Reiki and Law of Attraction for Fertility with Andrea Reiter – #37

0:27 Charlene Lincoln: Welcome back to another episode of the Fertility Hour. I’m your host Charlene Lincoln, licensed acupuncturist and women’s health and fertility expert. Okay, we have taken a break. Summer happened and travel and everything else, but I’m excited to be back. For those of you who have been loyal and listening to the podcast, thank you so much. Make sure to subscribe, leave a comment on how we can improve or what type of topics you would like us to cover and we will definitely try to do our best to help you out. Also, there is a Free Report on FertilityHour.com, “Restore Fertility and Get Pregnant Naturally”. It’s 39 pages expertly written by our own Dr. Iva Keene I highly recommend that you download that.

Today, I have a very special guest, Andrea Reiter. Am I pronouncing your name correctly?

Andrea Reiter: Yes.

1:23 CL: Okay. Thank you, Andrea. Andrea is a holistic fertility expert, Reiki master and author specializing in a mind-body approach to fertility. She uses a combination of reiki, intuition, and mindset coaching to move women through the emotional and physical blocks that are impeding them from conceiving naturally. Her book ‘How to Get Pregnant Even When You’ve Tried Everything: A Mind-Body Guide to Fertility’ is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Andrea has been published by the Chopra Center, Mind Body Green, Huffington Post, Thrive Global, The Elephant Journal, and is a regular contributor to Fertility Road Magazine. Though based in New York and LA, she helps women all over the globe achieve their dream of motherhood.

Well, welcome Andrea. Thanks so much for being here.

AR: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

2:21 CL: So your book came out in the summer, you said it was in July?

AR: Yes.

2:26 CL: Okay. I love the title of that book. It’s very enticing. I would think that if you’re trying to conceive, that would definitely catch your eye because I know that women out there are trying everything. And I love that you wrote about the mind-body connection because the more we learn about the subconscious mind and the mind’s effect on the physiology of the body, is there anything more important than that?

AR: Right. I think it’s such a hugely overlooked component in all of this. A lot of the women that come to me have tried everything up until this point, you know, all kinds of interventions. Their major complaint is that they’re being looked at as a uterus with feet. There’s a whole life going on. There’s a past, there’s relationships, there’s work. There’s a whole bunch of things that affect our brain, and the brain is the control center for the body. It’s giving the body orders and so you have to look at that, I think. I think it’s one of the big missing pieces that needs to be addressed more on this journey for women.

3:43 CL: Do you want to give us like case examples or just kind of… I mean, I’ll let you lead this. What’s your approach? How do you go about kind of delving deeper into the psyche of someone who’s dealing with fertility issues?

AR: Sure. So what I do is, like you said in the intro, it’s a combination of reiki, intuition, and mindset coaching. That’s kind of the three-pronged thing. How that works essentially is, what I do now is because I have clients all over the world, is called ‘distance reiki’. Reiki, in case people aren’t familiar with it, it’s an energy technique. I kind of like to call it acupuncture without the needles. Just to give people an idea, it’s the same, you know, we’re going in to unblock the stuck chi or the stuck energy so that your body can get to a relaxed enough state to start to heal itself essentially.

So I started doing in-person sessions. I was mainly working with people with chronic pain and cancer. As I was working on people, it’s hands above or on when you’re doing it in-person, and I would start getting these intuitive ‘hits’ which is just a feeling with a visual attached to it that lets me know subconsciously what’s going on with the person. So I would tell them about it afterwards and they would be like “Oh my God, that’s this…” and blah, blah, blah and then they would go work on that and then they would get better. And I was like, “okay.” And then I started reading more like Louise Hay, and Metaphysical Anatomy by Evette Rose. The major premise of my work is that there is an emotional cause to the physical issue and once we address that emotional cause, the physical issue doesn’t need to be there anymore.

For example, my sister-in-law who I was still working with chronic pain and cancer people at this point, but she had had her second miscarriage and she was like obviously wanting to get pregnant again but her brain was really scared to be pregnant again because as anybody who’s been through a miscarriage knows, it’s not only physically traumatic but emotionally traumatic. So I asked her if she wanted to do a session thinking that there’s the same thing, emotional cause to the physical, so we did a reiki session and we started working together. And all of this stuff kept coming up about her job. She was way overextended at her job and one of the visuals that I saw was she had like 8 arms and she’s got hands and everything. You know, your brain at its base core ‘fight or flight’ survival mode, it’s like, “do we fight this thing or do we run away?” and how do we take care of ourselves, that like little lizard part of your brain.

When you are taking care of so many other humans and so many other things, your brain is like “Whoa, I can’t take care of another human. Like let’s just not even go there.” So when you’re in that fight or flight mode, everything goes to your heart and your brain and your lungs, like all of the essential things to get you out of that situation or to fight it, all non-essential body systems slow down or shut down. So your reproductive system is not necessary when you’re fighting a grizzly bear or stressed at work, whatever your fight or flight thing is.

So that’s the case with a lot of unexplained fertility clients I find is that there is some sort of external thing going on or some belief, thought process thing going on that’s just scaring you enough to just shut this down. So that’s what’s happening with my sister-in-law and so we worked through, we did the energy sessions to clear everything out but also for me to find out subconsciously what’s going on through these images and then we talk about it at the end and then they have homework. So that may be in the form of visualizations or brain dumps, which is just vomiting on paper, thoughts about the topic that came up.

We process things to the extent that we can at the time when we go through something and then we have to move on because we have to move on, because life doesn’t stop. That doesn’t always mean that we have cleared up the thing that happened. That’s what I work with my clients on is whatever these residual traumas are or beliefs, fears that are coming up, we process that. So there’s more of the like psychology element at the end to finalize and process and release that kind of stuff. So, I did that with my sister-in-law and she got pregnant with my nephew and I was like, “Holy crap. Like this is a thing.” So many people, I think it’s 1 in 6 people deal with infertility. That’s a lot of people so I immediately switched over to fertility and have been in that vein ever since.

Every client that I’ve had that’s gotten pregnant has had something different click for them but it has always been as a result of something they were thinking that they shifted or it’s something that had happened that they released. A lot of clients have things like past abortions, terminations, rape, a lot of things that maybe you don’t necessarily think are related to your uterus right now but they really are. A lot of my clients have thyroid issues and that’s the throat chakra which is being able to voice your opinion, feel like you’re being heard. So if that’s being stifled somewhere, that’s where it’s going to show up, it’s in the throat. So figuring out where are you not able to voice, where are you not feeling confident. Like that kind of thing. So it’s a multi-pronged thing. The reiki is how I get the information and also clear them out then more of the mindset-belief work is how we actually process the fear.

9:49 CL: With your sister-in-law, she was able to keep that job but it was just shifting the subconscious and the mindset and then allowing her to approach the job differently because it seems like probably the stress level of the job didn’t go away if she had to stay there, right?

AR: Right, right. Are you familiar with Byron Katie at all?

10:10 CL: Yeah.

AR: The basic idea is that it’s not the situation that’s stressful; it’s what we’re making it mean that’s stressful. So yes, you’re right, like there are things that she did to sort of shift her perception of what’s happening and ways to make space within her given circumstances. “Here is my job and I can’t quit my job right now.” So within that space, “I can at lunch go outside and just sit on the ground for a little bit instead of staying inside. I can take 10 deep breaths before I even go into the building.” Little things like that, that gives your brain a little bit of like, “Okay, that space is for me. Okay.”

Like we need to sort of trick your brain into thinking you have more space than you do. Because a lot of us do have those kinds of jobs. I have a lot of clients who are teachers, CEOs, people responsible for groups or teams of people and your brain just already thinks you have children. It already thinks you’re responsible for too many things. But there were things that she did back off. She was a department head, she taught two AP classes, she taught a college class on the side. She was a club advisor. She did back some of that off and I know sometimes it feels like you can’t do that especially since all of my clients have amazing work ethics and they’re like ninja get-it-done, really good at being efficient and all that, and that’s awesome.

The biggest thing I hear when people come to me is “Oh, well when I get pregnant, I’ll back that off.” That can be the reason why you’re not getting pregnant, you know. You have to kind of show the universe, show yourself, show your brain, that you can make a little space. I’m not saying quit everything and just move for food and sex and that’s it. But we do have to create a little more space. Especially nowadays we are so overloaded and scheduled and pressured for deadlines, and we need to just create a little bit of space there. Even if you can’t quit your job, that’s okay. We just need to find ways to make space and make it more palatable, you know.

12:18 CL: I totally agree. I mean one of our mantras is, act as if you are already pregnant as far as changing your whole lifestyle, like you said, to make space and the foods you’re eating, the things that you have to cut out, and all the obligations, things like that because you really… I mean, your body, it’s all about survival and so reproduction isn’t part of that survival tactic. That’s kind of last priority so you need to, like you said, make space. Yeah, that’s wonderful so that must be really fulfilling and obviously for your nephew.

AR: Oh my God. I want to eat him every time I see him. It’s like, you’re alive because your mom did this work. Like every time see him. And his birthday is the day before mine and so I’m like so bonded to him, I love him.

Whenever my clients send me pictures of their little Rugrats running around, it’s like it’s so amazing. Like they’re walking around just because the parents shifted their energy, not because they did something and had 97 supplements, but because they shifted how they’re putting their energy out there. I just think that’s like amazing, you know.

13:33 CL: It is amazing. So let’s talk about that. You talked about unexplained infertility, but talk about someone who has a diagnosis—a clear-cut diagnosis and pretty much when someone gets a diagnosis like you have endometriosis or PCOS, it’s all about the diagnosis and having to resolve that and if you can’t resolve that, you can’t get pregnant. So let’s talk about a situation where someone has one of these conditions and was able to overcome it with that mind-body connection.

AR: Yeah. So one of my clients had endometriosis and fibroids, which if you have that, you know is pretty nasty and pretty painful. So what we worked on mainly was, you know, so we’re looking at that area of the body, the whole reproductive area is the sacral chakra. That has to do with creativity, relationships and children. When I’m working on that, I’m sort of looking at like what around those areas is causing this flare-up because if you think about it, some of the severe endometriosis, not just the polyps but like wraps around your bowels even and your uterus. So the uterus and the ovaries represent the point of creation and your bowels represent being able to release and let go of things.

So this client had it wrapped around everything and it was like strangling like IV, like strangling everything. We talked about what can’t you let go of, where are you feeling strangled; what around your past relationships, your ability to create, what’s going on there. So it came up… two things. Fibroids. A good resource if listeners don’t know is Louise Hay’s ‘You Can Heal Your Life’. In the back there’s a glossary that has like pretty much every physical condition and what the mental or emotional cause is and then an affirmation to kind of start—you know, an affirmation is not going to solve it but it’s going to help you start pointing away from “Oh my God, I have endo. Oh my God, I have…” you know.

And then fibroids. The emotional cause of endometriosis is like frustration, disappointment and blame around something with relationships, family, baby kind of stuff. And then fibroids is nursing old hurts. This is usually 99 percent of the time is around past relationships, not necessarily the one you’re in, but ‘past’. So we worked on that kind of stuff. So for her, the fibroids where she was toward the end of her last relationship, she feels like she wasted most of her 30s on this guy that was not emotionally available and that really freaking hurt, like “That hurt. I wasted all this time.” So we worked through some beliefs on “I wasted time.” Is that true? Is anything really wasted? And we did some cord cutting, some releasing, but a lot of mindset work around this.

Then the endometriosis, the disappointment and blame was also around that but also her parents were really not supportive of her creative career which is the same area, creativity. They wanted her to be a doctor. She wanted to be an artist. So there’s a whole bunch of things going on there. So once we processed that stuff, the physical condition goes away and she was able to get pregnant.

So it doesn’t matter if you have nasty endo, whatever degree, 37 fibroids, you can actually work through it. But we have to look at the ‘why’ first. So yes, when you’re looking at the picture, you know, if you have severe endo, yes you have to get that under control before you can work on getting pregnant and that’s a good thing, honestly. Because sometimes we get so gung-ho that “I have to get the baby, I have to do this now, I have to…” And the body is like a check engine light in a car. When it goes off, it’s like we need to replace the sensor or we need to, like, look at something first. It’s the body is not failing you. Remember I said before like your brain is giving the orders, your body is taking orders from the brain so if your body is not doing what we want it to do, we have to look at what we’re thinking, what are we making this mean. What are we still hanging on to that we don’t need to anymore? And especially relationships are tricky because it’s the same area as the baby. And so, even though you’re like, “No, I’m with my soulmate. I don’t care about this guy anymore,” if you’re hanging on to stuff, we still need to address it, you know.

So it took six months for her to process all of that because it’s years old, you know. You need time to retrain your brain. But she did it. She was trying for 10 years, that’s a long time, you know.

18:35 CL: I was going to say six months, that’s six days. I mean, that’s nothing…

AR: Yeah. Oh, it’s nothing for those things, yeah.

18:41 CL: Yeah. Because sometimes with endometriosis, I mean, women suffer their whole lives and they move and it comes back. I was told, I interviewed a woman, did her doctorate on endometriosis and one of her colleagues did a study and it was like, I hope I’m not exaggerating but I think it was like 80 percent of the women who had severe endo had severe sexual trauma in their lives.

AR: Yeah. Almost all of my clients, that’s the case for sure. Yeah.

19:15 CL: And that’s really interesting about the fibroids, the hurt from the former relationships. Does it have to be a former like romantic partner or former—

AR: No, no. It can be parents, it can be… you know. I have one client with her best friend of like 25 years, they had a huge falling out. Relationships in general, it’s usually romantic. More often than not it’s romantic but it can be… you know, one client, it was a work partnership. They had built this company and she took it out from under her and she was understandably nursing that hurt for a while. So it can be other relationships. It’s usually romantic though. PCOS is more cysts in the whole emotional caused the physical of it all. That is also nursing old hurts, rerunning old movies in your head. The thing that’s sort of frustrating initially to the PCOS endo crew is that when it’s something that’s so painful for you, it’s really hard to wrap your head around that you could shift your energy and this thing could shift. Like I’ve had people get angry. Because it’s so painful and when you are backed into a corner and you’re a wounded animal, like you’re going to want to lash out.

So, just know that if that’s how you feel when you’re looking at this mindset approach, that’s okay, and feel that and let that go. And then go, “Okay, I’ve done everything. Maybe I want to look at shifting this or maybe I’m still hanging on to this.” Honor how you feel initially but the body is showing you this for a reason. This is kicking up for a reason and very often it’s best if we work through it now versus after you have this baby and then you just kind of never get to it. So everything that’s happening is happening for you, not to you. And I know that’s really hard to wrap your heads around. Totally get it. But we’ve signed up for a certain amount of things this time around and there are ways to work through it.

So I think a good place to start would be either my book or like I said, the Louise Hay book, the Evette Rose book. Just kind of entertaining that there are things that affect our body. We grow up hearing the phrase “mind over matter.” If you put your mind to it, you can do anything. That comes from somewhere, you know. This Law of Attraction thing hasn’t been called that forever but it’s been around, referred to since the early 1800s. It’s like energy attracts like energy. What you’re putting out, you’re getting back. “What you reap, you sow.” That saying has been around for a long time. But the trick is, the universe doesn’t care what you’re saying. You can be saying “I want to be a mom” all day long but if you’re under current, it’s “Oh s***, what if I can’t do it, what if I can’t do it? I’m running out of time, I’m running out of time.” That’s what the universe is hearing. Not what you’re saying. So we really have to look at this subtext of energy that’s happening and address this fear. And I do think that that’s the thing that’s missing. You know, a lot of people just do affirmations or they just are like, “I’m going to focus on what I want 110 percent and that’s going to be enough.” You can vacuum the drug all you want but if you’ve got lumps under the rug, you’re going to have a very clean lumpy rug, like we need to get the dust bunnies out of there. You have to look at this old stuff. And that’s not fun, I totally get it. But it’s slightly more fun than surgery. It’s slightly more fun than having to go through IVF if you don’t have to. You know what I mean?

So, I think now the world is sort of shifting in a direction where people don’t freak out as much as you say the word ‘energy’. People have heard of the Law of Attraction even if it’s just The Secret which I don’t think really covers it enough but at least that’s an intro. But we kind of have to move in that direction. Our minds are so powerful and to think that they’re not affecting our fertility is crazy. Of course they are, you know. But most people don’t know how to shift it because everybody’s got a blind spot. I have one. I can’t see my all my own s*** from the back. That’s why I have a business coach. So she’s like, “Ugh, this thing is back here.”

We can see a lot of our stuff but we can’t see all of it. Sometimes we know something needs to change but we don’t know what, and so that’s why it’s so important to have an acupuncturist or have a fertility coach or have a psychologist or something—something that’s giving you some sort of outside feedback or way to direct or ideas to shift.

23:56 CL: I totally agree with you. No matter what your expertise is, you talked about the blind spots and also just to touch base, it’s so true with the affirmations. I mean, I tried affirmations for years and in theory they sound wonderful but when I first learned about muscle testing, you would say an affirmation and then they would do a muscle test and I don’t want to confuse people if you’re not familiar with muscle testing, but it happened to the subconscious to see if you really are strong for a statement. So, we would test each other on statements like “I want to be a mom” and it would go weak. Well, because maybe you want to be a mom but there might be a lot of fear behind it.

AR: Oh, yeah.

24:40 CL: I became a mom at 42 and from being childless all those years, I mean, part of it was I was so scared how am I going to handle my career and being a mom. Am I going to repeat the same patterns that my mom did with me? How am I going to change that? You know, so many different things. So, I want to be a mom? Sure, there was that but then there was a bunch of fears that I had to really work through to make it valid for myself. I think a lot of us have that going on.

AR: Oh, it’s the default setting, unfortunately. I wish it wasn’t but your fight or flight is automatic. It is “Oh god, like do we fight this or do we run away?” And yes, we’re not being chased by large-toothed animals anymore but we do have our own forms of stress, usually it’s work-related, sometimes it’s family. You know, sometimes it’s relationship. But if it is freaking us out enough that even if it’s just on a low-grade level, there is a lot of fear running under the surface. And that’s part of what my work does is go under the part of the iceberg that you can’t see. Like what is really running in the background? And like in my book I say it’s like these fears or these beliefs are like apps that are open on your iPhone I leave Google Maps open all the time and my battery dies so fast all the time. I haven’t learned yet.

But there are these thoughts, these beliefs, these fears. “I’m running out of time.” “It should have happened by now.” “I’m getting too old.” All that stuff, those are apps that are left open on your phone. Even though you’re not looking at them all the time, they’re draining your battery. So we need to kind of close those apps and we have to look at the fear and not just affirmation over it. Affirmations are helpful. Do you need to get to a positive place to be able to do this? A hundred percent. But you can’t leap over the “yuck” either, like we have to look at that. But the good thing is that the things that scare us, the Byron Katie work, that will be another good book, “Loving What It is”, the thoughts are scarier than what actually is happening. The thought “I’m running out of time” is like “Oh, s***. Like, oh my God.” But is that true? Are you still getting a cycle? Do you have a good relationship? Are you taking steps that feel good for you? Like, I get in the microcosm of your life why it seems like that, but if you were constantly putting “I’m running out of time, I’m running out of time, I’m running out of time,” the universe has to bring a match to you running out of time and here’s another cycle of it not working, and here’s another crappy doctor, and here’s another… you know what I mean?

So, we have to address those fears so that they’re not draining your energy because there’s so much of your energy that’s going to the fear and not where you want it to go. So, that’s kind of the goal, is to figure out what is tripping out this automatic fear, fight or flight switch because it is automatic. You can’t stop it from happening. But being more plugged into your intuition, that can be your kind of manual override switch because it’s going to happen, you’re going to have the fear come up. It’s just how do we process it and talk yourself down from it.

27:50 CL: I love talking about this stuff. I just think it’s so fascinating and it’s so powerful. What seemed kind of like very alternative in New Age, and I guess it still does but flash forward in 10 years, everyone’s going to sort of be talking about energy medicine.

AR: I think so, yeah.

28:12 CL: I mean, it’s real stuff. Okay, a couple of things came to mind. I’ll just throw them out and whatever you want to discuss, talking about irregular menstrual cycles and the subconscious because I want to know what you think of this or what you have found to be kind of underlying factors. And then I interviewed Dr. Christiane Northrup and she talked about women who can’t get pregnant in a relationship and then they divorce, I mean this is kind of a sticky one I guess but it’s kind of interesting.

AR: I have a bunch of clients.

28:44 CL: They partner up with someone else and then they get pregnant. If you want to talk about that one. I think it’s kind of interesting.

AR: Sure, it is, yeah. So to touch on the irregular cycles first, I’ve had a bunch of people who come to me who haven’t had their cycles in like 7 years. One client never got her cycle, like she was in a traumatic natural disaster when she was like 8 and her body was in such fight or flight she never got her cycle. So she’s a great example of how that just shuts off when you’re freaked out.

But yeah, some clients do have regular cycles. I have some that have like a 50-day cycle and then a 21-day cycle and it kind of yoyos back and forth. It’s always directly related to how much stress they’re in. A lot of my clients who have this, it’s either work stress or they’re just so consumed with the “Oh my God, it hasn’t happened yet, I’m running out of time,” fear. Usually it’s those two things. But I do find there are external things you can do because sometimes our type A brains like to have a thing to do and I do find like a red clover infusion has helped a lot of my clients regulate their cycle. I like red clover because it’s a pretty gentle herb and having it in infusion form for like 6 to 8 weeks, that’s really helped a lot of my clients level out their cycles. But honestly, a lot of it has been working through these fears that come up and the cycle just starts to regulate itself. But it’s almost always stress. It’s almost always that. And so that’s the important thing to know. It’s actually a good thing, like, “Oh, okay I have to work on my stress which sucks and it’s going to take a while, but if I work on this, I can regulate my cycle.” And we want to feel some relief from that because a lot of times we think “Oh my God, the cycle is going away and I’m never going to get it back.” And that’s scary, totally.

But when we are looking at it as the ‘check engine’ light situation, it’s just your body going “ugh, we need to look at something,” and then you look at it and it comes back. You know, I have countless clients who have gotten their regular cycle back. I know it seems like a big issue but from an energetic perspective, it’s really not. It’s totally workable. Just like everything. Endo, fibroids, anything internal. I can’t regrow a limb but anything internal, we can work on.

Then the relationship thing. I have three clients where this has happened. One of them, she was in the marriage for 10 years and it wasn’t happening and she was 41 at the time and he was a workaholic but he also had substance abuse issues that he wasn’t dealing with and he also made her feel very small. She is like, if you need her, she is like sassy, like fabulous, and she wasn’t that when I first talking to her because he just kind of made her feel so small but she’s like, “I’m 41. Where am I going to go? What am I going to do?” And she just kept beating her against a wall. And we work through some beliefs around this like “I am not going to find anybody else.” Is that true? Do you know that for a fact?

Pretty much the only thing we know for a fact is that we’re going to die at some point. That’s all you really know is going to happen to you. I could be hit by a bus tomorrow or I could win a million dollars tomorrow. Who knows? Like we don’t know what’s going to happen to us. We can assume, but we don’t know. And so we work through some of our fears and beliefs. The difference for her is that he was not willing to work on anything. So some people who have partners who are willing to work on it and it just takes a little while, and again, that’s another indication from your body that you guys need to work on this first. You guys are why you want to have a baby. You know what I mean? Like you can’t skip over that. I have a bunch of clients who are like “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I want to get the baby.” This is who you are having it with, like you have to work on that. But this guy was not willing to work on anything so she decided to leave, she moved across the country. Three months later she met somebody, a month later she was pregnant, like it was a one night stand but they’re in love, and like they’re together and they have a baby.

So, who the hell knows? You don’t know. So don’t feel like you have to stay somewhere just because you feel like “Well, it’s going to take me a year to meet someone, a year to get engaged, a year to get married, a year to have…” Not necessarily. We kind of sometimes have to be okay with things happening out of the order that we expect them to. We kind of have this Disney-fied idea of how life should go and sometimes the universe throws you a curveball and you have to go with it instead of fighting it, you know. That’s where a lot of our problems come in is when we’re in resistance to what is happening.

33:44 CL: I’m assuming that with that woman, congratulations to her.

AR: Yeah, she was 43 by the way by the time she got pregnant.

33:53 CL: Very cool. I mean, I think the work that she did with you made her open to those opportunities because if you feel like you have the script of your life and it’s not going to be ever changing, I mean you really cut off a lot of opportunities for yourself, right? One, she probably would not have moved across the country.

AR: No.

34:15 CL: Well anyways, yeah, very, very interesting. I was going to make a bad joke about “go out and divorce your husband.” But I have treated some women who they tell me about their relationship and it sounds stressful and awful but they are so well bent on having a baby and they’re sort of, you know, I’m like, I don’t know if I can support this and I try to talk to them and logically they are just cut off. They are like, “I’m not doing this.” And it’s not happening a lot of times. Then people out there could be like, “Yeah, but I know plenty of people who are unhappy with their spouses and they have three kids.” So yeah.

AR: Well, they’re probably not in attachment to needing that to happen, needing kids to happen. When you’re in like “I need this”, the universe is hearing “I don’t have, I don’t have” and that’s where you’re keeping that with. But it’s so tricky because we’re the ones with the clock, not the guys. But the guys do feel like a piece of meat a lot of times. Like you can’t be like, “I’m ovulating. Go!” You can do that. I mean, it sounds cliché but you have to do the date night thing, you have to pepper sex through the month so it’s not like “and go.” That’s a lot of pressure. So they feel like a piece of meat, you feel like they’re not participating and it’s like ugh. Man, you can’t skip over that. I mean, you can but it’s not going to help.

35:45 CL: I hear that a lot from different fertility experts like “You need to keep it still romantic.” I know it’s easier said than done but really that does put a damper on things for sure. Anyways, okay, so the work that you do, it seems incredible working with you. So someone could pick up your book and how does that kind of work as far as like a DIY?

AR: I like that phrasing, yeah. Yeah. So obviously the intuitive component to what I do, I can’t stuff that into a book. I would have if I could have but I can’t. But it’s broken into 4 parts, this book. So the first part is the external factors that are happening, things that we don’t necessarily think are affecting us but can be obviously. Job, family. If you have family who’s like, “When am I going to be a grandmother?” Like, “ugh!” Like, “I don’t want to be around you.” You know what I mean? And that could be like to… to your uterus, you know.

The partner stuff. Sometimes the guy has cold feet. Did you really discuss it with him or were you just like “We’re having a baby now”? Sometimes conversations need to happen.

Money issues. This is a huge one for a lot of my clients. If the woman isn’t going to be working or has to take time off and things are already tight and you’re trying to add something, your brain goes, “Yeah, no.” Money is how we get food and shelter and if that’s going to be sacrificed and our survival is put at stake, we’re not doing that. So, money is a big issue.

And not being able to say no. I have a lot of clients who have big families and there’s a lot of required responsibility or they’re teachers and they’re keep asked to do extra stuff and they feel like they have to and spreading themselves too thin. So there’s 15 external factors in that first part.

The second part is beliefs which I started to touch on a little bit. A belief is not a true statement but is a thought that we think over and over and over until it becomes true for us. So for example, it should have happened by now. It freaking feels like it. I totally get it. You’ve been trying for 5 years, it should have happened by now. The problem with that belief is that when we put out “it should have happened by now” what the universe is hearing is “I’ve missed my window.” Your brain is putting that out, your body is listening to that. “Oh, she’s missed her window? Okay, never mind.” If your body is not going to fall in line with getting pregnant when the signal is, it should have happened by now and it didn’t, so it’s not going to.

So, these thoughts that are stress, we have a stressful reaction to these thoughts, so any thought you have where you have a stressful reaction, fear, anger, frustration, whatever, we’re believing something about that situation that’s not true and I know that’s hard, I know it’s hard to wrap your head around that sometimes. But if you should be pregnant by now, you would be. It doesn’t mean you won’t be but it just means that there are things going on in some area of your life that’s not allowing that and so if we can go address that, then that opens up and your uterus can be like “And we’re back” once you do that thing.

So, the belief part is looking at… you know, there’s 10 very common beliefs that most women have. So it’s going through that there’s a worksheet of like how to you put your stressful thumb in and it sort of dismantles and turns it around so that you’re not sending so much energy to that. It kind of opens your perspective of how it might actually not be true, how could the opposite of that be true. Again, it’s based on the work of Byron Katie, so you know, you can YouTube some videos of that to see kind of how it works.

Then the third part is physical issues like endo, thyroid, pituitary issues, male infertility, unexplained… It’s been so long now since, like we were saying before. I think there’s 10 conditions in there. It goes through what is the condition and what is the mental emotional cause of that, and then how do we work through that. So each one has an exercise that you can do that’s like practical which a type A brain is like, like “Here’s something I can do to move through this.” But it is sort of engaging your intuition and cracking your perspective open at the same time.

Then the fourth part is Law of Attraction part, explaining why, where we put our energy is important, why that matters and how it physiologically affects your body and how even in the most serious circumstances you can turn that around. And I know, again, when people who have a condition here that you can shift your thoughts and this can happen, what those people hear sometimes is it’s all in your head. And that’s not what we’re saying. You are feeling real freaking pain with endo. You are feeling real pain with fibroids. Totally get that. The pain is real. But what’s causing it is something that’s going on in the thought process. So that’s what we want to shift. And that will hopefully shift your physical pain. I see it all the time. It is possible and I know that’s hard to hear sometimes but I think it is a necessary part of this journey to roundabout. You can’t just keep throwing interventions at it and trying harder because from a Law of Attraction perspective, if I’m trying harder, I’m being met with something, a reason to try harder and I just keep pushing. So we want to do something that feels like ease, that feels like I’m talking a left instead of a right this time. Because I think isn’t like the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Try something different. Even if it’s not this kind of work, if you have been doing five rounds of IVF and it hasn’t worked, go do acupuncture, go do yoga. If you always do yoga, meditate, go for a walk. Switch up something so that you are creating new pathways energetically and shifting things even incrementally. And that’s what’s so important too is we go from “It’s never going to happen” to “I’m pregnant!” and that is a big leap. A lot of people can’t make that leap right now because they’re so in despair or lack. So you can’t expect to just be pregnant because you’re not energetically a match to it right now.

So what we have to do is sort of incrementally move over. Like what did go well today? What is going right now? “My relationship is good.” “I am financially stable.” “I still have a cycle.” “I like my doctor.” “It was nice out today.” Anything that is like, what did go right today. Because it’s our default setting to focus on the problem. “I still don’t have the baby.” That is automatic. We can’t help it. We have a Grand Canyon carved of this is what’s going wrong. So we have to start to pull our head over here to like here’s what’s going right, here’s why it’s likely this will work, and that is not second nature. It’s going to take a while. A lot of my clients have a list of what is going right and why it is likely this will work on their nightstands, and have them look at it every day. So they are starting the day with this is what’s going right, and it’s going to take a while but eventually your brain will be more okay with defaulting over to this side. But it takes a long time. You’re combatting an automatic response and it’s going to take a little while.

43:32 CL: When you mentioned the word ‘universe’, I mean sometimes people who are into Law of Attraction, they kind of take it, “oh yeah, the universe.” But what about people who aren’t really familiar? What is the universe? Is it God? It sounds like such an elusive term.

AR: It is, yeah. I do have some clients who are religious and they don’t like the term ‘universe’. For me, I’m not a physicist or a metaphysical whatever so I don’t know that I have the best definition but for me, God, universe, it’s interchangeable. It’s higher power, laws of nature, forces at work kind of thing. For some people, it’s God. For some people, it’s angels, guides, universe. Whatever. I mean, I don’t know that I have the best explanation for it but it’s basically the forces that are at work other than what we are dealing with on this plane right now. I don’t know. I don’t really have a great explanation for it. But I do use them interchangeably for the people who like God is important. It’s the same thing. It’s your higher power, it’s what you are putting faith in, it’s what you are releasing your control to.

So if that’s a purple elephant in the sky, fine, I don’t care. But it’s mainly about we’re so used to controlling things and feeling like we have to fix it and we have to make it happen. That works great with our careers a lot of the time and keeping our household in order and all that kind of stuff and we’re used to doing A + B equals C and we get it done. Fertility is not linear like that. It is a bunch of curly cues and sideways things going on. So that’s hard for our brains to go but wait, like I’m doing all the supplements, I’m doing all the kale. You know what I mean? And a lot of it is because we are trying to control. And in this whole, you know, I don’t know if you’ve read or any listeners have read any of the Esther Hicks (Abraham-Hicks) kind of stuff about getting you vibrationally in alignment with what you want versus what you don’t want. Like if you are driving in the right lane on a highway and you’re hitting all kinds of traffic and roadkill and it’s like a little big, and then you put your turn signal on and you move into the left lane and you shoot down the road, it’s not that the traffic isn’t there anymore, it’s just that you’re not aligned with it.

So it’s not necessarily that we have to solve everything that’s going on with us. It’s just that we have to be focusing on the things that we do want versus the things that we’re scared will happen. And that does take a while. But Esther Hicks talks about in the Law of Attraction books and… I’m blanking on the other one right now. But essentially that you have to focus on what you want versus what you don’t want but you have to… I just blanked.

46:49 CL: Be an emotional match or…

AR: Yeah. Oh, shoot, I can’t remember.

46:59 CL: That’s okay.

AR: I don’t remember.

47:08 CL: Yeah. I just remember doing that, being a vibrational match like I had to imagine physiologically myself pregnant, feeling that belly and my breast. Yeah, just putting yourself in that emotional place that it has already happened. You could feel that little baby like holding it against your chest, that warmth and the newness of it and the smell.

AR: And sometimes that’s hard to do when you’ve been on a journey for a while. Sometimes your brain won’t let you go there and I think that’s why doing the mindset piece is so important, working through some of those fears so that you kind of clear out that gunk, so that you can be in a place where you’re imagining that. Because really, when you’re feeling that, like I love the small of the new baby, you’re feeling, that’s when things begin to shift on a cellular level. If we just think it like “Oh yeah, baby smell, that’s nice.” Doesn’t do anything. But when you’re actually feeling that and you get chills or you feel your eyes well up, that’s when things are moving energetically. So many of us are so cerebral and driving our bodies around from our heads all the time that we really need to get back in touch with the body because frankly, the body is going to be the one that’s housing this thing for 9 months. We need to be on the same team as your body. And that can be the thing that gets your brain going “You know what, it’s okay to do this, it’s okay to do this.” And the body is like, “Oh, okay, it is.” Like reestablishing that connection is so important and I think it’s an overlooked thing.

I know a lot of people are into the spirit baby thing of it all. I don’t think that’s necessary to do right away necessarily. I think a lot of people have a hard time with that when they’re feeling so stuck. It’s hard to go to that. Some people do find it helpful. But I don’t even think you need to go to that. It’s really now just about sort of entertaining that things could be different. If I shift my perspective and if I focus on something that does feel good to me, I can shift this. That’s where we need to start. I’ve had clients email me to work together and they’re like often I’m the last resort because they have done five rounds of IVF and all that stuff and it hasn’t worked. I ask them, “Are you open to this idea that by shifting your thoughts, you can…” “I don’t know. We’ll see.” And I was like, with this work there’s nothing you need to ‘believe’. Like I said, you can believe in God, purple elephant, whatever doesn’t matter.

So there’s nothing dogmatically you have to believe. You just have to be open and sometimes it’s hard for us to be open when we’re so tunnel vision on this thing we want. So I think that’s what a lot of us are being called to do on this journey is to just take a step back in the grand scheme of things, like we said before. You know, a month, two months, six months in the grand scheme of your life is a blip. Like we need to kind of dial it back a little bit and get back in touch with our body. Because it’s so easy like I was saying before to blame your body especially if you have something like fibroids or endometriosis. Like, what won’t it just get onboard? So re-establishing that connection and finding a way to thank your body for what it is doing. Because if you think about it, if you’re like in gym class playing dodgeball and you’re like, “Well, I guess I’ll pick you, body,” even though you’re the slowest and the stupidest. You know, nobody wants to be that last kid picked and be like, “Well, I guess I’ll take you because I have to.” Is that kid going to perform well for your dodgeball team when it feels like crap? No.

So we kind of have to, like what is your body doing for you? It carries you around all the time. You don’t have to think about breathing. That’s awesome. Like what does it do for you because when you’re in that mindset, your body does more for you to be grateful for. It’s incremental. We have to be okay with the slow process of it and not making that a huge leap because we’re just not an energetic match to that right now. So focusing on what is going right, what you are capable of, that’s a good place to start.

51:39 CL: Absolutely. How do we find out more about you? Tell us the title of your book again and your website and anything else that you want to mention.

AR: Sure. The name of the book is How To Get Pregnant Even When You’ve Tried Everything: A Mind-Body Guide to Fertility, and you can get it on Amazon, Kindle (paperback), Barnes & Noble, and Llewellyn Worldwide which is the publisher, so any of those websites. Instagram and Twitter is @fusionfertility. My website is FusionFertility.com. If you head over there you can get the free conceivable toolkit which has 10 exercises in it. It can help kind of get you moving in that direction, so that’s a good free option.

The last thing I just kind of want to say is like even if you’ve been doing this for a decade, even if you’ve been trying for that long, try to draw a line in the sand and go “yeah, everything up until this point has been hard and it sucks.” Totally get that. And going forward can be different. Like I said before, if I take a left instead of a right, I’m going to end up somewhere different. So one of my clients that just gave birth last month is 47. Naturally. So please don’t give up but please do something different than you have been doing.

53:07 CL: I agree 100 percent and I love the work that you’re doing. I believe in it wholeheartedly and it works. It works.

AR: It does, yeah.

53:18 CL: Work with your healthcare practitioner but work on the mindset and the subconscious. It is so powerful. Oh, this is what I wanted to ask you. When you work with women whatever that condition, some hormonal imbalance, does it show up in their hormone panels? Can you talk about like reflecting—

AR: Oh yeah. I have a bunch of people who have like FSH off the charts or AMH nonexistent and then they get retested and it completely shows up, yeah.

53:52 CL: That’s really fascinating, right?

AR: It is, yeah. If you think about it too, so AMH, again that whole ovaries area that’s the sacral area which is besides creativity, relationships and children, it’s the point of creation. It’s where life is created. And so a lot of times the AMH goes down because it’s the area where life is created so it’s our diminished belief in our ability to create. And so it’s like I guess we lose 90 percent of our eggs by the time we’re 30, but you still have at least 100,000 eggs left by that point. Like you need one. So it’s focusing on bringing up that quality. I have a lot of visualizations that I have them do and stuff like that and through that, it will show up different on a panel. FSH is usually stress related but it can be around this idea, this ability to create. But yeah, it does change all the time.

54:56 CL: Thank you so much.

AR: You’re welcome. Can I just say one more thing? Make sure that your care provider is on your team, please. This is so, so important. Everybody that comes to me is like, “I’m 40 and they told me I need to do IVF yesterday and even though I have a regular cycle and they’re just not willing to blah, blah, blah.” Whatever. We’re several generations removed from valuing our intuition as a valid barometer of how we’re doing. We immediately place all of our capability in the hands of the white coats because they have years of training. Totally get that. And you have this immense amount of capability that you are not claiming because we’re putting it in somebody else’s hands whether or not we can do this. And that’s part of this energy shift that needs to happen is you need to decide you can do this and assemble a team around you that is going to support that. So if that means going from an RE or a GYN to a midwife who does well women care, do that. If you’re totally into the medical thing, pick somebody who is supportive of you. They do exist. You have to hunt sometimes. But that having a team assembled that is an acupuncturist and people who are supporting you and repeating or reverberating how capable you are, that is what shifts things. So please make sure whoever is on your team is on team “you”. They are working for you. We are working for you. Not the other way around. That’s important.

56:41 CL: Isn’t that critically important to have.

AR: Yeah, a hundred percent.

56:45 CL: Yeah, because a lot of people are just kind of “Oh I heard this RE was the best” and every time you go it just feels very sterile and you’re just evaluating numbers and you feel like, I mean, you’re just getting evaluated if you’re a good candidate for IVF or not, if you can get pregnant naturally. I mean, giving birth in my 40s, I was like, I am not having anybody tell me that I can’t be a mom. It’s just not what I can accept.

AR: Absolutely, yeah. I love that. Yeah.

57:14 CL: Okay, well, thank you so much.

AR: Thank you.

57:17 CL: I really appreciate it. It was a great interview, and congratulations on your book. I know you work hard and all the work that you do. I will contact you in the next couple of weeks when this goes love.

AR: Alright, cool. Thank you so much.

57:27 CL: Thank you so much, Andrea. Bye.

AR: Take care. Bye!