When conception and pregnancy come with effort, or not at all, the risk is to set oneself up to feel like a failure or, alternately, to try everything in the hopes of being “good enough” to conceive. Difficulty in achieving pregnancy can cause great pain in a woman’s heart.
I’ve witnessed the bountiful creative energy in women who are ripe with fertile essence yet can’t seem to conceive or hold a pregnancy. It’s puzzling. Aligning the energy of our bodies can support our fertility, but it’s essential to love ourselves no matter how our journey with fertility unfolds.
The inner creative potential
The first priority in preparing for conception is to make a connection with your pelvic bowl and womb. Since many women are delaying pregnancy and using birth control, they’ve often unconsciously conveyed an internal “no” to their womb regarding pregnancy. Ten or twenty years of fertile time may pass in which they have unintentionally but energetically repressed the creative potential of the body.
When a woman decides to have a child, there may be pent-up frustration in the womb. Most modern women embody a masculine pattern of doing and driving that goes counter to the more feminine, internal, and cyclical nature of the womb. For years, regardless of whether a woman is menstruating or in a more restorative mode, she continues moving as if there were no inner cycle at all. Then, after the womb has been dragged along and ignored through relentless career development and other linear tasks, a woman may suddenly demand the womb’s participation in having a baby. Does this sound familiar?
Reconnecting with the pelvic bowl
When they begin to connect with the internal realm of the pelvic bowl, many women initially find pent-up feelings of grief, sadness, shame, fear, or anger. These feelings are based on unmet needs that tend to accumulate with life habits or work structures that require an external focus and often cause you to ignore your own center. Held emotions may also be from past traumatic events, the imprints of your lineage, or the denial of the feminine that are embodied within us.
Clearing stagnant emotional energies from your core allows you to restore the flow of creative vitality meant for your life. Rather than containing stored emotional energies, the pelvic bowl is designed for gestating your life creations.
Once you reconnect to your pelvic bowl and stay long enough to clarify your core, you’ll discover that there lies a profound vibrancy in your center. This creative essence contains the sacred potential to generate life.
If you’re having difficulty conceiving, it’s not a measure of your connection to this mystery — it’s simply not that personal. Women can become pregnant whether they’re connected with the internal creative potential or not. My own feeling is that the energies of the earth have been diminished, and since our female bodies reflect the energy of the earth, we also reflect the dissonance of living out of balance. Whether facing this through challenges with fertility or the diseases in our children and ourselves, coming back to balance in the center is vital.
The best hope we have for healing ourselves and re-centering our world is for women to remember the wisdom of their own body, honor this life-giving potential within, and follow the truly sustainable rhythm that arises from the womb. Making a connection with the womb offers guidance in regenerating life and harmonizing our energies for living.
Cultivating a feminine approach to conception
Modern women have typically adopted a masculine form of production in developing their professional careers. This linear and task-oriented way of operating tends to make the energy more focused and targeted. Masculine energy isn’t gender specific, although males may embody the masculine more readily. Many women in the business world have learned the masculine form of projecting energy in order to drive and lead a company.
The energy of the womb, and place of conception, carries the opposite and complementary energy to this linear and masculine movement. The womb is round, receptive, and feminine. It embodies the power of the feminine, which lies in being, or holding space, rather than doing. I encourage women to intentionally soften themselves to prepare for conception. The more soft, feminine, dreamy, and non-time-based they become, the better for cultivating the feminine aspects of their energy.
Measuring temperatures and checking ovulation is a task-oriented process that will increase your masculine essence. To aid conception, avoid the mental or linear focus as much as possible and instead dip into the mystery. Follow your body’s desires and let yourself be open to the passion with your partner. If assessing ovulation is necessary, do it in a relaxed and fluid way. Make love spontaneously. Your body may know better if you can restore your womb connection and tune in to your feminine intuition.
When you’re making love, bring awareness to your womb. Invite your partner’s essence to move deeply inside you. Open yourself like a flower to his masculine energy. In same sex couples, this same concept applies to fertility processes where one partner may be in the receptive/conception role and the other partner is holding the masculine presence. This fusion of masculine and feminine in lovemaking nourishes each partner and generates a potency for the relationship that creates life.
Though this masculine-feminine fusion is found all around us in nature, you may need to clear away layers of shame or protection to receive the beauty of your partner in this way. Remember the sacredness of your connection and allow your feminine to receive the masculine.
Tami Lynn Kent is a women’s health physical therapist and the founder of Holistic Pelvic CareTM where she utilizes her ability to read energetic patterns of the body. Kent maintains a private practice and an international training program in Portland, Oregon. She has authored three previous books. Her latest, Wild Mothering: Finding Power, Spirit, and Joy in Birth and a Creative Motherhood (Atria Books, May 7, 2024), is a newly updated edition of her classic, Mothering from Your Center. Learn more at www.wildfeminine.com.