The Chinese Lunar Calendar just ushered in the New Year; The Year of the Yin Wood Goat. And with springtime approaching my mind is on baby-making. It frequently is considering we see many fertility patients at Mama Lounge, but knowing we are in a yin year makes me think on receptivity which is a very yin and/or feminine quality, and the major role receptivity plays in getting pregnant. There is often a frenetic and very active energy around the women of San Francisco, working hard to get it all done and get it done really well. This driven, goal-oriented energy, when applied to fertility, frequently becomes counterproductive.
An old client and dear friend of mine, who is about to go into labor with her second baby, was joking with me today about how she got pregnant nine months ago when I instructed her to take a month off and stop trying so hard. It worked like a charm! After trying 8 or 9 months, at least in this case, the increasingly incessant effort was blocking the goal.
Cultivating Feminine Energy For Fertility
There are two ways to get what you want in life. One is to actively pursue it, a very masculine aggressive approach. The other is to passively trust and receive it, a very feminine approach that in an age of instant gratification takes excruciating amounts of patience. Have you ever stopped to notice how much of your time is spent being active versus passive? Most of us are only passive when we’re sleeping. Enter acupuncture and massage for fertility.
At Mama Lounge of San Francisco, we provide a variety of services that enhance fertility and pregnancy by allowing the body a time, every week, to passively receive a boost of reproductive energy, a quieting of the nervous system. This time spent being receptive allows the hormones to fall into balance and becomes a mini-retreat to step back from the active pursuit of our daily tasks. Most of our clients are initially surprised at how often they do not relax and just lay quietly and receive for an hour. While both energies, the masculine and feminine, are needed to create new life, and to engage with the world in a healthy balanced manner, I frequently find carving out more time to be receptive is a the root of a lot of female endocrine imbalances.
For more reading on the cultivating your femininity:
Tami Lynn Kent, a physical therapist specializing in the pelvic floor, writes a really great book called, The Wild Feminine, that provides deeper access to these energies in the body, how to find where they are blocked, and access to greater reproductive energy through visualizations and exercises.
*Photo by imagerymajestic at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
