Mindset Matters
How your thoughts and beliefs can get in the way of pregnancy
We’re going to talk about beliefs and how they affect your fertility. We’ll be breaking down what they are, why they’re important, and how to start moving through them.
This is one of the most important pieces for moving forward at a much faster pace than with therapy or energy work alone, and it applies to all areas of your life, not just fertility. It can help with relationships, money, health … everything.
When I say “You might be plugging into beliefs that aren’t serving you anymore,” what does that mean?
What is a belief?
A belief is an acceptance that a statement is true or that something exists. Notice that I didn’t say it’s a truth. It’s an acceptance that something is true. A belief is a thought you think over and over and over again until it becomes a truth for you. And even though it might feel true, I can promise you, if it’s stressing you out, it’s not true. Now, that’s a tough pill to swallow for most people, but let me show you what I mean.
Most of my intuitive work with my private clients involves identifying these unconscious beliefs that are playing in the background. We either didn’t know they were there or thought we’d already dealt with them.
Our brain’s function at its very core is to keep us alive. While the fight-or-flight response still has its purpose in our lives today, it sometimes goes a little overboard. It can stop us from doing things we want or need to do because it perceives them as a threat to our “alive-ness.” Whenever we start to think outside the box and want to try something that our brain has no proof we will survive, it freaks out. It sends the message that it’s not safe, so we resign ourselves to not do it.
The brain begins throwing us thoughts that are way scarier than what actually is happening. We get so scared that we begin to think it is happening or that it’s imminent, and we shut things down. This includes a physical shutdown, ladies. The terms psychosomatic and mind over matter exist for a reason. The mind is uber-powerful. I’ll get more into the emotional/physical connection later in the book, but when your brain is in freak-out mode, it can slow or even stop the functioning of the endocrine system (especially the thyroid) as well as the reproductive system.
Your brain may throw thoughts at you such as these:
These all feel defeating, overwhelming, hard, and scary. I would bet that if you’ve been trying to get pregnant for any length of time, more than one of these ideas has crossed your mind.
Here’s where they can get you into trouble:
When we have a hard time getting pregnant, whether it’s miscarriages or just a bunch of negative pregnancy tests, our brain says, “See?! It’s been hard, so it’s going to continue to be hard. Let’s just back off.” Then this thing that you want more than anything in the world slips a little further away as more of your energy says, “I guess you’re right.” We don’t even realize what we’re doing because the belief feels so true.
The more we plug into these thoughts and beliefs as truth, the more they begin to carve a different path for our life—different from what we want or deserve.
We are so plugged into the gripping fear that these scary thoughts will happen that we get more desperate and more attached to needing our thing to work out. We’re going to get deeper into the Law of Attraction as it applies to fertility in chapter 4 but for now you need to know that fear and desperation attract more fear and desperation. That’s all we can see. It keeps our wheels spinning in the stagnant energy of “I should be pregnant by now. When will it happen?”
As I mentioned earlier, whenever we think something should be or shouldn’t be other than what it is, it’s not true. When you’re in “what is,” you’re okay. You’re alive, and your future isn’t written yet. Even if what is isn’t what you want, you’re coming from a more grounded, centered place to say, “Okay, this sucks right now, but it’s happening. And whatever is happening is supposed to be happening, so let’s figure out why.”
I promise that if you inquire from an exploratory place of “Huh. This is weird and unexpected. I wonder what’s going on,” versus “Why, God, whyyyyyy?” you’re going to find the answer a lot faster.
When you have your wheels spinning in “It shouldn’t be happening like this, it should be happening like this,” so much of your energy isn’t going forward. Your body is tight and scrunched up; your emotions are raw and heightened. It’s exhausting! No wonder there’s not enough energy to go forward. A lot of it is committed to what you think should have happened already. Many times we aren’t even aware that these thoughts and beliefs are affecting us. They’re running subconsciously in the background without our awareness, like those apps on your phone, draining your battery because you haven’t closed them out. When you have too much going on and you’re constantly funneling energy to something that may or may not happen, your drained body can’t do the things you want or expect it to do. Working through these beliefs and stopping the energy leak is crucial.
We can think that we “should have been pregnant by now” all day long, but the fact is, it hasn’t happened yet. When your brain thinks “Pregnancy should have happened already,” it makes the calculation that you’ve missed your window of opportunity. Since the body takes direct orders from the brain, if your brain says you’ve missed your window, then there’s no point in your body making any effort to make this baby happen. See if you can take yourself out of your brain, look objectively at this “you” creature, and inquire what is going on that is impeding this at the moment. What steps can you take to move your energy forward? If motherhood should have happened by now, it would have. It hasn’t. So why not? Explore.
Review that 15 External Factors worksheet from chapter 1. Adjustments can be made that will shift your energy forward.
Most importantly, know that there’s always a reason for all of the challenges we face. The Universe is not random.
Without searching the internet like a maniac (which isn’t good energy-wise, either), come from an exploratory place of “Ohhhhh, that’s why this is happening. It’s not good, it’s not bad, it just is. And here’s something I can do to move in the direction of what I want.”
It’s like when you have a dream that a monster is chasing you. The more you run, the more it keeps chasing you. But if you stop and turn around, you see it’s not as scary as you thought and doesn’t want to kill or eat you at all. It was just bringing something to your attention. We want to see the brain not as the enemy but as this scared little thing, albeit a pain in the ass, that’s having a nightmare. We want to explain to it why moving forward is safe and beneficial for everyone. Then it can relax and go to bed.
It takes much less energy to come from that place and allows you to move forward so much quicker. It can be a little scary to entertain the idea that we can choose/are choosing everything that comes into our existence. Most people don’t want that responsibility. That’s where ignorance is bliss, and blaming God or the Universe takes the onus off us: “If it’s God’s or the Universe’s fault that it’s not happening, then at least it’s not my fault.” Or we go into a place of blaming ourselves and feeling like a worthless failure. It’s no one’s fault. I promise that it’s actually an amazing thing that you can choose/are choosing everything that comes into your existence. Because if you are choosing, you can un-choose or choose something else that you do want. By shifting your beliefs, you can literally shift your reality.
The other important thing to remember is that just because it hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it won’t happen. That’s something a lot of women subconsciously believe. When you plug into that as truth, then it becomes the reality. But is it a truth on its own? No.
Here’s where we have to draw a line in the sand and acknowledge that what happened in the past is valid and purposeful but that the past doesn’t dictate the future unless you let it.
So how do you not let it? With a little underused thing called intuition and a worksheet.
Theoretically, if you’re reading this book, you are aware of your intuition on some level. It’s such a huge part of the work. We’ve heard the phrases “she’s an intuitive” or “a woman’s intuition,” but most people have very little personal experience with intuition, let alone know how to use it to get what they want.
Intuition is defined as the ability to understand something immediately, without conscious reasoning, or as a thing one knows or considers likely from instinctive feeling rather than conscious reasoning.
I’m sure some of you have gotten a feeling or message to do, or not do, something. You couldn’t explain it, but you just knew you should listen to it, and it turned out to be right. Many of us had a knowing feeling when we met our spouse—that they were the one for us. Or we’ve gotten an uneasy feeling that we shouldn’t walk down a certain street though we couldn’t explain why. Or how many times have we smacked ourselves on the head and said, “I should have listened to my intuition!”
We aren’t encouraged to lead from our intuition in today’s society. As women, we have been trained to default to trusting the white coats—especially around pregnancy and birth. We are told that we need to look to doctors and specialists for answers, and that our bodies aren’t capable of becoming pregnant and giving birth without outside help.
Our overscheduled lives keep our brain running the show. Our poor intuition can’t get a word in edgewise.
I may eventually write a whole book on intuition because there’s so much to it, but here’s how it applies to this belief chunk:
I like to refer to the brain/ego as “thinking” and the intuition as “knowing.”
When you’re trying to “think” of an answer, it’s more of that forcing energy: “I have to figure it out, I have to figure it out. It shouldn’t be this way! How can I get pregnant? I’ll never get pregnant.” That’s the wheel-spinning energy.
The intuition is a knowing that you can’t explain—you just know. Put a hand on your heart or your belly and take a big breath in through your nose and out through your mouth. Visualize a ball of light at the top of your head dropping into your body and slowly down to the base of your spine. It not only stops the tornado in your brain but also allows thoughts such as these: “I’m perfectly healthy. I’m still of childbearing age. I’m going to be a great mother. I get to decide the experiences I want in my life. There’s no reason I can’t have a baby. I know my body and myself and I know that, despite what other people may say, I can do this.” It’s calmer, takes less energy, and is so empowering. We have way more power than we use or know how to use.
I’ve seen amazing things happen when women are plugged into the knowing versus the thinking place. All of my clients who got pregnant succeeded through getting to that knowing place.
Your brain is super-adept at keeping you out of harm’s way, and although it means well, it can be really sneaky. So it’s going to take a while for you to get more adept at using your intuition to counter and move through the brain’s freak-outs.
While you’re getting more adept at that, we can use the Belief Sheet from the Conceivable Tool Kit to delve into the brain’s fears and the intuition’s empowerment.
This Belief Sheet is adapted from “The Work” by Byron Katie. She developed an amazing inquiry of our stressful thoughts that can stop years of anguish in minutes, available for free at her website, TheWork.com. When I began using it, I couldn’t believe how it helped my relationship, finances, and future interactions that might otherwise have derailed me. It can move you forward much faster when you really allow yourself to “go there.”
When filling out the worksheet, you don’t want to be the enlightened human being that you are. You want to get down and dirty with fear, pettiness, anxiety, and anger. And feel it, don’t think it.
When starting this work, some people are scared that if they really go there with the emotion, they’ll attract more if it. And this piece is different from the Law of Attraction in the sense that we need to feel it in order to be able to let it go. Too often we’ve been shoving these feelings down. From an energetic perspective, which we will get to in chapter 4, if you’re pushing these feelings down, that means they’re coming up—which means you’re pushing them down, which means they’re coming up. It’s exhausting for your mind and body to do this for any length of time. It’s time for these feelings to surface and be processed so they can let go of us. Then it becomes something that happened for us and not to us.
The turnaround at the end of the Belief Sheet brings the positive that we’re looking for, so please go full bore with this part. Otherwise it’s like putting a bandage on gangrene. We need to dig out these uncomfortable emotions and beliefs and deal with them. (We will discuss the turnaround portion of the Belief Sheet in more detail shortly.)
The brain and its beliefs can be sneaky. They are that elevator music you don’t even realize is playing in the background. Your brain is perfectly happy that you’re not aware they’re only thoughts. To you they seem real, and therefore you aren’t able to move forward. And with that, the brain has won, because that way you’re safe and alive, so the brain has done its job.
When working with my private clients, I’m able to tap into the specific beliefs that are holding them back. Here is a list of the nine most common beliefs I see coming up for women struggling with fertility:
We aren’t preprogrammed with these beliefs; they are learned. We “download” them from our previous experiences, including those with our parents, teachers, peers, doctors … the list goes on. Sometimes it’s hard to tell where they came from because they’re so ingrained. Many are society’s beliefs, so we end up living in this weird “brain cult” where everyone accepts the fears as true when they’re really not.
It can seem hard or nearly impossible to extract yourself from the scary thoughts, but by doing this worksheet you can take the personal, scared element out of the thought and really look at it from a place of objective inquiry. While a belief sheet can be done at any time, I suggest not doing one when you’re amped up about a belief. It may still help, but chances are your brain will be so freaked out that it will try to rationalize and convince you that it has worked it out and everything’s all better when it’s not. You’re more likely to “think” the answer than “feel” it. That’s really the tricky part.
It may seem like walking a fine line, but if you truly go there and dig, the same problem cannot show up in the same way again. There may be several legs to a certain belief that sound similar, but that particular belief, if fully worked and felt through, will let go of you for good. The best time to go through these beliefs is when you’re not supercharged about them.
This is where a lot of people get confused and say, “Well, I don’t think this way all the time, so do I really need to work on the belief?” The answer is hell to the yes. The brain is awesome at convincing you that you’ve got it under control and it’s not that big of a deal. It’s perfectly happy for you to not deal with your issues, so it goes on playing in the background without you noticing until (cue ominous, scary music!) it’s the fourth week of your cycle and you are a scared, desperate maniac. It’s hard to back down from that attachment and truly plug into your intuition when you’re not used to doing so. It’s a work in progress, but know that when you “need” something to happen, that’s the best way for it not to happen.
Just a side note about referring to it as “the week of your period”: This is an energetic thing that we’ll get into in chapter 4, but if you’re referring to it as “the week of your period,” the Universe is hearing that you’re expecting your period to come. See if you can start looking at it as “test week.”
When you’re doing the Belief Sheet, look at the question “How do you feel when you think that thought?” We know you’re not thinking it all the time. Tune in to the times when you are thinking that thought. Use your cell memory and your imagination. When you’re in that thought spiral, what is going on?
Similarly, when you get to “Who/How would you be if you COULDN’T think that thought? How would you FEEL in your body and show up in life?” use your imagination. If nothing was actually wrong, how would you feel? Your brain’s default answer is going to be “I don’t know,” so press further. If you did know, how would you feel?
Imagination and creation are technically different but are tightly linked, and the more you can go there with your imagination, the easier it is to access and begin trusting your intuition. Creativity and children are both represented by the sacral chakra. The more open to creativity and imagination you are, the wider the doorway for your munchkin to come in.
When beginning this work, most people have a hard time with the turnaround portion of the belief sheet. We want to look for three statements where the opposite of the belief could be true and three examples of where each of those turnaround statements could be true. The idea is that if you’re finding multiple examples of where the opposite of your belief is true, then your belief can’t be true.
Here is an example of the belief work I did with one of my clients, using a belief sheet. Sometimes these can be difficult to do on your own. I will often dig a little deeper when working with clients, but the Belief Sheet is a great tool to use on your own or with a mentor who will hold you accountable. I wanted to include this to illustrate how the process works with a real-life situation.
Maria’s belief statement: I’m probably going to get my period this month.
Is it true? Yes.
Can you be 1,000 percent sure that you’re probably going to get your period this month (feel into it)? No.
How do you feel when you think that thought? (Close your eyes and notice your muscles, breathing, where that feeling shows up in your body): I feel it in my lower abdomen. Nervous butterflies. Panic. Fear. Resigned. Really sad. Defeated. Dread.
How do you show up in your life when you think that thought? What/How does it affect your life when you think that thought? I’m scared and on alert all the time. I alternate between that and the feeling of “What’s the point of trying?” I’m not present. I’m in the future with something I’m convinced will happen, but I really don’t know if it will or not. I’ve got a bit of a wall up—not wanting people to ask me how it’s going or feeling sorry for me because I can’t seem to manage this one simple task. So I withdraw from other people, from my husband, from the whole process.
Who/How would you be if you COULDN’T think that thought? How would you FEEL in your body and show up in life? Lighter. Like I can breathe a little easier. Excited butterflies in my stomach. If I couldn’t think that I was probably going to get my period, I’d be excited that this could be the month. I’d be looking forward to testing, knowing that I’ve been taking care of myself and there’s no reason I wouldn’t be pregnant! I’d feel more confident, more present. More capable.
Which way is going to get you what you want: thinking the thought that you’re probably going to get your period or not thinking the thought? Why? Not thinking the thought. Because if I have that wall up or am resigned, then I’m never going to attract what I want—only what I don’t want. If I’m able to feel confident and capable, then theoretically that has an effect on my body as well. I have to at least give myself that chance. I’ve also projected a future that hasn’t happened yet, and am kind of shooting myself in the foot before I really get started.
The turnaround. Can you find three examples of where the opposite of your belief is true? (Ex. If the belief is “My boyfriend makes me mad,” these are the turnarounds: I make my boyfriend mad. My boyfriend makes me happy. I make me mad.): I’m probably NOT going to get my period this month. I’m probably going to be pregnant this month. It’s okay if I do get my period this month.
Can you find three examples where each turnaround is/could be true?
I’m probably NOT going to get my period this month. It could be true because:
I’m probably going to be pregnant this month. It could be true because:
Sometimes there will be a turnaround that makes you go “Huh? That sounds awful!” For example, take a look at the last turnaround: “It’s okay if I do get my period this month.” Your initial reaction might be “It’s not okay!” But how, theoretically, could it be okay? The purpose of this is not to set you up to fail; it’s to help you let go of the attachment energy that you have to be pregnant this month—because that brings more attachment, as we will see in chapter 4. We want to be as neutral as possible, because everything that happens is happening for us—even when it’s not the timing we think it should be. So how could it be okay?
It’s okay if I do get my period this month. It could be true because:
This gives you an idea of how the process works. Look at your list of beliefs or sit with your intuition, and see what beliefs are coming up for you. Then run them through the Belief Sheet. The important thing is to take your time with it and actually feel into the bad and the good. Remember, feeling helps things begin to shift on a cellular level. If you just skim it, the belief will continue to lurk beneath the surface. So you owe it to yourself to really go there. It’s better to be uncomfortable for a few minutes than to suffer through years of frustration.
Learn to sit in what feels good too, because emitting that can bring more feeling good. Feeling like you need to check for spotting or temperature or peak ovulation keeps you a slave to this condition. It can seem hard to break out of that pattern, but it’s absolutely possible. This belief work is a good way to do that.
Remember that if a thought is stressing you out, you’re believing something about the situation that’s not true. I totally get why some of these beliefs will feel so true, but see if you can step back and find how they’re actually not. Taking the fear and urgency out of the situation allows you to look at the situation clearly and realize that it’s only a thought. See if you can get here: “It’s not actually happening to me right now. I’m safe. It’s only a thought, and thoughts can be changed.” That’s the first step toward changing your reality.
So many of us live in the past or the projected future. The past has already happened, and we can’t change it. The future hasn’t happened yet, but we waste so much time in the fear of what might be when we can’t possibly know if it will be true. We spend so much energy in the trauma of the past and fear of the future, but the only place we can actually change anything is in the present. When we are in “what is,” we are okay. Right now we are alive, we ate today, we have a place to live—for this moment we are okay. If we let go of the “story” of what is scary or why we can’t do something, we can then actually be open to solutions that can move our situation forward.