Entries tagged with “natural fertility”.
Do you find yourself frustrated because a Mind~Body approach “doesn’t work”?
You’ve done it all. The relaxation. The affirmations. The visualizing. And you still don’t have your baby.
Often, we make the decision that we’re the missing key — but in a negative way.
We are somehow broken, defective, or out of favor with the Divine (Spirit, God, Goddess). The Truth that we’ve cleverly hidden from the rest of the world is finally on view for all to see — we aren’t enough and the fact that there isn’t a baby is the final physical evidence.
All of these convoluted thoughts is one of the reasons infertility is so painful. Not only do you not have the child you want, but you use it as proof to beat yourself up.
The fact of the matter is, the key to allowing a Mind~Body~Spirit focus to bring you the baby you want is simpler than you think.
Each day we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 60,000 thoughts.
60,000 opportunities to take us to a Zen or stressful state of mind.
60,000 opportunities to put our bodies in a place of growth or fear.
60,000 opportunities to create a relax signal or a danger signal.
Depending on your choices, you are either placing your body in a state of alignment with fertility or with infertility.
If you can take 51% of the opportunities to move toward peace, Zen, or growth, you are well on your way to creating an internal environment that is in alignment with fertility.
If you take 51% of the opportunities to surrender, let go, trust, open to receive, expect what you want, amplify your fertility, or play in the present moment (all pillars of Be-ing Fertile), you are well on your way to the consistency that will powerfully impact your fertility.
We have a life time of habits of thought that take us to feeling fear, worry, anxiety, and more.
All of these will help you create a consistency of thought that will bring your Mind~Body~Spirit into harmony, build your Be-ing Fertile state of being, and align you with your baby.
Remember, I am asking you for consistency, not perfection. You do not need to be the master on the mountaintop to conceive.
I ask you to simply become aware of how you are directing your 60,000 thoughts each day and set the intention that 51% of them bring you towards Be-ing Fertile.
What does medical science have to say about the impact stress has on fertility and women who are dealing with infertility?
Research demonstrates the effects of stress are multilayered, including direct effects on the body and indirect effects on a person’s ability to copy and stay in treatment. If I included all the research, this newsletter would be more like the length of a doctoral dissertation. Let me review four of the studies.
In a study of women undergoing either IVF or GIFT procedures, researchers asked the question: Does stress affect fertility and pregnancy rates? The researchers looked at whether stress from a patient’s life situation or stress from the procedure negatively reduced the patient’s ability to achieve pregnancy or to have a live birth. The women were given questionnaires to rate their moods, feelings about infertility, expectation of achieving pregnancy, amount of social support, coping style, and overall stress levels. The questionnaires were completed at their first clinic visit, before and after hormone use, and before embryo transfer.
The results of this study found women who had higher expectations of achieving pregnancy and had less overall stress had a greater number of eggs retrieved and fertilized, a higher number of embryos to transfer, and a higher pregnancy rate as compared to the women who had a lower expectation of pregnancy and a higher rate of stress.
Another study looked at the impact of group psychological interventions on women who had been experiencing infertility for less than two years. This study found women who participated in a mind~body group were more likely to conceive as those who did not.
A third study looked at why women who carry insurance for IVF stop treatment before having a live birth. Thirty-seven percent of the respondents stated it was stress that stopped their participation. The main stressors reported were the impact on their relationships and feelings of anxiety and depression.
Finally, a study looked at the impact of a mind~body group on women, 40 or younger, going through their first IVF cycle. Fifty-two percent of the women participating in the group were successful, while only 20% of the control group became pregnant.
While research demonstrates a mind~body~spirit approach is not a magic pill that guarantees pregnancy, this type of approach, whether used on its own or in conjunction with a medical approach, improves the likelihood of pregnancy.
Possibly even more importantly, it lessens anxiety and depression and gives tangible coping skills for this very challenging life situation. Why do I say this is even more important that getting pregnant? You are able to return to yourself and make choices about treatment from your whole self, which means you make decisions you will be at peace with for the rest of your life.
Not only that, when you are successful, when you do bring your beautiful baby home, you will be able to be even more present and have the tools to help you with the myriad of emotions that come with being a new mother.
Whether you choose to use my products or services, or some other practitioner’s, I highly encourage you to bring this approach into your journey. Your body, mind, and spirit will be refreshed and help lay the foundation to bring you your baby.
Domar AD1, Clapp D, Slawsby EA, Dusek J, Kessel B, Freizinger M. Impact of group psychological interventions on pregnancy rates in infertile women. Fertil Steril. 2000 Apr;73(4):805-11.
Domar AD1, Rooney KL, Wiegand B, Orav EJ, Alper MM, Berger BM, Nikolovski J.
Impact of a group mind/body intervention on pregnancy rates in IVF patients. Fertil Steril. 2011 Jun;95(7):2269-73.
Klonoff-Cohen H, Chu E, Natarajan L, Seiber W. A prospective study of stress among women undergoing in vitro fertilitzation or gamete intrafallopian transfer. Fertility and Sterility 2001;76:675-687.
One of the advantages of using a Mind~Body approach to healing your fertility is that this approach is very personal to you. You are connecting and listening to what your body is telling you, you are paying attention to the emotions and feelings that are present for you, you are “feeding” your body with images of what you want.
However, this can lead to a sneaky new belief: I am the one who has to create this baby. I have to make sure I’m doing all the right things for my body. I have to make sure to visualize at the right time. I have to pay attention to everything. I have to… (fill in the blank).
I say this belief is sneaky because discovering the power you have in relationship to your body is SO important. However, when you want something as much as a child, you want to do everything you can, and it becomes easy to cross the line. Meaning, you end up trying to control your body and its processes instead of listening and working with them.
All this does is create more stress in your Mind~Body~Spirit system.
Your job is to listen to your body. To allow your emotions to flow. To shift your thoughts and feelings. To follow the inspired actions that arise as you listen. To be open and allow your body to do her work.
When you are in this place of allowing, you open to your deep wisdom, your connection with Spirit, the mystery portion of conceiving. This is where conception happens.
So tune into the powerful Mind~Body connection with whatever tools resonate with you. Feel your body coming into alignment with your deep connection to Spirit. Whenever you sense yourself tiptoeing over the line into wanting to control Spirit’s job, come back to your tools. Come back into allowing.
Now you have truly found the power of a Mind~Body approach.
If only the OBs were able to explain this in a deep and complete enough way, so many more people could be helped with that information! However, without an understanding of why it’s so important to incorporate relaxation, the comment “just relax” comes off sounding like a dismissal of your experience, or how you are feeling inside is unimportant or easy to change.
Mind~Body medicine is able to both explain the impact of how you feel on your fertility and give you the tools to shift. In other words, how you are feeling is directly related to your fertility, and therefore, vitally important to consider. (It isn’t just how you are feeling BECAUSE of your fertility challenges, but how your emotions and beliefs impacted your fertility BEFORE you wanted to conceive).
Let me give you a more in depth explanation from the point of view of one form of mind~body medicine, Chinese Medicine.
From a Chinese Medicine perspective, we are all born with a life essence, which is stored and expressed as Kidney energy. The activity we do during our daily lives either adds to that bank of energy, or removes it.
The goal is to have many more activities that add to the bank. When we constantly remove — through stress, anxiety, fear, busyness, etc. — we end up dipping into our basic life essence, which is hard on the body and the basic life processes we need to work — including reproduction.
How you feel is a perfect indicator of whether you are adding or subtracting from this life essence.
When your life is full of emotion that doesn’t feel good like perfectionism, fear, worry, shame, guilt, stress, hopelessness, and anger, you are not adding to the bank of life essence, you are withdrawing from it. People come into this life with all different amounts in their banks. However, with enough ongoing drains, no matter what you came in with, you will start draining that basic amount.
When your life and feelings tend more towards neutrality, hope, calm, peace, happiness, you are adding to your life essence.
What is even more interesting about all of this is that in Chinese Medicine, Kidney is responsible for reproduction. This gives you a direct correlation between how you feel and your ability to conceive.
For the next week, I ask you to slip into the role of observer: are you adding or subtracting from your life essence?
Imagine your mind and body is wrapped around whatever you wish to release as tightly as a new bud on a rose bush. This bud is completely wrapped with the green outer petals still tightly furled. It is so tightly furled that the true shape of the bud is still distorted. What would happen if those first leaves never released? What if the flower yet to be just stayed tightly curled around its core? How much energy is it taking just to be trying to hold so tightly to this position? Imagine your mind and body is slowly deciding to loosen, just a bit. Perhaps, even loosening seems scary, so they decide just not to hold on so hard, so the first decision is to release the muscles that are working so hard to hang on. Then, when you are ready, imagine that your mind and body are slowing unfurling from this issue, gently opening and releasing, and opening and releasing, slowly showing more and more of what’s inside, exposing the color, shape, and beauty of the flower within. Gently, and at your own pace, opening to new possibilities.
How many times have you heard women are born with all the eggs they will ever produce? How many times have you heard there is nothing you can do to change the health of your ovaries, follicles, and resulting eggs?
Neither of these is true and it breaks my heart each time I hear a new client talk with me about these fears.
Dr. Randine Lewis addressed both of these issues very eloquently in a recent blog post. If you are not aware of Randine’s work with fertility, please visit her site at TheFertileSoul.com, or pick up a copy of her book, The Infertility Cure.
I am sharing her full article with you today.
A new study confirmed the underlying belief, unproven, that the ovary contains deep, hidden stem cells, capable of becoming new eggs. It was previously believed that a woman’s ovarian potential was determined before birth, and was incapable of being improved upon. While science hasn’t been able to study ovarian potential from healthy, living ovarian tissue, rodent studies have supported the idea that mammalian ovarian cells have a potential to produce new cells. Yet, the only tissue science has previously had to study was pathological or diseased tissue, removed from the body. It was previously proven that menopausal ovaries, when placed in a younger, healthier body, were capable of ovulating again. Science does not know how, why, or under what circumstances those stem cells can produce eggs.
The ovaries respond to cues from the internal environment (the blood circulation, hormones, nutritional status, oxygenation, stress hormones in the blood., toxin and antioxidant levels…) and create a follicular environment to mimic the body’s internal response to its external environment. It is within that follicular environment that the eggs (which have been in a dormant state since before birth) undergo meiosis, and wait to see if they will be selected for maturation and ovulation.
The body is capable of miraculous feats, when provided the right cues. I am less concerned with how to manipulate stem cells in the lab ten years from now, than I am with providing the right environment where the body can call upon its deepest, dormant potential now.
While the examples might be clinical anecdotes and not research worthy, the beauty of these stories is that each of the women above had to call upon a higher potential within.
According to Chinese medicine, the energy that stirs this primordial potential comes not from the Kidneys (which govern the ovaries), but from the Heart (Spirit’s) interaction with the primordial potential within the ovaries. Energetically, ones highest potential must reach into one’s most basic potential.
When an internal pressure cooker is provided (like the fertility journey,) an internal state of tension is produced, requiring one to call upon this higher level of interaction. If it isn’t accessed, the HPO axis continues on its previous (horizontal) pathway of decline. When a woman can access her heart’s highest potential, we can consider it an evolutionary jump, calling upon that hidden (vertical) potential to now manifest at a higher level.
Dr. Randine Lewis is the author of The Way of The Fertile Soul (Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2007) and The Infertility Cure (Little, Brown & Company, 2004), and her work is regularly featured in the international media including on CBS’ The Early Show and in the Washington Post, The Economist, the Wall Street Journal Europe, the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Therapies, Elle magazine, Organic Style magazine, Pregnancy magazine and other publications. Dr Lewis is also the creator of The Fertile Soul ® body, mind, spirit program of deep internal healing based upon Taoist and Chinese medical practices. For more information, including retreats, please visit www.TheFertileSoul.com.
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