The Art of Meditation: Improving your Fertility Journey

Hey, Hey, Welcome back!

In today's episode, I share how meditation is one tool to have at your disposal that can help in so many ways. There are many benefits to meditation from stress relief, enhancing self-awareness, health, healing sleep etc.   

I reflect on how a mere five minutes a day of meditation can work wonders in shifting your mindset. I discuss how it helped me release negative energy and connect to my desired family, goals, and dreams. I also share some of the meditation techniques I found most helpful and encourage you to experiment to discover what resonates with you. So, tune in, open your mind, and let's embark on a transformative journey together. Because remember - every step of your journey is a part of you so let's find ways to make it better. 

In Love and Gratitude
Jessica xxx

Email - jessica@thefertilitymind.com
Website - https://www.thefertilitymind.com
Amazon Store - https://www.amazon.com/author/thefertilitymind

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to the Fertility Mind podcast. I am your host, jessica Friesen, a certified fertility mindset coach, a sound healer and an international best-selling author. My mission for this podcast is to give you weekly episodes where you hear my own success with IVF and how mindset and manifestation changed it all for me. You will also hear from my guests who share their success stories in the fertility world. I want you to know that you are not alone. Even when things feel tough and when things feel like they aren't going your way. The tools and techniques you will get in this podcast, I know, can change everything for you too. So thanks for being here with me today and let's dive in. Hello and welcome back.

Speaker 1: 0:57

Today I want to talk to you about meditation. Meditation is something I think is incredibly beneficial to anyone, but specifically to anyone that's on their fertility journey right now. And I say this because mindset is so incredibly important and it's so imperative to understand your mindset and understand where your underlying beliefs and limiting beliefs are and how you can flip their perspective and move your focus to focusing on your end result of your desired family. So I have tried many forms of meditation and I will be honest, you need to find the one that resonates with you, and in full transparency. When I first started meditation, I had limiting beliefs, that I wasn't good at meditating, that I couldn't quiet my mind. I had limiting beliefs that I was already overwhelmed. So to add even five minutes to try and sit still when I have this massive to-do list was a waste of my time. I had a whole bunch of limiting beliefs that were going on in my head and I also made assumptions that meditation really wasn't going to do anything for me or I didn't need it. And I want to tell you that there is so many amazing benefits of meditation. So the benefits of meditation, especially while you're on your fertility journey. It allows you to focus more on your end result. It also gets you out of being in your current environment or your circumstances, where things may not be working for you. And I say that because you could have just experienced a canceled cycle. You could be experiencing a loss right now. You could be in a waiting period to even just get into a fertility clinic. I'm just trying to give you a reference of wherever you are on your fertility journey, whether you're starting. You've been here for many years. You've experienced emotional impacts, you've experienced assumptions. You've experienced things that you did not want to experience because here you are.

Speaker 1: 3:09

So meditation there is so many different forms of meditation. You can listen to a guided meditation. You can listen to frequency meditation, where it's just frequency, sound, healing you can listen to like there's restorative or relaxation meditations and there's also active meditation and again, there's still many forms. And active meditation is where you know. This is something that I've learned over the summer, that I'm now incorporating into my courses and I'm incorporating it into just my everyday life. So this is something that I'm new to of active meditation.

Speaker 1: 3:51

But it's all about going to we have four levels of mind and going to your deepest level of mind and how you can solve problems. And you can also know that, like, if there's background noise, it doesn't distract you from being in your meditation. And that, for me, was key, because when I would sit and try and be quiet or sit still, my mind was always going through things and I always had to say to myself be present, be present, be present, and I would always have different things. And then there's also visualization meditations that you can do, where you're visualizing your end result. So I say I'll sound like a broken record, but I will say that meditation is beneficial because I really encourage everyone that's listening to this to really understand. Focusing on your end result of your desired family and feeling the feelings of what it would be like to have your family and when I tell you that, think of what it's like when you introduced your baby to your family or have your first holiday, if you celebrate holidays, or if you have a baby shower or your pregnancy announcement. I want you to think of these things and feel how amazing it would feel to be there right now, because feeling is the secret, and spending time in your imagination, doing visualization, you are becoming a vibrational match to your desires, which can allow things to come faster to you, and meditation can allow you to do that.

Speaker 1: 5:41

So, especially when you're going through certain things, allowing your mind to be quiet is something that is so beneficial because, from someone who has gone through fertility to fertility journeys, when your mind is telling you that maybe you're not worthy, or you are cursing your body because it's not doing what it's supposed to do, or you're frustrated maybe you went into your fertility clinic and it was busier than normal and your doctor was running late and you felt like you didn't have enough time with your doctor, etc. Etc. Etc. That will trickle throughout your day and then it starts kind of like a negative feedback loop and I want you to just be able to sit still and be able to start every day as a new day. So if you're gearing up for a new cycle, being in a meditation can allow you not to forget anything that's happened, but know that you're starting in a new spot right now, that you can have this quiet time and tell your ego or tell your fears, tell that inner self-image that's not serving you, that this is the time that you are prepping and you are preparing and you are spending time in your end result.

Speaker 1: 7:17

So I'll go back to the act of meditation for a quick second. I have found it absolutely incredible. So it was a 28-day course where, for every day, for 28 days, you practice going into your four levels of mind and you could start telling yourself, by the time you did a 3-to-1 method, you would be able to get into this level of mind and you would start to say, by the time I'm done doing my meditation, by the time I'm done asking my questions or focusing on what it is that I want, I will feel like I just had an extra hour of sleep. I wake up restored, I wake up completely relaxed and my body is healthier, my mind is healthier, and I can't tell you the difference that I felt after doing this. So the first couple of times I was like okay, but what attracted me to this meditation was that I didn't have to quiet my mind, I didn't have to push things away and be like focus, focus, focus.

Speaker 1: 8:36

And I do really truly believe that restorative or relaxation meditations are wonderful too, especially if you can't quiet your mind at night. Or I think of there is huge corporations that actually have meditation rooms in their building or they encourage their employees to do meditations, because you can be far more productive coming out of these meditations, and that's why I think it's so amazing for you to find a meditation that works for you, whether it's just listening to a relaxing meditation or finding a meditation that really applies to fertility, that you can listen to before you go to appointments, or anything that you can do to relax your mind, relax your body and go to a state that is beneficial. So if you're a person that is already feeling the overwhelm, I want you to switch your perspective and just say if I could spend five minutes in the morning, or five minutes on my lunch break, at lunch, or even five minutes before bed. What if it was those five minutes that I spent in a meditation or visualization connecting me to my goal? That only relaxes my body, it puts me in a vibrational match and it's getting me closer to my desired family. Whatever you can can do to flip that perspective.

Speaker 1: 10:11

For you to find time to meditate, every single person has five minutes in a day. You can do longer ones, you can do shorter ones. They do have like two or three minute meditations. I believe they might even have one minute meditations, but my point is it is so beneficial for your mind.

Speaker 1: 10:34

It is beneficial to leave the baggage of what's not working for you behind and start focusing on the things that are. Even when your world feels like it's crumbling, there is still something that you can grasp a hold of. Find those things that you can find joy. Find the things that you can focus, that help you distract you from your current physical environment right now. And the more time you spend in gratitude, the more time you spend in joy, the more time you spend in your imagination is all of these things that are going to help you, because I want you to remember, no matter what, at the end of the day, this is your journey. I want you to stop using the words this is not working. I want you to stop thinking about how this isn't happening, like how this is happening to you. It's not happening for you, because that is a vibration and the longer you stay on the vibration and please understand, I am not trying to diminish your grief, I am not trying to diminish your emotional impacts, I am trying to move you forward, to get you to where you want to be, and when you do meditations, it can help you move through grief faster. It does not ever take away what you've gone through, but it can also help you process emotions and help you process for the next point, that you need to be in your fertility journey.

Speaker 1: 12:18

And every single person that I have talked to whether it is a naturopathic doctor that talks about mindset or fertility clinics that say, you know, maybe get counseling to prepare you for things that you could possibly go through, or you know a fertility mindset coach like myself that truly understands how mindset is what carries you through. Mindset is what really carries you through your fertility journey. Meditation is just one form of something that can help you through, and it's also a tool that you can put in your toolbox to help you, and I think it's so important to have, you know, a virtual toolbox that you can pull tools out of whenever you need, whether it's blessing and releasing, whether it's, you know, journaling, focusing on gratitude, living in your imagination or connecting to your desires, understanding your limiting beliefs, meditation, any of those things, so that you can be in a place that you want to be, because, no matter what, life is still happening Every single day eat, sleep, repeat, it's happening. So why not be in a place where you can focus more on joy or more on gratitude, so that you can start living your life right now and, as your fertility journey progresses, you can be in a far happier state, you can be in a better state to receive and you are focusing on your goals. You're focusing on your desires. You're focusing on your dreams instead of focusing on what is happening right now. So the thoughts and things that we have today are creating our tomorrow. So if, every single day, we are focusing on how things aren't working out for us, how we hate our job or we don't like our fertility clinic, or our fertility doctor isn't listening to us, or you've been trying for many years and this just outright sucks. I don't want you to focus on that. I know it's easier said than done, but any type of practice that you put into place right now is setting up your tomorrow for a better place. You don't have to be perfect at manifesting. You don't have to be perfect at gratitude. You don't have to be perfect at meditation. So I'll go off in a little rant for you and explain how I started meditation.

Speaker 1: 14:58

When I started meditation, it was recommended to me because I was explaining that I was in a really stressed out state. I was juggling my family dynamic of having my stepdaughters in and out of the house and trying to line it up with me and my husband on how we can get them to school. On days that I had to drive an hour to my fertility clinic just for blood work. I had to manage my prescriptions and driving an hour out of town to go get those and making sure that it was ready and if it wasn't, how I could get back there after work. There was just a whole big juggling process and this was something that was recommended to just help me reduce some of this stress.

Speaker 1: 15:44

So when I first started trying it, within five minutes I would tell myself, yeah, this isn't for me. I tried to listen to relaxation ones and it would be like just sit and quiet your mind and my mind was racing of all the things that I had to do or my house was noisy. If I tried to do it any time before my children were asleep, and by the time my stepkids were asleep, I was exhausted and I thought, okay, and I would try and do it laying in bed, and my mind would just start racing and I'd shut it off and be like, no, I just want to go to bed. Like this is silly, you name it. I had every excuse why it wasn't working for me and I thought, okay, well, what if I try and get up early in the morning? And back then I was not an early riser, so to try and get up and you know, try and do this meditation just seemed as another step of overwhelm, of something I had to add to my to-do list and I really didn't believe it was going to work for me. And because I believed that it didn't work for me, it wasn't working for me.

Speaker 1: 16:52

And then I tried listening to certain guided meditations, and that didn't work for me either, because an old version of myself was very much a perfectionist. So when I listened to like money manifestation guided visualizations and meditations, they would say, like you know, put your hands on your steering wheel and imagine your you know your dream car. I didn't know what my dream car looked like. I was thinking like a mom van would be great, because that means I have my kids besides, just my step kids. And but then I was like, well, what kind of mom van do I want? And I would work my way out of the guided meditation because I didn't have these answers. And then I would put on my to-do list, go, you know, find different, different vehicles that you think would be like fun and fancy. And again that overwhelm took over and I was like this is just something else that I have to do. I don't need this van right now. I don't need this right now. And we don't have the money for this because all our money is tied up into our fertility treatments, and I hope you can, as I'm explaining this, you can start to identify my limiting beliefs of that. We didn't have the money which, if I observed my physical bank account, absolutely it said I had no money and we couldn't buy a new van and we couldn't do this and we couldn't do that and I thought it was pointless. So, fast forward.

Speaker 1: 18:21

When I started studying mindset and manifestation meditation was one of those things that we were recommended to do and because it was really important to become a vibrational match to your desires, it was really important to spend time being in a place where you're not observing your world around you, you're not. You know you're not whatever status you are, you're not wearing whatever hat you wear on your everyday life. That this is a place where you could just come, quiet your mind, focus on the things that you want, relax your body and then go on with your day. So, again, when I started doing this, I was afraid to go big because when I started this, I was just trying to manifest my last baby, so I did not want to go any bigger than I needed to go. I was just like, okay, I would spend time visualizing. I knew I wanted to have a boy. I knew, you know, I could get specific on details. I would have absolutely been 100% okay if we had a girl. But I thought, if I'm manifesting and I'm learning, manifesting this is what I'm going to try and manifest. I absolutely manifested my little baby boy, who's now almost three. But here's the thing I was afraid to go big because I had the again a limiting belief that I just wanted to have a healthy baby. If I could choose, I would choose a boy, but I just wanted to have a healthy baby and this is what I'm going to do.

Speaker 1: 19:59

And the more and more we got doing meditations, I allowed my mind to go bigger and bigger each time and I thought, okay, well, this is the desired amount of money because when you know, my son arrives, I want to be doing this, this, this and this. I want to have this much money in my bank account, I want to know that I can take a maternity leave and, you know, be financially okay, not living paycheck to paycheck or not living in a certain way. And I got bigger and bigger and bigger. And these were all because I was practicing meditation and visualization while I was doing meditation. So I started with listening to five minutes of like a frequency, healing sound, just something to like quiet my mind, and every time I listened to that at the beginning. My mind would go and I was like, no, I'm getting better and better, I'm getting better and better every day. And I really did. I got to the point where I could sit there for five minutes and just breathe in and breathe out. And if my mind started to wander, I would start saying the words in my head, breathe in and breathe out, so that I was focusing on the words that I was saying. And for five minutes I was not a stepmom, I was not a wife, I was not a mom, I was not, you know, living in some of the contrast that was going on in my world and that relaxed my body. And then I would do the visualization and I found it easier to do that.

Speaker 1: 21:41

I'm telling you, find whatever meditations work for you, but again, I'm going to repeat mindset is so important for your fertility journey. If you are going into every appointment just saying I hope more than anything, that this is the time, or that this is the cycle, or that this is the procedure, this is the clinic, this is the doctor especially for anyone that has been in multiple clinics or multiple doctors I want you. Yes, hope is a great thing. That is the first step I tell everyone that is the first step to get you to mine Mindset and manifestation is you start with hope and then you do the actions. And you know, I just, I just want you guys to understand.

Speaker 1: 22:30

When you spend time feeling grateful for your partner or you feel grateful for whatever things that you can feel grateful for, you will start to see a shift. When you spend time focusing your mind on the things that you want, you can push through hard things. You can push through hard things and it can move you through your grief faster or your emotional impacts faster. I'm never asking you to forget, because every single part of your journey is part of you. It is part of you. You can flip the perspective and understand however you want to bless and release, but I want you to start making this part of your journey, from this moment on, far better.

Speaker 1: 23:20

I want you to start holding the belief that things are working out exactly the way, in the right divine timing. I don't want you to hold the belief that you're not going to have what it is that you want to have. I don't want you to hold the belief that it's never going to work for you. I don't want you to go into your clinic saying I hope this, but I really don't think that it's ever going to work for me. I can't tell you the emotional impacts that every woman feels. If you're just new to fertility, I don't want to scare you in any way, shape or form, because I truly do know women that got pregnant their first try. I don't ever want to promise you'll get pregnant on your first try and I don't ever want to promise that. I really do believe that there is a right divine timing, but I believe that you can connect to that faster when you focus your mind on the end result, when you are always focused on fear, when you're focused on it didn't work last time, or I experienced this emotional impact, or I experienced this loss, or XYZ. I don't want you to focus on that Every time you go in for a new procedure, a new cycle, new blood draw, whatever it is. This is a brand new day, it's a brand new time and meditation can help you with that.

Speaker 1: 24:42

Maybe you do a gratitude meditation, I mean, like there is hundreds, there's millions of different types of meditations out there. I've really fallen in love with this active meditation because I can even do it with my kids around me and I've got to the point where I am not distracted by sounds. I can quickly go to a certain level of mind. I can ask questions. I can ask questions about contrast that I might be experiencing. I can ask questions specifically to spirit, guides or the universe, whatever you want to connect with. There's even a method where you drink a cup of water or half a cup of water before bed and you say I'm going to remember my dreams and you wake up in the morning, you drink the rest of the cup of water and you will get your answer throughout the day, whether it was in, you woke up and you really remembered your dream, or you have intuitive hits and you're just like oh my gosh. That's the answer to the question that I was just asking. There's many, many different ways, but active meditation was something that I just. I have felt such a shift and fell in love with meditation so much more.

Speaker 1: 26:00

So, going back to my rant of how meditation didn't work for me, because of my limiting beliefs, I did practice meditation. I wasn't consistent at it I will be 100% honest but I knew when there was more contrast or when I was feeling really stressed out. That was one of the tools that I did pull out of my toolbox. I thought, okay, I'm going to meditate or I'm going to sit and listen to frequency healing and then I'm going to do my visualization of reminding me of my goals, reminding me of the things that it is that I want to do, and I felt so much better, I was able to relax easier, I was able to sleep better that night and I really do believe that there is so many benefits of meditating.

Speaker 1: 26:50

You can heal your body in meditations. When I did my belief coding session, which was absolutely incredible, we were in a meditative state. I was not asleep, it was like a hypnotized state, but I was fully aware. I was hearing the words, I was hearing these things, but it was all about healing my body and moving stagnant energy out of my body, removing traumas out of my body and removing pains. And I woke up thinking like I was very much fully awake. But I came out of that meditation and I was like, wow, okay, this is again. It's a new form of meditation that I had never been aware of, but it was all about healing.

Speaker 1: 27:37

And there is meditations on how you can heal your eyesight, how you can heal ailments in your body, how you can heal diseases. There's so many different types of meditation. Meditation is incredibly beneficial, and I like to do meditating and visualizing together. So I start by quieting my mind a little bit when I want to do a very specific visualization of really focusing and seeing the end result of all of these things, of things that I'm working towards and that light my soul on fire.

Speaker 1: 28:17

So, before I keep going on and on and on, I just want you to understand why I truly believe that meditation is beneficial, why I think you should search out one that works for you and how you can use it to focus your mindset, how you can use it to you know, refresh yourself every single day so that you can go into a day without holding yesterday's heavy baggage. It's a way that you can also just spend five minutes not wearing the hat or being in your environment, where you're experiencing things that you don't want to experience. It is a way for you to release some of that negative energy. It's a release that helps you also connect to your vibrational match of your desired family, of your desired goals, of all of your desires and dreams. So find, reach out if you'd like, and I can send you meditations that I've loved, but I also want you to think before you also go to the place.

Speaker 1: 29:26

Like you know, when I Google or go on YouTube or whatever to find meditations, it's overwhelming the first one that comes to you. Try it out. If you don't like it, don't hold the belief that it's not for you. Reach out to other people that might do meditations. Whatever you do, I just honestly encourage you to find a meditation that can help you, whether it's guided or not, that can just help you quiet your body and be in a place for five minutes or more, if you'd like, where you are just not focusing on all the things that are going on around you. That it can help you get into your imagination. It can help you get into your visualizations. It can help you allow to create and help you connect with your desires and your dreams and your goals, to get you to that vibrational match. So I am sending you a massive amount of love today and always, and I hope you truly have an amazing day, thank you.