Fertility: A Definition of the Heart

How we perceive ourselves, the stories we construct around the challenges life places in our path, the ideas we perpetuate and the words we use – they don’t just shape our experience. They are carved into our cells and determine the consistency of our Holy Human Loaves. They disrupt our ever fluctuating hormone levels.

So as I read the latest mind-body study on stress (my favorite useless term) and fertility, and read the designer of the study speak of “infertile patients,” and see countless advocacy and medical sites proclaim the institutionally sanctioned fertlity definition: The inability to conceive after a year of trying — which gets reduced to 6 months if you are over 35, and 5 minutes if you’re over forty — I’m compelled to pass on a fertility definition of my own.

It’s about being receptive to the seed of the next creation hurling toward you, opening up as wide and juiced up as you dare to be.

For me, fertility is about conception, and gestation and birth, and conception and gestation and birth and on and on. It’s about being receptive to the seed of the next creation hurling toward you, opening up as wide and juiced up as you dare to be, whether by tear or thrill, but moist to the moment: the gaze of a stranger, the heart stopping headline of injustice and betrayal, the swift shadow of malice as it shoots across the countenance of a friend.

To let all of that be your compass.

If you have never stepped into the darkened chambers of your own heart, when you keep placing one fickle foot over the threshold then keep drawing back as if from a hot stove, how will you ever know which life is yours to live?

It’s all here. The writing’s on the wall. Right in front of our eyes. All we need to do is look up Breathe it in. Let it find its way and land on the floor of the soul. Just once.

If we keep dodging the day’s directions carved into the dust, for us the treasure hunt will never cease. We’ll perish from thirst and never taste the sweetness of the living stream dripping through the fingers of our cupped hands.

The revised fertility definition calls for seeing fertility as a willingness to make good on a promise we once made. To live and love as only mortals can. To tremble in terror and do it anyway.

It’s about choosing a road, and letting it unfold before us, not because someone tells us it’s the right road to take, but because every cell in our body says no other road will do.

Fertility is about asking ourself over and over again: what is it that’s calling to be birthed through me? If Life is not delivering the baby on my timeline, what is it I’m asked to bring forth right now? How do I clear the runway to make it easier for the child to land?.

Fertility is about standing up for something. Exposing an injustice, and feeling so energized by doing so, we want to do it again. It’s about discovering as we speak up for others, that we have never truly spoken up for ourselves.

So we begin.

The revised fertility definition is about resolving to do one act of self-loving kindness, one tiny experiment in feeding ourselves in a way that makes us feel taken care of. Or maybe we get up the courage for one small unprecedented expression of intimacy with our partner or friend.

And no one will have to prove to us that this has made us more alive, because we’ll be tingling with excitement. The current of the life-force moving through us will be – beyond any doubt – a palpable, felt, lived experience.

That, to me, might be a good start toward defining fertility.

Julia Indichova, www.FertileHeart.com All Rights Reserved