Читать книгу The Ayurvedic Guide to Fertility - Heather Grzych - Страница 10
ОглавлениеDo not kill the instinct of the body for the glory of the pose.
— VANDA SCARAVELLI, Awakening the Spine
Becoming a mother is the ultimate yoga practice. My sisters, we are the torchbearers of one of the freakiest and most wonderful experiences a human can have — opening up and sharing the inside space of our bodies with another person and directly sharing a bloodstream, cells, energy, and nourishment. The problem is: we’ve gotten so good at not getting pregnant for most of our lives that we have all sorts of issues when we actually want to get pregnant!
When a woman wants to have a child — whether it’s now or in the future — oftentimes a little thought crosses her mind: When is the right time for me to get pregnant? And if a woman has actually tried to get pregnant and is having difficulty, this thought shifts to: Why can’t I get pregnant? How can I get pregnant? Women these days seem to have a lot of fear and insecurity around conception, as evidenced by the increase in measures taken by women today to try to control the outcome. Women are confused about what is best for their fertility and are grasping for help.
Even big corporate employers these days have picked up on this collective fertility insecurity. Many of the most competitive companies are now offering egg-freezing benefits to women in the workplace — women who dedicate their time, energy, love, and attention during the most fertile years of their lives to their jobs, rather than to starting a family.
But, over history, many women have had children and never planned it. They never thought much about how it would interfere with their lives, how they would continue building their careers or maintain a deep connection with their partners. They just had sex and rolled the dice. However, women today don’t do anything by rolling the dice. Do we?
Modern women want to make sure everything is right when we do it. We love to strive. We love to make progress. We get a good degree, a good job, and a good performance review at work. When it comes to preparing for conception, we make no exception. We want to know if we’re fertile ahead of time. We go get our Pap smears, pee on ovulation strips, check our hormones, do yoga, undergo acupuncture treatments, and expect conception to happen immediately because we’re doing everything the way we were told to do it.
At the same time, as I mentioned, now women are masters of not getting pregnant. We have innumerable birth-control options, and it’s become a societal norm to use them. Then we start to wonder what it really takes to turn it all around.
The good news is that, with a little care and attention — and some sexy lingerie — odds are, you can probably have a baby if you want to. I want to help you improve your overall health and your chances for conception so that you will have a better pregnancy and more ease as a mother down the road. Modern life has helped get you here, and now Ayurveda can help you better care for your fertility going forward.
Failing Fertility 101
Women have fewer children today than their mothers did. Between 1960 and 2015, the average number of children a woman gave birth to was reduced by half. The number of childless women has doubled since the 1970s, and the average woman in the world had 2.5 children in 2015, as opposed to 5 in 1960. But today’s fertility landscape looks very different based on where you come from, what your religion is, how much money you have, and how many levels of schooling you’ve been through. Ironically, the women who seem the most successful — those with the best jobs, making the most money — are the least successful at having babies. Instead, it seems that putting so much energy and time into a career can rob a woman of the energy and time, and perhaps even the desire, she needs for fertility and motherhood. In addition, the stress levels that many women experience working in demanding jobs can end up sabotaging their health, damaging bodily tissues, crushing their creative spirit, and decreasing their reproductive power.
The women who are the most tapped into their fertility are actually women in less developed, less stable countries. For example, women in global areas of conflict, like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen, have more than twice the number of children as do women in the stable, developed countries like the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Of all the religious affiliations, Muslim women are the most fertile, having 24 percent more children than the world average, while Buddhists are the least fertile, having 36 percent fewer children than the world average. Women with less money are great at making babies. Younger women are also very good at it, but they are increasingly giving up their prime fertile years and waiting until later in life to start a family, typically to pursue education, careers, or travel.
In summary, the women who look like their lives have the comfort and independence that so many women today are striving for somehow seem to be the ones who are failing in the fertility department, while those women with seemingly more challenging lives are popping out kids like champs.
So why is the modern woman having difficulty with fertility? There are many reasons, but here are some of the more common ones: First, there are particular time frames when women are more fertile, and because many are now heeding the call of nature much later in life, they are missing the peak fertility windows. Second, modern women build very rich lives outside of family life. They can put all their energy into their passions and simply neglect the passion of creating a family. Third, in their quest for achieving the perfect life, modern women have lost an appreciation for events that happen outside of their control — which are, unfortunately, the majority of natural biological processes occurring in the body and in nature. And this third reason may be due to the fourth reason: the environment can be so toxic for women that it affects their health and creates confusion about whom or what they can trust.
When it comes to fertility, many women are limiting themselves by the very thing that appears to give them power in other areas. Modern women appear empowered and strong because they are going after the great career, breaking molds, or shattering glass ceilings, but they may be lacking in the areas of love and family. I find that many women in my Ayurvedic practice aren’t even creating the space in their lives to meet a compatible partner, let alone start a family. Some dislike their jobs, bosses, colleagues, workload, or traveling so much — but they can’t stop prioritizing these things above all other facets of life, including family.
Many let this go on until they reach a point where they don’t feel they’ll be able to reproduce naturally because they waited too long to have a child, and due to this, they undergo many years and thousands of dollars’ worth of medical procedures to have a baby. Women try to outsmart time with the help of their doctors. Egg freezing, intrauterine insemination (IUI), in vitro fertilization (IVF), and getting a sperm donor and/or donor eggs and embryos are examples of the procedures a woman will undergo in order to check motherhood off her to-do list. Such an approach ends up working for some, and ends up with unfortunate outcomes for others. Even with egg freezing, there is always the risk that the freezer breaks. And root causes affecting fertility do not get addressed by focusing only on fertility treatment, and they can remain or get even worse after the baby is born.
And it’s not just women who are having problems with fertility. Male infertility is also on the rise. The times are changing for both women and men who want to start a family. It’s become difficult and expensive for so many people to have a child. However, there is also good news: the overwhelming majority of women who have children still conceive naturally, so there is hope for any woman looking to do so.
The Misaligned Superwoman
Today, modern women are exhausted, confused, and burned-out. Why else would we be so into yoga? We love burning ourselves out. Apparently, vacation time has been on a steady decline since 2000. A study done by Project: Time Off found that more than half of American workers left unused vacation days in 2018. And those who do take vacations frequently work while on them. With so many of us working like dogs, it’s no wonder we are suffering from stress, anxiety, digestive disorders, insomnia, substance abuse, and so forth. Really, people? Is this what we’ve decided is the American dream?
I’ve been guilty of it myself. I remember canceling a vacation once when my team at work was implementing a critical project and I felt guilty leaving during such a difficult time. Guess what happened right after I called off this vacation? I got sick twice in one month. Oh, the irony: I canceled a vacation when I needed it most. I must have thought that no one else could function without me, or perhaps I didn’t want anyone to function without me. What an ego. Truth is, if you work with a good team, then the moment you are out of the environment, people will shift around and start picking up the slack. Unless you are a key employee (this is fewer people than you may think), you are always replaceable, regardless of how late you work or how much time you put into that presentation.
Guess what happened when I left that job a year later? The work went on without me, as I went on my way with my work.
What have you done to burn yourself out in the past? What are you doing now?
A high percentage of people who experience stress (73 percent) report common psychological issues, such as irritability and anger, nervousness, lack of energy, or the urge to cry. An even higher percentage of people (77 percent) experience the common physical symptoms of stress, including fatigue, headache, upset stomach, muscle tension, and even loss of sex drive. So many of us are truly misaligned today. The wisdom of the body must be recaptured.
How we fill our free time is up to each of us. Some women will not take any time to relax or play, finding more and more opportunities to work themselves into the ground. Others are so lazy or so tired from work that they will sit in front of the TV all day or night.
It is important to look at yourself if either boredom or burnout is happening. They are two ends of the same spectrum. Either way, the wisdom of the body is being overridden by all the things you think you are supposed to be doing.
And this I can guarantee: However you are now, it’s going to get magnified if you have a baby. Every pattern you have presently will become exaggerated if you give birth to a child and don’t change your lifestyle because, in addition to having the same job, house payment, car payment, and so on, you will also have much more chaos and a tiny human depending on you who requires all the free time your sleep-deprived self can give.
What happened to listening to Mother Nature? Instead of being the intuitive goddesses women have been known to be throughout the ages, we are tiring ourselves out too much to truly listen. I can tell you where Mother Nature is: she’s inside your body, and she’s calling you home.
I’ve often wondered why we have so many yoga teachers today, myself included, and why the vast majority of yoga practitioners and teachers are women (which, oddly, is the complete opposite of how it is in India, where yoga was developed). Women are lost and confused. We are looking for more meaning. Things have gotten so crazy for us that we all need to go lie on the floor a couple of times a week and have some soothing voice tell us that everything is going to be okay, as long as we look within — and yet we don’t truly look within and have to keep going to yoga class every week for a little break from life. This is not true healing. This is only a brief respite from the root causes. The world needs women to do yoga off their mats and go make themselves and the world a better place.
Undoing the Decades of Neglect
Modern culture doesn’t celebrate feminine creative power very well. It celebrates women achieving things — becoming the CEO, starting the company, and doing it all with four kids. However, women are not taught much about the deep wisdom of their bodies and how to read it. I certainly was not.
If you had a woman in your life who thoroughly explained to you when you were a teenager what a treasure your body was, then consider yourself lucky. Many women today are educated about the female reproductive system in school, and only briefly. I still remember the day in fifth grade when the boys were taken outside to play kickball, and an educator proceeded to inform all us girls about the impending changes that would be happening to our bodies over the next few years. No one asked questions. We were all way too embarrassed. Here was an opportunity to teach us about the magical, mystical power we hold inside, and instead we felt traumatized. Like it or not, puberty was happening.
We are taught at this young age that we start to become different from boys, and that our bodies are something to be protected — from boys, from creepy adults, from pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. There is very little celebration of this newfound power awaiting us, and as a result, many of us do not learn how to fully tap into it and there’s always an element of fear or disconnection surrounding our relationship with it. This often changes for us once we contemplate having a child. Suddenly we become very interested in this feature of our bodies that we felt was a nuisance for most our lives.
Biologically speaking, a woman develops the drive and capability to procreate at an age that is too young for her mind, family, religion, or culture to deal with. A young woman can have a baby once she goes through menarche (first period), which typically occurs between ages 10 and 15, with 12.6 being the mean age. Mentally and culturally, though, a budding woman at these ages is still developmentally a child. She has not yet matured enough to gain the level of independence or experience with the way of the world that an adult woman has. She is legally still a minor. Therefore, it is not socially acceptable for her to utilize this part of herself at the time it becomes biologically activated and available for use in the world, despite whatever normal, natural urges she has. If she is a responsible girl with urges, then in today’s society, she immediately gets set on a course for blocking pregnancy that can last for decades.
As adult women, we are often confused by, and don’t appreciate, our reproductive systems. We think they are way too inconvenient, and for years we mess with birth-control pills and other drugs to try not to have a period. If you are like me and lots of other modern women, then you spent most of your life using some form of birth control to avoid pregnancy. Perhaps you were so set on having sex whenever you wanted without getting pregnant that you even inserted a scratchy little IUD into your cervix to block sperm from getting in, even if it caused inflammation or hormonal imbalances. Maybe you wore a patch or even had some little implant placed. You let your intellectual and primal selves try to work together to solve the perennial problem of unplanned pregnancy until you felt ready for a planned one. You elicited help from your doctor to make this happen. And, when you finally decided that you might be ready for pregnancy, you began to feel that you had work to undo — to remove toxicity and blockages in both the mind and the body.
Most of my life, I wished I never had a period. It was a nuisance — something that got in the way when I wanted to go on vacation, work out, or have sex. I even went so far as to take the birth-control pill continuously for stretches of time so that I would never get a period. This was actually recommended to me by a gynecologist, so back then, I assumed it must have been a good idea. It was all very convenient for the other areas of my life, but after learning more about how the body works, I realized how narrowly focused our thinking is to cut off such a vital part of being a woman just because we find it inconvenient. A woman’s body is meant to flush itself regularly even if it isn’t getting pregnant — and perhaps especially if it’s not getting pregnant.
Many women remain confused about whether they want to have kids until right before they think their biological clock is about to stop ticking, when confusion turns into panic and fear of missing out, and they wonder if they can still freeze their eggs. And then what ensues is either a hurried hunt for the father of their child or a dramatic letting go of the idea altogether and burying themselves back into work so they can forget about it — until perimenopause hits and everything blows up again.
If you have been physically or mentally blocking your reproductive energy, it’s time to start to get to know this part of yourself again. Your awareness is power. By reacquainting yourself with your reproductive system, you will discover how truly magical it is. You are already, without a doubt, much more extraordinary than you’ve ever given yourself credit for.
Shifting from being a woman who has been blocking pregnancy to one who welcomes fertility is a multilevel process. It involves your mind, body, and spirit, and it’s not just about you. Your partner is greatly affected. Your dynamic with this person and others in your life is in a potential transition state. Since you mean business now, it’s time to look at all of this.
There is so much you can learn by studying your body, mind, cycles, and the environment around you. All your senses and several major systems of your body are involved in the monthly cycle, and if you are not paying attention to these cycles, you are missing out on some serious intuitive power — but when you reconnect with your inner being, even after trying to avoid pregnancy for so long, you are more likely to be reconnected with your reproductive power. When you turn a mirror back on yourself, you begin to see all the parts that may have been neglected or possibly even hurt. When you can see these clearly, then you can rejuvenate and heal and, in the process, develop superpowers.
Designing Your Life
Preparing your body for conception is really not that different from planting a garden. Once you learn what something needs to grow and thrive, you can create the conditions for that to occur: plant your seed during the right season, position it well, and then water accordingly. The first step is looking at what you yourself need in order to grow and thrive, and then you can focus on the elements that are supportive of building a family.
You must design a life moving toward bliss and health. To have these things, you need to cultivate the understanding that allows you to clearly perceive your environment. Then you have to make decisions that encompass your vision for your life, coupled with the reality in front of you. If you use your intellect wisely, you will make good decisions and health will prevail. If there is any flaw in your decision-making or in the use of your sense perception, then cycles of imbalances can begin.
It’s really important that you be as healthy as possible before you conceive, because stuff gets crazy after you get pregnant and have a child. Just trust me on this. I hope you are excited about learning how to take really good care of yourself, because all your life experiences will be so much better if you have your best health, whether you have a kid or not.
Embracing the Unknown
The process of creation is not one that can be controlled — there are so many unknowns — and this can be a little unsettling for a lot of women. However, creation emerges out of vulnerability and even darkness. Creation is dominated by unseen forces that later give rise to something tangible and seen.
If you are considering having a child and you want the experience to be as joyous as possible, then first you must understand the process of how things are created and surrender to it. Creation comes from the need for change. It doesn’t come when things are in perfect order. Otherwise, you wouldn’t need anything different to happen in your life; there would be no space for something new.
There are variations on how conception occurs. Some women surrender to this process easily, and some after a glass of wine. Some women need to have doctors do it for them. Even when a woman goes to see a doctor for IVF or egg freezing or any other type of intervention used for conception, there is a form of surrender. It is just a different kind of surrender than getting pregnant the old-fashioned way.
Your job is to start to get comfortable in the darkness of space — when you don’t have the answers or conclusions. Furthermore, your job as the female is specifically to let creativity happen through you. Yup, it’s time to give up some of that control.
How do I sell this idea to you, though, if you are like a lot of other modern women and like to make vision boards and execute plans to get toward where you want to go? It can feel like a real struggle when we cannot make something happen via our own thinking and doing, can’t it? It may feel difficult to let things unfold naturally until we feel we’ve done all we can. However, because conception takes more than one entity, a state of receptivity is important, and this can become compromised if we are trying to control everything. I’m not saying this is easy — receptivity and surrender challenge our fears around trust and even our own self-confidence.
In having a baby, you are not the one “making” anything when it actually happens. You are a vessel. You cannot control the outcome. You can try to influence it, but you can’t control it. This is part of why a fertility journey — like any creative endeavor — is a spiritual journey for the modern woman who has a hard time relinquishing control. First, you do the best you can to take care of yourself in your environment, you connect deeply with your partner (literally and figuratively!), and then you roll the dice. You may experience mental anguish in the void, and this is where it’s handy to hold a sense of faith and wonder. Allowing yourself to be surprised by the universe can actually be a really magical thing, sometimes even more fun than planning everything to a T and getting exactly what you want when you want it. Remember the saying “A watched pot never boils”? Well, it applies when you are trying to get pregnant, too.
Women who feel the call to conceive often start to grasp for a baby. They want to reach out and grab it, and they will do whatever they can to get it. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it sabotages the whole thing — because if there is too much grasping for the outcome, then there is no room for receiving the gifts that take you to the outcome. The baby you were meant to have will not come by your forcing. It will come by magic.
Pathologies are created energetically and physically when there are imbalances of giving, receiving, and grasping. Conception becomes blocked, elusive, or rejected when such pathologies are present. The balance point between receiving and giving is where you find the fertile ground for conception to take place.
How You Treat Your Body Matters
Physically, issues of under- or overnourishment of certain reproductive tissues will interfere with conception, so your diet and metabolism affect fertility. Some women are so undernourished that they don’t have any energy for their menstrual cycle, and others are so overnourished (or wrongly nourished) that toxins and blockages begin to interfere with their normal metabolic processes, throwing off hormones and monthly cycles. Therefore, it is extremely important to get your diet and lifestyle equalized prior to trying to have a child. Some women benefit from cleansing and fasting to remove toxins and blockages, while others need more rejuvenation. Everyone, though, benefits by understanding their body type.
You want to take very good care of your body, internally and externally, especially if you wait until you are on the older end of the fertility spectrum. Older women generally pump out fewer follicles each month than younger women, and their bodies are often less moist and pliable. They typically do not get pregnant as easily and are more likely to have a C-section. You also need to take better care of your body if you’ve had any health issues that interfere with your general health or menstrual cycles.
Regardless of your age and health condition, having vigor and the ability to recover quickly is helpful, because being pregnant, giving birth, and nursing a small baby are all paradigm-shifting events for a body that can cause sleep deprivation, depletion, depression, and a whole host of not-so-fun things that you never hear about until you have a child. This is why it’s important for you to focus on your own health before you get pregnant. It will make everything easier before, during, and after pregnancy.
Fertility through the Ages
Shortly after I had my own child at age thirty-nine, I was watching a group of young mothers on blankets at the beach with their little babies. They were energized, throwing their babies around, laughing, chatting, and smiling — all of them. Not one of the mothers looked the way I felt, which was completely zapped. I longingly mumbled under my breath, “They are so young.” I envied their energy and resilience. At the same time, when I heard the bubbly, twentysomething naivete of their conversations, I suddenly was happy I was bringing a child into the world with more years on me. There are pros and cons at every age. However, when it comes to fertility, the condition of the body is more important than what the mind says about anything, because the body always wins.
There are clear stages of biological life for a woman, beginning with infancy; going through childhood, puberty, adulthood, and perimenopause; and beyond menopause. The stages do not fall on exactly the same years for all women, because women have different birth constitutions and age at different rates for various reasons, but the general pathway is the same. The first part of life is a time for building the body, the middle is for maintenance, and the body breaks down more in the final phase of life.
Figure 1: The life stages of a woman
There are different strengths, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities in each of life’s phases. When it comes to deciding when to have a child, every woman has to find her own sweet spot based on her own constitution, how she lives her life, her intimate relationships, and the sort of support she has around her, although I would argue that the current trend of women having children later and later may be socially and financially beneficial but generally is not biologically beneficial. The body is more resilient when it is younger, which is very handy when having a kid because gestating, birthing, breastfeeding, and lugging around a toddler can be seriously physically challenging athletic endeavors. It’s also easier to deal with sleep deprivation when you are younger, and new parents inevitably become wickedly sleep challenged for a few months and even a few years.
It All Starts in the Teenage Years
When we look at a child or even a teenager, it can feel a little weird to think of that individual as a sexual creature, but the reality is that most girls and boys hit puberty when they are still children — many even before they are teenagers. Not only that, but most females become sexually active in their teenage years. Only 17 percent of women are still virgins into their nineteenth year. Assuming you are an adult woman now, the defining relationship with your reproductive system started a very long time ago.
The early years after puberty, typically the teens, are not an optimal time for a young woman to have a child. A woman’s body is still developing, essentially practicing its menstrual cycles and continuing its way through the awkward years following onset of puberty. Add to this any moral considerations, plus the fact that she is still legally a minor until she is eighteen and is typically financially and socially dependent on her parents during these years, and it makes it especially challenging for a teenage girl to deal with her own sex drive and developing intimate relationships when, inside, so much is changing for her. At the end of the day, if a female is ovulating, then she could possibly become pregnant, so this is indeed a tricky time of life!
The teenager of the modern society is more than likely going to wait until her twenties, thirties, or forties before she has a child. However, the teenage years are an important time, because how she handles her sexual urge and manages her menstrual cycle and reproductive functioning in this stage of life will influence her sexuality and overall health for years to come.
In these next sections, we’ll break down the phases of the fertile era — from young women to mature women, terms used loosely because women are aging at different rates due to differences in constitution, lifestyle, and environmental factors.
Young, Fertile Women
A healthy twentysomething’s body is robust and juicy. She is in her physical prime, an ideal time to have a child. Her body is already mature enough to conceive, gestate, birth, and breastfeed a baby. Children are very juicy, and a young woman carries this juiciness with her into her womanhood. A woman’s ability to heal and rejuvenate after a physical trauma (which is often what giving birth is!) is typically stronger at this time of life.
The earth and water elements are plentiful when women are young, and these become magnified as the fire element starts to increase in puberty. The increasing fire element gives a woman greater intensity and influence over her environment. She has only to choose where this energy goes.
Young women are increasingly delaying having children until they are in their thirties and even their forties. As of 2012, less than 50 percent of women had a child by the end of their twenties, and these numbers are still decreasing today. Many women are placing the rest of life in front of having a child, especially if they are educated. These women are also delaying marriage more and more. Many women have a feeling that there are things they want to do before they become a mother. This creates a paradox for a young woman because while her body may be completely ready to have a child, her mind and oftentimes her support network are not. Depending on her culture and specific life history, she may not feel ready to have a child yet. However, if she does have a child, then she’s doing it at the generally best time biologically.
Despite increasingly not wanting to have kids until later, young women are often sexually active and using some form of birth control. In my practice in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I’ve worked with hundreds of people, I have had only one twentysomething client who was abstinent by choice, and she did so for religious and spiritual reasons. But regardless of her reason, I observed that she was one of the most aligned individuals I’d come across in my years working with clients. She knew she didn’t want to get pregnant — and so she just didn’t have sex. She was old enough. She was mature enough. She was even living with her fiancé. However, she planned to remain abstinent until they got married. I remember thinking: Wow, that must be hard to do! In a sexually liberal city like San Francisco, you don’t meet many people who are abstinent by choice! I noticed she was also very diligent about her eating and exercise routines — apparently not having sex gives you energy for lots of other things. Or perhaps she just had more self-control than most people.
A young woman is not in a rush to be a mother nowadays, because she believes she has many more years ahead of her to get pregnant and have a family, especially after seeing so many older women have children. The clock does not tick for her — except when it comes to her fears about the future. Young women still experience fear of missing out on having kids when they direct their energy elsewhere, and more of them are resorting to egg freezing. Given that the big companies that a lot of these women work for are increasingly offering their female employers egg freezing as a health benefit, it’s clear that young women are still concerned about waiting to become mothers. Freezing their eggs feels like an insurance policy in case they end up waiting too long to get pregnant. However, an older woman with frozen eggs will still be left with her own older body, which will need to be medically assisted in the process of becoming pregnant. It’s not just the eggs that matter; the rest of a woman’s body matters, too, and the seasons of life can be manipulated only so far. We can outsmart nature only so much, and there are usually consequences when we do.
But where do the thirtysomethings fall? This is the decade in which a woman often feels the most pressure about having kids (unless she’s still in limbo into her forties, of course!). It is also, coincidentally, the decade in which many women seem to have some sort of midlife crisis — myself included. The thirties can be an empowering decade for a woman, but they can also be confusing if she has gotten out of alignment in some way — physically, mentally, or spiritually.
Thirtysomethings go in one of two camps — early thirtysomethings can oftentimes put themselves in the “young woman” category if they still feel physically young, but as forty looms, those who have read the data on fertility and listened to what everyone else around them says about it will likely start to put themselves in the “mature woman” box. The midlife crisis so many women experience in this decade has to do with how they’re living their overall lives, and oftentimes, fertility is a major factor. Some women go through this crisis before having their kids, and some have it afterward. I had mine beforehand.
Some women in their thirties are worrying about their fertility for good reason, and other women are worrying about it for no reason at all, but it doesn’t have to do with age so much as it does with how a woman cares for herself and what sort of environment she is in. Doctors typically say that a woman conceiving at thirty-five or over is a high-risk pregnancy, and it can be a little unsettling when you feel absolutely fine and your doctor tells you that you are a geriatric pregnant patient (the actual term used for pregnant women over thirty-five). The problem is that once someone throws a number out as a guideline, saying it’s the average age when something happens, then people stop seeing possibilities and start looking only at numbers.
The reason this is sad is because everyone is aging at different rates. Time matters, but only insofar as it is relevant to the individual’s constitution, lifestyle, and environment. Some women are actually aging faster, and some are aging more slowly. Women do not all first get their periods at the same age, do they? And we all start menopause at different ages, too. Therefore, our fertile windows can also be different.
A woman is much better off studying her own body — the quality of the tissues; her ability to heal and regenerate; the quality of her hair, skin, nails, sleep, digestion, and menstrual cycles; and how she feels emotionally — to analyze basic physiological functions and features. She may just be a little bit different from her peers and even from her family members. She may have more years left than she thought, or she may have already missed her chance. The key is for her to pay attention to her body.
Mature, Fertile Women
Once you hit thirty, thirty-five, forty, or whatever age you consider yourself a more mature woman, it’s good to forget about the numbers for a moment and take a very objective look at your body. The later chapters in this book will help you evaluate it, but I will give you a hint now that the key is in the five elements: space, air, fire, water, and earth.
As our fire increases at puberty and builds into middle age, it eventually burns away some of our earth and water. The question is not if this will happen but when. With healthy aging, we become a little less like a watery, chubby baby and more like a shaped and refined piece of fine pottery. However, if the earth and water elements get a little too depleted, then we burn out and dry out, increasing the air and space elements and moving toward breakdown, degeneration, and even inflammatory issues.
Women who have a well-functioning, juicy body and manage their health well in their youth may be in better shape to have a child during their mature years, just as women who have signs of early aging and degeneration may not have as long a fertile window, because the air element has already begun to take over. A mature woman feels a greater disruption to her overall lifestyle when she has children because she’s lived her old life longer and is used to it. Therefore, the new state feels like a big psychological and behavioral shift. In addition, the more mature body needs more time to rest and rejuvenate after going through such a significant physical and emotional event, but she can manage that by building support around her.
It is always best to get an honest and raw understanding of the condition of your one-of-a-kind body using the senses. What do you see, taste, smell, hear, and feel? What is underneath the makeup or the hair dye? What happens when you don’t wear deodorant? What kind of condition is your skin really in? How about the teeth and the gums? Sometimes the small things you might want to fix cosmetically are telling you something critical about your health. One tissue can become affected by an imbalance more than others. The key is to pay attention and know yourself for how you really are.
Let’s say you find that you aren’t really showing many signs of aging or toxicity — both issues for fertility. For example, your skin still seems juicy and thick. Your hair is still lustrous and is mostly not gray. You still get regular, effective periods, and the flow patterns seem relatively unchanged. Your injuries heal fairly easily. You have an appetite. You don’t have any cysts or other growths. You generally sleep well at night. These are just a few examples of youthful health. If you consider yourself a mature woman and yet your body still maintains a healthy quality and vitality, then you might be one of the lucky women in their older fertile years who may do just fine having a kid.
If you are feeling like the clock might be ticking, then still, it’s not time to freak out; it’s simply time to truly look at your body and position yourself for the best health possible (again, something I hope to help you with in this book).
I’ve had women in their early forties start working with me thinking that they are going through early perimenopause, and in all cases they were wrong — they were just going through a life transition that was interrupting the basic physiological processes involved in menstruation and throwing off the rest of their health, too. It’s not that early menopause doesn’t happen to some women — it’s just very rare. It happens in about 5 percent of women.
If you feel healthy and strong and like you still have your youthful glow and juiciness, then you may be in good condition to have children for years to come. If you feel like you may need to improve your health, then this book will help you reclaim your vitality. Regardless of your age, take care of yourself, and if you do end up having a kid, I would suggest that you devote your energy to lining up support around you to help with postpartum rejuvenation and childcare — even if you are a stay-at-home mom. The transition from nonmother to mother can be challenging for many women — even if they desperately craved a baby — but it’s worth it.
