Have you ever found yourself weighed down by grief, especially when it intertwines with the yearning for fertility success? This episode is a deeply personal account of how navigating grief with purpose has the power to reshape our fertility paths. By sharing the strategies that have helped me respond to grief with love and gratitude, I aim to guide you toward a mindset that acknowledges pain and fosters joy and healing. It's an intimate conversation about the choice to move with intention through the darkest times, transforming them into stepping stones towards fulfillment and, ultimately, fertility success.
Embracing the journey of personal growth while facing fertility challenges can be a profound experience. I'll take you through the emotional landscape of my fertility journey, revealing how the pain of past losses became a driving force in my quest to support others. Discover the transformative morning routines and mindset practices that have kept me focused on my goals despite fears and the pull of old habits. This episode isn't just a story of confronting grief—it's a testament to the power of intentional living and the incredible resilience that lies within all of us. It's a heartfelt invitation to join me on this path, to choose yourself, and to find gratitude and love in every step toward fertility success.
Have you ever found yourself weighed down by grief, especially when it intertwines with the yearning for fertility success? This episode is a deeply personal account of how navigating grief with purpose has the power to reshape our fertility paths. By sharing the strategies that have helped me respond to grief with love and gratitude, I aim to guide you toward a mindset that acknowledges pain and fosters joy and healing. It's an intimate conversation about the choice to move with intention through the darkest times, transforming them into stepping stones towards fulfillment and, ultimately, fertility success.
Embracing the journey of personal growth while facing fertility challenges can be a profound experience. I'll take you through the emotional landscape of my fertility journey, revealing how the pain of past losses became a driving force in my quest to support others. Discover the transformative morning routines and mindset practices that have kept me focused on my goals despite fears and the pull of old habits. This episode isn't just a story of confronting grief—it's a testament to the power of intentional living and the incredible resilience that lies within all of us. It's a heartfelt invitation to join me on this path, to choose yourself, and to find gratitude and love in every step toward fertility success.
Welcome to the Fertility Mind Podcast. I am your host, jessica Friesen, a certified fertility mindset coach, a sound healer and an international bestselling 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. Today I want to talk to you about grief, and I want to talk to you about moving through grief versus going through grief, talk to you about moving through grief versus going through grief, and I want to start by asking you what does grief look like for you, meaning like? What are you grieving and what is something maybe you have grieved in the past that you wish that you didn't have to go through? Because I want you to think about things that you have experienced grief, how you were going through them at the time and what you're going through now. And then the second question I want to ask you is how would you like to move through grief versus how you're going through it right now? So the difference between moving through grief versus going through grief. Going through grief, it's heavy. It's like being part of the worst club you never signed up for, you didn't ask for this. You don't want to be part of this club. You can't wait to ding that bell to say you've graduated, you're moved past, you've gone out of, you've exited this group. You're moved past, you've, you know, you've gone out of, you've exited this group. It's heavy, it's dark, it's encompassing, it's all consuming, it sucks and you don't want to go through this. That is going through grief. That is going through grief.
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Moving through grief is not suppressing anything. It is feeling what you're going through. It's looking at what you're going through and saying how do I want to feel versus how I'm feeling? How can I move through this? How can I hold space to understand that? Yes, this is what I'm going through. But is there an easier way?
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Maybe you say something like today is a day all about me, where I don't think about anything to do with fertility or doctor's appointments or anything. I'm just going to go, maybe, to the bookstore and get myself a Starbucks and look at all the books. Maybe it's shopping, maybe it's a day at the spa, maybe it's a weekend away. Whatever that looks like for you. Where can you quote unquote escape to just make you feel more like you, where your life isn't consumed about doctor's appointments and medications and seeing everyone around you have all the things that you want medications and seeing everyone around you have all the things that you want? Maybe you say today I want to just focus on joy. Maybe I just want to have a really, you know, a nice day. I'm after work, I'm going to order some takeout, I'm going to watch a movie, one that makes me laugh, maybe my favorite one and I'm just going to snuggle up with my partner.
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Today is just a day I choose joy. Maybe it is saying today I am me. And what does that look like? How does that feel?
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How can you choose to move through things? And again, again, it's not pushing it down, because while you're on a fertility journey, you don't know the time frame, but would you rather move through the grief in a place of more gratitude and love and joy and empower yourself to say like I am incredibly powerful, versus that heavy knit, like the heaviness of going through grief, and saying like I am on a fertility journey and I don't know when this is going to happen. And this sucks, because you know what. I really just want to talk to my best friend, but she just had a baby and hearing the sound of baby cries right now is just freaking, crushing. This happens, so how do you want to move through it? How do you want to choose to feel so that you can find more love and joy and gratitude through this? Because I want to share with you times that I've been going through grief versus how I move through grief now. So you can kind of understand, because grief looks different for every single person. You can grieve the childhood that you had because you wished you could have had something better. Maybe you know I'll leave it at that. You can grieve everything and anything because your emotional impacts, your emotional responses to things, your conditioning, your environment is unique to you and grief looks so different on everyone and grief is filled with entanglements everyone and grief is filled with entanglements, so even something that you think that you've blessed and released this this past week, I was triggered by something I really thought that I blessed and released years ago and in full transparency.
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I hadn't been triggered by this emotional impact in a good couple of years, so I really believed that I had blessed and released it. But I was triggered with it this week and then I said to myself, okay, how am I going to move through this? I could have easily gone into a past version of me where I felt all the lower vibrational emotions and I would just be like why is this happening again? Why I don't know. No, no, no, you name it. Instead I thought, okay, I thought I blessed and released this. This is my awareness that you know I'm being triggered for a reason. There's more work to do. How do I want to move through this? How do I want to react? Respond and move through this versus this is heavy. Why is this happening again? I don't want to experience this. You know why I moved through it. But I'm going to go back to my past for a minute. But I'm going to go back to my past for a minute.
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In my younger years, I never appreciated how simple my life was, if you will, because as soon as I was 26 and living with my husband. We weren't married yet, but we were living together. Everything that I had known to be more simplistic was not anymore. My life was now filled with a lot of complexities. I craved simplicity. I craved simplicity. I was grieving that simplicity would no longer exist in my life and, please understand, I'm talking about my past, when I did not know about mindset or manifestation or how incredibly powerful I was. I was going through grief. I started grieving that the ideas that I had had for my life were changing.
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I grieved that I fell in love with someone that was nine and a half years older than me, that had three children, that had been married. I grieved that I fell in love with someone that was nine and a half years older than me, that had three children that had been married. I grieved that I wouldn't get to share a lot of firsts together, like the first time buying a house. He had already bought a house before the first time buying a vehicle. Yes, we could have our first, that way of us buying our first house together or us buying our first vehicle together, but it wasn't an original first, if you will. He had already been married. He had already had kids. I hadn't had kids, I hadn't been married before, I hadn't bought a house before. Before that I was always renting. So I grieved firsts.
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I grieved simplicity and even the idea of growing our family. We had to have a vasectomy reversal first, and there was hoops and loops. We went through with that. There was no such thing as simplicity and I was grieving that, dare I say. I even grieved the life that I wish I could have had. I know that sounds cruel and that sounds selfish. I absolutely love my life.
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But back then, after we had been married for I don't know five or six months, and we had been trying, naturally for a while, I started to grieve what if I had met someone closer to my age who hadn't been married before, who didn't have three kids, who didn't have this? Would I be on a fertility journey? Would I be dealing with the complexities of a blended family? Would I be dealing with a lot of things that we're dealing with right now? I was grieving that. I grieve the idea of a more simple life because I really didn't believe that simplicity could be in my life and I thought if anything was going to be simple, it was going to be like 20 years away, then things could possibly be more simple, but I didn't want to wait 20 years for simplicity. I was grieving a lot of things. Then I found herself on a fertility journey and I was grieving again. I was grieving time time that it took for us to have our baby and our babies and at that time it was an uncertain amount of time. I didn't know. No one gave me a crystal ball and said on this date you're going to be pregnant and this date, you know, your fourth implantation is going to be the one that actually takes.
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I was grieving time in a different way as well Time that I didn't get to sleep in anymore. I had a luxury of getting up at 6.30 in the morning and getting ready. I had a luxury of getting up at 6.30 in the morning and getting ready, doing my makeup, eating a nice breakfast and going to work. I was now in a place where I was getting up at 4.30 in the morning, putting on bare minimal makeup, to get out the door by 5 and shower and do all my fertility stuff and still be back at work on time. It felt like a whole chunk of my day had happened before I started work, whereas before I could sleep in till 6.30 and get up and just start my day. My day was now starting on a different thing.
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So I was grieving time, that I wasn't getting to sleep in.
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I was grieving simplicity.
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I was grieving the losses the loss of my babies. I was grieving the fact that nothing seemed to be working. I was grieving being on a fertility journey in whole. I was grieving that I wasn't relating to my friends anymore. I was grieving that I was losing myself. I was grieving that I was filled with such negative self-talk for a while. But when I was trying, naturally I said the most awful things to myself Because I thought what is so wrong with your body? It was so I won't even go there. But it was hard Things that I had never said to myself. I was saying to myself because my body wasn't working, I clearly wasn't worthy because I didn't know anyone on a fertility journey. I was feeling alone. I was feeling so many things and I was grieving.
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I was going through it. It was all encompassing, it was hard, it was stressful, it was oh, I wouldn't have wished it on my worst enemy. I hated it. I kept saying I don't want to do this like this. This isn't fair. Then I was pregnant. I felt so much love and gratitude for my pregnancy.
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But here's the other thing. I started a whole nother grieving process because my body quote unquote failed me. It didn't fail me, but then in my mind it did, because I gave birth to my twins at 31 weeks, six days, one day shy of 32 weeks that's two months early and I watched them in the hospital for six weeks. I didn't get to hold them the way I wanted to hold them. I didn't get to do all the things I wanted to do. How I envisioned bringing my babies home was not to be. I did a lot of blessing and releasing. I saw the bigger picture and I know how it all worked out for me.
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But in the thick of it, when you're grieving, it was heavy, it was hard and I was filled with a lot of new hormones and emotions and my heart was now outside of me with two beautiful little babies in incubators. I grieved that time that I didn't have with them, that I wasn't allowed to hold them. I had to sit there watching them, just staring at them, saying I love you, please come home. You guys are fighters, you guys are amazing. Now here's the good part, I'll bring this to a good part and I'll stop the tears is when I started studying mindset manifestation.
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I was about to embark on my secondary fertility journey and this is when I started asking myself how do I want to feel versus how I'm feeling? Because I was filled with a whole new set of emotions. I was filled with a different level of guilt of you know, I already have two healthy babies. Like you're guilty for wanting to have a second pregnancy. What if your body can't carry another baby to term? What if you have to take this time away from your husband, your stepdaughters and you're now twins to you know to be in a hospital with the newest baby, you name it. The emotions and thoughts were there. I was grieving how much time I had to take away from my family again to be embarking on a fertility journey. I grieved my miscarriage and how long it took for my body to fully miscarry, with the methotrexate shot and everything Like it, from start to finish. It was months, and then we had to wait three months again before we could start to do things.
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I decided then I wanted to move through grief. I wanted this pregnancy to be different. I wanted to start focusing on yes, you can grieve that yet again, I'm embarking on a fertility journey. I can't just be intimate with my husband and become pregnant. I was also holding a grief because I had already started thinking of how I can help people on their fertility journey and every time I went into our fertility clinic I just thought it's filled. I want to help each and every one of you and I don't know how each and every one of you and I don't know how but I just thought I want to help and my heart felt heavy and I was grieving the losses that I had had.
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I was again grieving time and I was grieving that so many people have to go through this. I was holding that emotion. So what I did differently is I started saying how do I want to feel? And I said I want to feel empowered, I want to feel like me. I want to feel like someone that can go through this journey and find love and joy and gratitude and find certainty, because I know I'm powerful and I know that I am the creator of my universe. I am the creator of the things that I desire. I started saying things differently and then, towards the end, I really started saying I am going to help people to have what I have, to have their desired dream and family, and I was igniting a spark that is moving through grief. Yes, still feeling pain, still going through the emotional impacts of losses. The emotional impacts of, you know, emotional impacts of losses, the emotional impacts of, you know, just being so exposed and the amount of hormones that are pumped through your body, the emotional roller coaster of it, yes, absolutely was grief, but I moved through it differently and I mentioned I was triggered this past week and again I moved through it. I know how easy it is. I know how easy it is to go right back to the negative because it's so programmed in us. I will share this with you too, because I feel like a lot of you are going through this.
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When I first started studying mindset and manifestation, I had to be up early in the morning. I had to get up at five and it triggered a lot of things for me because I was like this feels a lot like my fertility journey here. But I knew, with the dynamics of my house, that if I didn't get up before everyone else, I would do very surface level work because there would just be so many distractions around me and I would just be checking something off the list. To check it off the list, not actually do a full introspection, not actually really dive deep and figure out how I operate, what it is that I do, what it is that I'm striving for, what it is that I want, connecting with my goals, my desires and my dreams, and also understanding my paradigms, understanding my crazy behaviors and habits and things that are creating my universe, awakening and becoming aware to my assumptions and my beliefs, and all of these things.
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Yeah, there was times I felt overwhelmed. There was times I wanted to throw in the towel. I felt overwhelmed. There was times I wanted to throw in the towel. There was times that I started to grieve. Time again, I was grieving that. You know, I had this idea of mindset manifestation. I could snap my fingers and boom. My dreams would be here. I'd be living in my dream home, driving my dream car. I'd be traveling all around the world. All the time, all these things, world, all the time. All these things. I was grieving how much I was craving to sleep in. I was craving things that I thought why am I doing this?
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And again, I was grieving a version of me. I'm being fully transparent because the fears that were so present in me when I first started studying what if my husband doesn't love me anymore because I grow into a new version of me that he just can't love? What if we grow apart because we're so different? What if my kids don't love me anymore? What if I'm taking too much time away from them Because at that point I was a stay at home mom? So what if I'm? You know what if I'm being selfish?
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This version of me had manifested my twins and was working on manifesting my second pregnancy. This version of me had gone and walked the hells of fire and made it out barely, but made it out, and I was ready to just keep going. That version of me had friends and family. That version of me fell in love with this beautiful man. That version of me got me places, got me places. So how could I say goodbye to her? I was grieving the idea of if I grew to what I could potentially grow to, what if I lost my friends? What if I lost my husband? What if my family didn't love me anymore? You name it I started a grieving process. You name it I started a grieving process.
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And when that grieving process started and it started to take a hold on me, that allowed me to start sleeping in and not doing my studies and not doing my stuff. And you know, I started compromising on my desires and my goals and my dreams and saying, well, no, you know what, I don't need that I can have this. I don't know, I never needed that in the first place. That was just a long shot. That's okay. I then recognized that me choosing me, me choosing studying I moved through that grief by saying but when I do study, when I do journal, when I do really connect with my goals and my desires and my dreams and I choose how I want to feel, my days are so much better. So stop grieving that time. That's what I said to myself. Stop grieving. This time. You're actually giving yourself more time because you're starting your day in a very empowering way, versus getting up feeling how you feel good sleep, bad sleep, however, and then starting your day.
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I'm intentionally waking up and starting my day and creating my outcomes. It felt different. Yeah, I was like, oh, it'd be really nice to sleep in today, though, but I would ask myself what would my 5 PM self feel about me sleeping in and I'm now trying to make dinner, get everyone where they're supposed to be, oh and wait, I still haven't done my studies, or I still haven't done this. And then I feel like for the rest of the evening and the rest of the day I'm just chasing the clock because I have to get everything on my checklist done and if I don't, then I have to start the day with like an already huge to-do list and I don't like that. And then I'm just behind and I stay behind and I stay in this all encompassed feeling.
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I moved through grief by saying what if I just keep growing and keep expanding and my family comes with me? What if I keep growing and expanding and I can have the financial freedom to do the things that I love and I never have to worry about my kids' sports or the things that they want to do and where that money is going to come from? What if I keep growing and expanding and I find a new level of intimacy and love with my husband? What if my relationships with my friends and family could be out of this world like so fun? What if? So how do I want to feel? I want to feel in an empowered place versus this overwhelming, exhausted grief place of I'm the only one studying. No one else in my house is why am I taking all this time to manifest things in our life while everyone else is, you know, sleeping in or snoring or doing all these things? It's easy to live there, but when I put it all about how I want to feel, I don't want to feel those things. I'm waking up and I'm creating more time in my day. I'm waking up and making myself feel good. I'm waking up and doing things differently and, my goodness, I moved through things. I moved through that grief. I moved through that. And when I mean, grief is different for everyone. It can be something small and it can be something incredibly massive, but grief looks different to everyone. Grief looks different to everyone.
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Again, it goes on to your emotional impacts, your conditioning, your environment. Maybe you grieve change. You wish that things didn't have to change the way they change, but they do and you just have to adapt to it. I want you to really think about grief and how you're going through it versus how you can move through it. I want you to look at your fertility journey and say, okay, this is everything I've gone through, but from this moment, I want to start moving through it this way. I want to add more joy, I want to add more love, I want to add more time for me or more time for my partner. Maybe I want to communicate better how I'm feeling. Maybe I want to create better connections. Think about how you want to move through what you're going through right now. And what if you could hold the idea and I want you to know I'm saying this with the utmost amount of love, because it's not always easy to hear but what if you really held the idea that everything is always working out for me? The universe is always blocking things or stopping things that aren't meant to happen. And, yes, you feel like you're on a roller coaster ride, but what if this is bringing you to a higher good, a better version? And when I say that, guys, I want you to understand.
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When I first thought about trying to get pregnant naturally with my husband, I only ever thought about having one baby. I then found myself in a fertility world and I said, okay, fine, I'm going to manifest boy-girl twins and I'm going to have it all in one shot. That may not feel called to you. Not everyone wants to have twins or multiples called to you. Not everyone wants to have twins or multiples, but I became really empowered and I started saying things what if this? Then and again, my original idea was have a baby here in Canada. Back then it was you had. You could take up to a 12 month maternity leave, as long as your employer and everything approved it. Um, and then I thought, okay, after a year I go back to work, the baby goes in daycare. Because of all the things that happened, I was able to become a stay at home mom. I was able to have my twins.
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You tell that to someone on their fertility journey. They're going to look at you like you've got 500 heads coming out of your body and you're going to be like, yeah, no, this isn't working out for me. I'm here to tell you, if you start to cultivate the idea that you can move through your grief and you start to cultivate the idea that everything is always working out for you, you're going to see shifts. You're going to see changes versus living in that grief, versus being in that place where everything is hard and heavy, being in that place of uncertainty, being in that place of I don't want to be here. I didn't ask for this. How dare you tell me that this is working out for my highest good? I've shared with you in another episode that my husband and I were on our way out of town and my daughter the school called and there was a car crash, and I thought if we weren't pulled over to take the phone call and then talk to her and then turn around and come back into town to pick her up from school, we may have been in that car crash. I'm sharing that with you because we don't know what the universe blocks for us, that protects us from having.
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When you start to have awarenesses, you will start to see synchronicities and you will start to see things like oh my goodness, what if this happened the way I thought it was going to happen? How would your life look like? I lived in Ireland for six months in 2008. I met such amazing, incredible people from all around the world that I'm still in contact with. I have such beautiful friends, people from all around the world that I'm still in contact with. I have such beautiful friends and you know what? I have many times in the past, thought like what if I would have stayed in Ireland? Like what would my life look like? Who knows, but I do know that me moving back home allowed me to have the life that I have.
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I know that there's so many different things. I don't feel like I'm getting across the example that I'm trying to get across, but I want you to know that if you start telling yourself everything is working out for me, everything is always working out for me, I encourage you. I'll put the link in the show notes. It's a YouTube video by Jerry and Esther Hicks Abraham Hicks and it's called the Morning Rampage, and she just repeats over and over and over everything is always working out for me. You can move through grief faster, you can add more love and joy through your journey, you can do things differently and you can start to cultivate the belief that everything is always working out for me and understand that the universe is giving you something that you can't see. It's giving you something that you can't see right now, but really something beautiful is coming.
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I love you. I'm incredibly proud of you for being here today and I'm incredibly proud of you for persisting through everything that you have. Thank you for letting me be in your hearts and in your mind today. Have an amazing day. I want to express my deepest gratitude for you tuning in with me today. I am proud of you and I am sending you so much love. I want you to remember that you hold incredible strength and power within you. If this episode resonated with you or you know anyone that would benefit from hearing, please share, and if you haven't done so already, head over to Spotify or Apple and please leave a rating and a review. In love and light, jessica.