HOW YOGA HELPED ME ON MY FERTILITY JOURNEY by Tasha Lackman - SUMMER 2011

HOW YOGA HELPED ME ON MY FERTILITY JOURNEY
by Tasha Lackman

Yoga has been a part of my life since before I was born. But never did I have to draw on the calm and strength that it provides as much as during my two-and-a-half year journey of trying to get pregnant.

Let me explain. My mother is also a yoga teacher, and practiced yoga regularly when I was in utero. When I was a child, she would fit her yoga practice into spare moments and turned yoga into a game with my brother and me. This was long before there were Mama-Baby and Yoga for Kids classes at every community centre – and yoga studios were few and far between.

I hit puberty like all the other girls, but never got my period. When I was about twenty, I was finally diagnosed with polycystic ovaries. At that time, my doctor told me that I would only be able to get pregnant with medical assistance. Being a mom was about the furthest thing from my mind at that point in my life, and I didn’t know that medical assistance meant running to the hospital every other day for ultrasounds, hormone injections, and all the ups and downs that go with such treatments, so I did not panic with the news. Looking back I now realize that being told that I could not have children naturally left a huge emotional scar and that I carried this information around with me as a “truth” about myself for over a decade. It is amazing how much our beliefs affect our reality.

From the beginning, my mother told me that doctors could not see into the future and that when I wanted to have children, I would get pregnant. But what did she know? Actually, she might have known more than I gave her credit for. She had been told as an adolescent that she would never be able to have children, and she was told this again by a different doctor when she was pregnant with me. Then she had my brother. My mother claims she just used yoga to prepare her body to conceive, asked God for a child, and it happened.

Still, that was her. I personally have more faith in modern medical wisdom. Yes, I did yoga regularly and knew that it made me feel good. It was a great counter-balance to my demanding job as a lawyer in one of Canada’s largest law firms. But I didn’t believe that it would have anything to do with helping me get pregnant. I turned out to be wrong.

Actually, I had an early direct experience with the power of yoga. When I was about seven years old I was often congested and had a hard time breathing through my nose. My paediatrician wanted to remove my adenoids. Before my mom would allow this surgery, she forced me to do a specific series of yoga postures every day. I remember it as torture. But when we went back to the paediatrician a month or two later, he was surprised to find that the surgery was no longer necessary – and I could breathe through my nose. Even after this first-hand experience I was sceptical.

Then, when my husband and I were ready to start our family, I was nervous and fearful that ours would be a difficult journey. My mother’s insistence that I should just prepare my body for a baby with yoga and leave the details to the Universe was irritating and felt unsupportive. After a few months of “trying” – which seemed futile since I still had not gotten my period – we met with a fertility endocrinologist. We did the work-up, but the whole thing was humiliating and impersonal. A nurse kept talking about my husband’s sperm as “the boys” and the doctor never looked us in the eye. I left the appointment crying and frustrated. We decided to try a different doctor at a different clinic. By the time we made that decision, got another appointment with a doctor we liked and did the work-up again (growl), many precious months had passed before we finally got to do our first IUI (intrauterine insemination) cycle.

The IUI cycle was unsuccessful. So were two more cycles. They just left me with painful cysts on my ovaries from the injection hormones and feeling very teary.

Two years crept by, and still I wasn’t pregnant. It seemed like an eternity.

I went through such a wide range of emotions during that time. My thoughts raced to the future or dwelt in the past. Rarely was I able to enjoy the present moment, which didn’t seem that enjoyable anyway. I had always imagined that I would have children, and was deeply saddened when I thought that the way I had imagined my life might never come to be. There was so much anticipation and excitement at the beginning of a cycle, and devastating disappointment when it failed. There was anger and resentment towards the people who were close to me but who couldn’t understand and offer the support I needed – although I didn’t even know what that was myself. And, of course, the complicated feelings when yet another friend would tell me she was pregnant – happiness for them coupled with jealousy or envy, and then guilt at feeling this way.

I felt so much pressure to become pregnant – mostly from myself, but also from family and society. I felt like a failure at something that seemed so easy for other women. All I could think about was getting pregnant and having a baby, which made it hard tointeract in a meaningful way with the people around me. It was a very lonely time, even though every chair in the waiting room of the fertility clinic was always taken.

Still, when I did yoga during this period, it cleared my mind and brought me temporary calm. It helped me recognize the emotions I was feeling and start the inner work which would allow me to let them go, not to mention that it helped release all the tension I was holding in my neck and shoulders. However, I felt so busy and tired trying to manage my job and running to doctor’s appointments and ultrasounds that I often skipped my yoga practice. When we are sad and overwhelmed, we often forget to take care of ourselves. Or we know we should, but it just seems like way too much effort.

It was time to do our first IVF cycle. We went through all the preliminary steps and paid for the cycle. Before we started, I recognized that I was ragged and needed to get myself together to have the best possible chance of success. I managed to arrange a month leave from work to do a one-month intensive yoga retreat. I had wanted to do it for years, but had never before made it a priority.

Right before I left for the yoga retreat, I found out I was pregnant! Amazingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, I had conceived at exactly the moment that I had finalized my plans to go the yoga retreat. During the retreat, the month of yoga, meditation, study and introspection was dedicated to the life I imagined growing inside me.

The day I came back home from the retreat I went for my ultrasound. I should have been 13 weeks pregnant, but the foetus had died at about 6 weeks. I was devastated beyond words. It had been a long road to getting pregnant, so I felt that I had lost my only chance at parenthood.

In yoga philosophy there is the belief that each experience we have leaves a deep impression on our subconscious being. In other words, every cell in our body stores memories of the past. This idea helped me to believe that after the miscarriage my body would remember how to get pregnant and that it would do it again.

In my grieving process, I delved into my yoga practice and began to read everything that was out there about yoga for women and specifically for fertility. I slowly developed a series of postures that focused on optimizing fertility based on my training as a yoga teacher and drawing from other schools of yoga. This gave me the tools and peace of mind to both let go and feel like I was doing something to help myself on my journey towards parenthood.

Six months later I was pregnant once again (without ever even having to do the IVF cycle). And now I am blessed with a fabulous daughter who is just over two years old.

I have met my mother half-way. Yoga was the key to me realizing my dream to become a mom, yet I do not regret that I went down the medical route. We owe it to ourselves to be proactive and make informed decisions about our health. IVF and other assisted reproductive technologies can and do help many, many women and couples reach their dream of parenthood. But we can also help ourselves by creating the optimal conditions in our bodies and minds to be receptive to new life, whether we make a baby in the bedroom or with the help a medical intervention. Which ever path we choose, the stress and anxiety related to infertility are enormous, and without tools to deal with this stress, the journey can seem unbearable. Yoga gave me those tools.

About the author
Tasha Lackman is the founder of Child’s Pose Fertility (www.childsposefertility.com or www.fertiliteposturedelenfant.com), which provides Yoga for Fertility and Coaching services to women and couples who are struggling to get pregnant, or simply want to prepare their bodies to conceive. She is a certified Yoga teacher, Reiki Master and she holds a Bachelor’s degree in Social Work. Tasha also works as commercial lawyer at one of Canada’s largest firms, and so is no stranger to a stressful professional life and the challenges of finding time to nurture one’s Self.