Blog
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Supporting Yourself on Mother's Day - This year and Every Year
I believe that we all have an incredibly strong desire to create, and this desire often doesn't fade with a baby. This is why women often have more than one. I am not saying to give up your hope of having a baby. I'm saying that we can use this time as an opportunity to begin to think about what else might be wanting to move through us.
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Women, Money and Fertility
We can actually care deeply about the well-being of the women we serve, we can care deeply about the planet, and we can offer products and resources that are effective, and we can be intentional about all of it. -
The Foundations of Fertility: Sleep
On a physical level, sleep is so beneficial for our fertility. Our body has time to heal and rejuvenate when we sleep. Sleep supports the balancing of cortisol levels which impacts all of the hormones involved in reproductive health. -
Deepening Into Your Yang Phase
Yang is related to the Element of Fire, to your heart. It relates to joy and excitement and passion for life and your ability to love and receive love. This energy of the heart needs to connect down to the womb for pregnancy to occur.
Many of us become burdened by the day to day stressors of life that we forget about the importance of fun and joy and inspiration. Many women in my practice have become frustrated and depressed or defeated by their fertility struggle that they've lost the sense of joy in their lives, in their marriage, even in sex. -
Deepening Into Your Qi Phase
Especially if you've been diagnosed with anovulation, PCOS or unexplained Infertility, understanding and healing this phase of your cycle is incredibly important.
The Qi phase occurs in the few days around ovulation, so after the Yin Phase and before the Yang, Phase, or approximately Days 12-15 of your cycle.By the time you reach this phase, your follicles are nice and juicy and one will have grown to be the plumpest of all and become the one you ovulate.
Here, we need a burst of energy for that ripe and juicy follicle to be burst forth from your ovary, and to have the energy to travel along the length of the fallopian tube and burrow into your uterine wall. -
Deepening into Your Yin Phase
Yin is responsible for uterine lining health, follicle growth and health, estrogen balance, cervical fluid and so much more. I believe it is the number one most important aspect of fertility, and often the phase that is the most out of balance.
During this phase, we focus on cooling, nurturing and nourishing your follicles to support the quality of your eggs. One of these nurtured follicles will be ovulated in the next cycle phase, the QI Phase.
This time is about gestation, of receptivity and growth, of waiting and patience and being in the not-doing. -
Deepening into your Blood Phase
I always consider the metal, blood phase the end of the pattern, the death of the cycle. But it's important to note that time is not linear. So where there is ending, there must be beginning. There is a new beginning implicit in the ending, just as there is ending implicit in the new beginning.
We must let go so that there is room to move into water, into gestation, so that new life can occur. So many of us get stuck in an inability to let go, and are unable to move into the water, Yin phase of healthy follicle development and even gestation.
The energetic of this phase should be about encouraging your body and your unconscious to let go of that which is not serving your highest conscious priority. -
The Six Elements of Healthy Fertility, #6: HOW
Trusting that when we heal ourselves, we heal our entire ancestral line, we will explore our own internalized patriarchalized feminine, to heal those wounds related to being a girl and a woman in this sometimes harsh but also beautiful world.
Honoring our Elders, we will become our own Wise Woman, and a Mother in the most positive sense of the word:
A woman who can embrace and create life.
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The Six Elements of Healthy Fertility, #5: WHY
It’s important to understand that infertility is just a symptom. Trying to “heal” infertility can be a bit like trying to fix a tree that isn't flowering by looking at the branches instead of focusing on the roots.Whether you have high FSH, Endometriosis, PCOS, Fallopian Tube blockage, POF, or even unexplained infertility, it’s important to uncover the root cause in order to heal.Each woman has her unique complex of needs required to bring her into perfect balance.When those needs aren’t perfectly attuned to, the resulting imbalances will contribute to her underlying root cause. -
The Six Elements of Healthy Fertility, #4: WHERE
The element of Where is all about Embodied Presence. "Where" is within you and all around you. It begins when we recognize that our body is a microsystem of the universe. And maybe we hold an entire universe within our womb.
"Where" is about connection. When we connect with our head with our heart, our heart with our womb, we can feel present. But when we connect our womb to the Earth and all the way up to the stars, to include the abundance of the Great Mother and the presence of our ancestors, that’s where the magic happens.
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The Six Elements of Healthy Fertility, #3: WHEN
Likewise, each of the four phases in a woman's cycle has its own energy that must be cultivated to create your own fruitful fertility story.
We release when we are bleeding.
We nourish when our follicles are developing.
We move and energize when we are ovulating.
We warm for implantation to occur.
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The Six Elements of Healthy Fertility, #2: WHAT
Fertility requires that we receive YIN. It’s not something we can go out and “get” by doing everything right. Yin must be received by dropping in, letting go and opening. It requires trust and vulnerability. To “hold” the Yang energy that is required during ovulation, conception and carrying a pregnancy to term, deeply nourished Yin is essential.
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The Six Elements of Healthy Fertility, #1: WHO
The WHO in our fertility story encompasses all aspects of the Divine Feminine, including the Maiden, the Mother and the Wise Woman.A woman may begin the process of exploring her fertility as a Maiden. While the Maiden is a valuable and important aspect of the Feminine, “Mothering Up” is crucial for every woman, regardless of whether or not she chooses to have children. -
Why Endometriosis Occurs and How to Treat to Increase Fertility
In my Traditional Chinese Medicine Acupuncture & Fertility practice, I’ve had a lot of success treating endometriosis, relieving the pain it inflicts, reducing inflammation and often slowing the development of new extraneous tissue growth. Many of my patients with endometriosis are now mothers.
While it’s best to begin to treat endometriosis as soon as the symptoms of pain or heavy bleeding begins, this is unfortunately when many women (or teenage girls) are put on birth control to block their symptoms. Unfortunately, this doesn’t do anything to unravel the pattern of stagnation, and because hormonal contraceptives have to be processed by the liver, they can actually exacerbate the imbalance of stagnation that contributes to endometriosis in the first place.
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Supporting Your Body's Fertility When you Have PCOS
When we begin to discuss PCOS, it’s important to note that while of course there are the factors that Western medicine would note, such as elevated LH levels and possibly cysts on the ovaries, in Eastern Medicine, which includes herbal/ botanical/ plant medicine, the focus is more on how energy is living in your body. This is important to note because this is the level at which plants and “energetic” type medicines like acupuncture, moxibustion and womb massage work.
These energies can eventually also manifest at the physical level, such as in the case as actual “cysts” and hormone imbalance but the energy that contributes to the physical cyst typically exists long before the actual cyst or hormone level elevation develops.
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One of the most effective ways to track your fertility
Why An Ovulation Predictor Kit Only Tells You a Part of the Story
While of course it’s important to know if you’re ovulating based on the hormone levels in your urine, a significant temperature spike in your BBT chart (at least 5/10ths of a degree) is a good indication that you’ve ovulated. However, only knowing that you’ve ovulated isn’t really enough to tell you HOW to correct an imbalance that might be impacting fertility. For instance, if your temperature doesn’t STAY elevated, even if you’ve ovulated, conception won’t occur.
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THINKING OF HAVING A BABY? WHY YOU PROBABLY NEED TO DETOXIFY YOUR LIVER FIRST
Not only do environmental toxins disrupt endocrine health and mitochondrial efficiency, which can lead to infertility, but many of these toxins can pass through the placenta. So even if a woman does become pregnant, she is unwittingly passing dangerous toxins to her baby. The Environmental Working Group reported that the cord blood of the average baby at birth contains over 200 chemicals (chemicals that should not be in baby’s cord blood!) While toxins affect everybody, children are especially affected because they have an inhibited and underdeveloped detoxification pathway. Because they’re not supposed to carry any toxic load, it’s harder for them to process the toxins, and they accumulate much more easily. -
What Should I Do About My High FSH Diagnosis?
It may sound dire, but it is possible to improve the quality of your follicles, thereby lowering FSH. I’ve had patients with FSH levels above 50 reduce their levels to within healthy range. I’ve even had patients who were officially diagnosed with low ovarian reserve and early menopause who have improved the quality of their follicles. These women not only conceived, but also carried their pregnancies to full term.
