Ok, I know you have been pounded with decreasing stress and surrounding yourself with “calm”. Yes, you know how important it is to decompress the emotional part of this journey. But very few ladies (never mind the rest of population) implement stress relieving techniques. Many of my clients struggle to cope and get washed away in a sea of emotions. As kids we were are taught how read and write, but not how to cope. Our main emotional teachers, mom and dad, usually don’t know how to handle negative feelings and pass their poor skills onto us. The fertility journey is giving you the chance to change this pattern and help your future children to cope better than we did.
First let’s get to the “dirty” secrets of meditating, it takes time, effort and requires you not to judge how well it’s going. Meditating has no quick payoff and takes planning. This is the main reason many people don’t do it. I know from my own meditating journey (over a year) that daily 30 minutes of quiet down time can feel like a hassle rather than help. Your brain is like a muscle and takes time to train it. Meditating can take weeks before you stop judging how well each quiet time goes. My mentor told me, “When you stopping thinking this sucks or how come each session can’t be sitting on a cloud, you know you are meditating.”
Why meditate? Meditating allows you to develop flexibility to swirling emotions. This is the idea of the emotions being like the wind in the leaves – it comes down suddenly and rustles the leaves on the tree. A healthy tree can handle the wind, swaying and moving, reacting to the wind’s direction, but the whole time its’ roots are firmly planted in the ground. The emotions do happen, it’s ok to cry, be angry, be full of sadness and experience it all. The difference is being strongly rooted, so the emotional experience can’t pull you out of life.
The flexibility in meditating allows your roots/energy to be firmly entrenched in the soil and so you can wait for the wind to die down (all emotional experiences pass with tim). Meditating won’t change your negative feelings (remember the wind is always present in life) and experiencing “negative” feelings is not a bad thing. Meditation helps you stay connected to the big picture and allows life to be nourishing (roots firmly in the ground bring nutrients to the tree) so negative feelings do not overwhelm the positives in your life. So no matter how bad the journey becomes in conceiving a child, you deserve to be connected to life and people you love (including self).
Don’t become the victim of the up and down feelings of fertility treatments. Break the pattern, try meditation and experience a different perspective.