Ways To Increase Your Fertility

Fertility by decades
 
The way women think and feel about their fertility is often dependent on their age, and the experience of getting pregnant is colored by the stage in life at which we experience it. In our teens we tend to have a carefree attitude towards our fertility, and pregnancies at this age are often unplanned and unprepared for, whereas by the time we reach our early forties, a pregnancy may have taken some time to achieve and can seem more precious, but it may be overshadowed by concerns about possible risks and problems. Just as a woman's fertility changes with age, so does her experience of pregnancy and motherhood.

Ways To Increase Your Fertility

Getting pregnant in your teens

Teenage pregnancy is often seen as an indicator of government failure to provide adequate education and accessible contraception to young people. Although we are all aware that getting pregnant when we are older carries medical risks, we may be less aware that there are medical risks for teenagers who get pregnant too. Teenage mothers are more likely to develop anaemia and high blood pressure, to go into labor prematurely and to have a low-birth weight baby with a greater risk of health problems.
 
Teenage mothers may face other social difficulties that can cause problems, along with the fact that they may not access regular antenatal care early in their pregnancies. There are also the obvious hardships of attempting to finish an education, establish a career and become financially secure while caring for a young baby.
 
'I was 17 when I got pregnant. We wanted it to happen but we hadn't thought it through properly. We were both really happy, but after a few weeks we were thinking, oh my God, what have we done? I've always wanted to be a mum, and I don't regret it now. By the time my son is 18, 1 am going to be 36, so I'll still have most of my life ahead of me" Fran, 20
 
I was 18 when I found out I was pregnant. It was a big shock. I went to my GP to talk about having an abortion, but that's as far as it went. Changing my mind was the best thing I ever did. lt was hard; there's that whole stereotype about young mums scrounging on benefits and stuff, and we were determined not to be like that. I started my nursing training when my son was two, and we've bought our own house.' Emma, 27
 
Getting pregnant in your twenties
 
Biologically, this is the ideal time to have a child. Women in their twenties are twice as likely to conceive as women in their late thirties. Your body is young, you probably have a good egg supply, you are more likely to get pregnant quickly and less likely to miscarry or have pregnancy-related problems.
 
However, in just about every other way, this may seem far from the best time to have a child. We still feel young in our twenties, we want to enjoy life, to travel and have fun, and we don't want to be tied down with responsibilities. We may be in full-time education and want to find a job we enjoy, to establish a career, sort out our finances and make a home for ourselves before thinking about having babies. Perhaps more vitally, many women in their twenties have yet to find a partner they feel they would like to settle down and have a child with. So when our bodies are at their reproductive peak, many of us are far from ready to make the most of this.
 

'I was 26 when I got pregnant. I think I'd always imagined I'd have children one day, but it certainly wasn't planned. I did miss out on some things. I don't think I have the financial stability that I would have liked ideally, and I do think perhaps I could have lived my life more fully.' Louise, 30. To find out more, you can check out Ways To Increase Your Fertility.

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.