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External Factors

The outside influences that can mess with your fertility

We’re going to cover a lot about energy and mindset in this book, but first we’ll talk about the fifteen external factors that could be affecting your fertility. These are outside factors that might not immediately seem related to your fertility but can be huge contributing factors. Obviously not everyone who has these factors deals with infertility, but this is where the mindset and the external factor together can block fertility. Not all fifteen will apply to you, but it’s very likely that, as we elaborate on each factor, one you didn’t think was an issue might resonate. Also notice if something other than these fifteen comes up for you.

I’m going to bring your awareness to things that can be affecting your fertility and ways to diminish or even eliminate these factors. I invite you to write in your own ideas on the 15 External Factors worksheet in the Conceivable Tool Kit if something comes to you.

Let’s begin with the first factor on your sheet.

1. Stressful Job

While most people think their job is stressful, I’m talking mainly about teachers, nurses, caregivers, and CEOs—those responsible for groups or teams of people. You get to work early, stay late, and give it your all. You’re great at your job.

But here’s the problem:

Your brain/ego’s main function is to keep you alive. The amygdalae in your brain are two almond-shaped groups of nuclei located in the temporal lobes. They play a primary role in memory, decision-making, and emotional reactions. This is where aggression, addiction, anxiety, PTSD, and, most importantly, fear reside. The amygdalae are responsible for the primal fight-or-flight reflex. This response is awesome when you’re being chased by wolves, but not so much when you’re trying something new. Your brain means well and wants to keep you safe, but sometimes it’s a pain in the ass. While we don’t live in a world where we need to run from saber-toothed tigers anymore, our brain is still triggered by stressors that it perceives as a threat to our survival. When we have too many things going on and are spread too thin, it triggers a silent alarm in our body. That’s when things can start to go haywire. The fight-or-flight response is part of the sympathetic nervous system, which means it’s automatic; and it can be triggered on a low-grade level without our even realizing it sometimes.

When you’re responsible for a lot of people’s health and wellbeing, such as a teacher, nurse, or caregiver, or you’re responsible for a team in a corporate situation, your time and energy are maxed out. So while you’re thinking “I want to have a baby,” your brain already feels as though it’s taking care of way too many people and says, “Why would we add another responsibility to our plate?” It literally can’t handle taking care of another human, and that can put the kibosh on the lady parts.

When you’re in fight-or-flight mode, all unnecessary body systems slow or shut down. All available energy goes to the heart, brain, lungs, and legs (in case of flight). During a crisis, you don’t need your reproductive system to stay alive. This is especially prevalent among women in the unexplained infertility group. When the doctor can’t find anything wrong with you, this very thing could be happening. Though it may seem like only low-grade stress to you, it’s not to your body. This continual stress pattern, over a long period of time, is exhausting. Again, not everyone in these careers has fertility issues, but 95 percent of my clients are in these fields. There’s an undeniable correlation.

So what can we do about it?

You might say, “Okay, great, but I can’t quit my job right now,” or “I love my job. Am I screwed?”

Of course not.

Are you the get-there-early-and-leave-late, give-it-your-all type? While that’s admirable and will garner you perks at work, this push-to-the-limit attitude could actually be getting in the way of conceiving. Your great work ethic is awesome, but unfortunately it can mean you’re taking care of everyone else’s needs before your own. So your lovely brain, which wants to keep you alive, says, “Um, we’re already stretched way too thin and not taking care of ourselves as it is. And you want to add something to our plate? Are you insane?!” I’m certainly not advocating that you become a sloth and only move for food and sex, but we do want to look at ways you can slowly start conserving more energy. When your brain feels that you have more space in your life, the fight-or-flight response isn’t triggered as often, and it will feel that a baby is a plausible venture.

Even though you, as an evolved human, want the baby and see all the positives, you are dealing with a primal, involuntary reaction in the brain that you cannot fool. So our initial job is to create an environment where your brain feels safe to start this process.

Consider it food for thought that when most of my clients come to me for fertility assistance, they also end up changing their career in some capacity. So I invite you to inquire in a journal entry if you’re in the career you feel you’re meant to be in, or one you feel you’re obligated to be in. More and more I’m seeing these two areas tied together, and sometimes it can be the reason the baby hasn’t shown up yet. You’re supposed to get a handle on that first.

When we want to have a baby so badly, we tend to skip over the areas where we need to do some work or make adjustments. But that work, ladies, is what helps you move toward the baby. These roadblocks being presented to you are not to be jumped over or gone around. You must move through them. They are likely a big part of why your pregnancy hasn’t happened yet. In your career, you need confidence, drive, preparedness, and the feeling of being capable.

More often than not, my clients tend to be in a job that is just that … a job. It’s a paycheck, or it gives them professional accolades, but it doesn’t feed their soul. I’ll ask them, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I’ve only had one person answer that it was what they were currently doing. On the surface that might not seem important, but I’m finding that we are being called to step into our purpose versus a career. When we are not in that purpose—the reason we are on the planet this time around—other things that we really want can be delayed. That delay is not your body failing you; it’s trying to give you time to find your purpose before you add another aspect to your life.

I have my clients explore what they’d love to do for a living if their “stories” about why they couldn’t do it didn’t factor in. I joke that if they want to be a mime in a park, we’ll find a way to make it happen. But seriously, if you’re harboring a super-creative person buried under an overworked CPA, it could be a problem. There’s nothing wrong with being a CPA if that’s your purpose, but if your soul longing isn’t being fed, it can manifest in your body. I’ll get more into chakras later in the book, but for now know that there are seven main wheels of energy in your body, going from the base of your spine to the top of your head. They all represent something different.

When I’m reading people, the sacral chakra, located at your lower abdomen, represents creativity, relationships, and children. Your ovaries and uterus quite literally represent the point of creation. So if you are in a job that’s not feeding your soul, feeding your creativity, that chakra can be closed. That means the creating children part shuts down as well. I’m not saying quit your job and draw landscapes on the sidewalk with chalk; but finding a way to feed your soul, whether it’s with something obviously creative (painting, drawing, dancing, photography) or something that just feeds your passion (getting a yoga teacher certification, making organic bath products, flipping houses) is a key component in how fast you move forward. Stepping out of the idea of being obligated to be in a job and into what were you put on the planet to do is so important.

Here are some things you can implement now to convince your brain there’s room for a baby:

If your schedule is maxed out, you must find a way to create space so that your brain can feel like there’s room for this baby to come in.

2. Family Pressure

Many of us, from the moment we’re married, are asked, “When are you having kids?” Parents are eager for a grandchild to spoil. We’re also so steeped in tradition as a society that it’s just what you do. You have a baby after you get married. We’re almost trained to ask that question.

Although family and friends mean well, their comments can seem preachy, judgy, or just plain insensitive. When we’re dealing with fertility issues, we’re already feeling insecure, and the last thing our brain wants is to feel worse about the situation. Not only are we worrying about our own feelings, but we then take on that extra responsibility of being able to tell our friends and family some good news. We plug it into our belief system the idea that “we should be pregnant by now.” The pressure of multiple people counting on us gets painful. And every time we encounter those people, we start to dread the inevitable question. We will talk more about beliefs in chapter 2, but suffice it to say that it wears on us.

Part of what keeps this pressure going is that we don’t always want our family to know we’re having a hard time getting pregnant. Though I hope this will change in the near future, infertility has traditionally been a very private struggle. So we think that if we share our issues, our loved ones will judge us or offer unsolicited advice that can be unintentionally painful. On the flip side, if we don’t address their comments, it continues to fester in us and perpetuates the problem. Social situations that were once fun turn into a tedious, defensive chore.

First of all, there’s no shame in this journey at all. And honestly, the more it’s talked about, the better. Fertility is one of the few taboo issues left. It used to be like that with cancer and PTSD, but now they’re openly talked about. Unfortunately there is still shame around infertility, because we feel our body is not doing what women’s bodies have done for millennia. We blame ourselves. Remember that one in six women struggles with infertility. It’s very likely that you know multiple women who’ve dealt with the same thing. Realizing that you are not defective is so important in this journey. Just because the check engine light comes on in the car doesn’t mean the car is a lemon. Addressing the issue removes the stigma.

Many of us have that family member or friend who continually asks when we’re having kids. As I said, that can be energetically draining. You put on a brave face and swallow your frustration. Every family party and dinner out with friends where you have to do this gets stored in your body—the annoyance, the frustration, the stress, the shame, the fear. Under the umbrella of the Law of Attraction is the Law of Psychophysical Response, which says that for every stressful thought, there is a stressful reaction in the body. Studies show that when we relive stressful past experiences or even hypothetical future scenarios, our bodies actually react as though it’s happening now. Every time you tell someone about it or think about it, your body is stressing in real time. It’s so interesting! Consider the effect that these thoughts have on your body each time someone asks you at work or the next baby shower, “So, when are you having kids?”

The problem with this, besides feeling annoying and hurtful, is that it’s actually impacting your body. When your body is in even a low state of fight-or-flight, it’s enough for your reproductive system to slow or shut down. Think about the primal fight-or-flight response: You need your heart, brain, lungs, and feet (in case of flight) to get out of a stressful situation. The last thing you need is for your reproductive system to be fully functional. So if not for your own sanity, do the following exercise for your body and your future baby.

We take on a lot of responsibility when we’re worried about letting family down. It’s hard enough to deal with how you feel. To take on someone else’s expectations can be really overwhelming. Perpetuating these stressful thoughts takes a toll on the body. The good news is that according to the same law, for every positive thought you have, there is a corresponding response in your body. It’s important that we choose positive thoughts and surround ourselves with positive people for this reason.

Exercise

My challenge to you is to say something to them, not from defensiveness, anger, or fear but from a loving place. You hopefully understand that they just want the best for you. And because they aren’t going through it, they have no idea how it’s affecting you. All they know to say is “Just relax” and “It’s up to God.” Know that, infuriating as that is, it’s coming from a caring place. But that doesn’t mean you should have to keep swallowing your feelings about their constant inquiries.

Speaking to them once about it can save numerous times of them asking. While I totally agree that it’s none of their beeswax, it saves you a perpetual headache. Swallowing your frustration can squash your energy and ability to allow a baby in.

A lot of times, that family member or friend has their own neurosis that they’re projecting onto you, and you’re absorbing it without even being aware of it. For example, before she was pregnant, one of my clients (who just gave birth to twins) was dealing with pretty severe anxiety. As we worked together, we saw that her mother was projecting all her fears onto her daughter. My client was subconsciously scared of being pregnant and of life in general. We did a lot of belief work, which we’ll get to in chapter 2, but to summarize here, once she realized they were her mom’s fears and not hers, she was able to speak frankly to her mom and stop the IV of anxiety and get pregnant.

Some people will casually bring up the subject not knowing that it’s been a struggle that you’re sensitive about. Not having gone through it, they can’t possibly know their nonchalant comments are actually coming across as insensitive. It could also be that friends and family members are just genuinely excited for you. They can’t wait to have a little munchkin to spoil. They know you’re going to be an awesome mom and can’t wait for this next phase of life to start for you.

Whatever the case may be—and it may be all three in various areas of your life—there’s a way you can approach it that will bring about understanding versus hurt feelings on one or both sides. It’s likely that they don’t know they are doing anything that’s hurtful, so if you lash out, both sides are hurt. Then there’s no lasting understanding, because to them it will seem like your reaction is coming out of nowhere.

On the flip side, you don’t want to constantly be defending your position to a pushy family member. Everyone’s got an opinion, and if yours doesn’t match Aunt Susie’s, it can be a little daunting. One of my clients wanted to take a more holistic route, while her mother was pushing every intervention known to man. It was mentally and energetically wearing on my client. So we talked about finding a way to come from a loving but clear place about what her boundaries were.

Try something to the effect of this:

“________ , I understand that you mean well and are excited for me. I know you love me and want the best for me and/or are just curious, so I need you to hear this. ________ and I are in the process of starting a family. I so appreciate your love and concern, but it stresses me out when people keep asking about our baby-making status. I’m really focusing on grounding and being peaceful and present right now. I love that you’re excited to be a ________ (grandparent, aunt, etc.). Just know that when there’s good news to report, you will be one of the first to hear. In the meantime, we are exploring all the avenues that feel right for us. Thanks for your support.”

You don’t want to admonish them. They’re your loved ones and genuinely want to see you happy. They just don’t realize how their inquiries are affecting you. Thank them for their love and concern while being clear about what you need. Remember that they aren’t doing it to piss you off or make you feel less than. And by addressing them in this way, you can head off a lot of your own frustration. That’s honestly the most important thing. We want to get you into a safe, supported, stress-free environment as much as possible. And heading off well-meaning friends and family at the pass can save a lot of energy.

3. Partner’s Energy Is Holding Back

This factor may be seen in the following ways:

Sometimes we get so gung-ho about having a baby that we can unintentionally miss our partner’s concerns and sweep them under the rug. But it doesn’t solve anything and you just have a really big lump under your rug. It’s important to step out of your situation and see if any of these scenarios might apply to your partner.

Even if you are willing to work with him, many husbands/partners are hesitant to consider non-medical alternatives—especially ones that have an energy component—so it can be hard to get them on board to move forward. And honestly sometimes it takes them seeing you making progress with this before they’ll ease in, but there are things you can do to help your partner’s energy move forward without going all woo-woo on them and freaking them out.

Close your eyes and take a deep breath. Visualize your partner in front of you, tune in to their energy, and ask:

Most times they aren’t aware of how to move through it, or sometimes they don’t even know they’re stuck. Sometimes supporting them and pointing them in that direction is enough to shift things.

I’ve seen this many times with men with low sperm count and motility. (We’ll get more into that in chapter 3.) It often comes down to them not being in the career they would love, or the fact that the woman is the breadwinner or the more dominant personality.

You might know what his dream career would be, or you might not. If you don’t, casually ask. Even if money and schedule are tight, what might be some ways that he could move toward it? Workshops? Classes? Meetups? If you can’t think of any class or certification he could pursue, you could just do some research about his desired career in your area or encourage a hobby that fulfills him. My client Amy’s husband was in a job he hated and wanted to be a firefighter. Finances wouldn’t allow that at the moment, so he joined the volunteer brigade and felt more fulfilled. As a result, his sperm count and motility improved.

In another case, my client Rae was pretty high up in corporate America, and her husband made much less than she did. She also made all of the household decisions. It sounds a little silly, but men still have that primal instinct to provide. They still innately feel the need to kill the food, drag it back, and see their family live because of them. So with Rae taking care of the “hunting” and the home front, her husband was left unsure of his place and certainly not feeling like a provider. In chapter 3 we will go into how this directly affects the body, but for now know that when a man isn’t feeling important or valid or that he has a primary role in the function of the family, his sperm motility and count can be affected.

Did I ask Rae to quit the prestigious position she loved, just so her husband could feel important? Of course not. There are other ways that men can feel like they’re contributing, even if it’s not financial. It could be something as simple as having him do a DIY project that you’ve been meaning to knock off the list for a while, or getting the car serviced, taking out the trash, or other things that need to be done to keep your lives running smoothly. We want to be careful that it’s not just giving chores to a kid. The important part of this is that you let him know how helpful it was that he did said task. It was such a big help, relief, took something off your plate, etc. Thanking him for making your life easier goes a long way with men. Not only are they more likely to keep doing a task when they are praised for it, but energetically they feel like they have a greater purpose, more worth, etc. That’s when we can start to see changes in the morphology.

Also look at his family situation:

All of the manifestations of male infertility come from fears and beliefs that he’s likely not even consciously aware of. So take some time away from the stress of getting pregnant and plug yourself into lovingly helping your partner forward.

4. Is Your Relationship Solid?

Some of the aforementioned things apply here, but this is more about the two of you. This can be a tough factor to really look at, so if this applies to you, try to breathe into it and see how you can move forward. When we are on Mission Baby, it’s so easy to want to skip over the pesky relationship thing.

Here’s the thing: the obstacle is the path. That’s a famous saying and it’s so true. This obstacle was put in front of you to move through—not to leap over or burrow under or find a way around. The Universe is a loyal friend, albeit that tough-love friend that you want to punch but know it’s right. We’ll get into why this is the case energetically in chapter 4, but for now know that avoiding our blocks doesn’t make them go away. Sure, we can choose not to deal with it now, but the pattern will keep repeating until we move through it, so why not address it and be done with it? Yes, it can be messy and painful, but honestly that’s better than staying in some kind of weird relationship limbo. Don’t hope that getting pregnant will change your relationship. Change your relationship so you can get pregnant. Ask yourself:

I know this seems like an unpleasant topic, but two of my clients, Jasmine and Diane, have gone through some combo of these issues and both chose very different paths. Neither is right or wrong. It’s more about making a decision.

Their husbands wouldn’t go to counseling because “nothing was wrong with them.” Their wives were putting so much energy into the relationship and not getting anything back. They were being made to feel small and insignificant—and believe me, the worth piece does a number on fertility. If you don’t feel capable in one area of your life, it’s really difficult to feel capable in others.

We can’t change our partners or make them do what we want. We can’t change anybody. But we can and must change how we react to this challenge we are being presented with. Do we find a way to move through the obstacle and stay, or do we leave and start over? Sometimes through the belief work (in chapter 2) we are able to shift our energy and viewpoint about what’s happening in the relationship and release negative energy about it and move forward. That being said, abuse is never okay and should not be tolerated. There’s always a lesson to learn on an energetic level, but I am by no means condoning staying in an abusive relationship.

So often we feel like if we leave now, it’s gonna take way too long to meet someone else, get married, get pregnant, and have a baby. We already feel like we’re running out of time (which isn’t true, by the way, and we’ll get to that in chapter 2), so we might as well stay.

I promise you, if the relationship isn’t fixed one way or the other, you’re going to keep spinning your wheels.

We want a baby so badly sometimes that we’re willing to leap over the relationship problem to get to the baby.

Remember that energetically, this roadblock is being put there for you to address, not to leap over.

Admittedly, that can seem like a huge pain in the ass. But see if you can look at it by asking yourself, “What do I need to learn from this first? What is the gift I’m supposed to be getting out of this?” This can be a hard question to answer, especially if your partner doesn’t know how to communicate or the relationship has been deteriorating for quite a while. I promise that there is always a reason we are going through what we are going though, and the timing isn’t random. The things that happen to us aren’t because of a vengeful god or because we’re being punished for cheating on that spelling test in fifth grade. There are always lessons to be learned. That phrase can have a not-so-great connotation to it. When we were little and heard the phrase “I hope you learned your lesson,” it usually meant we’d been punished for doing something we shouldn’t have done or that shouldn’t have happened. So we can be a little gun-shy when it comes to us having to learn “life lessons.”

I’d like to reframe that a little bit. Whether you believe in reincarnation or not, I like to refer to our life this time around on Earth as “Earth Camp.” I believe that each time around we pick things to “work on,” whether it’s family, relationships, health, or money. These are not easy things to move through, but if we do, we acquire skills that up-level us, so to speak; and if we don’t, we repeat it the next time until we do get it. So everything we come across in this incarnation on Earth Camp is a class with something to learn. As long as we don’t assign a stressful meaning to the thing, it can be as simple as taking history, algebra, or a relationship class. Yes, in some cases it’s a doctoral-thesis kind of class, but it’s for us to learn, not something to harm us. I like to say that it’s happening for you, not to you. We will live through it, though it doesn’t feel like it at the time. So the more we can say, “Okay, this sucks and is really stressful right now, but I’m in this situation to learn something, so what might that be?” There is an answer. I will bet lots and lots of money on it.

In the case of my client Jasmine, her husband was super high-strung and was always going to put work first, and he verbally abused her to keep her small. He had addictions he wouldn’t deal with, and her lesson was to take back her power and believe that she could do or be anything she wanted. She moved back among her friends and family and blossomed. She found love soon after and was pregnant eight months later at forty-one! So her not getting pregnant with her former husband was a sign for her to deal with the relationship.

My client Diane had a similar experience in terms of being made to feel small—her husband was squashing her personality because she was “too much,” and he was verbally abusive and unsupportive. He threatened divorce on a daily basis and told her that she was the problem and he had nothing to work on. He was also lacking in some social skills and had to deal with an overbearing mother who controlled everything well past the normal timeline. He either chose not to leave his mother’s nest or wasn’t allowed to, but his mother overstepped boundaries by continuing to try to make decisions for him even after he was married, and to make my client feel like a burden and less than.

Diane realized her husband hadn’t learned certain things about relationships because of being sheltered by his overbearing mother. Things like how to work through disagreements without threatening divorce. That the way your wife does things isn’t necessarily how your mother does them and that’s okay. That once you’re married, the two of you are a nuclear unit and make all decisions, financial and otherwise, together. That you don’t squash the other person’s personality to make it fit your ideals. My lovely client, who wanted to make this relationship work, was the more evolved of the pair and did a lot of work on herself to clean up her beliefs and blocks so that she could be in a place to help him through his and move forward as a team. She made the decision to stay and was able to get pregnant.

So whatever you decide, the important thing is that you decide something and take action in that direction. The Universe can’t bring you what you want when you’re in a place of limbo.

When there’s another person involved in the decision, it makes it more complicated. We can’t change that person and we can’t make them get on board with our plan. We can’t make them heal themselves or the relationship if they are not willing. So in order to assess where they are, we need to crack open our heart and tell them about our dreams for a family and for the relationship, and our desire to work on things, go to therapy, and exhaust all options before throwing in the towel, plus how much we really love and value them, etc., and then see where they are mentally. If they are willing to recognize that they need to work on things as well and are willing to do what they can to preserve the relationship, fantastic! Together you can outline some steps and a timeline for the goals of the relationship and begin moving forward. Having a heart-to-heart really helped my client Diane to stay, because she saw a different side of her husband and his commitment to implementing solutions and moving forward. We want to know that we are on the same team and that the other person has our back. So having a heart-to-heart can strip away the stories we have in our head about the other person and allow us to see them in a vulnerable state and reconnect with them. Often, by working on ourselves and bringing our energy up, they will rise up to meet us.

If your partner says you’re the problem and he has nothing to work on, first of all, that’s not true. I don’t care if the ratio is 50-50, 70-30, or 99-1, but there is never one person who is completely at fault in an argument or a relationship. We can get ourselves so closed off because of our hurt and frustration about the other person and so plugged into our “stories” about it that it can seem like the other person is the problem. But there is always something to work on. No one’s ever done or finished early. Everyone has crap to work on. Unfortunately, if your partner can’t see that you both have things to work on, it can be hard to move forward. If you are funneling energy into something and not getting anything back, that can mean that it may be better for you to move on, as Jasmine did. If you are staying small, giving up your dreams, and walking on eggshells around your partner, that is not even remotely conducive to conceiving a baby. And leaving could mean that you’re allowing in that next partner, like the one who came for Jasmine just months later. Leaving didn’t stop her from being a mom, and it didn’t take nearly as long to have a baby as her brain thought it would.

Close your eyes and put your hand on your heart and ask yourself which scenario feels right for you. We cannot make the decision to stay or go out of fear of what our partner will do, fear of what will happen to our dream of having a baby, or fear that we will make the wrong decision. We will talk more in chapter 4 about how to align your energy with what you want versus what you don’t want, but making a decision from a calm, plugged-in place will ensure that you’re doing the right thing.

5. Too Cerebral (Not in Your Body)

Many women dealing with fertility issues are not connected to their bodies. They’re smart women who are good at their jobs and figuring things out, but there’s a disassociation from the body that can happen that can exacerbate the infertility issue. We are essentially driving our meat suit around from our head and are often disconnected from our intuition as a result.

Just as the third eye is an accepted center of intuition, so is your gut. I’m sure you’ve heard the term “gut feeling.” But so many of us like to think and analyze things down to a bloody stump, to the point that we are completely unaware of what our intuition is trying to tell us, and we get frustrated when our body doesn’t do what we want or think it should do (which we will talk about more in chapter 3). We feel that our body is failing us and that if we could just get it on board with our brilliant plan, everything would be fine. We need our body in order to have a baby, but if we are treating it like this unfortunate ball and chain that we have to drag around, it’s very hard to be connected to it and to conceive.

It’s also likely that if you’re super-cerebral, it’s not so easy for you to feel into the emotions of things. So we want to look at some ways to get you more aware of your feelings and how to direct them toward what you want, as well as to bridge the gap between your brain and body by learning to listen to your intuition. Now this may seem easier said than done. As with any habit or pattern, it takes time. But here are a couple of exercises to get you started.

Exercise

It’s hard sometimes for us cerebral folks to just “get into our bodies.” So sometimes having visual cues can help us connect to our body and therefore have more access to our intuition. Close your eyes and visualize a tiny purple elevator sitting at the top of your head. Close the door of the elevator and watch it start to descend to your forehead. Taking deep, slow breaths, see the elevator move down to your throat, down to your heart, and lowering deeper still to your upper abdomen. Your breathing slows down as the elevator descends into your lower abdomen and finally comes to a stop at the base of your spine.

Once you’re dropped down into your body, place a hand on your abdomen and just ask a question, like “What do I need to know/do in order to move forward?” Now here’s the tricky part: we want to not be attached to getting an answer. We will get into attachment in chapter 4, but for now, just ask the question and be open to receiving whatever comes. It may be a visual, a color, or a feeling, or you may hear a sentence. You may hear nothing for the first week of doing this. It’s okay! You wouldn’t expect to be able to learn and speak Aramaic in the span of a week. Cut yourself some slack and just keep calling in the energy of the next best step for you. Write down whatever you do notice, even if it seems insignificant. If you get the color blue one day and an ostrich the next, write it down. See if you can feel into what they might mean. You can also look up the symbolism of the things that come up, but I find it best to feel into what it means for you.

When developing your intuition, the hardest thing is to trust it. When I was developing mine, I remember saying more often than not, “Is that my intuition or my imagination?” While it is difficult to discern at the beginning, you need your imagination to access your intuition. This is why it’s important to write everything down each time you do this. The more you do it, the more you will see patterns or coincidences, and you’ll begin to trust yourself more. We will dig more into intuition in chapter 2, but it’s essential that we learn how to be in our body instead of driving it around from our head. There are things that our body is trying to tell us, and the more connected we are to it, the more we can interpret the information and take action to move the mind and body forward together versus pulling them in opposite directions.

Exercise

Here is an exercise for getting a little more connected to your emotions. Close your eyes and think of a time when you were really sad or angry (a relationship ended, your boss was mean to you, someone passed away, etc.). Notice where in your body you feel that thought (in the pit of your stomach, wanting to vomit, wanting to give up, blood boiling, etc.). Notice what that thought does to your body.

Now wipe that visual slate clean and shake it off. Close your eyes again and imagine a time when you were really excited about something (the day your partner proposed, when you got a promotion, when you got a puppy, etc.). Notice where in your body you feel that thought (butterflies in your stomach, goose bumps/chills, can’t stop smiling/laughing, etc.). Notice what that thought does to your body.

We get so caught up in our day-to-day routines that we rarely check in to see how our emotions are affecting our body, especially if we lean toward the cerebral end of the spectrum. So take some time to take stock of your emotions and see how you really feel about something versus what you think about it. We will get into this more in chapter 4, but when we feel things (versus thinking about them), that’s when things begin to shift on a cellular level in the body.

It took me about two months to get my client Leah to be able to assess how she was feeling, not her thoughts about her feelings but how she felt. As an academic with multiple long-standing family issues, she was great at having the drive to get things done, but she had zero idea about what was going on with her emotions. Emotions seemed like a hazard or certainly a huge inconvenience to her, so it was best to be strong and not care—all the time. This started to take a toll on her physical body, which we will get into in chapter 3. Her check engine light was saying, “Hey! We need to process some shit! And since you won’t look at it, it’s affecting the vessel that makes the baby you want so desperately.” Using the previous two exercises helped her get to a place where she could check in with how she was feeling and to process things so that she could heal her body and therefore get pregnant. Most of us are like Leah in that we don’t like looking at our uncomfortable emotions. After all, who wants to feel anger, sadness, hopelessness? This is, however, part of the process of healing (as we will see in chapter 4) and is also important in terms of getting your body to a place where it feels positive and safe to bake this baby.

6. Super Planner/Micromanager

I say this lovingly to all my Type-A compadres: We get shit done, right? And most of the time that’s a good thing, but when it comes to the arrival of our munchkin, it can be a little frustrating when it doesn’t happen when we want it to. Whenever we think we can control everything, the Universe has a little laugh and says, “Oh yeah?” All of a sudden it’s like, “What the hell happened to my plans?” We want to get pregnant at 7:01 p.m. on April 17 in Paris because that’s when it’s convenient and fantastic for us. It sounds funny, but some of us really can get like that about our timelines. We want everything to fit into this nice box, but the Universe has other ideas.

Relinquishing our need to control things is perhaps the trickiest part of this whole process. Most of us already know if we are a bit of a control freak or not. Chances are, if we are team Type A, we probably have a bit of a control issue.

Sometimes this just manifests as needing to be tidy all the time, or else we get nervous; but some women are entrenched in having to deal with a more extreme manifestation, like OCD. These can be things that have developed from a point in childhood or adulthood where we have felt an extreme loss of control and have put the manifestation of that into an action or need. It may not seem directly related to your uterus, but the fear of not having control perpetuates more fear (which keeps your fight-or-flight switch on).

Exercise

If you have a need to control, take a deep breath and visualize whatever your specific issue is (the load of laundry that needs to be done, the bed that needs to be made, etc.). Feel what that’s like in your body. How much does it bug you? How compelled are you to finish the task? Where do you feel that in your body?

Then say, “If I didn’t need to do the laundry or make the bed, how would I feel? If the dishwasher isn’t unloaded today or I don’t make the bed, what will happen? Will anyone die? Will something bad happen?” It feels like it sometimes. But we need to give ourselves a break, because maybe it’s more important to take a bath or watch a movie with the hubby. See if you can zoom out of your body and look at the compulsion as just a thought. It’s not a reality that you will die or anything bad will happen, it’s just your brain’s story about the thought.

Can you just sit in the discomfort of the thought long enough to realize nothing will happen? Then, don’t make the bed or do the dishes (or whatever you chose). Once the wave of fear goes over us and we realize that we survived, our brain may freak out a little less each time.

As you know, having a child is going to turn your schedule on its ear, so can you start getting used to not getting everything done perfectly and being okay with it now? One of my clients did this by not making her bed and not doing the dishes. She sat in the discomfort of it and felt into what she was making it mean: “Does it mean I will become a slob and will end up on a reality show about hoarding if I don’t do these things for one day? That my life will spiral into a pit of despair? Can I prove to myself and to the Universe that I don’t need to control everything?” This process really helps us to be more okay with the timing of things. Think of it as a show of commitment to do these practice runs, despite your uneasiness about them. I am of course not saying to never do dishes or laundry again; it’s more about addressing the anxiety that comes up around the need to do it that we want to ease.

If you’re reading this book, you’re probably open to the idea of how your energy affects your body/life. So you may even be aware that trying to control everything is not so conducive to this process and you may want to let go of the control. We will go into the energy of this more in chapter 4, but basically most of us try to let go of our control as fast as we can—which means we are controlling how we give up control, which is still controlling. It’s like trying to run away from something that you’ve been Velcroed to. Frustrating as that may be, there are ways around it. We’re going to talk about it more in the Law of Attraction material in chapter 4, but let’s find a mantra around releasing control—one that doesn’t have the word “control” in it. Try some of these on for size, or create one of your own that has a positive, forward feeling, and invite in the next step, versus hunting it down:

The cool thing about a mantra is that even if it doesn’t fully resonate with you, the more you say it, the more it drops down into your body. And that’s when things start to change on a cellular level. So write your chosen mantra on a bunch of sticky notes and put them everywhere—fridge, bathroom mirror, night stand, laptop, etc. Get used to saying the mantra over and over. It will help to start retraining your brain.

As Type-A-vengers, we might also want to keep an eye on our brain/ego’s need to be right and to have some tangible acknowledgment that we are doing well. As Type-A-ers, we are good little students and want to know that we are executing the task at hand correctly and performing well. Our trust for our body goes right out the window, and we rely on outside measures to tell us how well we’re doing. Many of you are taking your temperature every morning, feeling pressured to have sex at the exact moment you find out you’re ovulating, and using ovulation sticks and waiting for the smiley-face peak fertility sign to appear. If that happy face doesn’t come up, we feel that we’ve failed; and if it does come up, we feel like we need to go have sex and that this has to be the month we get pregnant. We will go into the energy of this in chapter 4, but suffice it to say that these things can actually exacerbate your infertility.

Constant monitoring and not trusting your body pulls in more fear, more needing, and more anxiety, which is not the cushiest place for your munchkin to bake. Your body wants to be trusted. It knows how to do what countless women have done before you for millennia. And I get that it’s hard when you’ve had previous experiences that make it seem otherwise. We tend to turn these past thoughts and experiences into the belief that we need things outside of ourselves to tell us when it’s okay. We will cover beliefs in chapter 2, but here’s my challenge to you:

Can you commit for one month to not

For those of you planners who feel you’re already running out of time, that thought of giving up the meticulous monitoring is going to make you gulp a little. But can you show your body energetically that you can trust it? Many of my clients who started in this place are now actually able to feel when they’re ovulating. They feel when the cramping is different from period cramps. Just the sheer idea of trusting that their body will do what it needs to do is a huge leap forward.

You don’t need anything outside of your body to get pregnant. Commit this month to your body. See if you can connect with it, and put out to the Universe that you know that together you can do this.

7. You’re Not Where You Want to Be in Your Career

We covered some of this in the stressful job section, so you can go back and refer to #1 as well. But I have really been surprised by the number of my clients who also end up moving their jobs as they move their fertility. Part of this can have to do with our solar plexus chakra, which is the energetic center of drive and ambition: our power center. It’s the confidence of being able to complete the things we set out to do, which can be related to work and/or fertility. If we are not feeling powerful or capable in our job, it’s easy to not feel capable of anything, and that can translate into your ability to create a human. When you are feeling powerful and capable, things seem to come easy to you and there isn’t a heavy “efforting” feeling, because you’re not feeling powerless or at the mercy of something you can’t control.

Many of you are in a job you feel obligated to be in because it’s what your parents thought you should do or it’s all you could find at the time. And more and more I’m finding that sometimes the reason for the baby delay is that we are really supposed to be stepping into our purpose—not just another higher-paying job, but our purpose. Many of us are not being what we wanted to be when we grew up. It may be partially that life got in the way, or that we were influenced by others who made us feel that the thing we wanted to be wouldn’t be viable, and that we would be poor and miserable if we pursued it. Alternatively, it might be that we’ve never allowed ourselves to really sink into what we would love to do for a living. What would light you up if you could do it every day and get paid for it? You have a unique set of talents that you came into this world with, and we want to make sure they’re being used and not squandered. If you’re a CEO who’s supposed to be a chef, or a dental hygienist who’s supposed to be a yoga teacher, there’s discord in that energy. And it can throw our whole alignment off so that we literally can’t receive the things that are important to us this time around. So often we have to adjust the career area first, and then once we are in alignment, the fertility easily follows suit.

My client Eliana was a teacher. She felt obligated to stay in that career, but her dream was her side business. Crafting organic bath and beauty products made her heart sing. She couldn’t imagine how she could let the teaching pension and the 401K go, until she saw the flexibility of working from home to be with her baby and the fact that she could build an empire on this. All of a sudden her sales started picking up, and that brought her closer to being pregnant.

Exercise

Write a little brain dump (freeform thought, no structure) around the idea that if money didn’t matter and you could do whatever you wanted for a living, what would it be? There’s no structure to this—just keep writing until you feel like you’re done. It’s important to write it down, as your brain processes it differently than when you just think about it. Try not to judge what comes up, and don’t be the “enlightened” human being that you are. Get down-and-dirty honest and list all of the things that come up, no matter how stupid or frivolous they sound. Even if your brain/ego goes to things like “that could never happen” or “no one will pay me enough just to do that,” write down everything that sounds delicious for you regarding this dream job. I jokingly say to my clients, “If you want to be a lint salesman, let’s find a way to do it!” The main thing for this exercise is to feel into the excitement of letting yourself dream big and noticing how it feels to entertain that you could design a career that you’d love, versus one that you feel obligated to be in.

More and more I am seeing this list turn into people’s careers or purposes. Dare to dream a little. (We’ll get into why that’s important in chapter 4.) It may very well be that you have a hard time identifying what your dream job title would be. That’s why I want you to feel into the qualities that you’d love in a job instead of trying to fit it into the box of what your brain knows or expects. When looking at your list, it’s okay if you then say, “These things aren’t a job.” I can relate. The work I do with my private clients is a hybrid of three different modalities. What I do didn’t exist before I did it either, but now I’m helping women all over the world and am filled to the brim with purpose every day. So try not to judge what comes up, but rather feel in your bones how awesome it would be if the things you wrote down appeared on your doorstep as a job that you got to do every day and that people were paying a decent amount of money for. We must start putting out energetic feelers toward our purpose, even if we aren’t sure how it’s going to work out or how we’re going to get there. It’s important that you just acknowledge that you have a purpose other than the job you’re doing, and that you then take whatever steps you can toward allowing that in.

8. Money Worries

This can be a tricky one. Money beliefs can be deeply embedded patterns in our psyche and can really trip us up. We learn these patterns from a very early age, without even realizing it. If we had secondhand clothes or were repeatedly told that money doesn’t grow on trees, etc., it can instill in us a survival pattern of there not being enough. It can elicit a really primal fear that we’re going to die at any given moment if the money stream runs out. We are going to get more into the fight-or-flight response and how it physically affects fertility later on, but know that fear—especially fear around something that dictates whether or not you have shelter or food—can be a huge block. I’ve been there and I totally get it, that feeling of “What if I don’t have enough to pay my bills?” or “I don’t see how I’m going to be able to afford that.” It lasted many years for me, because not only was I not aware of the pattern, but I also didn’t think there was a way out of it or that there were steps I could take to shift it.

Sometimes we get so ahead of ourselves that we never move forward because we’re scared of what might happen. Now obviously, if you’re living in a cardboard box, it might not be the best idea to bring a child into the world, but most of us are not living in that scenario. So we want to separate our thoughts from what is actually true (see chapter 2 for more), so that we are not paralyzed by fear but actually allow in more abundance—which allows our body to feel safer.

Exercise

Write a list of what you do have enough money for. Include everything you can think of, from the epic to the miniscule. Can you feel into a place of being grateful for each one of those things? When we get into manifesting in chapter 4, we will see that a big piece of getting things moving is being grateful for what we do have and feeling into that.

Think about what you do have that isn’t necessarily monetary but is helpful in terms of making your life easier, more enjoyable, and less stressful, such as a great support system of family and friends who would help when needed. Explore these areas and then take time to feel into them.

It’s important not just to make a list and intellectually acknowledge these things to be grateful for. That doesn’t do much in terms of moving your energy forward. What gets things snap-crackle-popping is when you feel these things in your body. That’s when things begin to change on a cellular level and you attract what you want versus what you don’t.

Exercise

Make a goal sheet for the rest of the year. (This worksheet is included in the Conceivable Tool Kit.) Break it into three-month, six-month, and twelve-month goals. Write three goals for each time period. When setting goals, we don’t want to think of them in the typical sense—the drive, the competition with the self or others, or the belief that “if I don’t achieve this, I’ve failed.” What would be awesome to shift in your career, or what circumstances would alleviate this concern? Each goal should feel good and should feel attainable. You don’t want your brain to shut off and go, “Yeah right, that’s never going to happen.” So make sure it sounds exciting and a little out of your comfort zone while still plausible. The great thing is that you don’t have to know how the hell it’s gonna happen, but just that it would be phenomenal if it did. Feel into how amazing it will be when three, six, or twelve months down the road you look at these goals and they all happened!

After you fill in your sheet, post it on the fridge or your nightstand and feel into each of the goals every day. Each day look at them and don’t try to force these goals to happen, but just imagine how lit up inside would you feel if they did. What would it feel like in your body if that thing just showed up?

Our perception about what money is and what it means is key. When we are stuck in these embedded patterns, it can be hard to think that money isn’t the root of all evil or that you’ll ever have enough. The wise Wayne Dyer said that if you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. From an energetic perspective, if we perceive an issue as heavy, it will feel heavy. If we perceive it as light, it will feel light. The less power we give money, the less we are governed by it. Can we look at money simply as wampum—as a means of exchange—and can we get to a place of not hoping but of trusting that the Universe will provide what we need when we need it?

Money is necessary in today’s society. There’s really no getting around that unless you go off the grid. But we can reframe it as something that helps us to have the experiences in life that light us up and make us happy, versus the thing we will never achieve or that holds us back. If you’re living in fear that there will never be enough, there never will be. So many of us are in survival mode when it comes to money, whether it’s because we actually don’t have money or we are afraid of losing it. This triggers our fight-or-flight response in a big way, because money is what we use to buy our two basic needs: food and shelter. Remember that your reproductive system isn’t needed when you’re running from a stressful situation. So if you are stressed about being able to provide for yourself, let alone another mouth to feed, we want to reframe that ASAP. It’s our beliefs (chapter 2) that are stressful, not the actual situation, so the sooner we can see what is going right with our money situation, the sooner we can move out of the dire situation. We then go from surviving life to enjoying it—and that makes a huge difference in the quality of your life, whether there’s a baby or not.

9. Do You Have a Hard Time Saying No?

This factor can be related to your job, if your boss continually asks extra things of you. It can be in terms of family (especially a tight-knit one). Is a family member ill or elderly, and a lot of responsibility falls on you? Do your drama-queen friends need you to be there for them all the time? Again, I’m not saying ditch your friends, your sick brother, or your grandma. I am saying we need to establish some boundaries.

When you are that go-to person for people and you readily do what needs to be done, people keep going to you because they know it’ll get done.

It’s great to know you’re helping people, but this is where your little brain/ego kicks in and goes, “We are taking care of everyone but ourselves. We literally cannot handle another human,” and hence the endocrine system and the reproductive system get wonky or slow/shut down because your brain is already convinced that you have no time to yourself and therefore can’t possibly add a baby to the mix.

So where can we set some boundaries?

As mentioned in external factor #1 with the stressful job situation, commit to staying late only one or two days a month if it’s normally five. If you don’t know how well that would go over, have a conversation with your boss or the HR department. Tell them it has been recommended to you that, due to a “condition” you’re going through, they’d like you to limit your overtime. You can say it without going into too many details.

If you are caring for an ailing parent or grandparent and have siblings, coordinate so that you’re not the caretaker every day. If you don’t, ask a family friend or spouse to help or, if means allow, hire someone to give you a break for a couple of days per week. This is not selfish. You are not a horrible child or grandchild if you do this. Think about what their soul would want for your soul. I promise that it’s not to be stressed and tired all the time because you felt obligated. They know you love them.

Help create this space for you so you can show the Universe that you can slow down your life and make room for what you want. Make space now. Put that energy out there. The “I’ll do it later” mentality brings more “I’ll do it later” energy, which we’ll get to in chapter 4, and that leads to you being stuck in an energetic loop of “later.”

Additionally, some of us have friends who are living in a Greek tragedy and need our urgent help all the time amid the ninety-seven other things we have going on in our lives. One of my clients and I affectionately call these people the “facehuggers” (from the movie Alien). You are the person who doesn’t say no, so these folks just migrate right to you. They don’t know how much it taxes your energy because they’re so caught up in their own drama. Do you ditch these friends? Of course not.

But you can try setting a boundary of a weekly lunch or dinner date where all the beans are spilled, and then it’s just occasional texting throughout the rest of the week.

You can also tell them you’ve got a lot of stuff going on that you’re trying to process, so if you don’t get back to them right away, you still love them and will be there for them as much as you can, but there’s some stuff you’re working through that may inhibit that.

Let your friend know that, say, between the hours of 6:00 and 8:30 p.m., you’re having dinner and catching up with your husband or partner, so if something super-important comes up, she can text you after that.

Brainstorm some things to say that would feel good to you, where you’re communicating to your friend, boss, or family member that you care about them and that there are certain things you need as well, and you appreciate their understanding of that.

Part of the fertility puzzle is claiming the worth piece. Your needs are just as important as other people’s needs. You deserve and are allowed to do whatever you need to move yourself forward. There’s enough to go around for everyone. Claim that.

Claiming your time and space doesn’t make you insensitive or a bitch or a bad friend. If you don’t stand up for yourself, you can’t expect anyone else to. And you can’t expect the people who are sucking up your time and energy to know that they’re being facehuggers if they’re not made aware of it. We often don’t want to stir the pot or upset people, but you can say it in a loving way by letting them know that you care about them but you also have to take care of what’s best for you right now. Voicing what you need is especially important for those of you dealing with thyroid conditions, which we will explore in chapter 3.

10. Are You Eating Crap?

Here’s the thing about the food piece for me: it’s kind of a double-edged sword in terms of this mindset/energy work for fertility.

I try to eat clean as much as I can. I eat organic whenever possible and I feel the benefits in my body. The energy I have when I’m eating well is super-noticeable. I’m definitely an advocate of the belief that if you can fight a condition with food instead of medicine or drugs, you absolutely should. There’s a lot of evidence for how you can manage hormonal imbalances with food and supplements, some of which I’m going to cover here.

My concern is that, as with many of these fertility “fixes,” our brain becomes obsessed with determining the right amount of beets, kale, and folic acid we should consume. We become rigid about it, like we did with the ovulation sticks, and it actually exacerbates the infertility. When we obsess over making sure we eat the right amount of this or believe we shouldn’t have any of that, it places our body in a stressed-out place, paranoid that the coffee we just drank means we can’t get pregnant this month. It’s just not a helpful place to be. We want to pull the body out of its fight-or-flight mode and help it feel safe, calm, and nourished.

The following guidelines are intended to be helpful, and I encourage you to consider consulting a holistic health coach or naturopath who has a chill vibe to further your understanding of and connection with the foods that may be beneficial.

From my experience with all of my work with clients, whether or not they got pregnant wasn’t dependent on whether or not they drank a cup of coffee or didn’t eat the right amount of kale. It came down to their mindset shifting. Let’s face it: we’ve all known women who don’t take care of their bodies (drinking alcohol, smoking, eating fast food, taking drugs, etc.) who get pregnant, so diet really is not the be-all and end-all. But it can help if you’re approaching it from a nourishing versus militant way.

So we’re going to look at five things to avoid and five foods to amp up.

Five Things to Avoid

Multiple cups of coffee per day. One cup of coffee will not kill your chances of conceiving, but caffeine in general can alter your blood sugar level and overstimulate the adrenals, which can send your hormones into a tizzy.

Soda and bottled juices. These are high in sugar and can have a negative effect on your blood sugar level and hormones.

Soy products. Unfortunately most of the soy available now is genetically modified and has been shown to affect both male and female fertility. Soy has estrogen-mimicking hormones that knock your body’s hormonal balance for a loop. This especially affects men in terms of low sperm count and motility, as it mimics estrogen.

Low-fat foods, especially dairy. Not only are these foods highly processed and packed with sugar, but your body actually needs fat to grow a munchkin. A 2007 study from Harvard showed that women who ate full-fat products had a much easier time conceiving than those who consumed fat-free ones (see “Diet and Lifestyle in the Prevention of Ovulatory Disorder Infertility,” www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17978119). If you feel uncomfortable about the idea of giving up low-fat foods, we need to have a look at your body image and beliefs about pregnancy. Sometimes releasing those things can be helpful so that we can physically and mentally allow a baby in.

Alcohol. Again, a glass of wine on occasion won’t kill you, but if you have a glass or more every day, you might want to consider reducing or stopping altogether. Alcohol consumption can prevent the production of progesterone in women and decimate sperm count in men. Cutting out beer is what helped Chloe’s husband get his count back up, and subsequently they got pregnant. So if your husband or partner drinks regularly, at least have him cut down when you’re ovulating—but preferably stop.

Five Foods to Amp Up

Leafy greens such as spinach and kale are high in folate for healthy ovaries and vitamin E for healthy menstrual cycles.

Eggs (including the yolks) are rich in vitamin D, supporting ovulation.

Sunflower seeds are packed with zinc, which helps support egg quality. Oysters are also a good source of zinc.

Wild salmon has the least amount of mercury of all fish and is a great source of omega-3 fatty acids, which help to balance your reproductive system and send more blood to the necessary organs.

Nourishing herbal infusions of red clover and linden flower are helpful to both regulate hormones and reduce inflammation. (Inflammation is one of the leading causes of hormonal imbalance.) Herbal infusion recipes are included in the Conceivable Tool Kit.

Again, please don’t drive yourself crazy with the exact amount of this or the wrong amount of that. If it feels good to you to do some of these things, great, but if you’re spending more time and energy stressing about eating the right foods than hanging out with the hubby or taking a yoga class, then I lovingly say, “Step away.” Getting too rigid about anything isn’t good, as we mentioned before with the ovulation sticks and temperature, etc.

It’s really about where your mindset and energy are. These are just supplemental suggestions.

11. Do You Not Have Closure on
One or More Relationships?

This factor might seem kind of out of left field, but a surprising number of my clients have energy hanging back in past relationships.

For some, it’s the “one that got away” mentality. They wonder if they would still be together if X circumstances hadn’t torn them apart, so a little stream of energy is hanging back there in “what if.” This can be a tricky one to catch, because even if 95 percent of you gets that he wasn’t the right guy for you, the brain can still be like, “But maybe it could have been. Maybe it would have been easier to get pregnant.” As long as we’ve got even 5 percent of our subconscious energy in that thought, it can be enough to derail us from Operation Baby.

For others, it’s not that they still want to be with the person, but that they never got closure and want to know why. What’s wrong with me that you broke up with me? Some of my clients have subconsciously made it mean something about their worth that this person no longer wanted to be with them. Of course it’s not about you or your worth, but it can feel like it, and a strand of energy is held back there. To your brain, it feels like “it shouldn’t have happened this way.” We’ll get into why that’s not so helpful in chapter 2, but trust that it actually happened the exact way it was supposed to. As long as we’re sending strands of energy to “it shouldn’t have happened,” we keep ourselves in a sort of bizarre state of limbo. The body and the brain are inextricably linked, so if we’re having these thoughts that aren’t helpful, it’s preventing our body from functioning at an optimal level as well.

Finally, for some others it’s not that they want to be back with the person, but they are mad that they spent what they feel were their prime baby-making years with the ex. They feel that they wasted time, and now they’re getting screwed because they waited too long. This is pretty common among my clients who are in their forties and had a non-
committal boyfriend throughout their thirties and feel like they are being punished now that they want to have a baby with their current partner. There tends to be a lot of subconscious anger around this, which can manifest in the form of cysts, fibroids, or endometriosis (see chapter 3). It’s important to address these hurts and beliefs so that your body can resume normal functioning.

You are always where you’re supposed to be.

We have beliefs about what should have been, which we’ll cover in chapter 2. But see if you can entertain letting go of the energy you’re giving to him for having wasted your time. It’s not affecting him. It’s affecting you. You can’t be in the energy of needing closure from him and be ready to make a baby at the same time. Those two energies are too far apart.

Exercise

Write a letter to this person. Handwrite it and get down and dirty with your emotions. Cry and yell while you’re writing it. Get everything out that you need to say and then burn or shred the letter in a ceremonial “I’m done.”

Visualize a gold cord of energy going from your heart to his. Sit in the emotion of this for a minute. Feel the hurt, regret, etc., and then see if you can genuinely wish him well on his path and thank him for lessons learned. (Remember, we are presented with the partners we need at the time.) Chop the cord with your hand. You may need to do this a few times to really feel a release, so rinse and repeat as necessary.

Write a brain dump (freeform thought, no structure) on why it was purposeful that things happened exactly the way they did. Why is it great that you didn’t end up with him? Why was the timing not right? Why is your current partner best for you to have a baby with, and why will he be a great father? This is perhaps the most important one to feel into. Make sure you write it all down. There’s something about the act of writing down your thoughts and then seeing them on paper that can help your energy shift.

Our brain loves to be in shoulda-coulda-woulda mode, but the fact is that it just keeps us stuck. We can’t change the past or predict the future. The only thing we can change is the present, by choosing positive thoughts. In order to start thinking positively on a more consistent basis, we must be willing to give up our attachment to the past. This can be easier said than done, which is why doing the belief work in chapter 2 can be really helpful in terms of offloading the energy that isn’t helpful to you.

12. Do You Have Space for This Baby?

A surprising number of my clients haven’t given any thought to where the baby is going to go (in terms of physical space). I get it. It’s one of those things where you think, “Well, we’ll figure it out when we have the baby,” or “I don’t want to get my hopes up and then find out I can’t have one.” We want to get more of your energy moving toward the idea that this baby is in fact coming. We want to be able to create the physical space as well as the energetic space for the baby to come.

Many women I’ve spoken with are currently living in small one-bedroom apartments and haven’t gotten excited about how they’re going to decorate because there’s nowhere for the baby to go. I get that you can’t exactly justify selling your tiny apartment at the moment or converting the office right now, but if you found out you were pregnant today, where would that munchkin go?

I’m not saying to set up the crib right now. That’s too much of an energetic gap for your brain to be able to get behind. But we want to start thinking in terms of the fact that this baby is coming. Doing visualizations can help you start to feel that in your body. We’ll explore in chapter 4 why it’s important to be putting out the energy of excitement, and that it’s a matter of when this baby comes, not if.

Exercise

Close your eyes and take a deep breath. In the space you’re currently living in, where is your baby’s crib going? What about her dresser? Changing table? Rocking chair? Really picture it. What does it feel like to see it all set up? What do you notice in your body when you realize that having those things set up in your space means that you did it, that she’s coming?

Is there stuff you’re going to have to get rid of in order to make room for her, things that are no longer serving you and that you haven’t used in a year or more (and probably won’t)? Commit to purging at least five things this week to symbolically make room for the baby. See where you can commit to making even a small change. This will go a long way in terms of shifting your energy.

My client Vicky had a tiny one-bedroom apartment, and even though she kept it very neat and minimalist, there just wasn’t enough space for a family. Despite this, she made a plan for where she was and then began visualizing the bigger apartment she’d love. She started a Pinterest board and vision board without knowing how she’d convince her husband to move. But she held the intention without attachment, and one day her husband came home and said that he’d been looking at apartments and was thinking they should move. Soon after they did, she was pregnant!

13. Did You Just Start a Business and
You Have to Tend to It Like a Baby?

There are so many moving parts to tend to when you’re starting your own business. Even if you are generally a laid-back person, it can be pretty overwhelming. Even if the business is something you really love and are passionate about, it takes a ton of energy. If we then overwhelm ourselves with “Why can’t I get pregnant?” we can be in for a serious uphill battle.

Have you found that your business is your baby? You provide for it, nurture it, and put its success above all else. Your brain may very well think you already have a baby and it doesn’t see the need for another one. According to your brain, you’re already devoted to something. From the flight-or-flight perspective, if your energy is tapped out, your brain isn’t going to want to add another thing to your plate and make it harder for your survival.

So what can we do about it?

Exercise

We want to look at streamlining your business, whether it’s how you’re scheduling things or how much you take on. Can you hire an assistant or intern to take some of the menial jobs off your plate? Or can you commit to not answering anything business-
related on weekends?

Implement some of the grounding techniques we talked about in the stressful job section (external factor #1), such as meditation, yoga, dancing, knitting, taking a bath, connecting to the earth, etc.

Give yourself the space to do what you need to do to feel solid in the business, and know that the baby will come when the initial craziness is over.

As women, we feel we need to do it all, and all at once. That’s admirable, but not very practical. Give yourself the space and permission to have one baby at a time. You only think you’re running out of time. I promise you’re not. Building your business is great! It’s going to provide a secure situation for you and your munchkin. It’s okay to build it first. We’ll talk about this more later on in the book, but the more in alignment you are in one area, the more the other areas are inclined to follow. Almost all of my private clients have either shifted jobs within their field or shifted fields completely, and that’s when they get pregnant. By working on stepping into their purpose career-wise, it moved their fertility energy along.

When you’re feeling capable and fulfilled in one area, other areas naturally begin to fall in line. Building a business, if that’s what you’re doing or want to do, can’t be rushed. It’s going to allow you amazing flexibility when you do have a baby, and you want to have as many of the kinks worked out as possible. The more you can look at it as something that’s going to support you and make your life easier in the long run, the faster things will fall into place. See the act of building your business as actually helping the baby get here, because it is.

14. Do You Have a Doctor or Care Provider
That You Aren’t Comfortable With?

Here’s the thing: I am not anti-doctor. I think many elements of Western medicine are awesome and necessary, and in a lot of cases it’s good they exist. Medical science has done some truly amazing things.

My hang-up involves the seriously overlooked mindset component to physical conditions and fertility. There’s a reason that IVF only works 25 to 50 percent of the time. And it’s not because you had that cup of coffee you shouldn’t have. It has so much to do with the mindset of the woman and what she’s believing or committing to.

Thanks to the Law of Psychophysical Response, for every thought the brain has, the body has a physical or chemical reaction. So if we’re having a stressful or panicked thought, it registers in the body. Thanks to the fight-or-flight response in the amygdalae of the brain, when we are stressed-out or triggered, our nonessential body systems slow or shut down. The reproductive system is not necessary for us to stay alive, so that’s one of the first to be affected. Many things can trigger this response, but what I’ve found in my practice is that women are often plugged into beliefs that are spewed at them from society, family, and, yes, care providers. We’ll get more into this in the belief and energy work later in the book, but the way some doctors, nurses, and technicians speak to women can be abhorrent and can actually perpetuate the infertility.

These are things doctors have actually said to my clients:

While care providers rarely mean to be insensitive, they’re often not aware that what they say and how they say it subconsciously plants itself into our belief systems—and sabotages our belief in ourselves and our body’s ability to be able to do the job women have done for millennia.

The wellness aspect and bedside manner have unfortunately gone out the window in many cases. Whether that’s due to training or hospital constraints, I don’t know. But the focus is often on the pathology, not the person. Many just look at you as a uterus and not a human. Again, I know some warm, caring doctors, but almost all of my infertility clients have had unfortunate experiences with insensitive care providers. And because these care providers are authority figures, these women buy into the belief that they are not capable, that it’s not likely to work, that they are too old. And according to the Law of Attraction, like energy attracts like energy, so if we’re plugged into the belief that we are not capable, the Universe answers with situations that are an energetic match to that thought. The result is several rounds of IVF that don’t work, unexplained infertility, etc., and it just never happens.

Of course these doctors’ concerns have some basis. But unfortunately they are trained to focus on the exception, not the rule. In Europe, it’s not so unusual for a woman to conceive up to age fifty. Part of that is due to eating less processed crap, and part of it is not being made to feel incapable at age thirty. Yes, it’s true that your egg count goes down quite a bit after thirty, and so from a scientific perspective, the odds decrease. But that’s just it—they’re odds. And you need one egg. Just one.

When the mindset component (the idea that by shifting your thoughts, you can shift your physical condition) is left out of fertility, it can be a bleak prognosis. Your mind is so powerful. I’ve seen amazing things in my practice, including the following:

It all happened when the woman was open to the idea that things could be different from the prognosis they were given, by doing the work and by having a care provider who made them feel safe.

What’s often overlooked throughout this fertility journey is your own intuition. You know your body better than anyone. You know what’s normal for you, what feels right/wrong, etc. Unfortunately over the last few generations we’ve lost touch with our confidence in our intuition and have given our power over to the authorities. It’s so important that you get back in touch with your intuition and start to trust it. It will help you exponentially to achieve your goal.

So many of my clients have stayed way too long with doctors who have made them feel uncomfortable, too old, less than, incapable, and like a lost cause. It’s so subtle that you often don’t notice it, but it’s a huge factor in your progress. So if you don’t love your doctor and they’re not uber-supportive of your journey and what’s right for you, consider a naturopath or midwife for well-woman care. If having a medical doctor makes you feel better, interview a few more and get someone you feel safe and comfortable with.

Feeling comfortable and capable is essential in this journey. Don’t be afraid to change providers. If they’re not on Team You, they need to go.

15. Are There Some Body Issues Coming Up?

This can be a big factor and may have many layers to it. After all, body image is something we’re sort of forced to be aware of from a young age. If we have beliefs that are either ours, our parents’, or society’s that are clouding our view of ourselves, we can have a fertility block. I have several clients who are former bodybuilders, or have dealt with eating disorders, or grew up overweight and are scared to death to go back to that place.

It’s not something we really want to admit to ourselves because, of course, we want the baby. This can lead to not eating well or eating processed low-fat foods, which adversely affect your hormones, as we mentioned earlier. If the hormones are off kilter or there’s inflammation in the body, the chances of conceiving are significantly diminished.

We’re afraid of growing larger, and that can trigger fear and kick up our Type-A desire to control how things will go, rather than basking in the idea that we’re about to be pregnant. These are two conflicting energies that sort of cancel each other out.

Exercise

Here are some avenues you can explore to help you move through your fears around weight gain/body image.

Written inquiry can really help the brain release anxiety. It allows us to let go of a fear that’s not moving us forward.

Body image isn’t necessarily something we think of as being a factor in why we’re not getting pregnant, but it’s a sneaky subconscious block that can keep us in limbo. For example, my client Kelli told me in an early session that she had decided she was going to adopt. Adoption is a great option and the people who do it are heroes, but I also know that Kelli really wanted her own biological child, so I asked why. One of the first things she said was that then she wouldn’t have to worry about losing the baby weight. Her friend at work who had a two-year-old still hadn’t lost the weight, and she was scared that she would have the same fate. So the brain says, “Let’s just adopt because it’ll be easier on our body.” I reminded her that she would never let the same thing happen to her. It’s just not in her personality. This is where she would use her Type-A-ness for good and schedule workouts, go for stroller jogs in the morning, and cook healthy meals. She relaxed after that, which is part of what helped her get pregnant. Kelli now has a two-year-old and is actually below her pre-pregnancy weight!

Look over the fifteen external factors affecting fertility again, and circle the top three that you think apply to you. Take some time to write down what actions you will take to move those factors forward. You don’t have to know how to “fix” the whole situation. Just put your energy forward toward what would feel really good.

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