The following insights
are intended as a guide for your fertility journey. Each one is intentionally designed to enlighten
you in shifting your perspective, propelling you forward from where you may be
feeling stuck, and giving you permission to listen to your intuition, your
Inner Voice.
May your eyes
land on the Jewel, the Insight that the Divine has intended just for you! And, so it is…
If
You Are In Search of Magical Formulas…
If you have been
trying to conceive for awhile, you may well be searching for that magical
formula for how to become pregnant. It
seems as if the human psyche gravitates to figuring things out, needing to find
a cause, looking for “The Answer.” How I
would love to be able to give you a magical formula! If there were such a thing, you can be sure
that the fertility clinics would be boasting 100% success rates.
Here is the
secret….There is no secret! There is no
formula. There is no “A + B =
Baby.” The secret for conceiving a baby
remains a Divine Mystery. Your job is
learning how to surrender to this not-in-my-control reality. For some of us, this is new territory.
Re-Creating
Your Story
Each of us lives
in two realities. The first reality is
what we do, where we go, who we are with…the daily events of our lives. Our second reality is what we tell ourselves
about that first reality…Our Story. Your
story is created from your interpretation of those events...how you choose to
connect the dots, the interpretations and presumptions that you make. Your life is the story that you manifest as
you try to create meaning out of a sequence of events that transpire each and
every day… over a sequence of days, a sequence of years.
If you are not
happy with your life—for example with your fertility journey—you can shift how
you experience your life by creating a new story. Let’s say that you are 35 years old and have
been trying to conceive for a couple of years without getting pregnant and have
been diagnosed with unexplained infertility.
Instead of interpreting those facts by telling yourself that you are too
old to conceive, a failure, and never going to become pregnant, you can
re-create your story! Those same facts
could also be melded into something like this: “I am the perfect age to
conceive my baby and have been given no reason that I cannot conceive in the
future.” Both stories could be
considered equally true as far as the facts go.
But, when you choose a story that reflects both truth and possibilities,
you create a shift that uplifts your spirit and echoes at the cellular level of
your body. The life that you experience
is up to you.
Which story will
you choose?
Living
Your Life from the Rearview Mirror
As women in the
“preconception waiting room” share their stories (see above!), they often give
detailed accounts of each and every diagnosis and procedure that they have had
in the past. Embedded within these
stories is an unspoken verdict: “Don’t
get my hopes up about the future…just look at what has happened in the
past.” They walk along their fertility
journeys with their eyes focused on their rear-view mirrors, totally
disconnected from the “now,” assuming that their futures will be a mirror
reflection of the past, more of the same.
To assume that
the future will only be a repeat of the past is presumptuous and limits God,
yourself, and all of those around you.
When you fall into the trap of looking in that rear-view mirror, you
limit the potential trajectory of your life. Your journey is constrained by fear. Just for today, shift your eyes to the road
right in front of you, look at the road ahead with the belief that you have
full freedom to go where you have never before dared! Start with one step…
As modern women,
we are products of our Western culture’s obsession with setting goals, figuring
things out, making things work, and being in control of our lives. We succeed by pushing things into being,
clenching our fists, and tightening our jaws ready for battle. Whenever we have wanted something, we have
willed it into existence. Up until now,
that is. Approaching infertility in this
manner does not work.
This
trying-to-conceive life has everything topsy-turvy, and we have not been able
to figure it out. The left-side of the
brain, the yang, masculine side is the side that we tend to default to. If you hear yourself “trying, analyzing,
figuring out”, then you are in full yang mode.
On the other hand, in this case “other side,” when you are using the
right-side of the brain, the yin, feminine side, you focus on synthesis,
leaning on your intuition, being in a receiving, open-handed mode.
The yin side
feels foreign to many of us who live our days in masculine energy workplaces
where we have adjusted in subtle, and some not so subtle ways, away from our
yin postures, words, nonverbal approaches, and intuitive capacities. Some of you may feel a physical, internal
rebellious reaction against this yin energy.
The challenge is
to embrace a whole-minded approach to fertility…coming into balance with the
left and right-sides of the brain and shifting to an energy, a posture of
open-handedness in your fertility journey.
Another human being is not something to push into being; a little one is
received into being. Conceiving a child
is not about achieving a goal.
One of the
fastest ways to bring angst into your trying-to-conceive life is by
“should-ing”! What is “should-ing”? The following examples are some typical
“shoulds” women trying to conceive experience:
• Why do teenagers who don’t want a baby
get pregnant so easily, and here I am in my 30s/early 40s wanting a baby more
than anything else in the world, and I can’t?
• I have been responsible all of my
life…went to college, worked hard, built my career, waited to get everything in
place before having a family…and now I can’t get pregnant.
• My sister (sister-in-law/friend) has it
so easy—everything has always come easily to her. Here I am, struggling to have what she takes
for granted—a baby. Life is so unfair!
The insidious
inner world of “should-ing” sets you up as the Preeminent Judge of “What Should
Be.” This is typically based on a
feeling that the world should be fair, that life should happen according to
certain rules where the responsible, good, hard-working person receives the
rewards, in this case getting pregnant and having a baby. If you know this “should-ing” world
personally, here are a few questions to ask yourself:
• How do I know what should and should not
be?
• If I set aside “should-ing” and
struggling against “what is”, how would life be for me?
The One Thing That You
Do Control…
The final Jewel
of Insight has to do with the one thing that you do have control of in your
quest to become a parent. No matter what
the circumstances bring, you are ultimately in control of your response, your
reaction, your attitude towards it all. Victor
Frankl, Holocaust survivor and author of Man’s
Search for Meaning, puts it this way, “The last of human freedoms: the ability to choose one’s attitude in a
given set of circumstances.”
You get to
choose how this waiting for a baby defines your life. You get to choose how you will see the latest
news in the scheme of your journey. You
get to choose what you will believe about what is and is not possible. You get to choose whether you will build a
wall around your heart to protect it from hurt or open your heart and be
receptive to what is to come.
Ultimately, you
get to choose the spirit in which you will walk this path…
Photo of Aladin's Lamp courtesy of pixmac.com
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