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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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. -
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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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.
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Which Exercises are Best for Fertility?
How exercise can impact your reproductive health
While I do encourage all of my patients to move their bodies regularly, when hard-core working out is such a big component of a woman’s life, it’s important to really understand how it might be impacting her reproductive health, including her fertility.
