Lately I’ve been having a lot of conversations with my fertility patients about the role of consciousness in fertility. I recently read a quote by Jiddu Krishnamurti that really resonated with this discussion: “It is no measure of sanity to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
This touches on an idea that has been percolating in my mind for the past few months and validates my belief that, when we view our body as a microsystem of the earth and the universe, perhaps infertility is the body’s healthy response to living in a society, a consciousness and a world that are incredibly unwell.
A natural response to dis-ease is to want to “fix” it. Of course we want to eradicate cancer, to reduce pain, to heal disease and to “correct” infertility. But what if we begin to examine the possibility that those “imbalances” are actually our body’s way of responding to living in “the matrix,” for lack of a better term?
What if the world around us is so inherently damaged that to be in healthy relationship to it feels impossible? What would a healthy relationship to an earth that is being decimated look like? Climate change, the rape and plunder of our natural resources, starvation, war, a dualistic approach to almost everything, including politics and gender. While I have tended, in the past, to try to remain neutral and avoid political discussion or “upsetting” topics in my role as a “healer,” I’m beginning to recognize that the issue of infertility must remain a part of a much larger conversation.
More than half of my patients are medicated in some form or another. While I have no moral judgment on the use of anti-depressants or anti-anxiety drugs, it is difficult to ignore the reality that most people are numbing themselves to life. Whether it’s in the form of pharmacological drugs, or in self-medicating with recreational drugs, alcohol, food, sex, we are a society that increasingly must blunt and deaden our experience of the world. Our experience in the world.
My impulse response to pain in any form is to try to fix it. My past relationship to “healing” looked a lot like trying to fix people’s experience of the world: to reduce their symptoms, help them function in society, whether by helping them have a baby, reducing their pain, helping them sleep, reducing anxiety and depression. But in looking at the world in which I’m helping them to function, I can’t help but recognize that perhaps I’ve been looking at the wrong side of the coin.
My fertility work has shifted significantly as my own experience of life has shifted. Three years ago I left Hoboken, NJ (right outside of Manhattan) and “escaped” to the mountains of Colorado. I sold my thriving fertility wellness center, recognizing that something was missing from my life, and spent two years exploring that feeling. I didn’t want to start over in a new place, in a new life, and simply recreate the same existence that was leaving me unfulfilled. I recognized that the first step in healing is acceptance. Recognizing that something isn’t working and rather than immediately stepping in and trying to “fix,” in holding that tension instead; that tension that something needs to change while accepting and exploring what is.
I bring this new ideology to the women in my fertility practice, who are usually looking to me to fix their infertility, heal them, heal their bodies so that they can be “whole.” But when a woman can explore the possibility that perhaps she’s not broken, that perhaps her “infertility” is an adaptation to a broken society, she can begin to recognize her body as a perfect microsystem of the universe.
My patients are beginning to view their fertility journey as a celebration of a new experience of their bodies, a new experience of life. It’s an experience in which each body is decidedly “right”, and while that body may be responding to unhealthy external stimuli, that response is also “right.” It is my belief that an experience of her own fertility is every woman’s birthright.
Breathe that in.
Experiencing your fertility is your birthright.
You are a fertile, creative being… and it is important to begin to recognize the possibility that your “infertility” is a response to a much bigger problem. A societal problem. A global problem.
I look forward to continuing to explore this new consciousness with you, where we recognize that healing isn’t fixing. Fertility isn’t pumping our body full of medications in order to create and sustain life. Healing, true healing, begins with recognizing that we must go inward to expand outward. We must look inward to create the space into which new life can be borne.
While this conversation will be slightly different, in that it won’t be one in which I “have all the answers” for you, it feels to me like potentially the most important conversation, one that is imperative to have. I would love to hear your ideas and thoughts on this subject, and look forward to continuing the discussion, which I explore more in-depth in The Fertile Mama Method.
Join my Facebook page, Wisdom of the Womb, and the Wisdom of the Womb Be Fertile group so that we can continue this conversation.