Welcome our guest blogger A Birth Within. “The journey to becoming a parent is a different road for every woman. Fertility by Hypnosis® relieves stress and empowers women to fulfill their dreams and prepare their mind, body and spirit to conceive a child.”

Due to its unique ability to address the body, mind, and spirit, hypnosis has been used for many decades to treat a variety of health conditions. Today more than ever, physicians and their patients are taking the need for holistic care to heart, and those struggling with infertility are looking for ways to maximize its treatment and minimize the stress and pain it can cause.

Fertility challenges often result from a constellation of factors, and a diagnosis of “unexplained infertility” can be especially confusing and discouraging. Chronic stress, anxiety, or depression can result in a suppression of the reproductive system. The Autonomic Nervous System (ANS)—a network of nerves connecting the organs of the body to the spinal cord—is responsible for maintaining the body’s internal equilibrium. The sympathetic nervous system is a component of the ANS that is responsible for the infamous “fight or flight” response to stressors. Intense or repeated emotional responses to personal, social, and work-related stressors can cause a physical reaction in the body, throwing it into a state of emergency. Since the reproductive system is unnecessary for immediate survival, its function is suppressed and the body’s energy is directed elsewhere in preparation to fight or flee. This response is our body’s way of protecting us from harm; however, modern-day stressors can be constant and all-consuming, leaving us suspended in survival mode.

Common stressors that may affect fertility (to name only a few) include the strain of “trying” to conceive and being unsuccessful; worry that you’ve “waited too long” to try to conceive; anxiety caused by invasive infertility-related medical procedures; unresolved grief from a previous miscarriage or abortion; memories or current experiences of abuse; and persistent beliefs that you will be a bad parent or be unable to conceive.

Negative messages that we receive from the media, family, friends, co-workers, and healthcare providers can manifest themselves as subconscious blocks, preventing the body from regaining the equilibrium lost in fight or flight. As long as the negative thoughts or feelings generated in response to these messages are internalized, or stored in the subconscious, they can possibly alter ovulation patterns, disrupt hormonal balance, and lead to any number of other barriers to conception.

Hypnosis is the most direct and effective way of tapping into the subconscious mind. Far from the strange, amusing, (sometimes even frightening!) portrayals of stage hypnosis that we see on TV, the hypnotic trance is as natural as a daydream and entirely self-controlled. Skilled hypnotherapists can ease you into a relaxed state where you will become acquainted with your subconscious and begin to reverse the negative thoughts and feelings that are potentially damaging to fertility.

Fertility hypnosis programs are not only designed to aid relaxation and enhance the efficacy of medical treatments, they are designed to help you get your life back and look forward to all its possibilities. You will become empowered to stop waiting for the other shoe to drop, stop preparing for the “worst case scenario,” and instead look forward to experiencing a healthy pregnancy and appreciating the natural healing powers of your mind and body.

About A Birth Within

Jacqui Pilla is the founder of A Birth Within, and Meg DeSanta, certified fertility and Birth by Hypnosis® consultant. A Birth Within offers both fertility (Fertility by Hypnosis®) and pre-conception hypnosis programs at its North Andover practice in person and by phone. For more information, visit its Website at www.abirthwithin.com.

We are pleased to be working with The Berkley Center for Reproductive Wellness – NYC on offering a complimentary mind-body seminar.

Join Joanne Verkuilen from Circle+Bloom in a special meditation and mind-body series to help you learn powerful visualization techniques for not only your fertility, but your overall health and well-being.

Learn stress reduction techniques that you can use on your own to help your body detox from excess cortisol and other harmful stress-related hormones. Free your body for fertility. Free your soul from stress. 45 minutes per session.

• Learn progressive body scanning techniques to relax all major muscles groups as well as to calm and center your heart, mind and spirit
• Quiet the mind to improve feelings of control
• Learn creative visualization and stress reduction techniques to awaken the beauty and peace within and to help you improve your fertility quotient

When
Every Second Thursday of Each Month
7:00pm to 7:45pm
Next Group Meets March 10th, 2011

Where
The Berkley Center for Reproductive Wellness – NYC
16 East 40th Street, 2nd Fl, New York, NY 10016
www.newyorkfertilityacupuncture.com

Registration Required
There is no charge for this event, but you must register as space is limited.
Please register via phone or email: 212.685.0985 / patientservices@berkleycenter.com

Do one thing every day that scares you.

We’ve kept these babies under wrap for some time… and we’re thrilled to finally let it out for the world to enjoy!

Working with the one and only Pamela Madsen (more on her and her new book here) we are thrilled to announce the latest addition to our growing mind-body family. We floated the idea of bringing fun back into baby-making-sex to our customer base to see if they would be interested in such a program, and there were shouts of yes, yes, yes. Goes to show you there is an incredible need, and demand to feel pleasure again out there!  And as things always seem to fall into place, about this time we began to get to know Pam…and the rest is history.  We have teamed up to address the need for finding pleasure head-on. We couldn’t have done it without Pam.

We decided to create two programs:

SHAMELESS SELF, LOVE AND SEXUALITY

For every women looking to awaken from a sexual perspective. The program contains 4 sessions that takes you on a journey inside your body to explore the true essence of your femininity. Pam helps you get your mind out of the way, and begin to explore the transformational power of pleasure to feel freedom, confidence and love for yourself…just as you are. Do you ever approach the idea of love-making with dread, anxiousness or just plain indifference? This program is designed to improve feelings of self-acceptance, learn about how your body is programmed for sex, and why pleasure is not only healthful for you but can transform your life. The first of it’s kind, this mind-body program is a unique combination of music and words that leads you through a journey of self-acceptance, helping you learn your sexual feminine nature and become accepting of your body as beautiful, elegant and uniquely you.

Click here to learn more about this program.

SHAMELESS BABY-MAKING

This program was specially designed for the TTC woman. A four session audio series helping you to engage your body again in the act of love-making. Reconnecting with the pleasure side of you will help not only your relationship, but ultimately your fertility as feeling pleasure is such a wonderful way to reduce the harmful effects of stress. Feeling sexy is good for you and good for your body it can transform your life. How often do you approach the act of baby-making sex like a fire drill Sargent? How much fun was that? Has this created problems in your relationship? Unfortunately, stress does play a major factor in fertility, and the downward spiral of despair of trying to conceive undermines our efforts dramatically. The good news is that baby-making sex, and having fun with your partner again, can actually help to reverse all of this negativity. Pamela will show you that pleasure is good and healing.

Click here to learn about this program.

Let us know what you think!

“In my view there is no conflict in being a rigorous scientist and a person who believes in a God who takes a personal interest in each one of us. Science’s domain is to explore nature. God’s domain is in the spiritual world, a realm not possible to explore with the tools and language of science.” – Dr. Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project

Week 10: The Connection Between Spirituality and Health

Welcome to Week 10 of our How Einstein Would Get Pregnant blog series. Last week we discussed the evidence pointing to the fact of the “Body-Mind” connection, or the fact that our body can make us feel certain emotions by virtue of its state of relative health. This week, in honor of the holidays and religious celebrations going on around the world, we intend to focus on the power of prayer…the miraculous stories of healing…and the biology of belief.

Click here to listen and subscribe to the podcast on Apple iTunes..
Click here to listen to Week 9 podcast.

Miracles Abound

It’s England on December 14, 1421 and a fourteen-year old girl suffered a painful and life-threatening injury when a hot spit went into her abdomen. People around here were able to extract the spit, but she was to the point of death. At that point, her parents and several other neighbors prayed to a specific saint (Osmund, the eleventh-century bishop of Salisbury) asking him that in exchange for her life being spared, that they would visit his tomb and honor him in prayer. Shortly thereafter, the girl began to show renewed signs of life, and two days later awoke and rose from her bed. Ten days later she was completely recovered.

The connection between religion, spirituality and healing is widespread and runs the history among many traditions. Jesus and Buddha were both healers, and saints and Gods are often attributed to miraculous healings, as exemplified by the story of the fourteen-year-old girl. Dr. Wayne Dyer speaks of his miracle cure to his knee during a visit to Lourdes in France, the famous shrine were thousands of similar healings are said to have occurred.

The History of Religion, Sickness and Health

Thomas Moore, in his book Care of the Soul in Medicine, suggests to doctors, nurses and other modern-day healers to try to possess a generally positive, “caring radiance” – making the comparison to the radiance associated with the halo around Jesus’ head as well as the radiant background to the various depictions of the Buddha. And as he says, “but we all have halos and auras. We all radiate the quality of our souls, both good and bad. It doesn’t take much to pick up on the radiance of care around a nurse or the radiance or expertise behind a doctor.”

“Those of us whose notions about the causes and cures of sickness are rooted in medical science may have difficulty knowing what to make of such reports.” The skeptics and scientists of our age often dismiss these stories as exaggerations, even pure fiction,” writes Robert Scott, author of Miracle Cures. He says that faith and the appeal of prayer to heal is “based on a body of theory and research that has been largely overlooked by those who study miracles cures: the work of social, behavioral and medical scientists showing that culture, beliefs, cognitions, emotions, social relationships and physical environment play a central role in the onset, course and outcome of illness.” I believe this is a very balanced and noteworthy point of view.

Our Thoughts, Beliefs and Fertility

The power of belief is all-encompassing when it comes to our bodies and our health. Barbara Bradley Hagerty in her book Fingerprints of God, writes about her experience with Christian Science, which holds as a central premise that healing is a function of spiritual understanding and that prayer changes our thoughts which enables us to heal. “Everything is thought in Christian Science. Everything is going on in your thinking.” She uses the example that if a mirror was full of smudges and toothpaste, your image is distorted and marred, but it is the mirror that holds the problem, not yourself. The way you clean the mirror – and restore your reflection – is to clean up your thinking.

She writes about the story of her Mother’s broken hand. She was playing around with her fiance at the time, hit her hand the wrong way, and knew immediately that something was wrong. She started thinking – almost like a mantra or meditation – “nothing can come into my human experience that I do no allow in my consciousness as a reality. You take it out of your consciousness – the broken hand – and erase it, and then you substitute health with the truth.  She then writes that her mother “had this great sense of light – of one thing flowing out of another, out of another, out of another, into eternity. There was nothing but light. It’s all one. It’s all God. The all-ness of God, which is the oneness of God, and I was within that oneness.” She later went to see a doctor about her hand, who said that yes, the hand was broken, but that it was perfectly set and almost healed. She writes that her mother “reliving the intensity of the moment, remember walking out of his office, my feet didn’t touch the ground, I was so filled with God’s truth, the spirituality, the marvel in it. That was the end of it.”

I don’t know about you, but when I hear such stories I get into a different zone of thought as various doors open in my brain that I didn’t even know existed. I listen to them with an incredible amount of hope. Knowing and sensing this greater power that is readily available to us at all times. The spirit and universe that flows through all of us.

In fact, the quote from above of “one thing flowing out of another, out of another, out of another” made me think of Jill Bolte Taylor’s Stroke of Insight and her incredible and very moving speech about what happened to her while she was experiencing a stroke. Here it is and I highly recommend if you haven’t already done so, please watch this.  For everyone faced with a medical challenge – or simply with the desire to live within a deeper level of truth and beauty – this video may point you in a new direction, a new wonderful way of thinking about life.

In Summary….

This meandering post doesn’t conclude with any specific suggestions or conclusions, but hopefully raised some questions in your mind about the power of belief as it pertains to spirituality. Why is it that the more we know about science, the more questions are raised that are almost unanswerable? Another great book is The Language of God by Francis Collins, who led the Human Genome Project. Here is a scientist who for most of his life defined his religious views as atheist, and the more he researched the human body and the building blocks of life, the more he became convinced that there simply is a higher power. Science and spirituality becoming closer the more we learn. Amazing.

When people talk about Circle + Bloom they use different ways to describe our programs and how it works. We hear our programs referred to as meditation, mind-body therapy, relaxation exercises, etc.

To a certain extent our programs incorporate parts of all of these descriptive terms, but our programs are also different from all of these as well. As one customer said, “five years ago when I was doing fertility treatments I used a different meditation program and it did not even compare. I think the fact that the meditations change with the cycle really makes it much easier to get in touch with your mind and body”.

Stumbling across this great book called Made to Stick, I had an ephiphany. The book talks about the importance of using stories to help people remember and understand your message. Among many reasons, the book states stories resonate because they cause mental stimulation. The listener begins to imagine the events that are being told to them.

And here is the shocker. When we imagine an event unfolding in detail, the same modules in the brain are activated as when we are actually part of the event. The body and mind do not differentiate from the imagination and the actual event. The listener physically and emotionally connects to your story.

And there’s more. The authors shared the results of an experiment conducted by UCLA students. In the study, there were three groups, one group stimulated their brain in general terms. So for example, we might be thinking “I am not getting pregnant, and I want my body to get pregnant, I want my body to do what it needs to do to get pregnant.” The second group stimulated their brain in process terms. For example, “This is day ten of my cycle, and my body is doing what it should do to gear up for ovulation.” And then the third group’s thought in outcome terms – or – “I will get pregnant, and it will be so great when I get pregnant. I can visualize being pregnant.”

Which group do you think had better results of achieving what they were mentally thinking about achieving? Group Two! Thinking in process terms was much, much more effective.

What does all this have to do with what makes Circle + Bloom different? Absolutely everything!

Our programs are fundamentally built on the process terms foundation. We make the mental stimulation easy for you to apply this to the way you think about and go about conceiving. Our programs follow specifically what your body should be doing for optimal reproductive health during the conception and pregnancy phase. We know of no other meditation, mind-body or relaxation program that takes this approach. They will use either the general term approach or the outcome approach – both are good, but we do not feel as effective us the process approach.

There are a few other differences to other typical mind-body activities such as yoga, acupuncture, on site mind-body programs. Circle + Bloom can be done in the privacy of your own home, when you want, on your own time. No need to drive anywhere, no need to sit in waiting rooms. And yes the cost is much lower as well.

We hope this helps to explain what makes Circle + Bloom different. If you are using our programs and doing other things like yoga, meditation or “alternative therapies”, we would love to hear other differences that you see as well! Comment below!

This is an actual email we received from a customer earlier this week regarding our Energy Program. Thought we would share it, because she goes to great lengths to connect it back to her life and her meditation practice. Keep these emails coming, folks! It makes our day, our week, our month!

Just wanted to send you this email and tell you about my experience using your new Energy program. I truly love the program! I’ve listened to all sessions several times now and have felt a remarkable difference–especially in my quality of sleep!

Joanne has a wonderfully soothing and calming voice that makes settling down with the program a pleasure that I really look forward to. I find the visualizations vivid and effortless to practice. For me, listening to the sessions has been like taking a mini vacation from the frenzy of my normal day.

For the last few years I have been meditating on a daily basis. Recently, though, since my work schedule has gotten a bit out of my control, I have not been as routine in my meditation schedule as I had been previously.

As a result, my energy reserves along with my patience and state of mind has suffered. The most surprising benefit of the C & B program has been that my daily mediation routine was rejuvenated immediately, and the quality of my meditations has improved significantly.

My daily meditations have become so much deeper since I began using the program! It’s been remarkable.

I don’t understand why, but the effect was immediate and dramatic!

Thanks for putting this out there. I hope more women take advantage of this great program. It will certainly make for happier moms, and families too!

- Cheryl in Massachusetts, via email

Click here to listen right now to a fun and engaging presentation Joanne made to the U.K. Fertility Telesummit.

Here is just a quick idea of what you can learn about how we can begin to our brain to improve our fertility:
*How the mind-body connection effects your fertility
*How stress can effect fertility and what you can do about it
*Learn how you can reduce the anxiety and stress associated with infertility
*How the reproductive system changes through its 28 day cycle

This is an iTunes Podcast as well – click here to become our subscriber for unique content as we continue this mind-body-fertility journey together.

And of course, we’d love to hear your feedback!

Whether or not the claim that we only really use between 5 – 10% of our brains is true, we know that we can always improve our mental well-being for purposes of increased focus, better sleeping and overall improvement in health and energy levels. I have found over the past three years that by changing my thoughts, meditating and entering into deep relaxation has allowed me to greatly expand my thinking, feel more optimistic and take steps to reach my goals on a productivity level that I have never experienced before.

What is interesting is that there are now many researchers and scientists documenting what meditation and relaxation can physically accomplish in our brains and how it connects within all facets of our bodies. Science is finally catching up to centuries old methods of how millions have approached a wonderful way of living, interacting and simply being.

One example of this research is found in this video, posted by the smart folks at Google in conjunction with Stanford University. Phillippe Goldin Ph.D, who is in the Department of Psychology at Stanford, is doing some amazing research into “Mindfulness Training.” Being funded by the NIH, he is proving – among other things – how meditation affects the mind and body through reduction of stress. What I find exciting about this work, is the opportunity to bring meditation and mindfulness thinking into the mainstream. No longer will this work be categorized as unproven, or even worse, something only men in robes do. Someone recently said that we are entering a new phase in human development, fully exploring the capabilities of the mind. I agree!

In this talk entitled “Cognitive Neuroscience of Mindful Meditation,” Goldin discusses how Mindfulness (as he defines it) is associated with stress reduction. He defines Mindfulness as using meditation practices to help you pay attention in a particular way without judging things as good or bad. He discusses what Mindfulness is NOT, such as being distracted, suppressing emotions, ruminating or avoidance. He helps us understand how we can put Mindfulness into practice for our own personal development. I highly recommend taking a bit of time to watch and learn – and then let us know what you think!

“Music and rhythm find their way into the secret places of the soul.” -Plato

Dr. Mike Miller, a research cardiologist at the University of Maryland, has been studying the effects of happiness — or things that make people happy — on our hearts. He began his research with laughter, and found watching funny movies and laughing at them could actually open up blood vessels, allowing blood to circulate more freely.  Miller thought, if laughter can do that, why not music? So, he tested the effects of music on the cardiovascular system. “Turns out music may be one of the best de-stressors — either by playing or even listening to music,” said Miller.  Here is a video that summarizes his findings, courtesy of CNN:

Music is a central element in the Circle + Bloom experience.  After sampling a dozen of artists, we chose to work with London-based Chris Mullett, Composer and Producer for Siliencio Music.  Speaking of his music, Chris says “I have always been intrigued by the therapeutic power of music which can heal the body and soul in wonderfully subtle ways.”  Chris’s music is extremely soothing, melodic and based on slow repetitive rhythms – around 60 – 80 beats per minute.  The flowing ambient music is based on extensive research into the beneficial effects of music, and the wide ranging influence of healing music from many different genres and cultures. The compositions combine acoustic instruments, the voice, digital samples and atmospheric recordings to create music which emanates peace, tranquility and harmony.

Sit back, relax and enjoy for a minute or two: Sample Background Music