We feel so much better when we are able to love.  Reserarch shows that people in community tend to live longer and enjoy better health than those who live in isolation.  Yet fertility challenges can be deeply isolating. This simple meditation can open and energize the heart center, rekindling our ability to give and receive love:

Bring your awareness to the heart center and notice any sensation there.  Perhaps there’s a sense of constriction, or alternatively, a feeling of warmth and expansion.  Observe without judging.

The meditation continues in three phases:

May I dwell in the awakened heart.
As you repeat these words silently to yourself, feel your heart center waking up.  Visualize a wheel of the brightest green glowing in your chest.  Sit with this phrase for several minutes, breathing into the heart, feeling it wake and glow with a fertile, radiant green light.

May I attend to what clouds the heart.
As you repeat this phrase, you may want to silently chant it on the exhale and “see” the clouds of your pain, disappointment, loss and anger dissolving in the radiant green glow of the heart.  Sit with this phrase for several minutes, until you feel that the heart is unobstructed and bright.

May my awakened heart be extended to all beings.
As you now silently repeat this phrase, feel the radiant light of your heart extending out beyond your body, wrapping the world in a huge loving hug.  Rest for a few minutes and allow a free give and take – offering the world this love and receiving love in return.

To end the meditation, join your hands in front of your heart in a gesture of reverence and gently bow to your own loving heart.

Have you ever had a week where a single idea pops up at you from a million directions at once?   In my life this week the theme that started to emerge was transition.  It cropped up in yoga classes, in conversation with friends, even at Pulling Down the Moon as we adapt to our cool new website and e-commerce system.  Transition is also all around outside.  In Chicago the mountains of winter snow outside my door are melting – revealing the shoots of tulips already breaking through the earth.  Of course, as a yogi, I believe that the themes emerging in my outer life contain clues to  my inner life.  So when I went to my yoga mat this week, I meditated on transition. 

At Pulling Down the Moon our fertility yoga practice is a style of yoga called vinyasa,  a flowing series of postures.  As I practiced this week I turned my attention to the transition between the postures rather than the postures themselves.  What I found was fascinating.  Moving from one pose to another with awareness was much harder than moving without awareness.  Between each pose I discovered an infinite number of experiences of breath, balance, strength and mastery.

Finishing that week of practice, I had what we call a “yoga insight” (or satori, in Sanskrit).  Transition is the place where life is actually happening!  Each ”finished” pose is gone – belongs to the past – and each “future pose” is fantasy – belonging to an idealized future.  Yet in the middle, where the pose is emerging and awareness is shaping each moment, life and joy are always present.

Infertility is a transition, too.  We are moving from our previous childless existance toward parenthood.  It’s easy to reject what has come before and race toward the future.  Yet in doing so we deny our own life and existance as valid.  This week we challenge you to exist in the transition, the now, of your life.  It’s in this moment that you can feel your own strength and beauty, your own courage and the exquisite creation of life.