Meeting Your Child Halfway Home Practice
Dear Glowingly Fertile Friends,
Thank you!! for being my and each other’s conception-partners yesterday. Please know how much I appreciate your open minds and hearts. I couldn’t have conceived or continued this Fertile Heart passion project without people who received what I had to offer.
When I say that there is a far more thrilling, far more self-loving way to give birth to the family you long for, I’m speaking as someone who has witnessed thousands of women do just that: turn this crisis into the single most reparative opportunity of their lives. That’s what it became for me, and for them. That’s what we’re aiming for in this work. (This one minute Good News/Bad News Video says it more succinctly.)
The only one that can stop you from a similar experience, is you. And now that you dipped your feet into that Current of Truth, you awakened the part of you that knows that. The Ultimate Mom part of you—the aspect of your nature linked to the trustworthy guidance that is always within reach—knows that you never again need to be a victim.
And now some suggestions for home practice:
Although it will most likely not take you a half hour to read it in its entirety, my invitation is that you stop reading this note right now and don’t continue until you find a peaceful half hour. Alone, without distractions. In order to have the space you need to take it in.
Those of you who attended the session with your partner, will be more likely to receive what you’re looking for, if each of you reads this note on their own.
Otherwise you will not get what you need from it and some of the caring and life-force I poured into it will leak out without reaching its destination. We both lose.
Wonderful, thank you so much!!
Important: I’m sending a lot to ponder here. Go easy. Take in what you can. None of this is meant to be overwhelming.
If ALL YOU DO is the imagery suggested below, place a notebook on your night table and record any dreams that come, that will be a HUGE STEP in the right direction. It’s the quality of your attention that matters more than the number of things you do.
If you have a question about your practice this week, send me a note to info@fertileheart.com, and I’ll either answer your question or if it’s something that requires a more in depth conversation I’ll ask you to bring your question into the call on Sunday.
Here is what you might want to consider:
You showed up yesterday looking for guidance. You got it. I’m all in. Hopefully that came through. What I invite you to gently LOVINGLY observe is whether your choices this week reflect that request.
The Orphans in us suffer and long for a tender parent. They say they want guidance, but they actually do whatever they can to reject it; to keep the door of the Orphanage locked. As much as they yearn for guidance, what they’re also looking for is a confirmation of their Orphan-Reality such as: “Life is so much easier for everyone else than it is for me.”
Dr. Freud, the eminent psychiatrist of the last century didn’t get everything right, but he nailed it when he said: “In the art of self-deception every person is a genius.”
If you are brand new or almost brand new to the practice, welcome your confusion. It’s appropriate. The Orphans in us want instant clarity and constant control. They are terrified of the new.
The Visionary is a perennial student. Hungry for a new experience. Eager to learn more. So bring it on: bring lots of questions to the next session.
Here are some additional notes of clarification and home practice suggestions to help you digest the experience of our first session:
The aim of this practice is to create a conception friendly space for healing whatever needs to be healed on a physical, emotional and spiritual level.
Sometimes you will know exactly what it was that needed to be healed, and sometimes the healing will happen spontaneously through the practice and without your awareness. Sometimes you will get a hint five years later, while walking your daughter to kindergarten. Sometimes you will never fully know what exactly it was that made a full-term pregnancy possible after 1, 2, 3, 5 miscarriages.
We don’t always get clear answers, because our ever-changing mysterious human organism is far more complex than—current medical dogma, our own level of awareness, the conventional wisdom of Facebook groups, neighbors and friends—lead us to believe.
You may want to be careful not to trivialize the power of this practice, turning it into some sort of hollow New Age positive thinking device.
We’re not just doing imagery or using the rest of the Fertile Heart tools (words, ideas, Body Truth, food, supplements, chants) to make us feel better. They really are potent “fertility drugs” which, at this point, have facilitated healthy births—both as adjuncts to ART or a replacement of high-tech intervention—when all else failed to do so. Many of us grew up marginalizing our own power at great cost. Let’s not do that anymore.
Your Visionary rooted practice this week:
If you haven’t yet done so, now is the time to get a beautiful notebook/journal for this project and your “family-birthing assignment” and record any dreams that come as well as anything else you wish to write about. Email me with one dream that you feel has been emotionally charged for you, or any dream you have remembered and noted in your journal.
In this first session we reviewed the meaning of OVUM and identified some of the Orphans for each of you that have become activated through this challenge,
Orphans that might not only be impeding conception but stopping you from living a fulfilling joyful life. If you have the book and can do so, read or re-read the Image by Image Chapter and The Seventy-Six Orphans and the Ultimate Mom chapter in The Fertile Female. Read the chapters looking for clues that point toward identifying and healing some of your own inner Orphans. (If you don’t own the book, don’t worry about it and simply follow the rest of the instructions on this page.)
Keep noticing what’s rising up for you in response to the workshop, to the work we’re doing, to your partner, to your family-birthing journey. Notice thoughts, feelings, words you use, choices you make and actions you choose to take.
Take a few minutes each day to ask yourself:
Who is the strongest Orphan that showed up, called for my attention today? Example: Not a single one of my friends knows what I’m going through. I don’t want them to know. They wouldn’t understand anyway.
Who is the Visionary calling to be born in response to this Orphan? The Visionary calling to be born is the Julia who chooses to trust one friend with the truth of what I’m going through.
What is one visionary rooted action I can take to feed the gestation of that Visionary? (A visionary rooted action is any action that is an expression of self-loving care.) Today I’ll text my friend Megan and make a date.
Here is a link to the Three Frames of Truth Imagery. The intention of this sequence of images is to co-create a more conception/gestation-friendly inner and outer space by experiencing the Orphan, the Ultimate Mother and Visionary aspect of your nature. For those of you who don’t own The Fertile Female, here are a few basic instructions on the Fertile Heart way of working with images from the Practice Section of the book.
From The Fertile Female:
“Here are A few suggestions on the “When and How” of this practice. Ideally you should do the exercise of your choice twice a day, in the morning as soon as you wake up, and in the evening shortly before you go to bed. It is recommended that you sit with your spine straight and begin each exercise by articulating an intention; reminding and clarifying to yourself what you hope to resolve by doing the exercise.
The next step is to close your eyes and allow the breath to move through you for a few seconds without manipulating it in any way. When you feel grounded and ready to move on, reverse your habitual way of breathing by focusing on the exhalation. In other words, begin each breath with a long slow exhalation through the mouth, then inhale through the nose. The longer and slower the exhalation, the deeper the imagery experience. Do this reverse breathing three or four times before each exercise, until you feel ready to move on to imaging. By changing your breathing you give yourself a signal that you are changing your ordinary mechanical way of being in the world. You’re giving yourself a subliminal message that change is possible.
The deliberate focus on the out-breath is, for me, also a reminder that we are breathing life into these new images.
It’s useful to conclude each visualization with one long out-breath.
Whatever imagery you choose to work with, I recommend that you do each one for cycles of seven, fourteen, or twenty-one days. In the course of each cycle the images might change, evolve, bring new messages and new insights, or remain unchanged. Try to see the images that rise up as additional clues, information to be used in whatever way you find most appropriate.
The one thing that stops most of us from learning something new is comparing it with something we’ve learned or heard about before. The Fertile Heart ™ way of working with pictures engages your will and creativity in a manner that is quite specific and different from the more familiar style of visualizations. So to get the full value of the medicine, I encourage you to read through the “Image by Image” chapter a few times and to follow the above instructions for at least a few months before you adjust the practice to your own style and temperament. Two Fertile Heart™ Imagery CD’s are available for additional guidance.”
You practice the imagery every morning and every evening as suggested in the practice section on page 163 of The Fertile Female or in the intro on Imagery One (blue CD) This is a link for workshop participants only, not to be posted anywhere or shared. Those of you who are more familiar with the practice can choose any other imagery you wish to work with.
Email me with any food related questions or supplement related questions. I will be asking you to repeat them in the session, but it will give me a sense of what needs to be addressed. In preparation for next week’s session please watch The Ultimate Fertility Diet Video.
Most important piece of home practice😊: The conception we practice in this beautiful work, is about making love. Not just as in “sexual intercourse” but as in partnering with ANOTHER (whether that Other is in imaginal reality, or it’s the Ultimate Mom, or your pet chihuahua) and conceivg a more love-generating space. I invite everyone, those of you who are on the road to becoming single Moms, and those of you who are birthing a family with a partner, to listen to It Takes Two to Tango and dance to it alone or with your partner. Allow whatever comes up as you do this, to feel and more fully experience how fertile you really are.
Again: Go easy. Chill. Breathe. Slow down. Just do what you can, without letting the Orphan turn the gift of this practice into another burdensome obligation.
You may not fully know this yet. I do. And if you show up, I can keep mirroring this reality to you whenever you need me to do so. You are exactly where you need to be, experiencing exactly what you need to be experiencing in order to live a useful life of wonder and awe.
See you Sunday.
Love,
