inflammatory issues.
Women who have a well-functioning, juicy body and manage their health well in their youth may be in better shape to have a child during their mature years, just as women who have signs of early aging and degeneration may not have as long a fertile window, because the air element has already begun to take over. A mature woman feels a greater disruption to her overall lifestyle when she has children because she’s lived her old life longer and is used to it. Therefore, the new state feels like a big psychological and behavioral shift. In addition, the more mature body needs more time to rest and rejuvenate after going through such a significant physical and emotional event, but she can manage that by building support around her.
It is always best to get an honest and raw understanding of the condition of your one-of-a-kind body using the senses. What do you see, taste, smell, hear, and feel? What is underneath the makeup or the hair dye? What happens when you don’t wear deodorant? What kind of condition is your skin really in? How about the teeth and the gums? Sometimes the small things you might want to fix cosmetically are telling you something critical about your health. One tissue can become affected by an imbalance more than others. The key is to pay attention and know yourself for how you really are.
Let’s say you find that you aren’t really showing many signs of aging or toxicity — both issues for fertility. For example, your skin still seems juicy and thick. Your hair is still lustrous and is mostly not gray. You still get regular, effective periods, and the flow patterns seem relatively unchanged. Your injuries heal fairly easily. You have an appetite. You don’t have any cysts or other growths. You generally sleep well at night. These are just a few examples of youthful health. If you consider yourself a mature woman and yet your body still maintains a healthy quality and vitality, then you might be one of the lucky women in their older fertile years who may do just fine having a kid.
If you are feeling like the clock might be ticking, then still, it’s not time to freak out; it’s simply time to truly look at your body and position yourself for the best health possible (again, something I hope to help you with in this book).
I’ve had women in their early forties start working with me thinking that they are going through early perimenopause, and in all cases they were wrong — they were just going through a life transition that was interrupting the basic physiological processes involved in menstruation and throwing off the rest of their health, too. It’s not that early menopause doesn’t happen to some women — it’s just very rare. It happens in about 5 percent of women.
If you feel healthy and strong and like you still have your youthful glow and juiciness, then you may be in good condition to have children for years to come. If you feel like you may need to improve your health, then this book will help you reclaim your vitality. Regardless of your age, take care of yourself, and if you do end up having a kid, I would suggest that you devote your energy to lining up support around you to help with postpartum rejuvenation and childcare — even if you are a stay-at-home mom. The transition from nonmother to mother can be challenging for many women — even if they desperately craved a baby — but it’s worth it.
Let your mind go, and your body will follow.
— HARRIS K. TELEMACHER, played by Steve Martin, L.A. Story
I have some news for you. Wanting a baby is not what creates a baby. Thinking about a baby doesn’t create a baby. It is your physical desire to have sex with your male partner when you are fertile, plus his reciprocated desire and the two of you acting upon it, that will get you pregnant. I actually believe that wanting a baby too strongly gets in the way of natural conception because it focuses energy and attention ever so subtly away from the actual act needed to make the baby.
The process of creation is an animalistic act that allows for a mystical event to occur, and this produces real, physical results...a new person! It is unmistakably a spiritual process — in the sense that it’s beyond material understanding. There are fundamental parts of it that cannot be grasped by the mind or by modern science. No one understands how a soul enters a cell, or group of cells, and when this occurs. Similarly, no one knows when a soul leaves a body. There is always more going on than we can understand.
A student once asked the great yogi Paramahansa Yogananda, author of Autobiography of a Yogi, when the soul enters the body. He stated that it happens at the moment of conception; that there are essentially souls waiting for the moment of conception to occur so that they may enter. Waiting where? Yogis call it the astral world. It’s supposedly beyond the physical world and the mind. Perhaps it’s that place we tap into in dreams. Yogananda believed that upon conception, a spark of light is released in that astral world, and that’s the cue for the soul to come on into the egg and sperm’s newly formed arrangement of matter. Maybe this is also related to the light people say they see when they are near death. Perhaps that’s not an ending but rather the beginning of something else.
And despite all religions and physicists attempting to define how creation occurs, ultimately, none of the best and brightest minds we know really understand it. This makes total sense, because creation is not a conscious, thinking process. Rather, it’s a deep, dark, and mysterious one.
You don’t need to meticulously think your way into creating a baby, but your thinking mind really does not like to hear this. Your thinking mind wants to feel like someone or something is within your control. The idea that events actually happen some other way, possibly even randomly, is a discomforting thought for you if you are like most modern women. We like predictability, control, and surety, and many of us find concepts like faith, trust, and surrender to be challenging. What exactly are we surrendering to?
Regardless of your religious or spiritual leaning, I hope we can agree that you have a body, a mind, senses, and a soul, and each of these dimensions plays a major role in every moment of your life, including conceiving a child. You know what your body is because you can see it. You have an idea what your mind is because you can hear it chattering all the time when life goes quiet. Your senses — hearing, feeling, seeing, tasting, and smelling — are used daily for basic life functions and experiencing pleasure and pain, so you have a tangible grasp of how they work. However, the soul is where the human animal gets a little more confusing.
In Sanskrit, the word atman is used to refer to soul or spirit. Yogis believe that the atman is beyond the physical body and the mind, and yet it permeates everything. Whatever you can observe, then, is atman, but you can’t perceive it with your senses. This elusiveness would make it very difficult for a scientist to find the atman, because science needs to be able to observe something to prove that it’s there. Atman is even more confusing because it is both very small and very big. The very fact that such opposites can exist simultaneously is precisely why the soul transcends the conscious mind. Just try making sense of it!
The main reason the atman is so ubiquitous is because it is the witness seeing everything, so a person cannot directly observe it. In order to observe it, one would have to turn the awareness back toward oneself and then not get distracted at all by thoughts, memories, or the body on the way there. But who doesn’t get distracted by these things in today’s world? We think all the time. We cling to the past. We fear the future — and we feel physical stress, pleasure, and pain, so the body is a highly distractible object.
In fact, this reversing of the awareness toward yourself to discover the soul has always been the goal of yoga practice,
