Читать книгу The Ayurvedic Guide to Fertility - Heather Grzych - Страница 11
ОглавлениеLet your mind go, and your body will follow.
— HARRIS K. TELEMACHER, played by Steve Martin, L.A. Story
I have some news for you. Wanting a baby is not what creates a baby. Thinking about a baby doesn’t create a baby. It is your physical desire to have sex with your male partner when you are fertile, plus his reciprocated desire and the two of you acting upon it, that will get you pregnant. I actually believe that wanting a baby too strongly gets in the way of natural conception because it focuses energy and attention ever so subtly away from the actual act needed to make the baby.
The process of creation is an animalistic act that allows for a mystical event to occur, and this produces real, physical results...a new person! It is unmistakably a spiritual process — in the sense that it’s beyond material understanding. There are fundamental parts of it that cannot be grasped by the mind or by modern science. No one understands how a soul enters a cell, or group of cells, and when this occurs. Similarly, no one knows when a soul leaves a body. There is always more going on than we can understand.
A student once asked the great yogi Paramahansa Yogananda, author of Autobiography of a Yogi, when the soul enters the body. He stated that it happens at the moment of conception; that there are essentially souls waiting for the moment of conception to occur so that they may enter. Waiting where? Yogis call it the astral world. It’s supposedly beyond the physical world and the mind. Perhaps it’s that place we tap into in dreams. Yogananda believed that upon conception, a spark of light is released in that astral world, and that’s the cue for the soul to come on into the egg and sperm’s newly formed arrangement of matter. Maybe this is also related to the light people say they see when they are near death. Perhaps that’s not an ending but rather the beginning of something else.
And despite all religions and physicists attempting to define how creation occurs, ultimately, none of the best and brightest minds we know really understand it. This makes total sense, because creation is not a conscious, thinking process. Rather, it’s a deep, dark, and mysterious one.
You don’t need to meticulously think your way into creating a baby, but your thinking mind really does not like to hear this. Your thinking mind wants to feel like someone or something is within your control. The idea that events actually happen some other way, possibly even randomly, is a discomforting thought for you if you are like most modern women. We like predictability, control, and surety, and many of us find concepts like faith, trust, and surrender to be challenging. What exactly are we surrendering to?
Regardless of your religious or spiritual leaning, I hope we can agree that you have a body, a mind, senses, and a soul, and each of these dimensions plays a major role in every moment of your life, including conceiving a child. You know what your body is because you can see it. You have an idea what your mind is because you can hear it chattering all the time when life goes quiet. Your senses — hearing, feeling, seeing, tasting, and smelling — are used daily for basic life functions and experiencing pleasure and pain, so you have a tangible grasp of how they work. However, the soul is where the human animal gets a little more confusing.
In Sanskrit, the word atman is used to refer to soul or spirit. Yogis believe that the atman is beyond the physical body and the mind, and yet it permeates everything. Whatever you can observe, then, is atman, but you can’t perceive it with your senses. This elusiveness would make it very difficult for a scientist to find the atman, because science needs to be able to observe something to prove that it’s there. Atman is even more confusing because it is both very small and very big. The very fact that such opposites can exist simultaneously is precisely why the soul transcends the conscious mind. Just try making sense of it!
The main reason the atman is so ubiquitous is because it is the witness seeing everything, so a person cannot directly observe it. In order to observe it, one would have to turn the awareness back toward oneself and then not get distracted at all by thoughts, memories, or the body on the way there. But who doesn’t get distracted by these things in today’s world? We think all the time. We cling to the past. We fear the future — and we feel physical stress, pleasure, and pain, so the body is a highly distractible object.
In fact, this reversing of the awareness toward yourself to discover the soul has always been the goal of yoga practice, despite its modern reputation as a way to turn your body into a strong, flexible, or more slowly moving pretzel in order to reduce stress.
The word yoga also comes from Sanskrit, and it actually means “to yoke together.” In yoga, we’re in a state of complete connectedness with an object of focus, without distraction. In all other states that aren’t yoga, distraction exists, as witnessed in the chattering of the mind that is present. In order for us to truly connect with anything, the noise must be silenced. We must achieve presence.
This search for soul is part of the yoga journey, whatever your version of yoga is. For example, right now, you are doing the yoga of book reading.
Cultivating Your Psychospiritual State
How many times have you heard of a woman who tried to get pregnant for a long time undergoing all sorts of invasive medical procedures for years; possibly beginning to search for alternative ways of baby making, such as surrogacy or egg donation; starting to look into adoption; or relinquishing the idea altogether — and then someday, when she’s given up completely, she magically conceives a child? What a ride. When I see this, it always makes me wonder: Was all this necessary? If she had done things differently, could she have still gotten to the same place?
Your state of mind is important for this journey, as is your sense of connectedness with spirit. Remember, getting too narrowly focused on the goal of having a baby will not help you, because you will lose sight of what it takes to make a baby. If you are already stuck obsessing about this goal, it’s time to explore the deep places inside you and ask bigger questions about the nature of life and the universe — so that you actually become open to new possibilities. Everything exists as possibility before it becomes reality.
Presence is also important for this journey. That means not being stuck in the past or thinking about the future. You might be lucky and unexpectedly get pregnant after a night of wining and dining on a hot date with the one you love. I say this is lucky, because the moment your mind becomes engaged in thinking about pregnancy, it can actually end up getting in the way, because it distracts from presence. Once you start planning, analyzing, scenario building, or scheming, this is often where the process becomes stressful and you have probably gotten off track from the cosmic, creative magic of it.
Natural pregnancy occurs in a way that is part predictable and part mysterious. When you are in a place where things seem a bit like they don’t make sense, you are probably on the right track. Having a sense of wonder is important. However, if you start trying to make everything happen the way you want it to, you may become frustrated. This would be a fruitless effort if you’ve never been pregnant before, because you really have no clue how it will happen, even if you are a healthcare practitioner or biomedical scientist and have lots of intellectual knowledge of biological reproduction.
Conception involves two people and the universe, and all three have to be on board for it to occur. Women have shared countless stories with me of undergoing painful medical procedures to become pregnant, and some without any luck for years. Imagine: chasing pregnancy as a goal, and it doesn’t happen when you want it to — for years? The women I’ve worked with in this situation are angry, frustrated, and devastated. Not getting what you want can be so soul crushing that some women begin to question everything.
I myself had to drop to my knees and weep a few times in my journey. However, it was in these painful moments, too, that I discovered a type of magic. I’m telling you — this journey may look messy and frustrating at times, but it will also bring some unexpected gifts.
The Primal vs. Intellectual Self
The modern woman has two minds. If these two minds are not on the same page, then they can wreak havoc on her life, but when they are in harmony, they can create magic, poetry, and little people. The two minds are the intellectual and the primal. You could call them the conscious and the subconscious. One of the dimensions is conscious mental activity, intellect, and thought. This mind likes ideas, stories, and information. The other is subconscious, in charge of about 95 percent of the body’s operations, with all its sensations, emotions, drives, and urges. These two minds coexist, but sometimes it feels like they are not in accord. Moreover, the dimension that you have less awareness of is the one running most of the show. Take a guess about which one you think will win if there is a conflict between the two.
You are both an intellectual and animal creature. Your intellect has the ability to understand what is good and bad, make decisions, strategize, and so forth. You can learn quickly in school, get the gold star for your homework, and later get that great internship or job. You can also make the decision to work late and overachieve, go to the gym, go home and cook dinner, or go on a date. All this is the job of your intellect.
Your primal self is ancient. It was passed down to you from generations long ago, and then it’s been iterated based on your life experiences and choices. It’s been influenced by your intellectual self. The primal wants to synchronize with the primordial rhythm of nature, and it does so whenever your choices and actions within an environment allow it to. However, the primal is also the space where emotions are felt, and if you are not used to listening to your emotions and letting them inform your decisions, then you will become misaligned and be unable to connect with the rhythm of nature.
You are smart but not perfect. You get hurt, and sometimes you even make mistakes. And you have blind spots. You are an emotional being — not a computer. This is what makes you human.
Women today need a pathway to explore their inner animals because our day-to-day lives are now spent in structures and systems that were originally designed by men, for men. And the wellness practices and teachings that many of us use to undo the effects of being caught up in this man’s world — modern yoga practices, for instance, or mindfulness — remain mostly focused on the mind, muscles, and bones, which are the areas of thoughts, will, and structure. Women today need practices and teachings that bring them into the more rooted realm of the emotions and urges.
The word buddha means one who has achieved enlightenment, but a female buddha will figure out how to simultaneously listen to the deep and ancient, unconscious spaces in her body, learning how to read the psychophysical experiences of her emotions, and translate these into wise actions. Since the primal animal is such a huge part of a woman, the mindful woman gets to know it more closely — especially when she’s contemplating having a baby. Getting pregnant, being pregnant, giving birth, and raising a child can be the most embodied experiences a female buddha can have in this modern life.
A woman who places too much value on her thoughts, ideas, will, and structure and does not balance that out with the exploration of her inner animal — her emotions, gut, heart, and reproductive functioning, including the 95 percent of her programming that isn’t conscious — will experience mental stress and bodily imbalance. A stressed-out woman can spend years and years reprogramming her mind via all sorts of training or therapies, but if she does not get into the experience of her body, and the emotions experienced inside, then she cannot make the changes necessary to realign her life back with nature, and she will get caught in a never-ending battle between the two selves. If she doesn’t learn to talk with her body, then that body will always seem to fail her.
So here’s the question: Can you let go of what you know to be your mind, the intellectual part, and tap into your primal dimension?
I’m not insinuating that the mind is not important. It is just as important as the animal self. A state of health comes from making good decisions, and most of the maladies we face in life are the result of the intellect being misused somewhere along the way. For the modern woman, one of the greatest misuses is not getting to know her animal self better, and instead aligning with meaningless pursuits until she wakes up. If she gets to know the animal self deeply, then her intellect can actually arrive at better-informed decisions, which will make her life more efficient, her body healthier, and her spirit more alive.
Getting in touch with your reproductive power requires that you dive a little more into the dark, mystical realm where you don’t already know everything and where it can be difficult to draw conclusions. You may feel confused. Things may not make sense. However, once you journey into this magical, primal space, you can clear a pathway for being receptive to the ultimate creative endeavor.
Going Deeper into Your Body
Once I was adjusting a yoga client as he held a pose for a long time, and he said to me, “Is it fucked up that I want things that are bad for me?” My heart sank. I felt his contrition, and at the same time, I knew I was guilty of this, too. Our minds oftentimes override a healthy, natural decision in favor of what we think we are supposed to do, and we’ve been trained to do this from a very young age.
It can be confusing to discern what is an urge of the body and what is an urge of the mind. The body sends feelings — sensations, emotions, and the like. The mind has thoughts. Your body feels something and then your mind tells you a story about it, and vice versa — when your mind tells you a story, your body feels something. Finding your truth can be difficult because sometimes your mind is confused or missing very important information.
It’s time to tap into the wise lady that lives within you. You are very smart when you pay attention. You cannot fully tap into your intuition if you are distracted by your thoughts. Intuition is what happens spontaneously when you have connected the two minds.
To tap into this power, you must begin to observe both your thoughts and your bodily responses. If you listen closely, you will see how your body reacts in certain situations — sometimes unexpectedly — and can begin to try to understand these reactions. The body is great at telling us that we need to make a different decision: allergies, digestive issues, energy depletion, irregular periods, and sleep or skin problems are a few examples of this. However, sometimes you may not heed the body’s call, and the solutions your mind comes up with when the body is experiencing discomfort are not so effective for relieving it.
An example is drinking more coffee or exercising a lot to get over your tiredness from either lack of sleep or not eating well for your constitutional type. When you don’t resolve the root cause, it ultimately is the source of more stress and anxiety and sabotages sleep even further, which then creates the stronger dependence on caffeine. Then you realize that you are getting headaches when you don’t have your caffeine, and the addiction persists. When you finally wake up and realize that such excessive amounts of caffeine are damaging your body, you have to go through withdrawal headaches, so then you have to take some sort of headache medicine in the process. What your mind prioritizes is sometimes not beneficial to your health or aligned with what you truly desire for your life.
To dive back into the primal, not only must a woman pay closer attention to her mind and body, but she must also learn to trust that the body knows what is best. The Ayurvedic approach to health requires that whenever there is a conflict between mind and body, the cues of the body win. The body is biological. The mind is fleeting.
Whenever you feel torn because of a battle between your head and your heart, it is really this battle between your thoughts and the sensations and emotions being felt in your body. Even while thinking, you will often find that your body sends you a signal. If you listen to your body’s responses with a finely tuned ear, you will move toward a place of health. If you follow your thoughts without listening to your body, a healthy way of being may elude you.
Connecting Mind with Body
To connect the mind with the body, most people today need to learn how to sense the body more. You may be used to doing yoga, dance, or fitness exercises, which is a good way to develop a deeper connection with the body. Any study of one’s movement, will, and actions is a worthwhile endeavor in understanding the self. There is, however, an additional dimension to connect with that can provide a good bridge between the mind and the body. This is the energetic layer, and the yogis throughout history have done a pretty good job trying to paint a picture of it.
The base of the spine is considered the seat of kundalini energy, known as primal serpent energy. This energy can be either dormant or awakened — the serpent coiled or rising — and if awakened, will travel upward and activate an individual at different levels and dimensions. This upward-moving energy is the crown jewel of those individuals looking to awaken their whole being, and it can occur for many reasons — either spontaneously or through guidance from a teacher. The chakras are the body’s seven main energy centers, which are oriented along the spinal column, from the base of the spine to the crown of the head. When kundalini activates the chakras above the heart, much of the energy goes toward communication and thought, whereas the energy in the lower chakras is more primal, fueling digestion, sexuality, and excretion.
With so much emphasis on thought and intellectual activity in our day-to-day lives, many women today have too much going on in their upper chakras. The prevalence of head-forward body postures is largely due to this overuse of the mind, reflected in the habit of sitting in front of a computer or staring at a mobile device, reading, viewing, thinking, and achieving through thoughts and communication. However, a healthy person will have balanced energy throughout the body and will not be dominated by one chakra center or the other. What this means for a lot of us is that we need to let go of our overuse of the mind.
Focusing on any one of the chakras will redirect awareness and energy to that center. For example, focusing on the lowest chakras brings awareness to the pelvic basin, and focusing on the center of the chest brings awareness to love and the rhythm of the heart. Focusing on the center of the belly will connect you with your willpower, and focusing on the throat brings energy to the voice. When you notice that certain chakras feel blocked or overactive, which can happen when the mind, physical body, or emotions have gotten out of balance, you can focus on the other chakras to shift the energy, or you can choose to go deeper into a blocked chakra to understand its mental-emotional-physical components.
In addition to chakra exploration practices, there is a spot you can activate that will bring you back to your primal energy: a point at the base of the skull that yogis refer to as mastaka granthi, or “head knot.” Mastaka granthi is located at the site of the brain stem, specifically the medulla oblongata. We know from modern science that the brain stem is the relay system between the brain and the rest of the body, and is also the control center for certain fundamental functions of the autonomic nervous system, or primal body, including consciousness, breathing, cardiovascular activity, and the natural, reflexive urges like sneezing and vomiting. It is a regulating center of a whole bunch of stuff that the intellect isn’t necessarily involved in. Mastaka granthi is the gateway between the head and the body — a space between — where the intellectual dimension surrenders to the primal, biological, animal state of the body, and vice versa. This is a useful spot to know about because while it is great to journey on the path to motherhood with balanced chakras, it’s even better to deeply get in touch with your basic biological functions.
Figure 2: Kundalini rising through the chakras, harmonized with mastaka granthi
Next, I offer a practice for you to walk through this primal doorway before we dive into some Ayurvedic health principles in the next chapter.
EXERCISE: MERGING THE PRIMAL AND THE INTELLECTUAL
As we begin this journey to align your mind, body, and spirit and improve your reproductive health, you can begin by connecting your mind with your body.
With a neutral, nontilted chin, take your left index and middle fingers and begin gently massaging high on the back of your neck. As you move your fingers around with very soft pressure, you may notice a small valley in the top center of your neck between the muscles on either side of the spine.
Keep slowly moving the left middle finger upward until you find a tiny cavern at the base of the skull. Once you have found that point, lightly rest the pad of your left middle finger in that little spot. You have found mastaka granthi. Continue to hold your finger there gently.
Chant om silently to yourself.
Walking through this doorway, you are beginning to align to the primal rhythm.
