrible, & it's beautiful. And yet, you wouldn't know. Because I hide it. I bury things at the bottom of the trash. I breathe, ragged and awkward through the cramps, all the while holding onto this tight lipped, painted on smile. Tampons? What are those. We don't say those words out loud. Hide them. In the back pocket of your purse, in the corner of the bathroom drawer, at the very bottom of your shopping cart (please let me get a female cashier)."

Stephanie's perfectly balanced poses are just one of the many things that make this post so impressive. Her ability to open up and tackle this scorned topic is admirable. She opened up to Cosmopolitan about her past as a young gymnast often overwhelmed with the fear that she'd bleed through her leotard, and she has had the same fears as a yoga instructor in her adult life.

"The possibility of leaking through even two super-plus tampons and a pad during an hour-long class enveloped my life," Stephanie said. "I would hide tampons in my sleeve or take my whole purse to the bathroom. If a spot of blood made it past my arsenal and onto my pants, I would tie a giant sweatshirt around my waist and spend the rest of the day exquisitely stressed out about someone seeing it and finding out the truth: that I bleed, and sometimes, I leak."

But Stephanie began to wonder why she felt so ashamed of her body's natural flow and decided she didn't want to hide it anymore.

"I knew a bright red blood spot on pristine white pants would make a statement in a society that rarely takes the time to actually read," she told Cosmo. "Leaks are such a typical occurrence for me, and something, I believe, women shouldn't have to be ashamed of."