I have always loved children and found out very early on that I had an ability to relate to them quite effortlessly. Because of this, I became an elementary school teacher and have worked with children of all different age levels for more than half of my life.
As my career evolved to working more with teachers as a consultant and trainer, my stress level increased considerably. I found that yoga was an antidote to all of the stress I was experiencing in my life, both personally and professionally. I not only started practicing yoga regularly, but got certified as a yoga teacher about three years after trying it for the first time.
I was approaching my mid-thirties and accepted the fact that I may never marry or have children when I met my husband, Dilip, on e-Harmony. To be honest, I was only on e-Harmony to pacify my mother who had heard about it on a daytime talk show. Once Dilip and I spoke on the phone, I knew he would become my husband, and we got married just after my 35th birthday.
We threw away the birth control immediately and started trying to conceive a baby. We both had busy schedules at the time but tried to at least be together during ovulation so that we could get moving on this baby business. After a year of trying with no luck, I went to my OB/GYN who recommended I visit a reproductive endocrinologist. I’ll never forget that first visit when the doctor told me we were a pretty boring case with just a mild form of PCOS. He was certain that we would get pregnant with some Clomid and an IUI.
I responded well to the medication and everything looked good, but I was not able to get pregnant after three tries of Clomid/IUI. With each failed procedure, I was slipping deeper and deeper into depression. I just couldn’t understand why this was happening to me and why everyone around me seemed to be getting pregnant with ease. Dilip and I started fighting a lot, but kept holding onto our dream of becoming parents. We moved onto IVF and while everything looked good with the treatment, the result was the same as the others; I had not become pregnant. After my second IVF resulted in all of my embryos arresting, I was told that I had poor egg quality. While I didn’t believe this to be the case, I knew that I had had enough with the treatments and trying to have a biological baby.
We sent in our application to the adoption agency a few months after our IVF cycle, and found out that we were pregnant the same day that agency stamped our application. We were beyond excited at this news! While we didn’t share our news with everyone, we announced to it to our close friends and immediate family. We saw the heartbeat on the ultrasound and were so happy that our struggle with infertility was finally over.
About 11 weeks into the pregnancy, I started getting cramps and spotting. I knew what was happening, but kept praying that it wasn’t what I thought it was. I ended up in the emergency room and lost the baby on Mother’s Day of all days. Dilip and I were completely devastated, but were not about to give up our dream of becoming parents. After we grieved this terrible loss, we got back to work on adopting a baby.
While all this was going on, I turned to my yoga and meditation practice daily to help me through the emotional ups and downs that I was going through. I started teaching Fertility Yoga and began leading a support group with RESOLVE, the national infertility organization. Without the support of the women in my group and classes, I’m not sure how I would have survived everything we went through.
Almost a year to the day that we lost our baby, we adopted our beautiful son, Raj. When I saw him for the first time, I knew that the healing had begun and that everything we went through was worth it. I continued to teach Fertility Yoga and lead the support group as I wanted nothing more than to help women who were going through what I had gone through.
It is my hope that this book will offer women some alternative and/or complementary practices as they try to fulfill their dreams of having a baby. I hope that this book will help you feel less isolated and alone if you are having trouble trying to conceive, as that was perhaps one of the most challenging aspects of my own personal journey. Finally, I hope that yoga teachers and others who are not personally trying to conceive may benefit from learning more about the process and how yoga can help prepare the body for the miracle of pregnancy and giving birth and the blessing of becoming a parent.
Namaste, Jill Petigara
The table of contents for this book sat in the bottom drawer of my desk for over five years. That it is finally written is evidence to me of the truth of this quote by one of my teacher’s teachers, the late Sufi master, Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, “If you dedicate yourself to service, the doors will open.” Not that I had purposefully planned to dedicate myself to service. It is just that my life kept moving away from what I had been doing for some years (international management) and moving toward teaching yoga, and specifically, teaching yoga for fertility.
I started doing yoga when I was living in Asia in the mid-1980s. When I returned to the states, it was to attend an MBA program at the University of Washington in Seattle. I continued my yoga practice through the stress of graduate school and as I started a career doing international management for high-tech companies.
As my career continued to advance, I took on responsibility for managing the international sales and marketing for a growing software company, which meant a lot of international travel. I was eventually managing a network of partners in over 40 countries, and a staff that spanned three continents. It was challenging, interesting, exciting, and exhausting. I became an expert in hotel room yoga, airport yoga, and even airplane yoga. I would rush from the airport, just off an 18-hour flight from Singapore, and head straight to yoga class.
In the midst of this, when I was in my early thirties, we decided that we should try to start a family. After trying for nearly two years, we went to a fertility clinic for a check-up. The doctor advised us that we were going to need to be in the same country at least during ovulation, or it wasn’t ever going to work! I was also diagnosed with endometriosis, for which I underwent a six-month drug regimen, followed by a laparoscopic surgery. Neither of these treatments allowed us to achieve a pregnancy.
In retrospect, it is not at all surprising that I did not get pregnant. Working against it were the job stress, the international travel that constantly disrupted my sleep patterns and internal body rhythms, and a very real, although probably not quite conscious, concern about how I was going to work a newborn into my job schedule. After almost five years, and various other medical interventions, I finally started my own consulting business to get control over my travel schedule, and we decided to try IVF. I should probably have given myself time to really de-stress and replenish myself at this point (more on this in Chapter 8), but that is easier to say in hindsight!
We decided ahead of time that we would try up to three rounds of IVF, and after that would pursue adoption. After our first unsuccessful cycle, I had a very strong vision of an Asian-featured baby (neither of us have Asian heritage). Because of the strength of this vision, I began to feel that IVF might not be our path. Still, I agreed to go ahead with the next cycles as we had planned. My yoga practice really helped offset the added stress and added hormones of the IVF process. I noticed that I had fewer of the mood swings and side effects from the medications than others I knew who were going through IVF at the same time. I was disappointed, but not terribly surprised, when our last two IVF cycles also did not work.
We had just started moving forward with paperwork for the adoption process, when we got a call from one of the handful of people in the world who knew what we were doing. He wondered if we were ready to adopt, because he knew of some potential birth parents we might like to meet. “By the way,” he said, “the birth father is Asian.” “OH!” I yelled into the phone. “That IS our baby!” And so, only two months after we let go of our seven-year process of trying to conceive, my infant son was in my arms. And, this many years later, it is absolutely clear that he was the right child, and that he arrived at exactly the right time.
Our experience taught me a couple of essential things. First, it was a lesson in the importance of keeping a strong intention to be parents, but also the importance of not trying to control the details of how that happens. The Universe (or God, or Spirit, or whomever you believe is helping us) needs space to grant our wishes, because we ourselves may not know what the right path is. In the yogic tradition we are counseled to reserve our judgment about what is the “best” way for things to happen, because we are really not able to say, from our surface perspective, what is a “good” thing and what is a “bad” thing. Yogis believe that there is intrinsically good and bad in everything.
The second key thing I learned was the importance of believing in my own intuition. It happened several times during our fertility journey, where I was told things by people who were undisputed experts in their fields, but which didn’t jive with what my own intuition said was true for me. For example, our highly experienced adoption attorney, who was an adoptive parent himself, told us there was a “one in a thousand chance” that our adoption would go through, given what we had told him of the circumstances. In my heart, I knew he was wrong, but my mind bought into the fear that he might be right. This heart-mind conflict was the source of a lot of stress for a few weeks, until it became clear that my intuition was correct, and the adoption would, in fact, go through.
After the sleep-deprivation stage of babyhood was past, I decided I wanted to start a yoga program specifically for women who were trying to conceive. I realized how much I had benefitted from my own yoga practice during my long fertility journey. I also felt (again, in hindsight) that the yoga practice I had been doing had perhaps been more strenuous than was helpful. I began to research this, and developed the Yoga for Fertility program that I have been teaching through weekly classes, workshops and retreats since 2002. During this time, I was still running my international consulting business, but I found that when I walked into my office and saw the two different stacks of work, I would invariably be drawn to the pile that was yoga related. Thus, my yoga teaching began to grow, and my consulting business began to play second fiddle.
When I first started to think about writing a book on yoga for fertility, I had been teaching the yoga for fertility program for about five years. I wrote the table of contents, did some research, and then the doors began to open. One student’s husband was a publisher and offered to help with my book proposal. Another student was a well-known personality and writer for Time magazine, The Washington Post, and other publications, and offered to help connect me with publishers. And yet, despite all the support, I didn’t manage to get it written. At the time, in addition to my teaching schedule, I was trying to figure out how to help my son who was really struggling in school (we eventually learned he has dyslexia). I was just unable to devote the energy and time to the book project.
Then, at the beginning of 2011, I realized that I finally had the time and energy available to write the book, and that I really wanted to make it happen. So, I sat down and had a talk with the Universe. I apologized for wasting the resources it offered last time, and promised to go through with the project if it were at all possible to be given a second chance.
Shortly after that, I read an article in The New York Times about Yoga for Fertility, and noticed a quote from Jill Petigara, who was teaching fertility yoga near Philadelphia. A few weeks later, I saw that Jill had given a webcast talk on fertility yoga for RESOLVE, the national infertility organization. Since there were so few people teaching yoga for fertility, I was interested to talk with Jill, and we connected by phone. About three-quarters of an hour into the conversation, Jill said, “I feel funny asking you this, since we have never met, and I’ve only talked with you for 45 minutes, but would you be interested in writing a book with me?” I said, “Well, funny you should ask me that! I just happen to have a table of contents for a book on yoga for fertility sitting in my bottom drawer.”
Jill had received a call from Noreen Henson, Executive Director of Demos Health Publishing, who had seen her quoted in The New York Times, and who was interested in publishing a book on yoga for fertility. Jill was very interested, but with the realities of a full-time job and a two-year-old son, realized she would not be able to do it alone. Thus began our long-distance collaboration on this book. I am extremely grateful to Jill for taking the risk of opening her project to someone else, especially someone she had never met (we did finally meet in person when Jill flew to Seattle for the photo shoot). I am also very grateful to the Universe for giving me a second chance—and this time, also including a co-author and a publisher in the deal, which was a pretty foolproof way to make sure it would happen this time!
From my personal experience as a long-time yoga practitioner and yoga teacher, I firmly believe that yoga benefits us in every aspect of our lives—physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. I hope that the information in this book will help you on the path to parenthood in all of those ways. And, when you do become parents, I know that what you have learned in the process will help you to be the best possible parents, which is the most important job in the world!
Namaste, Lynn Jensen