How To Increase Ovulation - The Divine Bow

How To Increase Ovulation

As the great philosopher-poet Kahlil Gibran said in his seminal work, The Prophet: 

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,Which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You am the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
And he bends you with his might that his arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so 
He loves also the bow that is stable.

You are the bow. The Divine is the archer. And you are being bent with might. Don't resist the tension - allow life, to mold you. Though it may seem at times that you don't have the capacity to bear the challenge, you can and you will. You'll do it by forgiving, by letting go, by finding the invincible strength within your own heart. You'll do it by taking care of every aspect of yourself that feels empty or neglected.

How To Increase Ovulation

Acknowledge any inner emptiness, feel the feelings, breathe into the peace of your inner void, and surrender to it. Your inner stillness will become your greatest source of power when you detach yourself from hitting the mark and pay attention only to what you can control: the pull of the arrow, the direction, and the release. How To Increase Ovulation

What are the arrows you wish to let fly? A song'? A way to help others? A new career? Higher education? How far are you willing to bend to the Divine archer? Your kidney energies govern the tension behind the bow and how far the arrow can fly. How deeply are you willing to look inside yourself?

What is on hold and needs to be unleashed - an unfinished project? A dormant profession? The liver energies allow the string to be released so the arrow can soar. What awakens the creative urge inside you and how will you encourage that urge so that it may be release? The spleen energies govern your intention or your aim in life. Where are your aspirations directed, and where are your sights set? The lung energies represent the target itself. Can you pay attention to the arrow rather than the target? Can you release the object of your desire so you aren't overly attached to the mark? And once you release the arrow, can you surrender to the process of the heart itself and enjoy the spiritual journey, soaring along the path of the infinite?

Denai never wanted children. She was a free spirit who lived life fully. When she was about forty, she became pregnant, an unplanned event that resulted in an early miscarriage. To her surprise, the miscarriage devastated her. She came to the Fertile Soul retreat to achieve another pregnancy, but soon recognized that it wasn't a baby that she desired. We checked what the pull of Denai's bow really represented, and redirected her aim. She described this as an awakening: "Something deep inside of me shifted. But the need wasn't for a child. The process in my uterus caused the emergence of a need to express myself from within my very bones." When Denai let go, she felt like the pregnancy made her aware of a great creative power within her. She tried her hand at an old love, writing, and wrote a workbook for women on how to express the joy of life. She allowed herself to be bent with gladness, and by trusting the divine archer she learned to live and love from the deep authentic place in her soul.

Meditation to Open the Heart and Bring the Spirit Home

To tap into your own well of boundless opportunity, practice this meditation to open your heart and release your fear. How To Increase Ovulation

Begin by breathing into your chest, expanding and contracting your ribs and diaphragm so your lungs can fill and empty. Follow this movement; become mesmerized by this movement. Then turn your awareness deep into your heart. Feel the place where your breath meets the pulsing of your heart. Still yourself until you can connect with the breath above and the heartbeat below. Keep going deeper into the void within the center of your heart. Go as deep as you can and feel the stillness that connects you to the entire universe.

How To Increase Ovulation

In the depths of the emptiness, bring your awareness again to your beating heart, which is constant and steadfast, always there for you and waiting to express its abundance. Envision your heart as the empress on her throne, with all the other organ systems supporting her. Listen calmly and quietly to what she needs from you. Be patient and give it time. It takes time and practice to establish rapport so the empress trusts you. She will tell you what she understands you are ready to hear. She knows what's best. Trust her rule.

As you practice this meditation, continue to connect with your heart as you go through your day. When you see an opportunity, quiet your mind, bring your awareness deep within your chest, and listen to and appreciate your heartbeat. Feel its constant, reverberating beat and the love it is sending. To learn more, you can check out How To Increase Ovulation.

How To Best Conceive - Breaking Open, Not Breaking into Pieces

How To Best Conceive

The heart has an amazing capacity to heal. After experiencing a heart attack the heart can recover and the person can go back to living an active life. When the heart is damaged in spiritual terms, from being jilted or losing a loved one or a dream, it can also recover - by being broken open rather than being broken into piece.

Tragic situations can wound a heart and break it into pieces, which a person then spends the rest of her life trying to put back together, a goal hampered by an attitude of victimization and identity with a negative self-definition: I am an abuse victim, a child of an alcoholic, a mother against drunk drivers, an infertile woman. But trying to patch heart fragments back together requires a person to constantly relive the terrible story over and over, prolonging the pain of past suffering.

How To Best Conceive

The alternative to this devastation is to let your heart be broken open, allowing true healing to take place. It is human nature to distract ourselves. Within the heart is the place the Buddhists call "the place of no hope", which may also be described as a place of no expectation that things will be different. While you may think that healing can't occur without the possibility of hope for something else, that is precisely when healing occurs - when there is no outside story to take you away from the present reality. Just as pure love is unconditional, pure hope is unconditional. The highest place of hope is not hoping for anything in particular, but to simply be present and to feel life in its completeness, no matter the circumstances. It is deep acceptance; it is trust and surrender at the same time.

To prepare for your heart to be opened, let what happens happen. Don't fight what is. Don't become the story, the drama, or the crisis. Allow. Stay fully and attentively present in the moment. You may still have fear, anxiety, anger, and hurt feelings, but your heart is open, able to heal and help others receive love as well. How To Best Conceive

Monique was an only child and knew she could have anything she wanted. When she grew up she became a legal aid lawyer and married a handsome man. After both her parents died, Monique rooted herself in her husband, but he was unfaithful to her. When she came, devastated, to a retreat, she was looking for a way to find a safe place for her roots to settle and for her to heal.

At all the Fertile Soul retreats, I use a therapeutic poetry exercise in which the women meditate and draw forth intention, then draw cards from a bowl. On each card is a single word, which the women string together to create their own poetry. Monique drew the words "roots," "fertile," and "sister." With those words, her healing began. She wrote, "I have found my fertile soul, I have found my true roots, and I have placed them within the nourishing love of my new fertile soul sisters." Monique continued to write healing poetry to help others heal, too. She had found a safe place to take root and a way to express and receive love.

Healing Yourself 

One part of the work I do focuses on helping women discover their creative, fertile power before their children come to them. If women heal themselves before they become mothers, they live happier lives themselves and are able to create a better world for their children.

I began to learn this myself when one of my own babies was just a few weeks old. A visiting friend and I were having a deep talk about being daughters and mothers. As I held my daughter and looked at her absolute perfection, I got so choked up over the love I felt for my baby girl that I started to cry. I connected with my sorrow in not feeling loved in the same way I loved her. As I wept, I realized that this was connected to my intense need to have a child of my own. I was parenting the hurt and broken parts of myself through my child and the intense love I felt for my daughter was the very same love I had always been missing.

Breaking open in this way and becoming aware of this fact created a conduit through which I was able to heal. The experience also made me realize the burden I might have placed on my daughter if I required her to fill my need for love, and hadn't healed my pain myself. How To Best Conceive

Do you know the old adage that we can't love others fully until we love ourselves? I think this is especially true when we're trying to become parents, I know that I couldn't fully parent my children until I was emotionally whole and loved myself. When I was trying to become pregnant, I took care of myself like never before. But once I had given birth, my second wellness practices went out the window. I had gotten healthy in order to have a child, but l hadn't been motivated to have a healthy me.

How To Best Conceive

The ingrained urge to care for myself through others still comes out in my interactions with my children. When Kyra decided not to go to a school dance, I panicked because I saw myself at her age, feeling lonely and rejected. But before l imposed my vicarious needs on her I was able to remember that she was Kyra, not me, and she was OK - she just didn't want to dance this particular dance. Whenever I approach her through the eyes of my own fear she gets annoyed with me and I have to come back to reality and realize that I still have some inner work to do. I choose not to mother from a stance of weakness, from what I didn't get as a child.

A mother who approaches her children from a place of wisdom rather than a conditional place of need, fear, or control, will foster a healthy independence in them. From the state of "universal motherhood," the difference between parenting and living someone else's life becomes clear. Just as I never belonged to my mother, my children don't belong to me. They were given life by their source, not by my desire. And I am no more whole because of my children than I was when I imagined that their absence was the source of my emptiness. To learn more, you can check out How To Best Conceive. 

When To Fall Pregnant - Rebalancing The Heart Energies

When To Fall Pregnant

So how do we keep the heart energies open, balanced, and moving? By taking care of the other four energies - those of the kidneys, liver, spleen, and lungs. Those organs receive and interact, enabling the heart energies to give. That means that if your inner needs aren't met through the other four energy systems, your heart won't be able to pour out love.

Feeling gratitude and reverence is another way to keep the heart energies flowing. Yet, because we work hard for what we achieve, have, and eat, we tend to feel entitled, rather than grateful, for all the things in our lives. When we are able to feel and express gratitude for what we have, things get even better and creativity in all forms abounds. Being grateful keeps us open, receptive, and full of joy, and let us give ourselves completely to life.

When To Fall Pregnant

Each day, first thing in the morning, I take a few minutes to connect with life and express the energies of my heart. Just before l get out of bed, when my awareness starts coming into focus, my natural tendency is to rush into the concerns of the day and forget the real reason for living. So, before I allow myself to get out of bed, I connect with the inherent joy of life. Keeping my eyes closed, I quiet my mind and bring my awareness deep inside my chest and my heart. Doing this for just a few moments puts the rest of the day into proper perspective and, no matter what deadlines I have or what dramas arise, I continue to experience the joy of being alive. When To Fall Pregnant

Many women find keeping a gratitude journal to be another way to tap into feelings of love and appreciation. It's as simple as writing lists of things that you're grateful for: a person, a day, your work or family, or even your current surroundings. Start with easy topics and then see if you can find things that you're grateful for in more challenging relationships. Remember to consider the basic things that are so easy to take for granted. For example, where would we be without running water and electricity? On days when you feel less connected to your heart energies, looking through your journal will remind you of the many things that you are grateful for, enabling you to easily reconnect.

Body movement is another way to align energy. As discussed earlier, dancing lets you move to your own song and know your true inner nature. Dancing also balances the heart energies and helps you to live with excitement, passion, affection, and enthusiasm. When I conducted a retreat in India a couple of years ago, in fact, a yogi told us, "Women open up through dance." So move to your own beat. Dance into your temple.

In addition to dancing, try to be mindful about the many types of other movements you make throughout the day, and express and take pleasure from them whether it's painting, playing a guitar, walking, working out, biking, dancing, planting a flower garden, or making dinner. Our bodies were meant to move and every movement is an opportunity for pleasure.

To balance your fire energies and find stability and calm, it is also important to stay nourished and eat healthfully. Drink plenty of liquids and avoid overindulging in hot, spicy, or drying foods such as fiery Mexican, Indian, or Thai foods. Avoid coffee, caffeine, natural or artificial stimulants, and, of course, tobacco. Eat foods that nourish the blood and the yin, such as mung beaus and beefs. Several supplements, such as omega-3 fatty acids, pycnogenol, grape seed, pine bark, and bilberry extracts, can support smooth blood flow. Talk to a naturopath or other person knowledgeable in herbs and supplements to explore what might help you.

It is also important to take time for yourself, to go within for solitude and restitution, and to preserve your boundaries. This includes not feeling obligated to take on other people's burdens and refusing to let anyone else tell you how to live your life. Every day, make time for rest and deep relaxation. Practice the meditative breathing exercises taught throughout this blog, especially before going to bed. During the day, practice expressing yourself and speaking your truth.

From your sense of the Divine, practice loving unconditionally. Ordinary love is rooted in desire and satisfaction, but divine love has no boundaries and no conditions - nothing stands in its way. There is a difference between unconditional love and need. For example, if you can't love your husbund or partner when he betrays you, that isn't love; it's need, need for another person's love in order to feel whole. Need is based in the other organs, not the heart. Need is an inward movement; love is an outward expression, like forgiveness. Yet, love isn't only something we exchange, it is what we are: and when we know this, we radiate it in all our encounters, even to those we don't particularly like. When To Fall Pregnant

Most love in this world is conditional and requires love in return. One of the most conditional relationships is that of the traditional husband-and-wife arrangement: I will love you and spend my life with you, but you in return must love me and be devoted to me and agree with me and support my desires and wishes. Love between a parent and child is the next most conditional relationship: I will love you and take cave of you. but you in turn must love me and respect me and do what I tell you to do; you must receive gratefully all the love I give you, all the education and opportunities I bestow upon you, and you must perform and become a respectable young lady or gentleman in return.

But true unconditional love requires nothing in return, not even consideration. The trick to this: you have to love yourself unconditionally as well. When you realize that your longing for love can always be satisfied by the devine you, it releases your dependence on others and your need to control them in order to feel good. You may still need to express emotions about the behavior of those close to you, and adjust your own, but these actions do not alter the state of love. If you'd like to love purely, ask yourself if there is anyone for whom you can't feel love.

Write down his or her name and journal about the feelings you have surrounding him or her. There is usually another emotion like fear, anger, worry, jealousy, or grief that inhibits the ability to love. Pray for or meditate on this person once per day for two weeks, asking that he or she be forgiven, and that all good things come their way. And then, see if you can send them love.

I try to parent my children by example, not through instruction. My children see me living my own passion - I have released them of the burden of having me live through them. I give them limits and try to guide them and be there for them, but I don't feel I own them and I do not need them to perform for me. What they accomplish will be their own and whatever it is, I will be proud of them. When I am anchored and healthy I am able to extend my love and goodwill without expecting return. And they can live freely. Children naturally want to do well for themselves, their friends, parents, and teachers. They learn a deep sense of independence when they follow role models rather than act out fear of not meeting someone else's expectations. And they approach life with an inner directive, an inherent sense of responsibility for their own actions and consequences.

When To Fall Pregnant

Relationships with animals are a wonderful way to stimulate feelings of unconditional love. Petting a cat or dog can immediately flood you with love. Nature can also do this: take time to appreciate how the wind blows through the trees, the way the air smells after a rain shower. Appreciating fully and purely is the same as unconditional love, allowing you to connect with life and joy.

Susan was a sweet, authentic woman who enjoyed the life she was leading, sharing it with two cats and a dog. Then she fell in love and married a man who was the only son of Greek immigrants, who felt it was his duty to produce a child to carry on the family name. But this wasn't Susan's path - her body, mind, and soul rejected participating in the process. When she came to a retreat, Susan had suffered through many in vitro procedures and had not become pregnant. She had, however, developed a lifethreatening autoimmune disease.

As I worked with Susan, she discovered she had adopted a false identity for her husband and that she was not living her own truth. Her real passion was not to mother a child but to care for animal habitats in the wild. As she came into the strength of her own intention, Susan separated from her husband and found great joy on her new path. She also rekindled her relationship with her sister, who shared Susan's interest in working with animals. Susan also eventually rekindled her relationship with her husband, who found during the separation that Susan was his true love and that he belonged at her side, rather than meeting the obligations that his parents had laid on him. As she healed her life issues, she was able to wean herself off steroids as her autotmmunity went into remission. To learn more, you can check out When To Fall Pregnant.

How To Know When You Got Pregnant - Finding Your Own Way

How To Know When You Got Pregnant

Until you become aware of and connected to your source, soul, and spirit, you may rely on your connection with others to feel secure and stable. But when you understand from where you came and who you are, you can walk the path you were meant to walk, majestic in your solitude. As Albert Einstein said:

I am truly a lone traveler and have never belonged to my country, my friends, or even my immediate family with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude, feelings which increase through the years.

Eventually, our spiritual path narrows to where two cannot walk abreast. We walk alone, yet through our breath we are connected to our inner stillness and aware of our connection to everything around us. The electromagnetic force created by lung energies interacting with source energies allows us to walk upright, aware, stable, and strong. Through surrender and acceptance, though it seems our very foundation is being shaken, we allow our essence below the surface to break through and become a fountain of support, love, and purpose in the world.

How To Know When You Got Pregnant

Live From Your Joy Rather Than Your Fear 

You've learned that the water energies represent the full expression of self. You've also seen that wood energies stand for the energies associated with change and opportunity. The earth energies bring it all together in your core. And the metal energies signify releasing all that is inappropriate or damaging so that you can live as your true self. The fire, or heart, energies are the energies of emergence, which allow you to blossom from a tightly bound bud to a full, unrestricted, radiant flower. How To Know When You Got Pregnant

When, as so many of us have been trained, fear is used as a guiding emotion, it blocks access to this full expression of joy. With the many advantages of a fruitful society also comes a tendency for us to sign over our personal power and be guided by external authority. This leads to many common, paralyzing fears: fear of not being good enough, fear of what people think, doubts about your own inner knowing, and so forth. Through practice, even deeply ingrained negative thought habits can be replaced with the infinitely more powerful thoughts founded in love, allowing for your natural expansion and creativity.

Fire Energies

The heart energies arise from the center of your chest and power you to immense vitality and infinite potential. Traditional Chinese medicine views the heart as the home of the spirit. As it pumps blood, it circulates the spirit throughout the physical being, When fear, anger, and grief are transformed through intention, spirit moves unobstructed through the body, allowing pure connection with all things. When our heart energies are balanced and aligned, we connect with the world through love. 

As you can see in the following horizontal-vertical grid, the heart energies take you to the zenith of your existence, crowning the acceptance at the base of the grid and the horizontal "doing" energies of wood and metal around the central pivot of Earth's knowing, At this apex you live as pure spirit and in peace.

Signs of lmbalanced Heart Energies 

The heart governs the spirit, so its manifestations show up in the psyche. If you are prone to heart palpitations, anxiety, agitation, or restlessness, or if you fidget, flush easily, are frequently impatient, lack vitality, have nightmares, or can't sleep deeply throughout the night, you likely have deficient heart energies. Because the spirit is contained in blood, deficient heart energies are also evidenced in conditions in which blood moves less freely through the vessels, such as blood stasis, a condition that develops as we age. They can also be seen in diseases that make you prone to blood clots, heart attacks, embolisms, and strokes.

In the system of traditional Chinese medicine, the heart encompasses consciousness, the highest aspect of the mind that contains the insight by which the will of heaven is known. Therefore, if your heart energies are blocked or imbalanced, your emotions may become unstable or shattered, causing you to lose your barometer for reality. For example, you can become convinced that you have nothing to contribute to life and be unable to live vivaciously. How To Know When You Got Pregnant

Imbalanced heart energies manifest either as excessive or insufficient energy. For example, when someone burns the candle at both ends, becoming hyperactive, grandiose, or wild, the fire energies are too hot and cause them to burn out of control. Excessive fire energies can also affect the psyche, causing disturbed, manic, or even psychotic behavior - a state Chinese medicine paradoxically refers to as too much joy. This doesn't mean too much happiness; it means overindulgence of excitement, entertainment, ego gratification, constantly doing too much, socializing too much, spending too much time talking on the phone, watching television, or listening for too many hours to loud music. All this doing doesn't allow room for other energies that are needed for balance. The result is an internal void that is never filled, but which can sometimes be temporarily masked by excessive activity.

Insufficient fire energies, on the other hand, can result in depression, a lack of joy or passion, agitation, restlessness, and a search for worldly, rather than internal, fulfillment. Insufficient fire energies can also result in restless, interrupted sleep.

The traditional Chinese medicine system explains that when the heart finds no inner anchor, the spirit can find no rest and wanders aimlessly throughout the night.

How To Know When You Got Pregnant

Activating the Divine Spark 

When source energy becomes the basis of our actions, we activate our own Divine spark and live authentically. When source, soul, intention, and spirit are aligned, we spiral upward to reside in the highest plane of existence, that of unconditional love. In this state we don't choose what or who is worthy of our love, we simply love because it is our very nature - we are love. We live in abundance and joy, and extend the inherent ecstasy and bliss of life.

The energies of the heart are the most potent of all the life energies. The electromagnetic charge of the brain can be detected about twelve inches outside the perimeter of the skull but the energies of the heart can be picked up about twelve feet away from the person emitting them. When we are unhindered by the restrictions of fear, anger, worry, and grief, there is no limit to how far the heart energies can reach.

Because the heart is such a powerful organ, the Chinese see it as the empress of the entire being, served by all the other energies. It rules from its throne deep within our chest, connecting us to every other spiritual current and supporting our spirit's highest work - to give unconditional love to ourselves, everyone, and everything. To learn more, you can check out How To Know When You Got Pregnant.

Ovulation Not Getting Pregnant - Rebalancing Your Metal Energies

Ovulation Not Getting Pregnant

Detoxifying your body will do much to enable you to take in life-giving energy and release substances that are not good for you. But you also need to enable your mind and spirit to release attachments that are toxic to you. Ask yourself each day, What am I willing to let go of? Identifying unhealthy attachments to things, people, work, or life situations will allow you to evaluate whether you need to enforce boundaries, adjust the situation, or leave it altogether.

Crying is one way we release attachments. When we are sad or grieving, our bodies contract, the lungs and chest tighten, and this pressure is released in a cry or moan. Failing to surrender to the need to cry and let go results in a lower state of energy in which we haven't the strength to power ourselves upward.

Ovulation Not Getting Pregnant

Denial and resistance inhibit the proper expansion of lung energies and are counter to the spirit's upward and outward direction. While it is natural and necessary to mourn significant losses, mourning that continues too long puts you at odds with yourself, preventing you from establishing a higher order, which can be achieved only through surrender. If you cannot accept external reality, then your internal wisdom begins to unravel. A split develops between perception and reality, which exhausts vitality and creates havoc. Ovulation Not Getting Pregnant

To prevent this from happening, ancient Chinese societies decreed that when a father died, his son was allowed three days of total immersion in grief, during which time he wept uninterrupted as he cared for his father's body, After the three days had passed, the intense grieving period ended and life went on (although the mourning period could last one year). The lesson of this is that after immersing ourselves in our grief it is essential to then let it go.

One of the most potent ways to heal grief is soul-to-soul cornmunication in which we connect with another person's release through tears. As rivers flow into the ocean, our own affliction can be relieved by aligning ourselves with the waterways of another. Have you ever felt like crying when you truly felt someone else's grief? When we join our tributary of tears to another, the soul is touched and healed.

I witness this incredible form of healing at every Fertile Soul retreat. As women who are going through similar heartaches share their stories, dramatic healing takes place. As they see each other, care about each other, and share their pain, their own pain lessens a bit. Though each of them may feel broken, when they connect with another person going through similar pain, they still see the other person as whole - and than can't help seeing themselves that way, too.

Emotional healing comes through surrender, when you allow yourself to be taken to that unknown place where you have no control. There you let the pressure within your depths work on you, transforming your rough edges and transforming your carbon potential into a diamond. Complete abandonment provides utter release and freedom, actually restructuring you and enabling you to live according to a pure state where your energies actually vibrate at a higher level.

Sophia, an Eastern European immigrant and only child, saw her grandfather die when she was six and lost her father when she was ten. At a retreat she revealed how her mother, who barely survived World War II, clutched Sophia to her tightly, hardly letting her breathe. Sophia felt joined to those who had died, and lived her own life unhappily, feeling dead inside. At the retreat, we worked on restoring her po using her acceptance and release of death with acupuncture,intention, and journaling. After she surrendered to the deepest grief she had ever felt, she became able to embrace life at last.

The Metal Energies' Transforming Power 

Just as metal can be reshaped by intense heat, the metal energies can combine with other energies to enable transformation. When metal, water, wood, and earth combine and are allowed to gestate deep within you, they enable you to reach your highest self. Through the process of alchemy these energies mold you into a new state of being.

But you can't force or control this interaction - it comes through release. And its power doesn't manifest on the surface. Just as metals form deep within the earth, transformation takes place deep. There, the intense pressures of life do their work - suffering and pain are turned to awareness and enlightenment. The highest, purest creations come from the strongest pressures of life. In my own case, learning to let go of the immense suffering I went through is what enabled me to reach the ecstatic heights I later experienced. It was the fuel for my transformation. Ovulation Not Getting Pregnant

The transformative process begins by knowing yourself and loving your source - deeply. 

• Water - You must accept yourself, wrinkles, warts, shadow aspect, and all. From this state of being, the desire to create, to become, grows.
• Wood - You hold the vision of what you desire to create. Then, to enable creativity, you align your love of self with thoughtful intention and action.  
• Earth - What actions do you need to take to align yourself with this focused intent? And then, by letting go and not resisting, you let life mold you into a new and abundant state of being. 
• Metal - Surrender to what is. You don't run or hide. You release the old so a new order can be established,
• Fire - Open up to your highest aspect of being, your spirit.

Ovulation Not Getting Pregnant

The downward energy of metal is what propels us upward. In this way, you follow in the footsteps of one of the highest mythical representations in Chinese mythology, the Queen Mother of the West, Xi Wang Mu, goddess of the ultimate yin. The Queen Mother resides where the earth turns away from the sun, representing the death of all things that no longer serve. She symbolizes the aspect of the Divine feminine that lets old habits die, releases inappropriate partners, and stops harmful life interactions. She also represents the death of the physical form when we are finished with this earthly vehicle.

Phoebe was a model whose greatest fear was losing her youth and beauty. Whenever she saw a wrinkle, she saw death sneaking up on her. The spiritual teacher Bhagavan Das says, "When you can't remember God, remember death. It will bring you there." After I talked with Phoebe, she decided to face her fear of death directly and began to visit a nursing home, spending time every week with those who had no family. 

After doing this for some time, Phoebe realized it wasn't death she feared; it was a new phase in her life that she was afraid of. Who would she be without her looks? Realizing this made her feel shallow, which she didn't like. She worked on creating a newer, better self by visiting the home almost every night, reading to the elders, combing their hair, and making them feel loved and cared for. In that way, she also loved and cared for herself. To learn more, you can check out Ovulation Not Getting Pregnant.