The Ayurvedic Guide to Fertility. Heather Grzych

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, despite its modern reputation as a way to turn your body into a strong, flexible, or more slowly moving pretzel in order to reduce stress.

      The word yoga also comes from Sanskrit, and it actually means “to yoke together.” In yoga, we’re in a state of complete connectedness with an object of focus, without distraction. In all other states that aren’t yoga, distraction exists, as witnessed in the chattering of the mind that is present. In order for us to truly connect with anything, the noise must be silenced. We must achieve presence.

      This search for soul is part of the yoga journey, whatever your version of yoga is. For example, right now, you are doing the yoga of book reading.

      Cultivating Your Psychospiritual State

      How many times have you heard of a woman who tried to get pregnant for a long time undergoing all sorts of invasive medical procedures for years; possibly beginning to search for alternative ways of baby making, such as surrogacy or egg donation; starting to look into adoption; or relinquishing the idea altogether — and then someday, when she’s given up completely, she magically conceives a child? What a ride. When I see this, it always makes me wonder: Was all this necessary? If she had done things differently, could she have still gotten to the same place?

      Your state of mind is important for this journey, as is your sense of connectedness with spirit. Remember, getting too narrowly focused on the goal of having a baby will not help you, because you will lose sight of what it takes to make a baby. If you are already stuck obsessing about this goal, it’s time to explore the deep places inside you and ask bigger questions about the nature of life and the universe — so that you actually become open to new possibilities. Everything exists as possibility before it becomes reality.

      Presence is also important for this journey. That means not being stuck in the past or thinking about the future. You might be lucky and unexpectedly get pregnant after a night of wining and dining on a hot date with the one you love. I say this is lucky, because the moment your mind becomes engaged in thinking about pregnancy, it can actually end up getting in the way, because it distracts from presence. Once you start planning, analyzing, scenario building, or scheming, this is often where the process becomes stressful and you have probably gotten off track from the cosmic, creative magic of it.

      Natural pregnancy occurs in a way that is part predictable and part mysterious. When you are in a place where things seem a bit like they don’t make sense, you are probably on the right track. Having a sense of wonder is important. However, if you start trying to make everything happen the way you want it to, you may become frustrated. This would be a fruitless effort if you’ve never been pregnant before, because you really have no clue how it will happen, even if you are a healthcare practitioner or biomedical scientist and have lots of intellectual knowledge of biological reproduction.

      Conception involves two people and the universe, and all three have to be on board for it to occur. Women have shared countless stories with me of undergoing painful medical procedures to become pregnant, and some without any luck for years. Imagine: chasing pregnancy as a goal, and it doesn’t happen when you want it to — for years? The women I’ve worked with in this situation are angry, frustrated, and devastated. Not getting what you want can be so soul crushing that some women begin to question everything.

      I myself had to drop to my knees and weep a few times in my journey. However, it was in these painful moments, too, that I discovered a type of magic. I’m telling you — this journey may look messy and frustrating at times, but it will also bring some unexpected gifts.

      The Primal vs. Intellectual Self

      The modern woman has two minds. If these two minds are not on the same page, then they can wreak havoc on her life, but when they are in harmony, they can create magic, poetry, and little people. The two minds are the intellectual and the primal. You could call them the conscious and the subconscious. One of the dimensions is conscious mental activity, intellect, and thought. This mind likes ideas, stories, and information. The other is subconscious, in charge of about 95 percent of the body’s operations, with all its sensations, emotions, drives, and urges. These two minds coexist, but sometimes it feels like they are not in accord.