In anticipation of Valentine’s Day, we wanted to do something special to add lightness to your day because we know that celebrations like this can be triggering and difficult (especially with a pandemic in the backdrop) when trying to start a family and suffering from subfertility.
It may lead you down a slippery slope of non-stop thinking. But here’s the thing, your thoughts are not reliable and often filled with all kinds of trash talk generating more worries and fears which you end up believing even though they are made up stories that aren’t even true.
So we brought in Dr. Alda Ngo and Stephanie Curran, both Traditional Chinese medicine practitioners, who not only shared how mindfulness helped them on their own fertility journeys, but through their expertise, knowledge, and full hearts, gifted you an incredible 7 minute guided meditation. Stephanie who had endometriosis and low ovarian reserve found mindfulness helped her connect back to herself and her husband.
Dr. Alda who had unexplained infertility for 7 years and multiple miscarriages, got a positive pregnancy test the first day of a 10 day silent meditation retreat and anchored herself in the steadiness of her breath and watched the storm of her thoughts without judgment not getting swept away by sitting with them as she made peace with the unknown of the future.
Mindfulness takes practice and gets easier the more you practice. Research shows mindfulness can elevate your mood, flood your brain with happy mood molecules and improve your perception of your fertility journey and in doing so may help you persevere and shorten the time to get pregnant. We hope you love this podcast as much as we did!
Resources
Mindfulness based curriculum
https://www.brown.edu/public-health/mindfulness/programs
https://www.mindfulnessstudies.com/pro-dev/mbsr-cert/
Mindfulness for fertility
https://mindfulnessforfertility.com/
Link to study that Dr. Alda speaks about
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34756644/
Risks of Delayed Consultation and Treatment for Fertility Patients
https://cfas.ca/cgi/page.cgi/webinar.html
This video provides an overview of the findings from a new multinational study with 9 countries and is very well powered. It speaks to the importance of our Mindfulness for Fertility program and especially the timing we have proposed for our pilot study with having REIs share news of our program at the time of initial consult at ONE Fertility Centre (Dr.Riki Dayan is doing her fellowship there and she has chosen our MFF program as her research project). Approximately 60% of people continue with treatment when emotional support is offered by their doctor at first point of contact vs ~30% if only fertility treatments are outlined.
