The Ayurvedic Guide to Fertility. Heather Grzych

of the spine to the crown of the head. When kundalini activates the chakras above the heart, much of the energy goes toward communication and thought, whereas the energy in the lower chakras is more primal, fueling digestion, sexuality, and excretion.

      With so much emphasis on thought and intellectual activity in our day-to-day lives, many women today have too much going on in their upper chakras. The prevalence of head-forward body postures is largely due to this overuse of the mind, reflected in the habit of sitting in front of a computer or staring at a mobile device, reading, viewing, thinking, and achieving through thoughts and communication. However, a healthy person will have balanced energy throughout the body and will not be dominated by one chakra center or the other. What this means for a lot of us is that we need to let go of our overuse of the mind.

      Focusing on any one of the chakras will redirect awareness and energy to that center. For example, focusing on the lowest chakras brings awareness to the pelvic basin, and focusing on the center of the chest brings awareness to love and the rhythm of the heart. Focusing on the center of the belly will connect you with your willpower, and focusing on the throat brings energy to the voice. When you notice that certain chakras feel blocked or overactive, which can happen when the mind, physical body, or emotions have gotten out of balance, you can focus on the other chakras to shift the energy, or you can choose to go deeper into a blocked chakra to understand its mental-emotional-physical components.

      In addition to chakra exploration practices, there is a spot you can activate that will bring you back to your primal energy: a point at the base of the skull that yogis refer to as mastaka granthi, or “head knot.” Mastaka granthi is located at the site of the brain stem, specifically the medulla oblongata. We know from modern science that the brain stem is the relay system between the brain and the rest of the body, and is also the control center for certain fundamental functions of the autonomic nervous system, or primal body, including consciousness, breathing, cardiovascular activity, and the natural, reflexive urges like sneezing and vomiting. It is a regulating center of a whole bunch of stuff that the intellect isn’t necessarily involved in. Mastaka granthi is the gateway between the head and the body — a space between — where the intellectual dimension surrenders to the primal, biological, animal state of the body, and vice versa. This is a useful spot to know about because while it is great to journey on the path to motherhood with balanced chakras, it’s even better to deeply get in touch with your basic biological functions.

       Figure 2: Kundalini rising through the chakras, harmonized with mastaka granthi

      Next, I offer a practice for you to walk through this primal doorway before we dive into some Ayurvedic health principles in the next chapter.

      EXERCISE: MERGING THE PRIMAL AND THE INTELLECTUAL

      As we begin this journey to align your mind, body, and spirit and improve your reproductive health, you can begin by connecting your mind with your body.

      With a neutral, nontilted chin, take your left index and middle fingers and begin gently massaging high on the back of your neck. As you move your fingers around with very soft pressure, you may notice a small valley in the top center of your neck between the muscles on either side of the spine.

      Keep slowly moving the left middle finger upward until you find a tiny cavern at the base of the skull. Once you have found that point, lightly rest the pad of your left middle finger in that little spot. You have found mastaka granthi. Continue to hold your finger there gently.

      Chant om silently to yourself.

      Walking through this doorway, you are beginning to align to the primal rhythm.

       Chapter 3

       Principles of Health

       I believe it’s really about unfolding ourselves.

      — ANGELA FARMER, The Feminine Unfolding

      Ayurveda means “the science of life,” and it is considered to be a sister science to the practice of yoga. I first discovered Ayurvedic medicine while studying to be a yoga therapist in my early thirties. I was taught just a smidgen of Ayurveda and became so fascinated that I entered a graduate program to study more. In India, it is a very old and well-established form of medicine, and today there are hundreds of thousands of Ayurvedic doctors and practitioners in India. Along with traditional Chinese medicine, which most people know by one of its popular therapies, acupuncture, Ayurveda is one of the oldest systems of medicine in the world. I had been practicing yoga and meditation for years, which helped me learn how to master my will and effort and influence my nervous system, but Ayurveda helped me unlock the golden door of understanding nature and how our cells, bodies, and minds are connected to the larger macrocosm.

      In the United States, barely anyone had heard of Ayurvedic medicine when I was studying it, though it has gotten wildly popular in the last few years in the wellness world. Even now, you will see mixed feedback about it if you research it online. Some sources will say it’s the great mother of all medicines, the most transformative form of healing ever to be found. Others will say it’s quackery and practiced by snake-oil-salesman practitioners. Ayurveda is actually a medical philosophy that’s been around for thousands of years, so it comes in many forms and is difficult to nail down. It’s been referred to as ubiquitous, or present everywhere, because its principles have been applied in so many areas — from beauty products, foods, and medicines, all the way to self-help literature and the classes at your local yoga studio. For me, it just made complete sense the first moment I heard about it, and the more I learned about and practiced it, the better my health was and the more alive I felt.

      I was more connected to nature. I noticed the moon in the sky more. The plants and trees were suddenly more interesting. And it finally gave me words, albeit in Sanskrit, to explain things I had felt for a long time but had no way to express. Before I knew it, I left my well-paying corporate career in the health-insurance industry to study a foreign form of medicine that no one I knew had heard of or could even pronounce.

      Like traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda is based on a five-elements model of health, the five elements being space, air, fire, water, and earth. They provide an uncomplicated, intuitive way to describe what is happening in nature and in a body and its environment. The five elements can be used to understand the properties of what a body ingests, and how these properties show up in tissues and physiology during states of imbalance.

      The body is a collection of channels through which air, energy, sound, and different substances and materials travel. Channels go in and out of cells, organs, and tissues. The integrity of the channels is paramount in Ayurvedic medicine. A healthy body has freely flowing channels, and when these channels are overwhelmed, blocked, or damaged, there is some imbalance in the body. Imbalances cause disease, and we don’t want disease if we are trying to conceive. We want to be a receptive and resilient channel.

      So how do we nip imbalances in the bud? Modern medicine typically isn’t very effective unless there is some emergency going on. Even then, when the modern medical system solves a problem with drugs or surgical or device intervention, it often ends up creating another problem altogether. True healing is found in other places these days, and it all starts with you.

      Healing now will make things easier for you down the road when you conceive. Studying your body can tell you a lot. Pain, inflammation, swelling, digestive issues, skin problems, headaches, tissue growths, and PMS symptoms signal that something needs to be looked at more closely, especially if the patterns remain persistent or get worse over time. Noticing quickly when the body is in a state of health versus a state of imbalance can make all the difference in trying to reverse disease processes. However, if you are like most people, you pay attention to your work, your friends and family, the news, or your thoughts more