Dr. Christiane Northrup: The Hexing of Women By The Fertility Industry – #32

00:27 Charlene Lincoln: Welcome to another episode of The Fertility Hour. My name is Charlene Lincoln, I’m your host. I just want to remind you we have a wonderful Free Report that my podcast partner, Dr. Iva Keene, wrote. It’s 39 pages and it’s called Restore Your Fertility Naturally. It can be found at our FertilityHour.com site. You’ll see it on the upper right. It will say ‘Free Report’. So go ahead and head on over there and download that Free Report. It is filled with amazing information, research studies, tips, strategies for restoring your fertility naturally.

So today, I have a really special guest. It’s Dr. Christiane Northrup. I’m honored that she decided to become a guest on our podcast because I know she’s extremely busy with all the books that she’s written and she’s kind of everywhere right now and she’s doing amazing things to empower women, and she chose a really interesting topic for today. So definitely stay tuned.

Christiane Northrup, MD — visionary pioneer in women’s health, is a board-certified OB/GYN, former assistant clinical professor of OB/GYN at the University of Vermont College of Medicine, and three-time New York Times Bestselling Author of “Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom,” “The Wisdom of Menopause,” and “Goddesses Never Age: The Secret Prescription for Radiance, Vitality, and Well-Being. In 2013 Reader’s Digest named Dr. Northrup one of the 100 most trusted people in America.

Internationally known for her empowering approach, Dr. Northrup embraces medicine that acknowledges the unity of mind, body, emotions and spirit, and teaches women to create health by tuning in to their inner wisdom. After a decade spent transforming women’s understanding of their sacred bodies and processes, Dr. Northrup now teaches women to thrive at every stage of life. Her book “Making Life Easy: A Simple Guide to A Divinely Inspired Life” was an immediate success. Her newest book “Dodging Energy Vampires” offers radical upstream preventative medicine.

As a business owner, physician, former surgeon, mother, writer, speaker, and according to Miriam Ava, PhD, “a rebel rockstar and authority on what can go right with the female body.” Dr. Northrup acknowledges our individual and collective capacity for growth, freedom, joy and balance.

She’s also thrilled with her company Amata Life (http://www.amata.com). Amata is a Thai word that means ageless and eternal, and the company is devoted to creating and distributing products that support ageless living throughout the life cycle. When she’s not traveling, Dr. Northrup loves dancing Argentine tango, going to the movies, playing the harp, getting together with friends and family, boating and reading. Don’t miss Dr. Northrup’s cutting-edge information. Join her worldwide community on Drnorthrup.com — and I’ll put her social media channels in the podcast notes — and her internet radio show “Flourish!”

Okay, well, I’m really honored. Can I call you Dr. Chris?

Dr. Christiane Northrup: Yeah. Or just Chris is fine, whatever you like.

4:15 CL: Okay. Thanks so much. I’m a huge fan. I swear, I don’t cry a lot. Not that anything is a bad thing but sometimes when I meet kind of my heroes, I feel really emotional because I know how busy you are and it just touches me that you gave us your time. So, great, now I’m crying again. I’ve cried a couple other episodes. I don’t around and just cry to people, I swear. It’s just like you meet people that have really impacted your life throughout the years and then you’re like, “Oh, she’s here and she gave up her time and she’s so generous.” So, thank you.

CN: It’s a soul-to-soul recognition is what that is.

4:53 CL: Oh, thank you. Yeah. Not a mental imbalance.

CN: No, not ever. It’s how you really know you’re on it. That’s how you know you’re on it. Yeah, it’s beautiful.

5:04 CL: So, you know, honestly I reached out to your people, I don’t know, close to a year ago and you were busy with a lot of things — and we’ll talk about that in a second. Then I thought, “Well, of course. Like, Dr. Chris? I’m going to let her talk about whatever she wants to. If she wants to talk about adrenal health or whatever.” A lot of people end up talking about that. And I asked what you want to talk about and Dianne, you know, wrote me back and she wrote something and then I passed it on to my podcast partner and she was like, “That’s so spicy. Let’s go!” Like, okay, thank you. I mean that’s pretty cool. So, what are we talking about here? The hexing of fertility?

CN: Yeah. The hexing of women because of the fertility industry. So what I want to say about that: when I was in med school and I’m not kidding you, I remember going to clinic and there was a 32-year-old having her first baby. Now, this is how you get a mind-body split going that you can’t believe. I literally thought, “Oh my God, she is so brave having a baby that late in life.” I have completely removed myself from the entire situation. I was maybe 22. And when you’re trained as a doctor back then, you were sort of trained as you’re different from a regular woman so this doesn’t apply to you. Then I used to give lectures—I kid you not—called “Pregnancy After 35”. Like this was a big deal. Right?

Then, the whole needle has moved in the culture beyond anything. I mean, it used to be if you had a baby, we considered a baby over 30 a high risk. I’ve been told by friends that a pregnancy after 35— here’s the hexing, ready? —is called a “geriatric pregnancy”. Give me a break. A geriatric pregnancy! What could be worse than that? Because here’s what I want women to know: The vast majority of women get pregnant after the age of 35.

One of my closest friends finally got married at 40, wanted to have a baby, had an IUD in for 18 years. This story is in the last chapter of Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom. I removed her IUD in my office in full ritual ceremony. We first set up a ritual and then we were going to call her intended because we were taking out the IUD to invite in a soul. So I take her into my office. It was a Sunday, she was a friend, so no one was there. I take out the IUD and I say, “Look, when we remove the IUD, the cellular knowledge in your womb is going to come up. So let’s take a moment with this.” Whenever you do a procedure in the womb, then I’ll tell you stuff can come up. You have access to what’s in the cells. In her case then I did some reiki healing, some therapy, therapeutic touch.

8:16 CL: The usual stuff MDs do.

CN: The usual stuff that we do, that’s right. In that moment, this was the most amazing thing, she sort of popped into another life and she began to sing. Well, first of all, she was in the woods, Native American girl having a premature baby. Now, this is a woman who didn’t know what umbilical cords looked like, she knew nothing. She literally was giving her birth in the woods. She’s explaining all of this to me as I’m doing the reiki on her uterus. We’ve just removed the IUD. Then she begins to sing in a language, in a Native American language. Now if it were today, I would have recorded it on my iPhone. I did not have that at the time but I’ll never forget it. She’s chanting “oh ne yanta” and it’s just us. It’s not like this is a stage performance for people to see how cool she was. And she said, “I could see the whole thing.” She delivered a premature baby in the woods, described the placenta, the umbilical cord. So somehow she got that out of her system and it was a fear that she had had, “I won’t be able to give birth. I don’t know how to do it.” She literally had the experience that her body gave birth in this sort of trance state and then after that, she knew she could give birth. So she got pregnant within three months and had a—oh, you know, like a three-hour first stage of labor. All this and a perfectly healthy little baby boy.

So what I want people to know is this: In the 1950s, what we could say or the ‘60s or even the ‘70s, a 35-year-old was likely a different kind of person than a 35-year-old now who is listening to your podcast. So let’s be clear on that. There’s a massive difference between chronologic and biologic age. You can have a 50-year-old going on 35 or a 35-year-old going on 50, depending upon what the lifestyle is like. I need to make a pitch for vitamin D before birth because I just was reading the data on Grassrootshealth.net. Everyone needs to know this website. Grassrootshealth.net. What they point out is women with their vitamin D in the optimal range, 40 to 60 nanograms per milliliter. Forty to 60. And please, anybody who’s getting their vitamin D checked, please don’t accept “oh, it was normal”. You don’t want normal. We’re talking you need optimal. And when you have an optimal level of vitamin D, your postpartum depression rate goes way down. Pre-eclampsia is non-existent. You have a much decreased level of pre-maturity; 68 percent decrease in prematurity just from having optimal vitamin D levels. Now in terms of conception and fertility, you want to have optimal vitamin D levels when you conceive. So let’s just talk about that.

Let’s say that you’re 40, you work in an office. You haven’t seen the sun for 2 years which is common, which is very common. You’re sort of working like a rat in a maze. You’re never touching the earth with your bare feet and the earth itself just standing on the ground, on bare ground of grass for 20 minutes decreases cellular inflammation in the body by 20 percent. And most of our infertility, especially the unexplained and all of that, is from lack of nutrients, lack of the electrons from the earth. The earth herself heals us. The other thing we find, so many women are now worried about sugar and they should be, but what that does is it leads us to never eat fruit and we finally have data showing. I mean, we heard the term ‘the fruit of thy womb’. If you want to conceive, you need to eat fruit. That is the gestation of the tree. And you need to think of the energy and information in fruit coming in, ‘go forth and multiply, be fruitful.’ So that’s some things that I wanted to point out.

12:44 CL: Fruit fear, right, they call it.

CN: Yeah. So we need to be fruitful, not fruit-fearful. But just remember it’s totally possible.

12:54 CL: You froze up on me a little.

CN: Oh, okay. It’s totally possible to be 50 years old with the body of a 35-year-old. We’ve also found from mouse studies done at MIT—

13:07 CL: Hey, Dr. Chris. Oh, you froze up on me for a minute. I don’t know if there’s something disrupting your internet. Sometimes if there’s like a cellphone on too close or something. Maybe it was because I kept mine and we’ve got airplane mode and see if that changes it. You froze up for a second. I heard MIT but —

CN: Oh good. So we got that far. Okay, let me just turn this off. They showed that in mice, and I understand that mice are not humans, okay? But they showed oocyte regeneration in mice. Now mice are mammals and they grew new eggs. What the standard teaching is this: you can have as many eggs as you’re ever going to have before you’re born. Like a 20-week fetus has the most eggs ever and then those start to decline and then from birth on, they’re declining every year. But here’s the deal. With the ovaries, you got more than enough eggs even in your 40s to take care of any pregnancy you’d ever want to have. But we constantly are giving our bodies messages from the fertility industry. Okay, so we have this portal. Dr. Mario Martinez who started the Biocognitive Institute talks about cultural portals and that they are more powerful at determining your biology than your biology itself.

So the cultural portal of, let’s say, age 30. I had a friend who his girlfriend is Korean. In Korea, 30 for a woman is considered the end of the road. You’re reaching your expiration date. That’s a cultural portal. Now, in the northeast at Harvard and Yale, nobody thinks that. Because women are having babies in their late 30s or early 40s. They’ve worked on their MBA, they’ve worked on their MD PhD, then they have babies. But what happens because of the cultural portal, now we’ve got women 27-28 who haven’t met the love of their lives and it is suggested that they freeze their eggs. Already the fear of “Oh my God, I might not have them” leads to. So now we go through a procedure to freeze their eggs and what scares me to death about that, is when you farm the ovaries in that way, like you give FSH, like you give Pergonal, you get a bunch of eggs all at once and you harvest them, then when you need the egg and you need your body to produce the egg, the egg has sort of been factory farmed and it’s not so willing to come forward.

I can’t tell you, when you have a career as an OB-GYN, what every one of us sees is women who have been told they can never get pregnant. I had one of these. Her husband was told “you have no sperm.” Okay, they finally came to grips with it. She came in at age 42 pregnant with who’s sperm? His. Because it only takes one. I remember doing tubal ligations back in the day and I’d wheel the patient into the recovery room and the attending surgeon would say to her as she’s in the hyper suggestible state of coming out of anesthesia, “You’re sterile.” You’re sterile! Come on. You had a tubal ligation. You’re not sterile. We need to think of fertility as a lifelong relationship, a co-creative relationship with life and with nature.

So what happens in our culture is, you hit age 30, now that’s changing and it’s changing quickly. The number of women who are 25 who are married now is way lower than it’s ever been. I mean, we’re really changing the demographic. But when you hit 35, there’s the statistic that you’re now 35. So people actually believe that the curve looks like this. Like suddenly at 35 you can’t get pregnant and that statistic alone, that cultural portal results in so much cortisol and epinephrine, stress hormones, that alone will shut down your ovulation.

There’s a group called the Huichol Indians and I remember meeting Brant Secunda, a shaman with the Huichol tribe. Brant is from Queens but way back, way back, Brant was looking at marijuana (at that time) encyclopedia and he was looking up ‘marijuana’ and it said ‘see Huichol.’ So I went to see him. They are a remote tribe and if you’ve ever seen the mountains of Northern Mexico, it’s like Bin Laden would still be hiding there. Okay? That remote. He went to find this tribe and nearly died on the way and as they rescued him, they said, “Yes, we’ve been waiting for you.” He lived with them for 18 years, learned their language, became a Huichol shaman. He said their culture, their tribe believes that being pregnant is a gift from God. He said the women are routinely pregnant in their 50s and 60s. They don’t have internet. They don’t have Instagram. They don’t have Facebook. They’re never told that age 35 your eggs are old. Therefore, biologically because we co-author each other’s biology.

So let me say this, and I’ve told my daughters this: Don’t give your age. You have to when you go to the doctor, I understand. But don’t give your age even to yourself or your friends after 33. Now, why do I say 33? There’s a really good reason. Tommy Rosa is a plumber from the Bronx who was killed in a hit and run accident going to get some bread. He was literally pronounced dead. They brought him back to life and then he was in a coma for I don’t know how long. When he came back, he said in heaven everyone who dies after the age of 33 reverse to 33. 33 is a spiritual mastery path number, happens to be the age at which Christ died. But that is a symbolic number. And he said, so if you’re older than that, no one is ever older than 33 in heaven. So I would suggest if that’s all we really are from a soul perspective, let’s stay there.

Now we also have other cultural portals. Age 40 – another cultural portal. Age 50 – another cultural portal. What I would say to people is do not ever again, after 33, celebrate a “milestone birthday” because those become a millstone that adversely affects your fertility. You say “It’s too late for me. I’ve passed through the portal.” All the rest of it. Now, I understand that there’s biology but what we’re finding is there are women who have periods into their 60s. Every month, every month, every month. You tend to have your last period when your mother had hers. However, we had this thing where there’s autoimmune “premature ovarian failure” which is what a horrible label to put on somebody. You have “premature ovarian failure.” Right? But even then, and that’s considered autoimmune, what is autoimmune? It’s a misnomer. Anthony William (Medical Medium) who’s a friend of mine—

20:53 CL: You turned me onto him, yeah.  Appreciate that.

CN: Yeah, I love Anthony. What he says is autoimmune doesn’t exist. The body never attacks itself ever. Ever. What it is, is cellular inflammation. Now, he goes into Epstein-Barr virus. I’m certain that the Epstein-Barr virus is around to carry out the deed, but it’s not the Epstein-Barr virus.

21:18 CL: Okay. Wow!

CN: No, it’s not. No, I don’t. It’s the environment. Louis Pasteur and Antoine Bechamp were rivals. Bechamp said it’s the environment; it’s not the germ. Pasteur said it’s the germ, not the environment. On his deathbed, Pasteur said Bechamp was right. So, it’s the environment. For instance, we know if your vitamin D level is optimal, you’re far less likely to get bacterial vaginosis. You still have the same bacteria in your vagina. But if the environment through optimal vitamin D is changed or if you have enough lactobacillus or if you have the right microbiome, then it will keep the germ whether it’s Epstein-Barr virus, whether it’s Gardnerella, whether it’s yeast, it will keep it in check. So it’s all about looking at your body as this fertile field. You want to do the organic gardening model. Like I like to say the time to eat right for your pregnancy for your child is two years before it’s born. So you start and you treat your life. You treat your body if you want to get pregnant. You treat your body as an organic field where you are fertilizing the soil, you’re rotating the crops. You’re re-mineralizing. You’re making it optimal. Because we know that women with optimal soil have a very decreased rate of birth defects and all the rest of it.

So I would pay attention to the cultural portals. It doesn’t mean you don’t use assisted reproductive technology. Heaven knows that’s helped a lot of people get pregnant. I don’t have anything against that. But always use it in addition to your own inner wisdom, to your own ability to create a beautiful outcome. Do not give the power so much away to the technology.

23:19 CL: That’s what we preach as well. I love that. And when you were saying the two years, I just was feeling like all these women going, “But I don’t have two years to do that.” Because what you were talking about, the age thing, it’s so ingrained in women and it’s so interesting. Now there’s some that say, “Oh, women can have healthy pregnancies into their 40s up until at least 45,” and then something magically really shifts at 45. Then if you say where you’re 47 and trying, you know, like wow, I don’t know, people kind of don’t want to touch that in a way because add a couple of years—

CN: It’s like the statistical thing, right? So what I’ve always done as a physician, let’s talk about like a curve for bone density. So we know that bone density tends to decrease over time. Bone quality doesn’t need to. But on every curve for age and bone density/bone density and age, every curve you’re always going to see some 82-year-old with a bone density of a 25-year-old. Always. What I would tell your people: become an outlier. Now, when you say you don’t have two years, see, instantly, now we’re in linear time, now we’re in Newtonian physics. Now we’re in the arrow of time that is chasing your back. That’s how we all live. “At my age it’s too late to…” “I wish I had…” I just read the statistic that most people stop listening to new kinds of music at the age of 33. “At the age of 33, this is what I like.” “This is what was popular when I was in high school.” That’s what we’re listening to. What? So you need to understand that every cell in the body is replaced every 7 years, now some more than others but on average. You get a new body every 7 years. You will get a new body and the cells will create themselves anew depending up upon what messages you’re giving them.

The ultimate paradox is, you have to be somehow strong enough in your own source energy to be able to go to a fertility clinic, a fertility doctor, hold the possibility that you are maximally fertile while at the same time using the technology. It’s like you basically go in there and they start to do the naysaying and you’ve got to say in your head “This doesn’t apply to me. This just doesn’t apply to me.”

26:04 CL: “I’m not the average person.” That they are basing all this on.

CN: That’s right. So you still treat your body as though you are feeding yourself to give birth to something outside of yourself and if it happens to end up being a new career or a book and not a physical baby, or if it happens to be that you’re going to be a parent because it turns out that your child is in Russia, or your child is in Guatemala or Chile, you’re still the mother of that child because you always get your children and maybe your children are going to be born through your sister. I mean, I have a friend who’s a well-known intuitive and when her sister gave birth to the second daughter, my friend Joanne goes, “She’s mine. That one’s mine.” To this day, they have that incredibly close relationship where she’s paying for college, they go on trips together. There are so many ways to fulfill motherhood. There are so many ways. So I want people to sort of keep that open.

I remember I had trouble getting pregnant with my first. I thought I did. I was a resident and things were crazy and it was taking six months. I watched what women went through to get pregnant. But we didn’t have anywhere near the technology that we have now. You couldn’t put the third mortgage on your house to try one more cycle of IVF. We didn’t have it. But I still watched what women went through trying to get pregnant and I said to myself, “If I’m not supposed to have a baby, I am not supposed to have a baby because I’m not going to turn into that.” It’s very, very, very stressful.

27:54 CL: And it gets dark, yeah.

CN: It’s so dark. Then we all hear the stories because that’s just the story. You adopt the baby, you get the baby home, you’re pregnant. Happens all the time. Where you just gave up. And it’s the same by the way with meeting the man of your dreams. You’ve done eHarmony and you’ve done whatever you’re doing, and you finally say, “Look, if I’m supposed to be with someone, God, you’re going to have to send him down the driveway.” Then you give up and you go off to Paris with your friends and you meet the guy because you don’t care anymore. It’s kind of like that. When the mind has a death grip on the outcome, “I have to get pregnant,” or, “We have to have sex now, I’m ovulating.” What does that do to the erection? Eh. It just does. Where is the orgasmic energy of creation that sex is about? That literally good sex sends a wave of nitric oxide throughout your whole body and I think that it sends this incredible beam of energy up to heaven and it pulls in the right soul.

So the other thing I would do, if you want to get pregnant, is I would go out like the Tibetans and I would pray and I would have a ceremony and I would invite in the soul because they’re around your body before they come in always.

29:14 CL: That’s such a cool image for me. We’re talking about fertility today but I listened to another podcast and you were talking about your book ‘Goddesses Never Age’. It’s just kind of like every cell in my body because you so need that as a woman. I’m in my late 40s and it’s like just redefining yourself. Is it okay for me to be passionate about things? What’s going to reignite my passion at this point in my age? What’s my sex life going to look like in 10 years because it’s kind of changing now. You were saying something about women having the best sex of their lives in their 60s and 70s. I was like, “I never hear that!” honestly.

CN: You don’t hear that but that’s the data from Gina Ogden. She did the Integrating Sexuality and Spirituality Study out of Harvard. She’s a PhD sexologist out of Harvard so she finally did the largest survey, larger than Kinsey, larger than all of the sex surveys of women. What happens as you grow older, you begin— Okay, so the biologic imperative, okay we put all of our energy into reproduction of the physical, of humans up until about the age of let’s say 42. That’s the Uranus Opposition in your astrological chart which is the time when the dictates of the soul come to the forefront and say “What about me?” So the reproductive biologic imperative to reproduce the species and put all the energy into there does tend to wane at about the age of 42.

So how do you get it back? You need to plug into source energy. This is the basis for Alberto Villoldo’s ‘Grow A New Body’ course that he does in Chile and he’s a shaman but he’s a medical anthropologist who worked for years being funded by drug companies to go into the jungles of the world to find the herbs that would be the next wonder drugs for cancer and every time he’d find an indigenous tribe, they never had cancer. But he’s got parasites. He got every parasite known to humanity and by the age of about 67, he was told he needed a new liver. He was infested with all kinds of parasites in his heart, in his lungs, in his brain, in his liver. He was put on the liver transplant list. But he knew from the shamans that you can change all this. So he took standard American medicine which is really good at killing things because we’re good at the sort of war metaphor in American medicine. And he killed this stuff and then he just worked with this radiant light body to grow a new liver, new lungs, new brain—and he did it. He has pre- and post-treatment liver biopsies. He literally grew a new liver. His lungs are fine. He said you can’t get a brain biopsy but he likes to play Scrabble and he was getting really bad at it when the brain was full of parasites. But now he’s back to where he was.

So it’s really important to know that we have the ability to grow a new body and that our bodies really are not meant to deteriorate and all of that as we grow older. Dr. Mario Martinez has studied 700 healthy centenarians all over the world. He has found that they all have the same thing in common. When you say, “when did you last see a doctor?” and they go, “I don’t know. My doctors are all dead.” They practice the causes of health and by the way, this will improve your sex life and fertility, and the causes of health are: elevated cognition, looking for thoughts and things that feel better, finding the information like I just gave on having the best sex of your life in your 60s and 70s, and certainly that is my experience like beyond anything I ever could have dreamed. Beyond anything. It’s like unbelievable. Okay, so there’s that.

Then, exalted emotions. Paying attention to what brings you joy. Getting off the YouTube blackhole where ain’t it awful, ain’t it awful… We need to understand the dark forces on the planet which is what Dodging Energy Vampires is about. They’re losing. The light is winning. They’re pulling out all the stops to get you as scared and as angry as they possibly can. That’s how they feed themselves these extraterrestrial lizards. It’s a different species. Don’t feed them. You do exalted emotions, things that bring you joy.

Then the third one is righteous anger. When your innocence or that of another is being threatened, you say something, you do something. You say “That’s not okay with me.” So for instance, you go into the doctor and they say—oh, when I first came out with Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom, my literary agent said to me, “You’re not getting any younger, you know.” She’s dead. She’s dead! I’m still going.

34:31 CL: What was the point? What did she mean?

CN: What she meant was I was publishing my very first book pretty late in life at the age of 42. I was pretty late in life and it’s like, she’s now dead. I’m still writing.

34:50 CL: She needed someone like you. She just didn’t have someone like you shifting her paradigm about it. She was told that her career was only a definitive.

CN: Yeah. She had a bunch of young novelists. So apparently in the novelist category, if you haven’t had your big New York Times Bestseller by the age of 32, see it’s the same conversation as your physical fertility. “You’re not getting any younger, you know.” You could say that to a newborn.

35:19 CL: Tick tock.

CN: Tick tock. Exactly. So, in the shamanistic world view, you co-create with nature. Time is not linear; it’s quantum. In the Newtonian view which runs western civilization, we’re always running out of time. We’re running out of resources, we don’t have enough time. Instead, you have to do this Einstein time thing which I learned from Gay Hendricks, and the Einstein time is quantum time. “I am the place where time comes from. I have all the time in the world. I am the source of time. I am co-creating with time.” Notice when you’re making love with someone you love, time stands still. Or when you’re talking with someone on a plane and you’re really having a beautiful co-creative experience, the plane lands six hours later and you can’t believe it. On the other hand, when you have your hand on a hot stove, two seconds is too long. So time is always relative. If we can step out of time, you literally can train your body to stop or to vastly slow down the aging process. The body is on automatic pilot about these things. You know, FSH and LH go up. But I’ve seen those reverse.

I’ve seen them reverse. I’ve seen people get pregnant when it never should have happened. I remember being a teenager and seeing the actress Ursula Andress having her first baby at the age of 48. I had a patient come in and she thought she was menopausal. She was 50 and she was 8 months pregnant. She was also a little heavy. She didn’t realize. That’s the mind-body split. She was so split off that she didn’t even know. I mean, a baby inside her kicking. I don’t know what she was thinking. But still, I delivered a perfectly healthy baby.

So this fertility thing is very mysterious. You can’t do it the way you got your PhD or your MD. It’s a receptive feminine thing. The egg calls out a signal to the sperm. It’s the sperm swimming madly to the egg. We have to get more egg light putting out the signal and then wait with. But what women are taught and Pat Allen says, there are more women with penises and more men with vaginas than ever in human history. Because we’re balancing the roles. But you can’t just get pregnant on a schedule. It’s like women scheduling an induction or a C-section for the birth. I mean, you’re taking away the very first choice your child will ever make, which is when to be born. Because it’s the child’s pituitary that determines the timing of labor in concert with the mother. But when we have to put it in our timer so that we can schedule everything, then we’re in that awful arrow of time riding right up your butt instead of what you do—and this is the work of Tosha Silver which I adore. So if you are meant to have a baby, here’s what she does with everything. She’ll say the right outcome, the perfect outcome is already chosen. You take that desire and you put it in a God box or you just hand it to your higher self and then you relax and wait to be shown. You wait to be shown. Then you’ll watch that license plate, fortune cookies, signs on the road will just be the voice of the divine giving you direction.

So let’s say that you decide that you really, really want to meet someone, a man and have a baby with that person. Or you want to adopt or whatever it is. And you say, “Just show me. I’ve done everything I know to do. And now, just show me.” So when you’ve done 10 vision boards, when you’ve done 100 affirmations, when you’ve done everything you know, then you just finally turn it over. Then when you really don’t care, you really seriously don’t care anymore, it tends to come. Because when you’re grasping “I have to have it this way and I have to have it now, and when you do that…” So I have an acquaintance who adopted a baby girl because she wanted a matched set. She had a blonde blue-eyed baby boy and then damn it, she was going to have a blonde blue-eyed baby girl because it “looked right.” So she essentially bought a baby. I mean, paid for the bills of a woman in another state where the state doesn’t give women who are having babies for adoption, it doesn’t give them any way to go back, and so she got this baby who has been nothing but a developmental disaster from day 1. Executive function disorder. It wrecked her marriage, it wrecked her whole life.

Because she was intent on doing this from the point of view of the ego, of the lower self, that I want this to look a certain way on Christmas cards. You can’t do it that way. You can’t. Now, from a soul level, did she get the baby she needed? Yeah. Because she was swimming in the shallow end of the pool.

41:21 CL: It will deepen you.

CN: It will, yeah.

41:28 CL: Let’s talk about periods because a lot of women, it seems like, have sudden imbalances going through life and say, “I had my first and only child at 42,” and really you could think, you take a blood test and everything seems fine and you go your merry way. It’s only when you try to conceive. It’s the true litmus test in a way, right? That actually, I have had screwed up periods or I’ve been on an IUD or birth control pills or 10 plus years. And we don’t really honor the menstrual cycle. Like I was interviewing someone else and they’re like, “The menstrual cycle is like a vital sign” and we’re not taught to read that.

CN: It is. It is a vital sign. That’s exactly right. Yeah, we’re taught to be ashamed and make sure no one ever knows that we’re on our moon. So the menstrual cycle is kind of a beautiful Rorschach for how imbalanced you are with nature, with light, with the moon. Natural light can enhance fertility dramatically. If you just have a full spectrum light bulb especially in the winter months and so on when you don’t have natural light, a full spectrum light bulb that you can just see out of the corner of your eye, that will enhance ovulation dramatically because light is a nutrient.

So again, remember how we talked about you need to stand on the earth, you need to be in natural lighting. All of that will enhance your period. The other thing that I actually invented an herbal supplement to help with this because so many women do have that problem and it’s a Thai herb called Pueraria mirifica. So this is called PM Balance and you take it day 7 through 21 of your cycle for three months. What it does, many women are in estrogen dominance from a diet too high in sugar where their insulin levels are too high. Insulin levels that are too high interfere with the metabolism of the sex steroids. Most everybody, if they’re under stress, if they’re eating a lot of refined foods, fast foods, they are going to have insulin levels that are too high and their estrogen-progesterone balance will be off. So you really have to eat well and whatever you can.

Now I have a daughter who lives in New York City and she’s really realizing—she’s currently doing the Whole30. The Whole30 is a very popular diet where there’s no dairy, no soy, no grains and no gluten for 30 days. She feels great on it and has begun to realize that in New York City because of the fast pace, it’s very easy to just grab something from a street vendor or whatever it is. So you truly have to slow down and you have to get in tune with your cycle. What many women find is, if they’re traveling in Italy where the pace of life is different and the food is better, or they’re on vacation, their period comes and they didn’t even know. I mean they didn’t get all that premenstrual stuff. So I call it premenstrual reality. PMS is really that your hormones are out of balance. I was able to back in the ‘80s, all my patients had PMS because I was the only one who believed in it and I knew it was a lifestyle thing and I would get them feeling better within three months by giving them the right supplements, the right diet, all of that. But here’s what I noticed. Almost nobody could stick with it. And why was that? Because almost every one of them was living with an alcohol, a borderline personality, a narcissist. So they were draining their life energy toward what I call the energy vampire and they didn’t really get permanent relief until they got into recovery about that relationship or left. So that’s taken me years to figure that out.

45:36 CL: Right. You could tell a woman 10 years ago who was suffering from PMS for years and years. I mean, if someone could tell her, “Let’s work on this on a spiritual level and on a lifestyle level, and let’s talk about the people in your life because this is making your life miserable.” Some women have it two weeks out of every month. There’s only 4 weeks in a month so that’s half the life. And saying, “And also, it can affect your fertility.” There’s sort of a disconnect there too.

CN: It totally does. But here’s where people are brainwashed. They’re brainwashed into “so I need my cycles ‘regulated.’” So then you bring in birth control pills which are synthetic hormones that make the problem worse because when you’re on birth control pills, there are at least 50 different metabolic things that are messed up. And you need at least more B vitamins and very, very few doctors are prescribing that.

Again, everything has a place including birth control pills, including IUDs, including all of that. Just be mindful. Oftentimes the woman is not in a place where she can look at the relationship although what I like to say to women is, sooner or later the body is going to present its bill and you’re not going to be able to get out from under it. So sooner or later, you’re going to have to deal with this. I have a former patient who’s now in her 40s and I told her this stuff at 15. She said to me, “I was not ready to hear it.” That’s okay too. I actually really honor people’s timing. You don’t drag out a baby with forceps until it’s ready to be born. So if someone’s not ready, they’re not ready and that’s okay. But it’s just important to be aware that the health of the menstrual cycle is totally related to the health of your life. I had terrible, terrible menstrual cramps. Terrible. From all the stress hormones of being up all night, delivering babies and all the rest of it. Never had trouble conceiving but really had bad cramps. Yeah.

47:50 CL: You know that book ‘Making Babies’ by Sami David? He was kind of like a pioneer of the IVF industry. One was making babies and he—

CN: I don’t know it. Okay.

48:04 CL: But anyways, he basically said and it’s been a few years since I read it, but he was saying that the reason he by and large stopped doing IVF and started working with women’s natural cycles and talking about nutrition and lifestyle and he brought in an acupuncturist who co-wrote the book was that the IVF fertility industry is the most under regulated industry in medicine.

CN: He’s not kidding. No kidding. Okay, so I used to do donor insemination. So listen to this, everybody. So guys would show up at the backdoor of my office, having just gotten that sample and they’d be paid $50. No screening, no nothing. Then I’d go in and inseminate a woman. I did a lot of lesbian inseminations back then. So talk about no regulation. At the time I was married and I tried to get my husband to donate because I knew this would be like, you know, he had two beautiful children. He goes, “No! I don’t want our daughters to marry their brother.”

49:11 CL: What are the chances?

CN: Well, here’s the thing. We had a guy in med school who donated for the money every single week for 4 years. Now people in the Upper Valley around Hanover, New Hampshire where I went to medical school, they’re not a very mobile population. They stay there. So he used to brag that he was the “father of the Upper Valley”. So the truth is, that is a distinct possibility. Then what else would we do? Because think about this. So we doctors, the residents would donate. They’d put their sample in a locker, I’d put it in my armpit and I’d go back to the office and inseminate somebody. I mean, and now, with surrogate mothers, with all of that stuff going on, he’s right. There’s no regulation whatsoever. You can kind of almost go out and pay somebody and whoa, it’s a little terrifying.

50:11 CL: Right. I’ve treated women who have undergone multiple cycles of IVF and for the lack of a better term, they feel bonkers after it.

CN: Oh, I know. Well, yeah. This stuff can screw you up. It really can screw you up. You can feel just awful about the whole thing.

50:31 CL: The thing that frustrates me is that women try to conceive and they kind of freak out. It doesn’t happen in the first year. They’re not getting much help in “Why is that? I’ll come back and try for a year.”

CN: Yeah, put the third mortgage on your house.

50:49 CL: Exactly. But then they refer to an IVF doctor and then sometimes they’re not a good candidate for IVF for whatever reason. So in their heads they make up “I cannot conceive naturally” even though there is probably variable reasons that could be remedied. Poor sperm quality, nutritional. Then they’re thinking “I’m just broken. IVF can’t even do it and I can’t do it naturally” versus someone going “No. Come back over. You can probably more than likely conceive naturally, have a healthy baby, wonderful pregnancy. We need to kind of dig deeper and see what’s going on.” Spiritual, lifestyle. Because I think that’s happening, oh gosh, so often.

CN: Let me tell you a factor that I’ve seen repeatedly. It’s like not one that women necessarily want to take a look at. But how often have I seen this over my career? Women can’t get pregnant, can’t get pregnant, can’t get pregnant. Goes through a divorce, remarried, pregnant immediately. I’ve seen it over and over again. There’s a New Yorker cartoon that’s very funny and the infertility doctor is looking at the woman and he says to her, “Well, maybe you just don’t breed well in captivity.” So I believe that the female body sometimes just says “I’m not doing this with him” and it’s a soul protective mechanism.

52:26 CL: Yeah. The egg chooses the sperm as you said, right?

CN: That’s right. But we don’t know it. Because you’re not ready to know it until you’re ready to know it.

52:35 CL: Scary thing to know.

CN: But I agree that both of these things are true. Imagine what it would be like, right? You’re 40 or 41. You go into the fertility clinic and everything is about fertility. You’re given a juicy mango when you get in there and you’re asked to tell the staff all of the creativity in your life, all of the things you’ve created, all of the things that have brought you pleasure. Everything that feels orgasmically fabulous in your life. You start to dress in wonderful colors like yellow and pink, and that’s part of your treatment. You got to wear pink underwear now and it’s got to be really sexy and fun. Then they prescribe a massage once a week and you get some acupuncture and foot reflexology. They teach you how to use essential oils and then you’re told this is the oasis where you sit on mother earth. A beautiful, grassy garden and you go out there and that’s part of your treatment every day. Then there is the sunbathing nude. That’s how it happens. Now, wouldn’t that be different?

53:51 CL: I feel more fertile just you describing that.

CN: That’s it.

53:55 CL: I know. I was like, look into your husband’s eyes, let’s practice some tantric yoga together, let’s do some dream journaling together. Let’s read night passions, what are the fears, let’s do some emotional freedom technique, tap into deep fears.

CN: Yeah. Doing the tapping, all of that.

54:14 CL: Oh my gosh.

CN: Yeah! Because you’re right. You go into a fertility clinic and in a way, it’s almost sometimes you look at those women, your heart goes out to them. It’s like they’re in a concentration camp.

54:28 CL: They’re hostile. Because I look at different pregnancy forums and things like that and I get it. In some ways I think, is this good for women? Because I feel they’re isolated and they’re angry and so they need people to go “Yeah, my uncle just told me I need to relax,” and I want to punch them in the damn face.

CN: They’re going to kill him.

54:52 CL: And so it’s like, yeah, you’re venting out but then, I don’t know. I guess it’s good if it feels good and sometimes I feel like it could be a little bit disempowering.

CN: It is. No, I’m telling you it’s the same. Okay, so all wounds need to validated or they do not heal. Someone has to say, “I’ve been where you are. It feels horrible and I’m validating this wound.” Then at some point, just like if you are going to a breast cancer survivor meeting 15 years after your treatment and you’re still calling yourself a survivor, you’re keeping yourself stuck in a box where your life is in relationship to breast cancer. So in a way you’re always vibrating with breast cancer. “I’m a survivor.” Instead of saying “I’m a thriver and I experienced breast cancer.” But not “I’m a breast cancer survivor.” Those are very, very different languaging. Very different.

55:53 CL: That’s such a good point. Yeah, I think that prompted another thought. Those forums for fertility, “Oh, I’m on my third injection cycle and this drug and this drug.” I’m just like, “Okay, if that’s helpful…” I don’t know. It’s kind of strange. It’s like people who lose a partner. Some really thrive in those support groups and other people are like, “I had to get out of there. It was so depressing.”

CN: Yeah, right. There’s a time and a place for it. But to be optimally healthy and optimally fertile, it cannot be your identity; however, that is individual with all people. I went into OB-GYN quite frankly because I abandoned myself when I was 4 years old to heal my mother after the loss of a baby. Then when I first saw a baby born in medical school, I just nearly fell to the floor weeping. That was my own abandoned self. I made my personal pain into an amazing OB-GYN career but at this point in my life, I don’t ever need to see a baby born again. It’s like I did it. I did it. My little girl wound that fueled this career has been healed. Even though I still love the work, there isn’t this “Oh my God, I have to go in there and keep rescuing women.” You see, because I was doing it from the point of view of “I got to rescue them” when the person I was always rescuing was me.

57:36 CL: That’s deep.

CN: Yeah, it is.

57:42 CL: We’re getting close to the end of our time. Just something that, I don’t know, a mantra or something that you keep to kind of inspire yourself.

CN: I like Gay Hendricks’ ‘ultimate success mantra’. It’s really a good one. It’s from his book ‘The Big Leap’. This is a good one to say for 1 or 2 minutes repeatedly in bed before you get up. Alright, the subconscious mind does not have the ability to make antibodies against this particular word: expand. So here’s what I would say for all your people wanting to conceive. “I expand fertility, joy and pleasure every day while inspiring others to do the same.” So “I expand” and you can use whatever words you like. But this will reprogram your subconscious. It will reprogram your ovaries. It will reprogram your central nervous system, your immune system, your endocrine system. “I expand fertility every day while…” not assisting others, no, “inspiring others. I’m going to be the model who is living this while inspiring others to do the same.” Yeah.

59:01 CL: Words to live by. Thank you.

CN: Right. Alright.

59:03 CL: Thank you so much. You have so much wisdom. I’ve gotten so much out of this. Thank you. Appreciate it.

CN: You’re so welcome.

59:10 CL: Alright. Dr. Chris, have a wonderful day!

CN: Thanks! Bye-bye.