I recently received a beautiful e-mail from a client who used the Anji meditations to help with conceiving and a healthy pregnancy. During our e-mail conversation, she shared this comment with me:

“It’s amazing what happened when I started to believe in myself again and trust my body, and relax. I used to get upset when my OB told me to ‘relax, it will happen,’ relaxing really was what I needed. ”

If only the OBs were able to explain this in a deep and complete enough way, so many more people could be helped with that information! However, without an understanding of why it’s so important to incorporate relaxation, the comment “just relax” comes off sounding like a dismissal of your experience, or how you are feeling inside is unimportant or easy to change.

Mind~Body medicine is able to both explain the impact of how you feel on your fertility and give you the tools to shift. In other words, how you are feeling is directly related to your fertility, and therefore, vitally important to consider. (It isn’t just how you are feeling BECAUSE of your fertility challenges, but how your emotions and beliefs impacted your fertility BEFORE you wanted to conceive).

Let me give you a more in depth explanation from the point of view of one form of mind~body medicine, Chinese Medicine.

From a Chinese Medicine perspective, we are all born with a life essence, which is stored and expressed as Kidney energy. The activity we do during our daily lives either adds to that bank of energy, or removes it.

The goal is to have many more activities that add to the bank. When we constantly remove — through stress, anxiety, fear, busyness, etc. — we end up dipping into our basic life essence, which is hard on the body and the basic life processes we need to work — including reproduction.

How you feel is a perfect indicator of whether you are adding or subtracting from this life essence.

When your life is full of emotion that doesn’t feel good like perfectionism, fear, worry, shame, guilt, stress, hopelessness, and anger, you are not adding to the bank of life essence, you are withdrawing from it. People come into this life with all different amounts in their banks. However, with enough ongoing drains, no matter what you came in with, you will start draining that basic amount.

When your life and feelings tend more towards neutrality, hope, calm, peace, happiness, you are adding to your life essence.

What is even more interesting about all of this is that in Chinese Medicine, Kidney is responsible for reproduction. This gives you a direct correlation between how you feel and your ability to conceive.

For the next week, I ask you to slip into the role of observer: are you adding or subtracting from your life essence?

Jennifer Bloome is a Fertility Expert helping women energetically balance and heal their mind, body, and spirit to boost natural fertility. Jennifer is the creator of the internationally recognized Journey of the Heart series of guided meditations to support women in all stages of fertility treatment and pregnancy. For 3 no-charge guided meditations as well as information on teleclasses or individual sessions, please visit www.AnjiOnline.com.

Question: “I have listened to relaxation/mindfulness CDs. I find the effects are not long lasting. Stress is alleviated for a short while, but returns rather quickly. What am I missing?”

Answer: Great question! It takes time to use the relaxation CDs, if they aren’t helpful long term, what’s the point of scheduling in the time? There are several points that I would like to share:

First: when you include relaxation or mindfulness CDs into your regular routine, you are making changes in how your body handles stress at the cellular level. It is as if you are putting a layer of Saran Wrap over the tops of the cells that listen for stress signals in your body.

This means when situations arise in your life that would typically cause you to feel stress in your body, the cells won’t react and therefore you won’t feel as anxious, tense, sore, headache-y, or with your specific stress signal.

Here’s the catch though. In order to get these lasting physiological effects, you need to be using the relaxation technique on a regular basis for about two weeks.

You will feel that short-term relief immediately upon listening — the deeper effects take longer.

Second: Stress is a catchall phrase for many different emotions: anger, frustration, sadness, fear, grief, hopelessness. These emotions are present in daily life for many reasons. Simply doing a relaxation exercise everyday isn’t going to change those reasons.

A relaxation exercise doesn’t change that you have been trying for a baby for two years, or that you are worried about your finances, or that you are still grieving over your last miscarriage.

It will change the intensity of the emotions, but the thoughts and beliefs that create the emotions will still be firmly entrenched.

In my opinion, the relaxation CD is simply the first step of feeling better. This is a very important step because it helps to quiet the body, which makes it a lot easier to hear what is really causing the emotion.

The second step is identifying and releasing the thoughts and beliefs, which are creating the stressful thoughts in the first place. EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) is an invaluable tool for creating changes in your thoughts and beliefs.

So, when you combine the regularity of a relaxation CD with releasing the thoughts and beliefs that cause stressful feelings, you end with a powerful combination that can change your day to day life experience as well as enhance your natural fertility.

Jennifer Bloome is a Fertility Expert helping women energetically balance and heal their mind, body, and spirit to boost natural fertility. Jennifer is the creator of the internationally recognized Journey of the Heart series of guided meditations to support women in all stages of fertility treatment and pregnancy. For 3 no-charge guided meditations as well as information on teleclasses or individual sessions, please visit www.AnjiOnline.com.

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves”
— Victor Frankel

It is simply human nature to try our “known” solutions before doing something else. It’s not that we only want an easy solution; it’s more about: how can you try something you don’t know about?

And yet, when a big problem persists, it’s time to find out what you didn’t know you didn’t know.

Mind~Body~Spirit solutions for fertility issues typically fall into the “didn’t know you didn’t know” category. Taking on a M~B~S view of fertility requires moving from believing that doctors and medical science have ALL the answers to uncovering your own role in your health.

You have probably made steps to taking care of your own health in the areas of diet and exercise before. However, what about listening to the deeper messages from your body?

Here’s something to think about: In addition to being painful, excruciatingly frustrating, depressing, sad and (add your current emotion here), infertility is also a message to you from your body.

A message that energy is blocked somewhere in your body. A message that your body is trying to get your attention in the only way it knows how. A message that when you really hear it; will tell you what to do to heal.

Christiane Northrup, M.D. in Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom puts this very eloquently: “Every thought we think has a biochemical equivalent. Every emotion we feel has a biochemical equivalent. One of my colleagues says, ‘The mind is the space between the cells.’ So when the part of your mind that is your uterus talks to you, through pain or excessive bleeding, are you prepared to listen to it?”

This can be quite a challenge to get your mind wrapped around. We typically aren’t taught to listen to our bodies. We’re taught to cover up symptoms with Tylenol or Tums. We’re taught to push through our body’s pain. Not with malicious intent — but from a disconnected understanding of how the body works.

I invite you to begin to step up to this new challenge to change yourself. Begin to start thinking of all of the physical symptoms in your body — painful periods, short luteal phases, muscle pain, headaches, and digestive issues — as messages from your body.

You’ll be amazed at what you hear once you start listening.

Jennifer Bloome is a Fertility Expert helping women energetically balance and heal their mind, body, and spirit to boost natural fertility. Jennifer is the creator of the internationally recognized Journey of the Heart series of guided meditations to support women in all stages of fertility treatment and pregnancy. For 3 no-charge guided meditations as well as information on teleclasses or individual sessions, please visit www.AnjiOnline.com.

How many times have you heard women are born with all the eggs they will ever produce? How many times have you heard there is nothing you can do to change the health of your ovaries, follicles, and resulting eggs?

Neither of these is true and it breaks my heart each time I hear a new client talk with me about these fears.

Dr. Randine Lewis addressed both of these issues very eloquently in a recent blog post. If you are not aware of Randine’s work with fertility, please visit her site at TheFertileSoul.com, or pick up a copy of her book, The Infertility Cure.

I am sharing her full article with you today.

Can Women Make New Eggs?

By Dr. Randine Lewis
TheFertileSoul.com

A new study confirmed the underlying belief, unproven, that the ovary contains deep, hidden stem cells, capable of becoming new eggs. It was previously believed that a woman’s ovarian potential was determined before birth, and was incapable of being improved upon. While science hasn’t been able to study ovarian potential from healthy, living ovarian tissue, rodent studies have supported the idea that mammalian ovarian cells have a potential to produce new cells. Yet, the only tissue science has previously had to study was pathological or diseased tissue, removed from the body. It was previously proven that menopausal ovaries, when placed in a younger, healthier body, were capable of ovulating again. Science does not know how, why, or under what circumstances those stem cells can produce eggs.

The ovaries respond to cues from the internal environment (the blood circulation, hormones, nutritional status, oxygenation, stress hormones in the blood., toxin and antioxidant levels…) and create a follicular environment to mimic the body’s internal response to its external environment. It is within that follicular environment that the eggs (which have been in a dormant state since before birth) undergo meiosis, and wait to see if they will be selected for maturation and ovulation.

Knowing that ovarian tissue is capable of producing new eggs, and knowing that primordial follicles remain dormant until called into circulation by communicating with the body’s internal environment (which is based on her emotional interpretation of the external environment), let me provide a couple of stories from women I have treated.

• A woman underwent high dose radiation and chemotherapy, which “killed” her ovaries. She conceived naturally.
• A woman in ovarian failure, with an FSH value over 100, conceived naturally.
• A woman conceived during her 7th IVF at age 47.
• A woman conceived naturally with ¼ of one ovary.
• A woman conceived naturally with only one ovary on the left, and only one fallopian tube, on the right.
• A woman gave birth to her first child, conceived naturally, at age 48.

The body is capable of miraculous feats, when provided the right cues. I am less concerned with how to manipulate stem cells in the lab ten years from now, than I am with providing the right environment where the body can call upon its deepest, dormant potential now.

While the examples might be clinical anecdotes and not research worthy, the beauty of these stories is that each of the women above had to call upon a higher potential within.

According to Chinese medicine, the energy that stirs this primordial potential comes not from the Kidneys (which govern the ovaries), but from the Heart (Spirit’s) interaction with the primordial potential within the ovaries. Energetically, ones highest potential must reach into one’s most basic potential.

When an internal pressure cooker is provided (like the fertility journey,) an internal state of tension is produced, requiring one to call upon this higher level of interaction. If it isn’t accessed, the HPO axis continues on its previous (horizontal) pathway of decline. When a woman can access her heart’s highest potential, we can consider it an evolutionary jump, calling upon that hidden (vertical) potential to now manifest at a higher level.

Dr. Randine Lewis is the author of The Way of The Fertile Soul (Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2007) and The Infertility Cure (Little, Brown & Company, 2004), and her work is regularly featured in the international media including on CBS’ The Early Show and in the Washington Post, The Economist, the Wall Street Journal Europe, the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Therapies, Elle magazine, Organic Style magazine, Pregnancy magazine and other publications. Dr Lewis is also the creator of The Fertile Soul ® body, mind, spirit program of deep internal healing based upon Taoist and Chinese medical practices. For more information, including retreats, please visit www.TheFertileSoul.com.

Dealing with infertility means becoming exposed to many difficult topics. You are inundated with facts and figures about age and chromosomes. You experience first hand the heartbreak of loss, whether that is the loss of trust in your body, the loss of the naïveté other women get to have regarding pregnancy, or the loss of a baby.

Of course you don’t want to spend any more time than you have to dealing with the difficult topics.

However, from a body/mind perspective, it makes a difference HOW you handle the difficult topics. Sometimes, instinct makes you want to turn away from the difficult topics, to protect your heart, to keep from being completely overwhelmed. Oftentimes, the easiest way to do this is to bury the emotions, the memories, and the thoughts.

The problem with this, to borrow the title from a wonderful book on this topic, “feelings buried alive NEVER die.” Not only do they not die, they go on living in your subconscious and the cells of your body. They are very much alive and influencing how the cells of your body are acting and behaving.

Stay with me here, because I know this can be an overwhelming concept at first. It is NOT my goal to have you scared of your thoughts and emotions. In fact, you have more power than you know when it comes to these thoughts and emotions.

Here’s the key to handling thoughts and emotions: Instead of feeling like the choice is to either bury the emotion down deep or to push it away and try to pretend your way into having it not bother you, take your feelings or your thoughts one step at a time.

Take the “scary” or emotional thought and see what the next best thought is you can have about it. The new thought doesn’t have to be all bright and shiny and positive, that’s not going to be believable. It just has to be a little bit better than the thought before.

So for example, let’s take the thought:

“My body is never going to do what I want it to do.”

Shift that to:

“My body hasn’t been doing what I want it to do.”

Feel the difference in those two statements. Read them each out loud and really feel the difference.

Shift that to:

“I’m learning new ways to work with my body that I didn’t know about before.”

Now, read the first statement and this statement out loud. Feel the difference.

If you never take this thought any farther, can you feel the difference of where you have “left” your thoughts and emotions on this topic? Even a shift like this will make a profound difference in the cells of your body and your reproductive system.

As you get more skilled with shifting your thoughts, you will discover the power that your thoughts and emotions truly hold.

Jennifer Bloome is a Fertility Expert helping women energetically balance and heal their mind, body, and spirit to boost natural fertility. Jennifer is the creator of the internationally recognized Journey of the Heart series of guided meditations to support women in all stages of fertility treatment and pregnancy. For 3 no-charge guided meditations as well as information on teleclasses or individual sessions, please visit www.AnjiOnline.com.

In the business world, days are structured with meetings, projects, and deadlines. Without structure, days would be chaotic and unproductive.

The same is true for your emotions and feelings.

When you don’t consider how you would like to feel, your emotions and feelings can be chaotic and lead you to many unproductive places. Paying attention to your feelings and emotions is important to your reproductive system.

While no one can be positive 100% or probably even 80% of the time, particularly when dealing with a challenging situation like fertility issues, knowing how to bring your emotions back to a neutral or positive place makes a positive impact on your fertility.

When you are consistently feeling stressed, upset, angry, frustrated, you are triggering the fight or flight stress response in your body, which wrecks havoc with your entire reproductive system.

One way to help shift your thoughts and feelings is to create a strong framework by setting an intention about how you want to feel before launching into the day.

For example, when you get up in the morning, as you are getting ready for the day, decide how you would like to feel today — peaceful, joyful, calm, accepting, curious, centered, exuberant, etc. Once you have decided what you would like to have as your primary emotion today, set your intention that your day will be filled with this emotion.

As you practice this on a regular basis, you will be surprised by how your days begin to follow your intentions.

Jennifer Bloome is a Fertility Expert helping women energetically balance and heal their mind, body, and spirit to boost natural fertility. Jennifer is the creator of the internationally recognized Journey of the Heart series of guided meditations to support women in all stages of fertility treatment and pregnancy. For 3 no-charge guided meditations as well as information on teleclasses or individual sessions, please visit www.AnjiOnline.com.

“Time is not a line, but a series of now-points” — Taisen Deshimaru

Pull yourself into this now-point. Experience this now-point.

If you are having a difficult day or a sense of worry, pulling yourself into this moment can feel a little scary. Most of us find a way to “numb-out” or bury a moment that is filled with a “negative” emotion.

This simply hides the emotion to act on the body at a later time. You are actually passing the emotion on to your future.

When you stay present in the moment, stay present to the feeling, you handle the emotion and then transform it. Feel the feeling, honor it, acknowledge it, and then actively make a new choice.

Staying in the present moment means you are giving a gift to your body and ultimately, your fertility.

Jennifer Bloome is a Fertility Expert helping women energetically balance and heal their mind, body, and spirit to boost natural fertility. Jennifer is the creator of the internationally recognized Journey of the Heart series of guided meditations to support women in all stages of fertility treatment and pregnancy. For 3 no-charge guided meditations as well as information on teleclasses or individual sessions, please visit www.AnjiOnline.com.

“Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.” —Carrie Fisher

There are always going to be people who trigger feelings of anger and resentment within you. It’s not that you have the initial feelings, but what you do with those feelings that will affect your ongoing physical and emotional health. Learning to be able to experience the feelings and then let them go as opposed to holding onto them and revisiting them over and over is a powerful lesson.

If you are having a hard time letting go, a good question to ask yourself is “why does this bother ME so much.” Yes, perhaps that person’s actions are truly reprehensible. However, what specifically causes a problem for you?

Is it that you would really want their situation for yourself?
Does it go against one of your core values?
Does it highlight how unfair your own life feels?

Once you can see what it is triggering in you, then you can focus your efforts on your own issue. It is 100 times easier to deal with your own issue than someone else’s behavior. Does it make the situation any better? Is it condoning that person’s behavior? No. However, the goal is to keep other’s actions from affecting your own emotional or physical health.

Jennifer Bloome is a Fertility Expert helping women energetically balance and heal their mind, body, and spirit to boost natural fertility. Jennifer is the creator of the internationally recognized Journey of the Heart series of guided meditations to support women in all stages of fertility treatment and pregnancy. For 3 no-charge guided meditations as well as information on teleclasses or individual sessions, please visit www.AnjiOnline.com.

Heals at a cellular level

Your cells carry emotions and memories from the many traumas we experience in our lives. These traumas can be small (like being yelled at in traffic) or large (a parent that leaves, a miscarriage or early infant death, a divorce). These storied memories and emotions contribute to the body’s “emotional chemistry,” which is responsible for telling the cells of your body how to act and behave (fear mode or growth mode), which aspects of DNA to turn on/off, and more.

Heals without having to know why

The subconscious mind can create blocks to your conscious desires — like becoming a mother. Energetic healing can see and heal the blocks without ever having to know why they were put in place.

Gives you insights about your body~mind~spirit

On the flip side, energetic healing gives you access to the deep wisdom within your body helping direct to what exactly needs to be healed. You end up having a much more insightful understanding about your mind~body~spirit and your system heals and comes back into balance gently.

Reopens the overall flow of energy in your body

Just as blood vessels carry life-giving oxygen and nutrition to all the cells of your body, your energy system carries the vital energy force to all systems, cells, and structures within your body. When blocked, it can’t support your body — or your reproductive system — in the way that it needs to for optimal functioning.

Deep, restorative relaxation

Clearing your energy signals your body it is safe to do deep healing. Achieving your fertility goals requires just the opposite kind of approach than all the other goals you’ve worked towards in your life. In other areas of your life, working hard, pushing and striving, help you achieve what you want. Your reproductive system, however, requires nurturing, gentleness, and receiving in order to do its best work.

Energy clearing may not be familiar to you. However, once you experience its cumulative, gentle effects, you’ll find you want to add it to your toolbox for moving towards creating the family you desire.

Jennifer Bloome is a Fertility Expert helping women energetically balance and heal their mind, body, and spirit to boost natural fertility. Jennifer is the creator of the internationally recognized Journey of the Heart series of guided meditations to support women in all stages of fertility treatment and pregnancy. For 3 no-charge guided meditations as well as information on teleclasses or individual sessions, please visit www.AnjiOnline.com.