An excerpt from The Ayurvedic Guide to Fertility
by Heather Grzych

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about 10 percent, or 6.1 million, women in the United States have difficulty getting pregnant or staying pregnant each year.

 

In The Ayurvedic Guide to Fertility: A Natural Approach to Getting Pregnant (New World Library, May 5, 2020), author and Ayurvedic practitioner Heather Grzych offers a gentle, holistic approach to understanding the physical, emotional, and psychological aspects of fertility based on Ayurveda, an ancient form of medicine that originated in India that means “the science of life.”

 

We hope you’ll enjoy this excerpt from the book.

 

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The process of creation is not one that can be controlled — there are so many unknowns — and this can be a little unsettling for a lot of women. However, creation emerges out of vulnerability and even darkness. Creation is dominated by unseen forces that later give rise to something tangible and seen.

 

If you are considering having a child and you want the experience to be as joyous as possible, then first you must understand the process of how things are created and surrender to it. Creation comes from the need for change. It doesn’t come when things are in perfect order. Otherwise, you wouldn’t need anything different to happen in your life; there would be no space for something new.

 

There are variations on how conception occurs. Some women surrender to this process easily, and some after a glass of wine. Some women need to have doctors do it for them. Even when a woman goes to see a doctor for IVF or egg freezing or any other type of intervention used for conception, there is a form of surrender. It is just a different kind of surrender than getting pregnant the old-fashioned way.

 

Your job is to start to get comfortable in the darkness of space — when you don’t have the answers or conclusions. Furthermore, your job as the female is specifically to let creativity happen through you. Yup, it’s time to give up some of that control.

 

How do I sell this idea to you, though, if you are like a lot of other modern women and like to make vision boards and execute plans to get toward where you want to go? It can feel like a real struggle when we cannot make something happen via our own thinking and doing, can’t it? It may feel difficult to let things unfold naturally until we feel we’ve done all we can. However, because conception takes more than one entity, a state of receptivity is important, and this can become compromised if we are trying to control everything. I’m not saying this is easy — receptivity and surrender challenge our fears around trust and even our own self-confidence.

 

In having a baby, you are not the one “making” anything when it actually happens. You are a vessel. You cannot control the outcome. You can try to influence it, but you can’t control it. This is part of why a fertility journey — like any creative endeavor — is a spiritual journey for the modern woman who has a hard time relinquishing control. First, you do the best you can to take care of yourself in your environment, you connect deeply with your partner (literally and figuratively!), and then you roll the dice. You may experience mental anguish in the void, and this is where it’s handy to hold a sense of faith and wonder. Allowing yourself to be surprised by the universe can actually be a really magical thing, sometimes even more fun than planning everything to a T and getting exactly what you want when you want it. Remember the saying “A watched pot never boils”? Well, it applies when you are trying to get pregnant, too.

 

Women who feel the call to conceive often start to grasp for a baby. They want to reach out and grab it, and they will do whatever they can to get it. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it sabotages the whole thing — because if there is too much grasping for the outcome, then there is no room for receiving the gifts that take you to the outcome. The baby you were meant to have will not come by your forcing. It will come by magic.

 

Pathologies are created energetically and physically when there are imbalances of giving, receiving, and grasping. Conception becomes blocked, elusive, or rejected when such pathologies are present. The balance point between receiving and giving is where you find the fertile ground for conception to take place.

 

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Heather Grzych is the author of The Ayurvedic Guide to Fertility. A board-certified Ayurvedic practitioner, she bridges the worlds of conventional and alternative medicine to help women and men heal their physical and emotional lives. Heather is on the board of directors for the National Ayurvedic Medical Association and has consulted with doctors, governments, and insurance companies. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Visit her online at http://heathergrzych.com.

 

Excerpted from the book The Ayurvedic Guide to Fertility. Copyright ©2020 by Heather Grzych. Printed with permission from New World Library — www.newworldlibrary.com.