Fertility Meditation for Couples >
Background
Infertility is shocking.
After years of careful contraception and perhaps the odd pregnancy scare, you decide the time is right to have a baby. You have unprotected sex and nature does her bit. Sounds easy.
But it's not that easy as many couples find out. In fact, approximately 15% of couples suffer from infertility (meaning they have not conceived after 12 months of unprotected intercourse).
So you suddenly find yourselves facing issues you had never had to think about. And you get lots of well-meaning advice from friends: stand on your head after intercourse (just the women), stop wearing tight y-fronts (the men), stop this, stop that, stop trying, decide to adopt and you'll magically get pregnant with triplets. And that's to say nothing of the stress of finding yourself surrounded by the seemingly rampant fertility of family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances and their plentiful babies.
This can start to get quite stressful for a whole host of reasons:
a couple's own high expectations of fertility
family expectations (parents wanting grandchildren)
time pressure (a loudly ticking biological clock or a career on hold)
miscarriage fears
psychological blocks
fear of major life changes
financial pressure
sex life out of the window
performance pressure in bed
the expectations of our "on-demand" instant gratification culture
the scary media stuff about the decline in fertility (it's epidemic, you are too old, it's all the electrical appliances we are using etc).
In fact, infertility creates its own stresses: the pregnancy and ovulations tests, the "baby sex", the obsessing over timing, mucus and temperatures, the waiting, what's wrong and with who stuff, the uncertainty and the search for answers. It all adds up.
And the harder you try, the harder it seems to become. It's like insomnia: the more you try and get to sleep, the further it seems to slip away beyond your reach.
