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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
