developing, essentially practicing its menstrual cycles and continuing its way through the awkward years following onset of puberty. Add to this any moral considerations, plus the fact that she is still legally a minor until she is eighteen and is typically financially and socially dependent on her parents during these years, and it makes it especially challenging for a teenage girl to deal with her own sex drive and developing intimate relationships when, inside, so much is changing for her. At the end of the day, if a female is ovulating, then she could possibly become pregnant, so this is indeed a tricky time of life!
The teenager of the modern society is more than likely going to wait until her twenties, thirties, or forties before she has a child. However, the teenage years are an important time, because how she handles her sexual urge and manages her menstrual cycle and reproductive functioning in this stage of life will influence her sexuality and overall health for years to come.
In these next sections, we’ll break down the phases of the fertile era — from young women to mature women, terms used loosely because women are aging at different rates due to differences in constitution, lifestyle, and environmental factors.
Young, Fertile Women
A healthy twentysomething’s body is robust and juicy. She is in her physical prime, an ideal time to have a child. Her body is already mature enough to conceive, gestate, birth, and breastfeed a baby. Children are very juicy, and a young woman carries this juiciness with her into her womanhood. A woman’s ability to heal and rejuvenate after a physical trauma (which is often what giving birth is!) is typically stronger at this time of life.
The earth and water elements are plentiful when women are young, and these become magnified as the fire element starts to increase in puberty. The increasing fire element gives a woman greater intensity and influence over her environment. She has only to choose where this energy goes.
Young women are increasingly delaying having children until they are in their thirties and even their forties. As of 2012, less than 50 percent of women had a child by the end of their twenties, and these numbers are still decreasing today. Many women are placing the rest of life in front of having a child, especially if they are educated. These women are also delaying marriage more and more. Many women have a feeling that there are things they want to do before they become a mother. This creates a paradox for a young woman because while her body may be completely ready to have a child, her mind and oftentimes her support network are not. Depending on her culture and specific life history, she may not feel ready to have a child yet. However, if she does have a child, then she’s doing it at the generally best time biologically.
Despite increasingly not wanting to have kids until later, young women are often sexually active and using some form of birth control. In my practice in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I’ve worked with hundreds of people, I have had only one twentysomething client who was abstinent by choice, and she did so for religious and spiritual reasons. But regardless of her reason, I observed that she was one of the most aligned individuals I’d come across in my years working with clients. She knew she didn’t want to get pregnant — and so she just didn’t have sex. She was old enough. She was mature enough. She was even living with her fiancé. However, she planned to remain abstinent until they got married. I remember thinking: Wow, that must be hard to do! In a sexually liberal city like San Francisco, you don’t meet many people who are abstinent by choice! I noticed she was also very diligent about her eating and exercise routines — apparently not having sex gives you energy for lots of other things. Or perhaps she just had more self-control than most people.
A young woman is not in a rush to be a mother nowadays, because she believes she has many more years ahead of her to get pregnant and have a family, especially after seeing so many older women have children. The clock does not tick for her — except when it comes to her fears about the future. Young women still experience fear of missing out on having kids when they direct their energy elsewhere, and more of them are resorting to egg freezing. Given that the big companies that a lot of these women work for are increasingly offering their female employers egg freezing as a health benefit, it’s clear that young women are still concerned about waiting to become mothers. Freezing their eggs feels like an insurance policy in case they end up waiting too long to get pregnant. However, an older woman with frozen eggs will still be left with her own older body, which will need to be medically assisted in the process of becoming pregnant. It’s not just the eggs that matter; the rest of a woman’s body matters, too, and the seasons of life can be manipulated only so far. We can outsmart nature only so much, and there are usually consequences when we do.
But where do the thirtysomethings fall? This is the decade in which a woman often feels the most pressure about having kids (unless she’s still in limbo into her forties, of course!). It is also, coincidentally, the decade in which many women seem to have some sort of midlife crisis — myself included. The thirties can be an empowering decade for a woman, but they can also be confusing if she has gotten out of alignment in some way — physically, mentally, or spiritually.
Thirtysomethings go in one of two camps — early thirtysomethings can oftentimes put themselves in the “young woman” category if they still feel physically young, but as forty looms, those who have read the data on fertility and listened to what everyone else around them says about it will likely start to put themselves in the “mature woman” box. The midlife crisis so many women experience in this decade has to do with how they’re living their overall lives, and oftentimes, fertility is a major factor. Some women go through this crisis before having their kids, and some have it afterward. I had mine beforehand.
Some women in their thirties are worrying about their fertility for good reason, and other women are worrying about it for no reason at all, but it doesn’t have to do with age so much as it does with how a woman cares for herself and what sort of environment she is in. Doctors typically say that a woman conceiving at thirty-five or over is a high-risk pregnancy, and it can be a little unsettling when you feel absolutely fine and your doctor tells you that you are a geriatric pregnant patient (the actual term used for pregnant women over thirty-five). The problem is that once someone throws a number out as a guideline, saying it’s the average age when something happens, then people stop seeing possibilities and start looking only at numbers.
The reason this is sad is because everyone is aging at different rates. Time matters, but only insofar as it is relevant to the individual’s constitution, lifestyle, and environment. Some women are actually aging faster, and some are aging more slowly. Women do not all first get their periods at the same age, do they? And we all start menopause at different ages, too. Therefore, our fertile windows can also be different.
A woman is much better off studying her own body — the quality of the tissues; her ability to heal and regenerate; the quality of her hair, skin, nails, sleep, digestion, and menstrual cycles; and how she feels emotionally — to analyze basic physiological functions and features. She may just be a little bit different from her peers and even from her family members. She may have more years left than she thought, or she may have already missed her chance. The key is for her to pay attention to her body.
Mature, Fertile Women
Once you hit thirty, thirty-five, forty, or whatever age you consider yourself a more mature woman, it’s good to forget about the numbers for a moment and take a very objective look at your body. The later chapters in this book will help you evaluate it, but I will give you a hint now that the key is in the five elements: space, air, fire, water, and earth.
As our fire increases at puberty and builds into middle age, it eventually burns away some of our earth and water. The question is not if this will happen but when. With healthy aging, we become a little less like a watery, chubby baby and more like a shaped and refined piece of fine pottery. However, if the earth and water elements get a little too depleted, then we burn out and dry out, increasing the
