In the beginning of this book, I described the sacred moment when I became aware of my daughter’s energy in my own field. The energetic exchange that she and I had at that moment, however subtle, confirmed an agreement that we both went on to fulfill: I was to be her mother in this lifetime, and she was to be my child.
Around the time of this agreement, as I explored realms of thought and consciousness at the university I attended, a friend mentioned to me the theory that we have karmic relationships with the significant players of our lives. That is, in a past life, our mothers might have been our sisters, our fathers might have been our sons, as well as many other possible combinations when it comes to the people we know and with whom we are intimately familiar. The thought, however fascinating, seemed complex and impossible at the time. However much I had fallen away from my Christian roots, I still held the notion that our eternal souls, although they lived on in heaven, did not pass back to this side of consciousness. I had, like many others, felt a sense of connection and deep familiarity with certain people, and this seemed to suggest an energetic history. But part of me felt that acknowledging this karma didn’t really change anything. Having these connections was sufficient without having to name or identify their origin or relationship.
But as I gained worldly experience and suffered the mistakes and heartbreaks and courageous carelessness that often occur in one’s late teens, I gained a new understanding of the key role of these karmic players. Many of those incipient experiences came with the liberation I discovered being free from my parents’ rule and finally being allowed to be my own individual.
I am the last of three children, and my sister and brother were more than ten years older than me when I was born. As a child, I often asked my mother why she chose to have me so long after the others. She would always reply, “God told me to have another child.” This was lovely to hear at a young age (it feels good to be chosen by God, after all), but it also placed an extremely heavy burden on me to be an example of godliness. I was the perfect child; other than my debilitating asthma, I expressed love and compassion for all beings and was kind to all others at school, church, and home. My sensitive soul took the messages of Christ to heart, and I sacrificed my own individual needs for those who were in more need than I was.
All of this changed when I was 15 and I felt the cruel sting of hypocrisy from my church community by way of judgment for the simple act of dyeing my hair purple. Something in me snapped awake. It was devastating to realize that those around me didn’t practice the compassion and nonjudgment I had learned as cornerstones of the Christian way of life. I have always felt that the karmic contract I made with my parents was as much about fostering a deep spirituality as it was about setting up a system for me to rebel against.
Having a system to rebel against set me on my path of exploring alternative consciousness, spirituality, and health. Something in my soul revolts any time it senses injustice in how one individual is treated differently and cruelly, compared to the rest of the group. This early sense of advocating for the individual led to my work in women’s health and fertility. There were times in that massive period of rebellion and exploration when I suffered greatly and came face-to-face with the depths of my soul, barely retrieving it on my way to the next life lesson. I lived with thirst and courage. I traveled alone, camping with bears in the wilderness, rock climbing with a renegade group of anarchist lost boys, studying with shamans, driving 24 hours straight to the Pacific Ocean for no other reason than to see the full moon on the water, living with an older man who was preparing for the end of the world at the millennium, and reading everything I could get my hands on. Looking back, it feels like I practically fit 20 years of living into the years between ages 17 and 21.
In 2000, when the world in fact did not end, I decided that I wanted to be in it instead of on its outskirts. But I was lost and tired. I needed a banner in the crowd. How could I find my path to service when I had so many fundamental problems with the normative systems of society? Medicine called me back. The Hippocratic oath was fair and equal to all, at least in theory, and I knew that my gift of healing could be useful there. Working from the guidance of spirit alone, I registered late for a premed lab class that was, much to my annoyance, held on a Saturday morning at 8 I arrived late and found the one open chair in the back.
Unbeknownst to me, I sat down next to one of those banner holders and key players of my life—a woman whom I have undeniably known for thousands of lives, my dearest friend in this lifetime, Heather Kim. Heather, like me, was a courageous lover of life—and she, too, was at a significant crossroads. We met there that day and were inseparable ever after. We each went on to become doctors and to serve and defend women and children from crushing systems that seek to oppress. I honestly am not sure if either of us could have alone successfully carried out the journey from that first lab class to our individual practices. I can say without doubt that we saved each other, and that our meeting was 100 percent planned and orchestrated before we were even born.
As children and young adults, we discuss a book after reading it. We explore key themes and characters as a way to learn at a deeper level. It’s sometimes only after this discussion that we get the most significant message of the novel. Similarly, we can assume that there are certain people and events that are set to occur in our lives without giving much thought as to why. But the post-discussion and analysis can unveil to us precious life lessons and themes. A retrospective look can reveal to us what was present all along.
I used to think that wisdom was impossible not to obtain, that simply living granted a person knowledge. Now I understand that the wisest of those I have met are the ones who were able to craft meaningful stories and myths from the milestones and major events of their lives. And the children that they had—as well as the ones they lost in miscarriage, termination, or death—were each significant figures in their story. Some contracts, after all, are simply powerful enough by just existing, even if they are never acted upon.
Many roads in our lives become available to walk only after we have met certain people. Identify the main players in your life thus far. Imagine they each hold a sacred key to help you unlock a very important door to your life’s purpose. These people often show up during times of great transition. What do these key holders have in common, and what is different about each of them? The resonance they share is a clue to the type of energy you are calling in this lifetime. Often, this energy will be reflected in the spirit of your child, as well. Your child is another important key holder along your path.
Some of my greatest heroes are my patients. I have sat with people in the most devastating spaces that a human can experience and have seen firsthand how the human spirit can alchemize tragedy into wisdom. That is not to say that the experience of going through miscarriage, stillbirth, and loss of a child ever truly leaves you—nor does it make you stronger, as the old saying suggests. If anything, it makes you more raw and vulnerable to the experience of being alive, with all of its delicate tenuousness. The philosopher Saint Augustine wrote that the best of humanity is practiced in faith, hope, and love. These are also the core tools that I remind my patients to access when they feel despair. In practice, you can observe the energetic impact these principles have on fertility.
Deborah was referred to me by a colleague at Carriage House Birth Doulas. The last decade has seen an exciting increase in education around childbirth, and doulas have spearheaded much of it. They are also at the battlefront of women’s reproductive health, and because of their positioning, doulas witness many traumas related to fertility firsthand. Doulas are often my favorite people in the room. In general, they have an extraordinary sense of service to others and the kindest hearts. Trust me when I say you want a doula on your team.
Deborah had a normal and healthy first pregnancy with manageable morning sickness and fatigue. All of her normally scheduled ultrasounds came back positive up until week 25 of her pregnancy, when her positive and upbeat ultrasound technician suddenly shifted into a serious and withdrawn state. Something had changed—and something was very wrong. Previously undetected irregularities had developed in the fetus. The pregnancy ended at 26 weeks. Upon later analysis, a very rare and not inheritable genetic variation was found to be the cause, which gave some comfort to Deborah but still didn’t answer why she had lost the baby.
There is an inventory of questions that most people scroll through while trying to make sense of losing a pregnancy. It almost always begins with a deep self-critique and includes waves of shame and guilt at the sense of having done something wrong or being inadequate as a mother. Deborah came to see me as she began to heal her body after the loss. Although she was doing well on the outside, internally she was full of unresolved grief and fear. “How do I get over this?” she asked.
“You don’t,” I replied. “But you do find ways to understand why. However, in my experience, those explanations often don’t come fast.” I never try and take away the grief from my patients too quickly, nor do I tell them to just get back up and keep trying, as many doctors suggest. Again, it’s been my experience that in Western medicine, a person’s age plays a major role in the fear she feels around the pressure to get pregnant. I’ve seen many a client over the years start trying to conceive again, too soon after an unresolved loss, simply because they feel their biological clock is ticking. For many, even strong fertility treatments cannot override womb break. It can only be healed with time, and that is the commodity that most people feel they are running out of.
The loss of a child is never something to be rushed through. Not taking the time to adequately mourn can produce more trauma, not just for the mother but for her future children, as well. The weight of being conceived to fix the heartbreak of a prior sibling’s death is unfair to those who come after, and can lead to feelings of being loved conditionally and not solely for who they are. The wisdom of the heart and its connection to the uterus will only allow a subsequent pregnancy to occur once healing has taken place. And healing looks very different for everyone.
I encourage my clients to give themselves permission to feel all their feelings after a loss. Feeling is often the first thing they want to stop doing. Often, the daily reminders from the world—like e-mail notifications from baby apps and reminders of the Pinterest board they had created for the baby’s room—are sufficient to catalyze a deep melancholy that is hard enough to navigate. Modern-day women hold in emotion. We censor ourselves to be more acceptable, to stick out less, and to avoid being perceived as overly emotional.
Over the years, many of my clients who have been through negative pregnancy tests, miscarriages, and loss have asked me how to manage the great sadness they feel. “Cry more,” I tell them. “It helps release the energy from your body and prepare for the next pregnancy.” Often, people still do not allow themselves to express their feelings fully, for fear of judgment—and of course, having to actually acknowledge their pain. Ultimately, it is as the great poet Robert Frost wrote: “The best way out is always through.”
A miscarriage is a missed connection. And just like romantic love, there can be so much that is right about a potential life partner; they can be almost perfect, but loving someone is ultimately not enough of a reason to stay together. However, that doesn’t mean there was no significance to the time you did spend together, however temporary. The karmic connections we encounter in life are there to help steer our paths and catalyze self-realization. Some practitioners in the realm of energy medicine describe miscarried children as transient spirits that are so pure of spirit that they cannot fully incarnate onto Earth. The closest thing they can experience to the physical realm is the womb. I have always liked this theory, and while it has resonated for a few of my clients over the years, it is ultimately too broad of an interpretation to be true for everyone. What I do suggest, and what applies to everyone I have worked with, is that the loss of a child is a significant event that requires examination, reflection, and time to heal. When we honestly take time to identify what felt right and what felt wrong, just as we would a romantic relationship, we often find answers that guide our path and that help to heal our womb break.
The increase in infertility is one of the unintended consequences of the sexual revolution. In the 1970s, women began to disengage and silence their monthly connection to their uterus, either through oral contraceptives or detachment from menstrual bleeding, pain, and discomfort, in order to be able to gain economic status and to compete for jobs that had only been held by men.
The value that had once been placed on reproduction and being a mother was no longer sufficient. Women had to not only have and raise children, and do the bulk of the housework; they also had to get right back up and achieve the same success as their professional male counterparts. Although the freedom that developed during this time was essential for global economic growth, many of the exalted characteristics of the feminine prior to the sexual revolution gained negative connotations. Fast-forward to the modern-day economy; while there are more options for women to take maternity leave and preserve their fertility through egg freezing and reproductive medicine, the world still runs on an active, masculine-fueled ethic of overdoing and productivity.
I have met many women who simply don’t know how to connect to their bodies, wombs, and reproductive cycles. They have been on oral contraceptives since college, and have been reassured that they are capable of doing everything that men do (plus get pregnant) as soon as they decide to. Women have been spoon-fed the notion that they can have everything—and they are exhausted and disconnected from their feminine essence as a result.
Countless times, I have asked women struggling to get pregnant how many hours a week they work, only to hear time and again that they are devoting an average of 60 hours a week to their job. Their sleep and sex drives suffer from so much doing. Quite simply, the expectations that society and modern women place on themselves and their reproductive systems are unreasonable.
A return to the feminine realm of intuition and connecting to the natural, internal rhythms of our bodies is not a return to a lesser form of intelligence—it’s a return to a sense of balance that is desperately needed in our world, among both women and men.
This might be a good time to remind you that my roots are in feminism. Growing up, I fought against established patriarchy. The kind of oppression I experienced could have easily demolished my spirit instead of facilitating the growth of my gifts, as it did. Moreover, I am not suggesting that there is a veil that sharply separates masculine analytic thought from feminine intuitive wisdom. Both sides can freely cross over and participate—and many men are naturally gifted with a developed feminine, while many women are more comfortable in the realm of the masculine. It seems to me that the majority of people tend to stay on one side of the divide. The imbalance of energies is reflected in the way we as human beings live, love, and reproduce.
When I teach women receptivity and connecting to the womb in order to facilitate pregnancy, one of the first steps is learning to listen to their menstrual cycles. They often pull out apps, data for their tracked cycles, and basal body temperature charts they have turned into Excel sheets, which is all well and good. But the type of listening I am asking for requires a different kind of data collection. It is not linear; it seeks a direct and open line of communication between your uterus, your heart, and your mind. My father use to say, “There are only 13 inches between heaven and hell, and that is the distance between your heart and your head.” To which I add the 16-inch descent from the heart to the uterus and the statement, “What you know in your uterus can be spoken through your heart.”
Some seem to think that it is easy to act from intuition versus analysis, and that following your intuition is a lesser form of intelligence than analyzing all aspects of a situation through logic. Indeed, explaining your reason for doing something by simply saying “My intuition said it was the right thing to do” can sometimes come off as confusing and chaotic in a world that values explanation. However, once you have developed a methodical personal practice, you can trust in its validity and the messages that you receive.
Let’s get back to the story of my client Deborah, whom I mentioned earlier in the chapter. She took the time needed to heal. Months went by, and although she was exceedingly busy with work and life, she made space to listen to her cycle and to grieve. She found ways to understand the significance in her life story of the loss of her first child, and came to the belief that the cosmic timing for that pregnancy was simply not correct.
Almost one year after the loss of her first child, she heard a small but clear whisper. “Hi,” it said. It was the sound of her child’s voice. It was different from the spirit she had felt and connected to before, but she immediately knew that it was, indeed, a hello meant for her. Naturally, she became pregnant the following cycle. Having walked through hell and back, she was now capable of sharing a deeper love than ever before, both for her unborn child and for herself.
Our greatest teachers are our partners and our children. They carry with them the blueprints for how to break into our most secure areas and take whatever they so desire. Carrie, a fertility coach herself, asked me if I had ever heard another baby spirit knocking at my door.
“Why do you ask?” I responded.
Carrie went on to describe the awareness of a baby spirit whom she felt had been with her for some time. “It’s just not the right time,” she said. “I’ve just raised my two boys, and I want to spend energy on my business of helping women.”
“It’s okay to tell her that, then,” I said. “Just say with unconditional love and sovereignty that this isn’t the right time, and allow her to make the choice to stick around or be free.”
Carrie felt liberated. It had been hard for her to open up about her own desire to spend the energy that she had devoted to motherhood on herself and her career, especially because she was aware that the energy was coming from a potential daughter and she was curious after raising sons what it might be like to be the mother to a girl.
“In my belief system,” I concluded, “energy and karmic connections are timeless—and if you don’t meet in this lifetime, you can in another.” Ultimately, the relationships that are absolutely necessary for our spiritual development are unavoidable. I share this affirmation with my clients, particularly when they are anxious or under the impression that everything and everyone that is intended for them will always find them.
Another hurdle faced when practicing receptive listening for the spirits of children is conquering the fear of hearing nothing. “What does it mean if I can’t hear or feel my spirit baby?” is a question I am often asked. Some people are so afraid of not hearing someone speaking back that they hesitate to even try my meditations. For me, this typically indicates a need to go back to the earlier steps of identifying and clearing trauma that we spoke about in the first chapters of this book. Most of the time the blockages to connecting and communicating with a baby’s spirit can be cleared, and the gentle presence of their spirit can be detected.
On occasion, I have encountered very shy and quiet baby spirits who prefer not to speak or make their presence too conspicuous. In these cases, I recommend holding a gentle and undemanding space for them to get comfortable in. After experiencing a safe and unconditionally loving space, these shy spirits always allow their presence to be known. Likewise, spirits can sometimes be exceedingly playful and mischievous, and will hide away from being known, as if it were a game of hide-and-seek. All I can say about these lovely souls is that they make the most feisty and energetic children and people!
In the multiplex of our cosmic theater, we are all connected. Karmic connections and contracts that we make before incarnating into the world are real and often binding. I think back on the events of my lifetime (and the ones yet to happen) that had to occur to assist in my actualization. All of the events and people, both negative and positive, have catalyzed essential processes and reactions that have guided my path.
However painful and difficult to navigate, I have come to acknowledge, respect, and appreciate the failures and losses. The pressure to be perfect and to get everything right the first time is a self-imposed torture we submit to in order to avoid having to explore our fears and sadness. But not a single one of us, regardless of our economic status or nationality, will live an entire lifetime without experiencing loss, depression, sadness, and despair. However, only some will courageously risk having to experience all of the loss again, by choice, to follow the messages from their heart. Amelia was one such brave soul.
Stillbirth is the loss of a child after the 20th week of pregnancy. The longer a child is with you, in utero or not, the harder it is to heal from the loss of that child. I have worked with many women over the years who simply cannot wrap their heads around the stillbirths of their children. It can send them into deep states of mental unwellness and depression, and often leaves a wound that is hard to recover from—especially when that stillbirth occurs as your first pregnancy.
Amelia was one of the most complex cases I have ever seen. She explained the tragic story of her loss with the sort of wit that comes from people who have experienced the darkest aspects of life but still managed to live. There is a reason firefighters and first responders are known as jokesters: humor helps dismantle trauma.
Amelia became a midwife after the stillbirth of her child, which occurred in her 20s. Her path of loss and her anger at the insensitivity with which she was treated by the conventional medical system at the time inspired her to help change the story for other women. Years went by, and a subsequent pregnancy resulted in miscarriage. She turned her attention to helping others have healthy pregnancies instead of continuing to try for her own.
But at one point, she changed her mind. “I’m going to be 35 soon,” she said. “I’ve got to try again now, if I am going to ever try again.” I was immediately on Amelia’s team. I remember both the joy and fear she felt when she discovered she was pregnant. We saw each other almost every week to work through the anxiety and fear of the unknown while also strengthening and supporting her body. Amelia had lost her best friend at a young age, and her young mind and heart had dealt with the loss by becoming obsessive about certain thoughts and behaviors. The loss of her first child was a similar repetition of the grief and complexity she had felt as a child.
When I see repetitive patterns, I look deeper into what these events mean in the greater unfolding story of a person’s life. I had the sense that the child that Amelia lost was related to the best friend who’d tragically passed away. By the time she came to see me, it felt like the karmic pattern she had been living in had begun to shift—and part of that was due to the spectacularly strong and present energy of her daughter’s spirit.
“This is going to be a successful pregnancy. She is strong and wants to be here,” I told Amelia every week. But there were a few times when it felt like the energy of the past tried to creep in, and that the pregnancy was in danger. “I feel like we all barely made it,” Amelia told me after the healthy birth of her daughter. The combination of her own faith and love, and the strength of her baby’s resolve to be here, persevered and literally dug out a new karmic path for Amelia’s life.
Society once had a process and rituals to cushion those who had recently grieved. The tradition of wearing black to alert others that a person was in a period of mourning has been practiced for centuries. Adhering to a ritual mourning period, while also assisting in the smooth transition of a loved one’s spirit into the afterlife, is still common in many religious lineages. But what about grief that does not pass or heal with time?
The most important path to avoiding unresolved grief is to allow yourself sufficient time to grieve. Grief has the power to stop a person’s unfolding life in its tracks with a chilling slowness; it is not easily shrugged off. This slowness is by design, creating the time and space to process loss. Space and time have become somewhat antithetical to modern life, while grief and melancholy have remained unchanged by technology and digital communication.
Identifying grief is as simple as asking yourself to take an honest inventory of when you have experienced the loss of a friend, a lover, a family member, or even a dream. How much time did you allow yourself to process the grief? Who did you share the loss with, and did you share completely how the loss impacted your life? And, most importantly, how can you allow yourself the time needed to work through and clear unresolved grief now? It is very possible to heal the wounds of the past in the present; in fact, you are better equipped than you were in the past.
The main characters in our lives have this power. They can swoop in and change everything that we thought we knew or understood about ourselves and the universe. They surprise us by being completely different from what we expected or even who we anticipated meeting. Children that are born after particularly difficult periods of spiritual crisis are always gifted healers. They are drawn to wounded people to practice and cultivate their own unique healing powers. In this way, the more honest we are with our children and the less we try to hide and cover up our soul’s hurt and pain, the more we set the stage for their learning and practice of compassion. All relationships are karmic relationships.
The first and only time I had a past-life regression was at the Berkeley Psychic Institute. I was 26 and already a practicing doctor, but I was still uncertain of my path and its direction and sought out a psychic. I sat before a middle-aged woman who didn’t look particularly spiritual; in fact, I remember thinking that she looked like she had just come from a job at a bank or university. The only information I gave her about myself was my name.
After 20 minutes of silent meditation, she spoke. “You have always been a healer,” she said. I was shocked. “For many lives, you have practiced medicine. But I see a life in ancient Mongolia. You were a medicine woman and married to a colonel. You were the only woman to travel with the army. They would take you with them to help the injured. But you longed for your child and missed her greatly.”
So much of what she said rang true, and I left feeling both awed and reassured. It’s not that any of my questions were answered, but the reassurance that a complete stranger could clearly read certain ageless truths about my spirit reminded me that my life was unfolding like it should. I felt that each life I have led was a deepening exploration into the major themes and lessons of my soul, and that there was a divine intelligence working through me.
When I remind people to look at their lives from a larger panoramic perspective, they can often recount the most significant moments in their character and plot development, just like in a movie. Often, we are looking so closely at the goals that are right in front of us that we neglect to relax our gaze to see past the horizon.
Art is one of my favorite metaphors for working with the energetic realm. My daughter made me a beautiful painting in kindergarten. When I asked her to tell me what it was, she shrugged her shoulders and said, “I don’t know. It’s just an abstract.” The true meaning was not in the details but in the kindness and love she felt in wanting to make something just for me.
When you examine grand theories of karma and spiritual contracts, you need to remove the everyday glasses that you see the world through. Sometimes, squinting your eyes just a little and allowing your imagination to fill in the blanks will unveil the magical message hidden within the patterns of your life. You have everything you need to determine the most essential energetics that have been at work in this lifetime and others. Your children, your partner, and your friends and family are an essential part of your karmic circle. As you determine the hidden yet consistent messages from your spirit, it becomes easier to see the similarities in other energetic characters of your life.
Understanding karma is a window into the deepest and most important relationships in our lives, including those with our future children. In this chapter, you learned how the main characters in your life have the power to swoop in and change everything, and that children born after long periods of loss are often gifted healers, a result of the wisdom that comes from suffering. Karma literally means action, so when we examine the actions of our lives, we are also examining our karma.
Remember to be observant of these actions and to the timing and unfolding of events in your life. It is only when we gain perspective on the most intense events of our lives that we begin to understand why they happened. The wisdom that comes from surviving loss and grief is often the most valuable wisdom we can gain. But it’s not easy to alchemize this material from negative to positive. It takes time and a practice of faith, hope, and love.