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Learn how to get pregnant with Chinese medicine, positive thinking & the mind-body connection from San Diego fertility acupuncture expert, Heidi Brockmyre.

Is infertility as traumatic as cancer?

January 27, 2015

Research has proven that the stress levels of women with infertility are the same as women who’ve been diagnosed with cancer, AIDS or heart disease.

Infertility is stressful. Period.

If only it were as simple as, “Just relax and let it happen.”

Yeah, right.

And the kicker is, this same research proves that stress makes it harder to conceive.

In a study published online in the journal Fertility and Sterility, the scientists reported that women who stopped using contraceptives took longer to become pregnant if they had high saliva levels of the enzyme alpha-amylase — a biological indicator of stress.

In fact, women with the highest concentrations of alpha-amylase were 12 percent less likely to become pregnant each month than those with the lowest levels.

Sounds like the makings of a vicious cycle to me.

The longer it takes to get pregnant, the more stressed you get. The more stressed out you get, the longer it takes to get pregnant.

So how do you break this nasty cycle?

The researchers suggest that finding ways to reduce or manage stress may be a low-tech solution for some infertile couples.

Chinese medicine doctors have been saying this for thousands of years.

You see, in Chinese medicine we understand how stress affects the body. We call it liver qi stagnation. We know that it directly affects blood flow to the reproductive organs, hormone balance, and drains your life force energy needed to make babies.

We know that using mind-body tools is the key to offsetting the effects of stress on your health.

Dr. Buck Louis, the study’s lead author, said, “Stress is the one most consistent factor that shows an effect on how long it takes to get pregnant, of all the lifestyle factors studied to date.”

So if you’re NOT practicing stress-management tools, like meditation, exercise, journaling, acupressure, and acupuncture etc., it NEEDs to be part of your program.

Most women that walk through my clinic doors are Type A personalities. Sound familiar?

Do you get stressed out when things are out of your control? Or when you can’t DO something to guarantee immediate pregnancy success?

All the more reason to follow a stress-management program, so that you can harness that need to take action without getting yourself more stressed out.

Dr. Sarah Berga, head of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Emory University who has studied the effects of stress management on women who aren’t ovulating, said, “The surprising finding was that even low levels of stress can have an impact on conception.”

In other words, you don’t need to be a total head case for stress to affect your fertility. You just need to be a normal woman with normal concerns and anxieties over why it’s taking longer than she hoped to get pregnant.

If that’s you, then please seek out stress-management solutions.

In fact, I'll be releasing my signature mind-body program soon, but in the meantime I'm hosting a FREE Live Workshop: Learn Stress-Management to Support Your Fertility & Get Pregnant NOW!

In this workshop, I'll be covering:

The importance of the messages you tell yourself and your emotional health for your fertility.
The importance of your physiology for fertility.
How your thoughts affect your physiology and your physiology affects your thoughts.
Signs that stress is affecting your overall health of your body and mind and your fertility.
How to change your thinking AND your physiology to support your fertile health.
Learn what tools you can integrate for stress-management, starting today!
How to make the time to successfully integrate massive change WITHOUT overwhelming yourself.
I'll host a live guided relaxation followed by a coaching workshop to overcome obstacles, find solutions and implement a plan for mind-body wellness and pregnancy success.
You'll also get a worksheet PDF upon signing up that to use during the workshop AND a Mind-Body Wellness Weekly Tracker PDF after the workshop so you can immediately and realistically implement the mind-body solutions into your daily life.

The LIVE Workshop is Wednesday February 4th at 12p PT (Yes, there will be a replay.)

(If you’re interested, you can read the study here, or the article Psychology Today summary here and the NY Times summary here.)

Here's to breaking the vicious cycle,

Sign up below for your FREE 3-Step Fertility Boost Series!

"Your eggs are old.": How to cope with negative fertility messages.

January 21, 2015

You visit your fertility doctor in hopes solving your fertility issues. But unfortunately, you might walk away feeling more defeated and hopeless than you did before you made the appointment.

Especially when your doctor tells you messages like...

"Your eggs are old."

"You’re too old."

"You have less than a 3% chance."

"You have bad eggs."

I’m not one for living in a state of denial. Genetic and lifestyle factors may well have impacted the health of your fertility and egg quality and quantity. A poor prognosis means it’s time to do something about it.

But I often worry that doctors use words like ‘bad eggs’ and ‘old eggs’ too liberally. Or in some cases, they assume that just because your numbers don’t like great now means that the picture can’t change no matter what efforts you make to improve your lifestyle and health.

When you walk away in a pit of despair because your doctor tells you it’s pretty much hopeless and that your ovaries might as well go ahead and retire altogether because they’re useless, it’s not helping the cause.

Why?

Because the negative messages you believe about your body create additional stress.

And what does stress do?

It ages you more quickly!

Dr. Lisa Rankin, author of Mind Over Medicine: Scientific Proof that You Can Heal Yourself, says,

“The studies show that, even in light of these things we can’t always prevent, what we believe, especially what we fear, has a tendency to manifest itself in reality because negative beliefs fill our bodies with harmful cortisol and epinephrine, while positive beliefs relax our nervous systems and allow our bodies to heal.”

So why don’t you give yourself a break and choose to believe in your body?

To be grateful for the millions of ways it’s working for you?

To nurture it in every way you can?

To tell it positive messages?

To be in awe of it’s self-repairing abilities?

Action Step:

Try writing down all of the negative messages you believe about your body, especially your fertility. Consciously choose to mentally throw out those messages that aren’t serving you and replace them with messages that make you feel empowered and proud. Use the messages as motivation to give your body what it needs to thrive, like nutritious food, exercise, meditation, sleep and stress-reducing therapies like acupuncture and acupressure.

Remember, your doctor is making an assumption based on limited evidence. While there may some truth to that assumption, your body may defy the odds.

Yours certainly wouldn’t be the first!

The importance of the messages you tell yourself and your emotional health for your fertility.
The importance of your physiology for fertility.
How your thoughts affect your physiology and your physiology affects your thoughts.
Signs that stress is affecting your overall health of your body and mind and your fertility.
How to change your thinking AND your physiology to support your fertile health.
Learn what tools you can integrate for stress-management, starting today!
How to make the time to successfully integrate massive change WITHOUT overwhelming yourself.
I'll host a live guided relaxation followed by a coaching workshop to overcome obstacles, find solutions and implement a plan for mind-body wellness and pregnancy success.
You'll also get a worksheet PDF upon signing up that to use during the workshop AND a Mind-Body Wellness Weekly Tracker PDF after the workshop so you can immediately and realistically implement the mind-body solutions into your daily life.

The LIVE Workshop is Wednesday February 4th at 12p PT (Yes, there will be a replay.)

Here's to your gorgeous & youthful eggs!

How One Woman's Emotional Baggage Affected Her Fertility and How She Overcame It

January 13, 2015

You're probably focused on the mechanics of getting pregnant; the right hormones, unblocked tubes, thickness of the lining, good quality eggs, healthy sperm, a fibroid-free uterus and so forth.

But are you overlooking the deeper side of health and healing?

Stress is more than just muscle tension, releasing too much cortisol and inflammation.

Stress is an unconscious belief that affects your health.

A belief that you’re not good enough. That you’re not worthy. That you need to perfect, gain approval or that you’re responsible for everyone’s feelings.

Each belief is charged with a vibration that delivers a message to your body on a cellular level. It changes your chemistry. It reroutes your energetic system which happens to be WAY more powerful than the mechanics of it all.

This may be hard to prove with science (although it finally is being proven and will continue to be). Science is relatively young and naive.

It wasn’t that long ago that science said the world was flat. In the 50’s, babies were born with deformities because doctors believed pharmaceuticals couldn’t penetrate the placenta. Boy, were they wrong.

Science is important, but it still has a lot to learn. Your intuition, on the other hand, has unlimited access to timeless wisdom.

Intuition involves your mind-body connection. It’s about paying attention to how you feel and what your body has to tell you.

Your mind can trick you, but your body never lies. It tells you stories, gives you messages and won’t let you ignore them.

When I was on a female entrepreneur retreat in Peru last Spring, I coached a woman on a spiritual healing journey. She’d confided in me that her and her fiance were eager to start their family, but that she was concerned with her reproductive health. She had a large fibroid in her uterus causing her cycles to be painful, irregular and with dark thick flow.

As we got into deeper conversation with each other, she also told me how she feels responsible for her mother, father and brother. Her parents are no longer together and her brother is older. But they put a lot of the weight on her shoulders, from borrowing money without repaying it, to living in her house and keeping her ex-boyfriend as a roommate against her wishes.

She's a naturally kind and generous spirit without a mean bone in her body, so it was apparent how easily others could put their burdens one her.

It was as if she was carrying the weight of her family literally in her womb in the form of a large fibroid. By unconsciously carrying it in her womb, she’d prevent herself from repeating the familial cycle. Plus, how could she free up her energy for her own family when her parents and siblings were demanding it for themselves?

On her spiritual healing pilgrimage walking through the Andes around sacred lakes hidden within the summits with hardly any oxygen to breathe, she cried while consciously dropping a little bit of the weight with each step.

After releasing heavy emotional bagger, her next cycle was the first 28 day cycle of her life. It was also the first painless cycle with healthy bright red flow.

It’s not easy letting go of these patterns. They become a part of you. And although they no longer serve you, it can be painful pulling them out of your energetic system. It’s like getting a splinter and leaving it there. It hurts, but you get used to it and your body grows around it making it it’s own. But eventually it grows infected. And it will sting like hell pulling it out, but ya gotta do it. Cause if not, that one tiny splinter could kill you one day.

If you want to take a deeper look into what’s affecting your fertile health by exploring emotional, mental and spiritual blocks and patterns, then you may be interested in my signature program, Positively Fertile Program. Stay posted, as I’ll be releasing it very soon!

In the meantime, I'm hosting a FREE Live Workshop: Learn Stress-Management to Support Your Fertility & Get Pregnant NOW!

In this workshop, I'll be covering:

The importance of the messages you tell yourself and your emotional health for your fertility.
The importance of your physiology for fertility.
How your thoughts affect your physiology and your physiology affects your thoughts.
Signs that stress is affecting your overall health of your body and mind and your fertility.
How to change your thinking AND your physiology to support your fertile health.
Learn what tools you can integrate for stress-management, starting today!
How to make the time to successfully integrate massive change WITHOUT overwhelming yourself.
I'll host a live guided relaxation followed by a coaching workshop to overcome obstacles, find solutions and implement a plan for mind-body wellness and pregnancy success.
You'll also get a worksheet PDF upon signing up that to use during the workshop AND a Mind-Body Wellness Weekly Tracker PDF after the workshop so you can immediately and realistically implement the mind-body solutions into your daily life.

The LIVE Workshop is Wednesday February 4th at 12p PT (Yes, there will be a replay.)

Here's to dropping heavy baggage,

Sign up for your 3-Step Fertility Boost Series below!