The Fertile Heart response to the May 10, 2012 Fertility Study in New England Journal of Medicine.

Yes, the Australian study published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine, which showed a 28% greater risk of birth defects in children conceived with fertility treatment, is the largest to date. The findings however are nothing new. Several  studies in the last decade have arrived at similar alarming conclusions.

I’ve written about this subject quite a bit, Fertile Heart is all about being proactive; about choosing assisted reproduction only as an absolutely last recourse and doing so in a way that protects the mom and the unborn child.

It’s a busy time around here, and I was actually going to let this one go, but then I read the New York Times article about the study with responses from the medical community. I appreciated the comments about the significance of the findings by Dr. Davies from the Robinson Institute at theUniversity of Adelaide. And then I came across a response by Dr. Pasquale Patrizio, director of the Yale University FertilityCenter, which begged to be addressed. So I thought I’d address part of this blog post directly to Dr. Patrizio.

“The most important message that I take from this,” said Dr. Patrizio, “is that it confirms pretty strongly the fact that infertility itself increases the risk for birth defects. If you’re infertile, you’re already at higher risk even if you don’t take any treatment.”

Dr. Patrizio, if you were one of those “infertile”  people  reading the morning edition of New York Times, how would this statement make you feel?

Is this really the most important message you take from this latest study, Dr. Patrizio? Is this the most useful message to pass on to your patients?  Aren’t our doctors meant to be the teachers to point us  first and foremost toward the road of no harm? Wouldn’t the most important message from this, yet another alarming study be, to encourage people to seek more health-affirming ways to resolve their fertility difficulties? Isn’t this yet another warning that we are not only hurting ourselves when we silence our bodies’ call for help, but we may well be  causing harm to the children we so desperately hope to bring into the world?

If any of your patients Dr. Patrizio, might be looking for a more life enhancing, actionable response to this study, please do let them know there is a great deal they can do to minimize the risks of birth defects. And if they express interest in intervention such as–health and fertility boosting foods, or energizing emotional and soul nutrients that might in fact completely eliminate the need for assisted reproduction–perhaps you could direct  them to the Fertile Heart neighborhood? My husband took that picture this afternoon, it’s all fertile and green around here. This Sunday’s workshop is full but they could come in June.

I bet quite a few of your patients -like our lovely Fertile Heart mom Denise Kunish in the Fertility Success Stories Video–will discover that they are far from infertile.  You see, Denise. as so many women in our community was told by your colleagues, Dr. Patrizio, that she was infertile; that she was at 37 of advanced maternal age and should rush to find an egg  donor.  But with not much more than a small dose of Fertile Heart intervention (no, no needles, no drugs, I didn’t even touch her, except for the goodbye hug) Denise gave birth to a wonderful little boy and then, wouldn’t you know it, she went on to have two more delightful, rosy cheeked  children.  Yep, spontaneous conception. I hope you’ll watch her story, and pass it on to your patients, doctor Patrizio, this might just be the right time for them to hear Denise’s story. There she is with her brood.  Not exactly a picture of the unfortunate-infertile-advanced-maternal-age-victim, is she?

And at the bottom of this post you’ll find a few links to pages your patients might appreciate reading,  about action they can take to tilt the scale toward a roof-raising pregnancy and a silky cheeked-Fertile Heart-game-changer-baby.

May the Australian study help turn the tide toward more sustainable, more fertility-inducing reproductive health-care!

Meeting a Healthy Baby Halfway:

10 Steps toward a Pre-conception Detox

http://www.fertileheart.com/10-steps-toward-a-pre-conception-detox/

Fertility Supplements: Holistic Fertility Treatment Options

http://www.fertileheart.com/holistic-treatment-options-supplements-part1/

How does Orphan Annie become a Mommy?

You know we really did conceive our inconceivable baby on red sheets. True  they were red flannel sheets.  Not really sure why I didn’t go for satin. But it worked!

As every year, the emails with subject lines, ”Coping with Mother’s Day,”  Infertility and Mother’s Day: Tips for Dealing with Mother’s Day Blues.” are pouring in from all directions.

So as each year, this is my short and sweet Mother’s Day card for all of you awesome flowingly  fertile red satin mamas chosen for this magnificent assignment, called Infertility. I know, it doesn’t always feel like such a magnificent assignment, but if you care to stop and drop all the way down into the floor of your fertile soul, you’ll hear a queit little voice letting you know that that exactly what it is!

Whether your children have already materialized in physical form or they’re still cruising in the over world, the umbilical cord of longing is already attached to your heart and that qualifies you for the Mommy Clan.

Whatever you do, I hope you ditch the coping and surviving game.  You know I don’t mean you turn your back on  Sadness or Envy or Fear.  When my older daughter Ellena was a little girl, she used to reach out to me when she was tired and cry: ”Carry you me, mommy! ”

So if any tearstained little Orphans raise their arms toward you asking to be picked up, you know what to do.  Mother’s Day is a great day to practice being a mommy. As for tips, I bet the Ultimate Mama in your very own fertile heart knows just what to give you to sweeten the day!

Would love to hear about some of the supremely self-indulgent, unreasonably extravagant gifts you’re giving yourself this Sunday!

A resplendent Mother’s Day to all!

Julia

Once again, I’m honored to be posting Morgan’s stunning story, surely a story filled with wonder and many a priceless lessons in-fertility.  Since Fertile Heart is a community focused on a radically holistic view of fertility, I can’t post this narrative without noting that egg donation, the recruitment of egg donors and the link between birth control pills and impaired fertility are among the most controversial subjects in the field of reproductive health and assisted reproduction.  So who better to add her voice to the conversation about these subjects than a young, brilliant ethicist like Morgan? Yes, I do believe, that getting pregnant through egg donation can be a journey of healing for both the mom-to-be and the young woman who chooses to be a donor. Morgan’s story and the case histoires of many of my former clients are a testament to that. What’s also true, is that we must engage in a much deeper conversation about the ethical questions surrounding this road toward motherhood.  May Morgan’s journey and the upcoming Fertile Heart Guest Teacher Teleconference on the subject contribute to a more meaningful dialogue about egg donation as an instrument of healing.

Julia

As the Heart Grows and What it All Shows   

In early February, 2011, just weeks before my 27th birthday, my husband and I were told I had Premature Ovarian Failure. When the doctor wrote out the POF support group website on a sticky note, the “F” was in doctor scribble. I asked what the letter was. “F” he said. For failure.

That day, and indeed the framing of the diagnosis in that language, marked the beginning of a journey – one in which I have come to see the POF diagnosis not as something that makes me a failure, but as a beautiful gift that has enabled me to become the person I was meant to be.

In the spring of 2009, my husband and I were getting ready to embark on the adventure of a lifetime – a year-long trip toEuropewhere I would complete my Master’s Degree in Ethics. All was well, except one thing. I was experiencing night sweats. And I’m not just talking about waking up a little warm. No, these were wake-up-drenched-and-need-to-change-the-sheets-kind-of-night-sweats.

I went to my doctor, and told her that I felt like the change was hormonal and that I wanted to go off the pill. “You don’t want to get pregnant, do you?” was her response. “Not right now, I said, but we would use other protection. And it wouldn’t be the end of the world.” “Let’s just switch your pill,” she said, “that may make a difference”. Being the good patient I was, that’s what I did.

Upon returning home from our adventure in August 2010, I stopped taking the pill. And then I waited… After six weeks and no period, I went and saw my doctor who told me that what I was experiencing was normal and that sometimes it can take up to six months for a woman’s cycle to return. If I’d known that, I thought, I would have gone off sooner. Or perhaps I never would have gone on the pill at all.

Fast forward two months – still nothing. Worried, I went back to my doc, who said, “I’m not concerned, so you shouldn’t be.” Well I was. In January, she sent me for blood work, and the rest – as they say – is history.

In a coincidence that I can only describe a miracle, my mom told me about Julia’s book just two days before we received the POF diagnosis. Something in me just knew that I had to find “Inconceivable”. After calling around to countless bookstores, only to be told they had no copies, I decided in a last ditch effort to walk to the used bookstore at the end of my street. And there it was – that little white spine. I devoured the book in an afternoon. It was as if part of me knew that I would need its strength to carry me through.

The day of the diagnosis, my heart was broken – ripped apart and raw. I was shocked that the thing that I wanted most in the entire world – a baby, the union of my eggs and my husband’s sperm – was not available to me. A few percentage points difference in the statistics of various egg donor clinics didn’t seem to matter much when the possibility of having children that were genetically my own had been stolen away – as if by some dark creature in the night.

Yet, even from the very beginning, I began to experience a sweetness. I was in great pain, yet simultaneously experiencing feelings of sheer joy like nothing I had ever felt before.

There was the feeling of being held, like a baby, between my parents after they rushed home from a trip to Guatemala to be with their devastated girl. There was the connection with the women in my life – many of whom had experienced a loss associated with yearning to have a child that I had not been aware of.  And there was a deepening love for my husband, which was highlighted in moments like the one when, between tears, we reflected on some of our more materialistic friends and joked that we would share our decision to go the egg donor route by saying “Oh, you went natural? We went custom. It was more expensive, but totally worth it.”

On February 14th, just 6 days after the diagnosis, I formally entered the Fertile Heart community via Julia’s Valentine’s Day Fertility Support Teleconference. When I hung up after those 90 minutes, I knew that my broken heart could – and would – become whole again. Just six weeks later, my wonderful mom and I were on a plane down toWoodstock,NYfor Julia’s Meeting Your Child Halfway workshop. Being from the Western part ofCanada, this was no short trip – but not going simply wasn’t an option.

We spent a nourishing weekend inWoodstock; eating beautiful organic food – including an omelette made of eggs from the chickens wandering outside the bed and breakfast where we stayed – and walking through theCatskill Mountains.

The Sunday workshop was amazing. Through the Body Truth exercises, I allowed myself, and my body, to speak its truth. During a visualization exercise at the Fertile Heart circle inNew York later that week, I received the gift of hope. It was an image of me – pregnant – wearing a blue and white checked tunic that I had purchased on our European adventure the year before. That image became my talisman, and I carried it with me for the months that would follow.

In one of Julia’s articles about POF she offers an alternate meaning of the acronym, POF, she says, stands for Plan On Fighting.

I, too, reframed my POF diagnosis saying, My hormones are currently at levels that make it difficult for us to conceive on our own.  As the Fertile Heart tools and a new way of thinking of this challenge helped me move through the initial pain of the diagnosis, the decision to go the egg donor route was relatively easy. I wanted desperately to be pregnant, and it felt like the way to go.

In the  fertility support teleconferences Julia often talked about cultivating our inner fertility specialist and being able to receive guidance that we could experience kinesthetically.  That idea became very real during our donor selection process.

When we first began the search, it felt as though we would never find a donor we liked. The problem was, none of the women were me! When I finally got access to the donor egg  database, I went through the first few profiles without feeling much of anything. Then I opened the fourth and there it was: a shiver ran through my body, I felt a spark, a warmth, like this person could be my “soul sister.”

Confirmation that we had picked the right egg donor came on a Monday morning, five months ago, when we met with our nurse in preparation for our transfer. She said that when she was at the clinic over the weekend, she saw a woman walk through the door and thought to herself, “What is Morgan doing here? She’s not supposed to come until next week.” And then, according to her, she realized it was our donor. When she told us that story, I was filled with the most overwhelming sense that everything was happening perfectly.

Our retrieval and transfer went beautifully. Today, I am five and a half months pregnant with our beautiful little babe. As I write this, I am wearing the blue and white checked tunic from my New York Fertile Heart Circle imagery – accented with a little brown belt to highlight my swelling belly. It’s my favorite outfit.

Some time ago, I realized that it was almost exactly nine months between the time I was diagnosed with POF and the time we conceived.  One day, thinking back on this journey, I received the image of the Grinch’s heart after he sees Cindy Lou Who, in Whoville.  Grinch’s small heart, they said, grew three sizes that day.  Well, I don’t think my heart was small before, nor would I say I was a grinch, but this past year my heart has grown at least three sizes. In those nine months, I birthed a new Morgan – one who is more empathetic, compassionate, and open than the one who was there before. For that, and for the role that Julia and the Fertile Heart tools played and continue to play in this journey, I am deeply grateful.

Today is April 26th, 2012, the 20th    anniversary of my “irreversible secondary infertility diagnosis,” I can’t think of a more perfect way to honor this day than with this beautifully narrated story of Annabelle’s perfect arrival! Thank you, Mandy, thank you Jon, thank you, Annabelle for helping me celebrate!

Julia

Getting Pregnant after Unexplained Infertility: A Perfect Time for Annabelle

by Amanda Queally

Recently, I found myself going through an old box of childhood collections- baby photos, tattered dolls, my 2-year-old clay handprint.  I came across a pile of some of my nursery school drawings. Underneath some oddly shaped stick figures were my teacher’s scribed description of the drawing.  I sifted through several, smiling at the drawings of the activities I liked to do in school, who my best friends were, my favorite books.  And then I discovered one that made me pause and take a deep breath, a small purple stick figure, a girl with a big smile. Underneath were the words: “I want to be a mother and a teacher.” At four-years-old, this was my dream for my future.

These are fairly common aspirations for a little girl, and many grown women would probably not have given this item from their past much attention.  What made me stare at its simplicity was not even that I now find myself both a teacher and a mother, but that the yearning and desire to mother has been a part of me ever since I was a little girl.  As an elementary school teacher, I am witness to many young people express their dreams for the future. There are the aspiring veterinarians, astronauts, professional football players, and Lego designers. I often try and picture them, all grown up, being who it is they want to be.  Young children seem to embody the word possibility. My goals as a four-year-old child were not seemingly as lofty as those aspiring doctors and astronauts.  How hard could it be to become a mother?  I could never have imagined at that young age just how long my journey would be to make my dream come true.

My wonderful husband and I began dating in high school and married 12 years later.  Our relationship has always been strong, loving and respectful, something I am very grateful for.  After nearly two years of marriage, we were very excited and ready to start a family.  I went off the birth control pills I had been religiously taking since I was 18, and was prepared for the possibility that it would take a little while for my hormones to balance themselves out and for my body to be ready to conceive.  This was what my doctor had told me might be the case.  To our surprise and delight, we got pregnant on my first cycle off the pill.  The elation is something I will always remember, feeling the presence of that little being as I walked alone, talking about how we would set up the nursery, dreaming about a little boy or girl and who he or she would be.

Only three days later I started feeling terrible pains in my lower left side. It being my first pregnancy, I thought perhaps they were normal cramps. This was, however, the start of my realization that I knew my body better than anybody, and that I needed to trust it and trust my instincts to take care of it.

I woke early in the morning and told my husband that I thought I needed to go to the ER, that something just didn’t feel right. I was quickly diagnosed with an ectopic pregnancy, and went right in for laparoscopic surgery to remove the pregnancy and my left tube, as there was too much damage to save it.  We came home that night, grief-stricken and sore.  The doctors had all said that I was very healthy, and that this was just a bit of bad luck. I remember one doctor smiling at us as we left and saying, “I bet I will see you back here within the year, giving birth to your baby. You won’t have any trouble getting pregnant with only one tube.”  Although very sad for our loss, I knew in my heart that we would be pregnant again soon. After all, we had only tried for a month and got pregnant right away.

But months went by and we began to spend more time worrying, and more money buying pregnancy tests only to end up devastated at the end of each cycle. After a year of trying, we were instantly put into that awful category of  “unexplained infertility.”  What my ears heard with this diagnosis was : “You are infertile and we don’t have any idea why.”

Thus began my frantic search for answers. Over the span of the next two years I saw multiple doctors, my husband had his sperm evaluated twice, I scoured bookstores and websites, bought herbs, did fertility yoga DVD’s, went to fertility acupuncture, and eventually had exploratory surgery to make sure I didn’t have scar tissue as a result of my ectopic pregnancy.  When all of these attempts still resulted in “unexplained infertility,” I went on to have an HSG to look inside my uterus. My husband and I were painfully frustrated and sad. I began to live my life by that vicious two-week cycle, waiting for ovulation to happen then waiting two more weeks to see if I was pregnant. I doubted my body, felt ugly, felt less of a woman, felt as though I could not give my husband that ultimate gift of a child.  Meanwhile “every woman that I knew” was either pregnant or giving birth to second children, while my husband and I were stuck in this devastating routine of hope and despair.

We went on to spend thousands of dollars on rounds of Clomid, more diagnostic testing, and eventually, IUI’s.  Those were the worst of the doctor’s visits. There we sat in the doctor’s waiting room, with my husband’s “sample” wrapped snuggly in a wool sock inside a brown bag.  On the table were parenting magazines and all around us were women in various stages of pregnancy awaiting their checkups while we waited to be artificially inseminated.  We did this three times, and although we held very real hope that each time would be the time it finally worked, there was always something inside me that didn’t feel right about it. My body would tense up, I would always arrive in tears and leave with even more. The final attempt my body tensed up so much that they couldn’t insert the tube to inseminate me, and several doctors were called in the room to try.  This made my appointment time run late, making me late for work.

I teach first grade, and was late for the start of the school day. I remember my 21 6-year-old students all making a point to tell me all of the routine things I had forgotten to do in the classroom that morning due to my tardiness. Instead of finding humor in their innocent need for everything to be just as it always is, I saw 21 annoying kids at whom I wanted to scream, “I am terribly sorry I didn’t write the date on the board like usual, but I was busy getting artificially inseminated this morning and am getting very tired of always taking care of other people’s children when all I want is one of my own!”

After nearly three years of battling infertility, I was becoming a much more hostile, unhappy, and self-pitying woman. Lucky for me, I have an unbelievably supportive husband who always tried to make me feel like a beautiful, fully-functioning woman when all I felt was broken and unworthy.  His love was what kept me going, and what kept my hope alive. This hope is what found me once more in the bookstore, looking for yet one more source of inspiration or the ultimate cure, since no doctor had offered me any.  At this point, the doctors had said that IVF would be my next option. We weren’t ready for either the emotional or financial realities that this treatment presented. I wanted a natural conception.  I found The Fertile Female at Border’s and read the first couple of chapters right there in the Women’s Health aisle.

What I read wasn’t a promise for a cure, or a prescription for a remedy, but a wisdom that spoke to me and immediately made me feel less broken and more trusting of my body.  I read it twice, and also began exploring Julia’s website, FertileHeart. I ordered the Fertile Heart Imagery CD and started to use some of the OVUM tools. Although I felt as though I had found the fertility support resources and online group I had been searching for, I still felt like I needed to connect to Julia’s work more intimately.

I found out about her all-day intensive workshops inWoodstockand initially thought it was a crazy idea to drive the eight hours there when I had no idea what to expect and when I could use the $375 it cost for another IUI, or some other treatment that might actually result in a pregnancy. Just as I had trusted my body and my instincts when I had my ectopic pregnancy, I decided to trust myself again and do what felt right.  With some family financial support, we found ourselves in the car on the road toWoodstock for a fertility workshop.  Never in a billion years would I have anticipated this to have been part of our journey towards a family.

I started a new cycle the same morning we woke up to attend Julia’s workshop, so I arrived pouring tears and once again feeling defeated by my body.  I was exhausted by my sadness. Looking back, this exhaustion was exactly what allowed me to be so receptive to Julia’s teaching and to the energy of all of the other struggling couples we sat beside that day.  I have never felt so uncomfortable while also feeling like I was exactly in the right place in all my life.  I felt very connected to Julia, and was, for the first time, in the company of other people who knew our struggles and shared the same feelings of devastation and despair.  That felt so incredible.

Our trip to Woodstock made the words of The Fertile Female come alive for me. When I returned home, I craved Julia’s voice and was able to hear it as I read the pages again. I started doing imagery work and dabbled in Body Truth, and signed myself up for some phone circle support groups with Julia. I also began connecting online with some of the folks in our group at theWoodstock workshop.  I certainly felt a renewed sense of hope.

The OVUM tools were a new form of fertility treatment, and one that demanded more of me. I couldn’t just show up at a doctor’s office and have a procedure that I hoped would work, or simply pop a pill to boost the amount of eggs I would release. This fertility treatment was hard emotional work and there were times when I felt like giving up, since after several months I still wasn’t pregnant. I kept reading the website, taking part in the phone circles and always kept The Fertile Female by my bed to read each night. I also bought a juicer, started to eat healthier, and thought less about my next medical step in order to conceive.

But It wasn’t until December of 2009 when I reached out to Julia for more support that I began to dedicate myself completely to this work. Julia gave me a public challenge to give it my all to the OVUM practice. She offered me one free private session each month, asked that I come into each of the teleconference support circles with something I was “burning” to work on, and she gave me weekly “homework.”

She generously offered me this if, after I became pregnant, I promised to help her with her Peace Project.

For many weeks I found myself on the phone with Julia, being guided through imageries that would lead me to make many positive changes in my life and come to realizations about both my own relationship with myself and with people in my life. I  made dietary changes to aid my digestion, and ate to nourish my fertile body.

I continued to go to an acupuncturist, but I continued this with  the knowledge that although it was part of my healing regimen, she wasn’t going to cure my infertility.  As I worked with Julia, I continued to feel jealous of pregnant friends, to regret baby shower invitations and to feel desperate and sad that I couldn’t make my husband a father and me a mother.  I felt all of these deep emotions, but this time I knew what to do with them. Julia taught me how to use them in my process of healing, to listen to them and to respond to them in a healthy way.

It was 3:20 in the afternoon on March 11^th, 2010 that I, once again, trusted what my body was feeling and went to buy a pregnancy test for the first time in many, many months. I had stopped wasting the money, since my cycles were so regular.  I recall feeling a very peaceful hopefulness, knowing that if the test turned out to be negative, I had the tools now to deal with my feelings.  What I didn’t anticipate was my reaction when that test turned out to be positive!  I saw the plus sign and began shaking.  Not only did it represent the possibility of a little life growing inside me, but it also marked the end of our very long journey as well as solidified for me the notion that my body was to be trusted.  I fell into my husband’s arms as I threw the test stick at him, and our bodies that had been ravaged by years of despair gave way to the bliss of letting go.

I had a very healthy pregnancy. We found out at 18 weeks that we were having a baby girl with a beautiful button nose. I am not sure if the word “coincidence” is the correct one to use when I write that her due date of November 17^th is also Julia’s birthday. Coincidence doesn’t seem to be a word of enough strength to describe such a reality.  For 39 weeks we awaited the arrival of this miracle baby, immersed in love from so many people in our lives who knew of our journey to meet her. Carrying this little being and feeling the nurturing from my husband was intensely joyous.  I had never felt more feminine or more fertile.

Annabelle Katherine Queally arrived on November 11^th, 2011 at 4:23 AM. She was born in the water, under a full moon whose brilliance crept out only briefly from behind storm clouds.  The rainstorm and howling wind that were happening outside during our labor made me feel at peace inside the shelter of our hospital room, as if there was no place else in the world we were supposed to be.  I pictured the earth’s beings all huddled under their own dry, warm shelter, awaiting her birth.

I had wanted a water birth, yet had prepared for other eventualities, since I had no idea what my body was going to feel like doing.  I labored for 13 very long and painful hours, always wanting to ask for something to take the pain away, but never did.  This was the ultimate moment of trusting my body to do what it was supposed to do like I had so many times in this journey to meet our daughter.  Besides my husband’s healing hands, and my sister-in-law’s perfectly soothing touch, there were a few other elements during labor that helped get me through the pain.  I had just begun to push, and heard my midwife’s serene voice from across the room. She said “Remember…your body won’t give you pain it can’t handle.”  It was reminiscent of Julia’s wisdom that our bodies know exactly what to do, but that it is up to us to trust in the wisdom of our bodies.

The final push that allowed for my daughter’s passage from my body into my husband’s awaiting hands made me realize my body’s incredible strength. It was the final push after years of yearning for that moment, after a lifetime of wanting to be a mother.  Our daughter was born to this world on what some believe to be an auspicious date, 11/11/11.  Perhaps these numbers bring luck, or light, prosperity, or a new dawn.  For me this date simply holds the perfection of our daughter’s birth.  We had wanted her years before this date, but as Julia once said to a latecomer to our Woodstock workshop, “You are not late. You are right on time, because this is the time that you arrived.”

  Choosing Possibility: FSH 150, AMH 0.01 and a baby on the way!

by Kumari Linley London, UK

“Turn right, down the tree-filled avenue of possibility!” I remember that line so clearly as I write this. So many times throughout this journey the Sacred Choices imagery on Julia’s Imagery CD helped me do exactly that, “turn right down the avenue leading to the park full of possibility” when I was tempted to turn left down the path of “infertility, hopelessness and self pity.” Perhaps my story will help someone do the same; to keep choosing the path of possibility even when the obstacles seem insurmountable. Our stories may not turn out the same, but if I learned one thing from the Fertile Heart Ovum practice, it’s that hopelessness is not a fertility friend and self pity can only lead you down a dead end road.

In June of 2010 I noticed my periods becoming sporadic and I began to experience hot flashes. I attributed the changes to stress, and the fact that I was in a new relationship after a rather traumatic breakup.  The hot flashes stopped after a while but I decided to get tested and my first FSH reading came back at 109. I had no idea what this meant. I signed up for an appointment with a fertility specialist through the National Health Service here in the UK.  When I realized that that appointment was going to take much too long, I decided to go to a private clinic.

The first specialist I saw said: Gosh with these levels you are way past menopause, FSH levels need to be under 10. I was completely crushed!!! Desperate to prove that this must’ve been some sort of mistake I was determined to find somebody who would have better news. I could hardly breathe when the second fertility specialist confirmed the diagnosis.  After that second consultation I was on a downward spiral and after each appointment I got more and more depressed.

So when one of the private clinics was offering free fertility support group sessions, I decided to join. But the energy in that group got me even more down. Everybody was so angry and bitter I was in worse shape after the group was over than I was before I got there.

The third fertility specialist was with the National Health Service and by then my FSH soared to 150 and when they tested my anti mullerian hormone levels, the doctor reported that my AMH was pretty much nonexistent at 0.01 level. It’s best, he said, that I move toward a donor egg cycle as soon as possible, because, the later I do it, the less chance of success. So not only was I devastated, now I was in a frenzy, feeling I had to act immediately or else all chances of having a baby would be gone.

I was about to talk to my younger sister asking her if she’d consider being my donor but then something just made me stop. I’m not even sure what it was that got me feeling that what I was hearing especially about the rush toward egg donation didn’t make sense. I was only 34. I was reading about women going through successful egg donor cycles in their late forties, even early fifties. Why was this fertility specialist in such a rush to get me sign up for egg donation? It didn’t feel right to me, so I decided I needed to just take a break, give myself a  chance to sort things through.

And that’s when one day searching for some information on fertility herbs I found Fertile Heart. I immediately got The Fertile Female  and Inconceivable, started to work with the Imagery CD’s, and when I heard the Expert Within Imagery it was a kind of an instant enlightement! I suddenly felt how true that was that I had been going to all these external experts, but really had no idea who my fertility expert within was, or how I would access her wisdom.

Gradually as I became more familiar with the Ovum ideas, the answers to that question seemed to come when I least expected them. When I joined a teleconference I immediately felt like this was a whole different way of looking at infertility. It was such a welcoming community and the focus was on truly mothering ourselves and turning this into an opportunity no matter how things turned out. I loved that!

I kept reading and re-reading the chapters in The Fertile Female. If I got down on my body about not doing what I wanted it to do, I’d read Issues in Your Tissues. For a while it was my favorite chapter. The Fertile Heart tools helped me get through the most crushing times, I had the CD’s on my IPhone and would listen to them whenever I telt like hopelessness was taking over. I’d do the Wailing Wall from the Body Truth CD when I got enraged at the pressure, which, looking back, was all about money making. But at the time I was so vulnerable that without these tools and without finally accessing the fertility expert within. it would’ve been so easy for me to succumb to the pressure.

Gradually I started looking at my life and this journey through a very different lens and I actually started looking at this journey as a great gift.  I know you might be saying it’s easy for her to say that now. But the truth is that even before I became pregnant I realized what a gift this journey was for me.

I’ve been so used to striving at work, in my relationships, and in just about everything, that my walk towards my baby, as Julia calls it, just became part of the striving. I would spend hours researching every herbal supplement, sign up for every alternative fertility therapy, berate myself for any slips in my “fertility diet,” do every visualization exercise. But it was all done in such a frenzied fashion that it was perhaps doing more harm than good. When I finally understood what the Fertile Heart Ovum practice was really about, I decided that I was doing a good enough job. And I stuck to my routine around fertility supplements, instead of trying to find new remedies every second or third day. I did my imagery, and the meditation and movement sequences from Body Truth, and I hung on to hope in a more compassionate embrace.

I found out I was pregnant on New Year’s Eve, what a way to start the year! Yes, I’m pregnant, conceived the old fashioned way with lovely intervention from my most wonderful husband.  And the journey continues.  Although I’m pregnant, I’m still using the tools, I’m still walking toward my baby, still learning about slowing down, treating myself to a reflexology session, reminding myself to be compassionate with myself. That, might be another important priceless lesson in fertility that I learned through my Fertile Heart journey. I must first be compassionate with myself, then it’s a lot easier to be compassionate with everyone else around me. I imagine it will also make it a lot easier to be a good mom. Thank you, Fertile Heart for being here, for helping me  hold on to the empowered fertility specialist within and to drown out the voices shouting at me from all directions that with and FSH of 150 and barely detectable AMH  of 0.01 I would never conceive naturally!  Julia, I think your work is sooooo important, thank you for the bottom of my heart!

This happened long ago and far away. Or maybe just yesterday. It’s a story worth telling.

We’ll call her Laila.

It was circle time. The irony of something Laila said, struck me and I responded with what I thought was a lighthearted comment.  I anticipated laughter in response. Instead, my words hit a nerve. Laila wrote a note after the call and told me so. I was genuinely glad she did. And I instantly understood why I might’ve hurt her.

I said, I apologize for hurting you. I also invited Laila to explore during the upcoming circle why my remark caused so much pain. In the Fertile Heart world, pain is a clue that something in us is calling to push through the birth canal. People who hurt us are often the “angelic midwives” assisting at the birth of the next not-yet-born aspect of our nature.

So after apologizing, I asked, “Would you like to work on it?” Meaning: Let’s go to the Orphan playground and hear what the howling in our hearts is about.

“No,” she said.

Instead she walked away. Our relationship wasn’t strong enough to weather the assault of that remark. Those few words, undoubtedly colored by an ever present abandoned little kid in my own heart, erased months of a caring connection between us.

Yep, the little kid in me and also the adult who genuinely liked and cared about Laila, was hurt. But I also knew that walking away is what Laila needed to do. Walking away is often a wonderful test that helps us discover what the relationship is made off.

My job was to step across the threshold of my inner orphanage to better understand my own response and behavior. I soon realized that, of course, Laila was helping me take another small step in my own birthing journey. The journey in which I get to meet the Julia who can claim not only the value of her work but her value as a human being. A journey in which I get to claim the value of being a human teacher with a risky task of keeping her heart open to thousands of strangers. My job was to forgive myself for being no more and no less than an all too human teacher, fallible but honest and brave enough to engage with her own Orphans first. Then do what it takes to create a safe space for whatever Orphans show up on our various Fertile Heart playgrounds.

Walking away might sometimes be the most sensible action. It’s how we leave and to what extent we understand why we leave or stay, that makes all the difference in how our departure affects the other person, and all our future relationships.

A safe space is not a space in which we don’t get hurt. The human game is a contact sport and if we want to play it for all it’s worth, injury is pretty much inevitable. A safe space is one in which we can hurt each other and then make room for the Orphans to speak their peace and the Ultimate Mom to arrive on the scene in full splendor.

That, to me, is the only way to create a truly safe and fertile space. And parenting is all about providing such a space for the tender vulnerable creatures that beam down to be our next, most venerable teachers. We will hurt them no matter how hard we try not to. They will do whatever it takes to attempt to hurt us back. But walking away is not going to be a viable option for either of us.

How do you respond when someone hurts you? Who shows up first? The O, the V, or the UM? And who has the final say?

What better time to launch a Visionary Moms Blog Series than the 20th anniversary of that week in April of 1992, when the number on the lab report with my FSH levels was the same as my age: 42. And wouldn’t you know it, that anniversary falls smack in the middle of National Infertility Awareness Week! Life has an impeccable sense of timing, if we can just let go and trust it!

Increased awareness would serve us well. I bet our children would cheer us on if we stopped seeing ourselves as victims of a disease and became more aware of how much we ourselves can do to co-create healthy fertile bodies and lives; I bet they would squeal in delight watching us morph into Visionary Mamas on an awesome mission: a safer Earth-Home for all.

So let the wild rumpus begin!

Our very first guest blogger series Priceless Lessons In-Fertility will feature bloggers like Kumari Linley from London, UK, whose FSH levels were more than 3 times higher than mine and her AMH levels (for those of you who are troubled with that controversial marker of ovarian reserve) were 0.01. Kumari is now 4 months pregnant with her first child.

We’ll hear from Mandy Queally, a second grade teacher in Maine, who has always dreamed of becoming a mom but never imagined to end up in the emergency room just a few weeks after her first positive pregnancy test. Mandy, too, will share the priceless lessons of her pilgrimage toward motherhood.

Morgan, a young Canadian ethicist and mom-to-be will write about the controversial topic of birth control pills and about transforming her donor egg cycle into a wholesome, life-affirming adventure!

This inaugural series hopes to introduce the first in a line of future Fertile Heart Visionary Mom bloggers, who have used the Ovum tools to birth babies, families and most important, to birth themselves. After reading their stories you might never again think of yourself as infertile or punished or suffering from a debilitating disease!

Hope to see you back here on the 22nd!

May the Force of Fertility Awareness be with us!

Julia

Does soy increase fertility or deplete your baby making potential?
By Julia Indichova.

Several weeks ago, I received a generous thank you note from a holistic practitioner who works with fertility issues. She was thanking me for clearing up some conflicting information on fertility foods and soy products. Her note note made me realize just how contentious a subject soy is, even among experts in the fertility field. So I thought it might be useful to offer a quick summary of what I have come to in the last 15 years of observing my own, as well as my clients’ response to soy.

Over eighty percent of the women I’ve worked with as a fertility educator, wrestle with various levels of digestive difficulties. A large percentage battles impaired thyroid function.

The good news is that as we begin to view food-related adjustments not as restrictions but as a source of power, dietary changes become easy. A baby is the one shiny apple, most of us will do just about anything, to reach.

During the pre-conception cleansing phase—fresh, live, high-water-content, easily digestible combinations of fertility foods (see recipe section of The Fertile Female), a close attention to individual nutritional needs and a supplementation with specific high potency, absorbable fertility supplements—is where we begin.

My article Fertility Supplements documents some of my research on the link between supplements and fertility.

As far as soy goes, my clients do best with fermented soy products such as tempeh, tamari, miso and nato.

The protease inhibitors in unfermented soy foods, such as soy milk, tofu, processed soy cheeses, inhibit the key enzymes that help us digest protein and can cause bloating, intestinal disorders and impaired pancreatic function. Fermentation on the other hand adds beneficial microorganisms that help break down complex proteins into highly digestible amino acids and fatty acids.

Women who, like myself, have been diagnosed “irreversibly infertile” due to high FSH and low estrogen levels, and generally most women over 35, do well with incorporating fermented soy in their food plan. (The exception are women wrestling with fibroids and endometriosis who tend to be estrogen dominant and need to avoid soy products in general.)

Fermentation also deactivates the soy’s mineral depleting phytates and other anti-nutrients. Otherwise the impaired mineral absorption—of calcium for example—especially for women with fertility challenges such as depleted ovarian reserve, can be a serious concern.

Women with thyroid related issues have done well with a moderate amount of fermented soy, combined with iodine rich foods such as seaweed. (See the Hijik Joy Salad recipe and other fermented soy recipes in The Fertile Female.)

Of course, no fertility food adjustments or fertility supplements will “get to where the trouble is” unless our entire Holy Human Loaf cooperates with the repairative process. Which is why I passionately encourage using the Ovum tools around food to reveal the hiding places of our inner Orphans, learn to love them through the choices we make, and call on our Visionary and the Ultimate Mom to plan the menu of the day. When we do that, the perfect “fertility diet” unfolds for us one bite at a time.

Last night in our fertility food-centered TeleClass, we decided to make one Visionary-rooted change that involves food. I am letting go of the Organic Nectar Pistachio Gelato I’ve been attached to lately. It’s great stuff, non-dairy, agave sweetened and there is really nothing wrong with a treat, but just as an experiment, I want to see what comes up for me as I let go of it for a while.

Perhaps you want to embark on an experiment of your own, making one fertility enhancing food change as you plan your menu for tomorrow.

Whatever you ultimately choose to place on your dinner table, let go of guilt and eat it with pleasure and gusto, and it will become the most potent fertility food!

Copyright @ Fertile Heart 2010; No part of this document may be reproduced without the permission in writing of FertileHeart.com and Julia Indichova.