The Mind-Body Connection

I’m sure you’ve heard so many people in the alternative world talk about the mind-body connection, but how does it impact your fertility?

I thought I would share this great example of exactly how the physical body can mirror the emotional body and visa versa.

Sally very much wanted to have a baby but even though she wanted a child she had a great deal of fear around pregnancy. She had heard stories about the dangers and complications of pregnancy and the anxiety that this created was affecting her to the extent that the doctors observed that Sally’s “involuntary nervous system expressed her buried fear by keeping her from becoming pregnant.” In other words, Sally’s body was having a physical reaction to her fear, and that physical reaction was blocking her ability to conceive. In more specific terms Sally’s doctor discovered that the muscles surrounding Sally’s fallopian tubes – responding to her feelings of fear – would involuntarily contract at the time of ovulation. This tightening of the muscles would close Sally’s fallopian tubes during ovulation, thereby preventing her from becoming pregnant. Her doctor contended that “An emotional crisis or shock may close these tubes just as it may make one clench one’s fist or jaw.  

Research shows that “A woman’s emotional problems may make her fallopian tubes involuntarily contract at the time of ovulation – when the egg is produced – making conception impossible.”

So how can our negative thoughts and emotions affect our ability to conceive?

The negative emotions and issues from our past that are generated by the subconscious mind create what we have come to collectively label as stress, and we feel this stress every day until we process and heal the source of it. Stress has everything to do with old feelings, emotions, and issues, and our daily workload is simply compounding what we have been holding inside, all of our lives. Therefore, the stress diagnosis is often misunderstood; cutting back at work is only a small part of a much larger picture. How can stress or negative feelings and emotions affect the body on a physical level? 

It can actually cause many reproductive disharmonies, including:

• Inadequate uterine blood flow
• Poor follicle production and quality
• Increased stress hormones which then inhibit the hormones that stimulate ovulation. These stress hormones can also block progesterone levels which can negatively impact implantation
• Block the hypothalamus gland which can essentially switch off reproductive functions when it is stressed
• Weakening the adrenal glands which can lead to lowering progesterone levels
• Disruption of the function of the pituitary gland’s production of hormones
• Creation of uterine fibroids
• Cause irregular cycles
• Increase prolactin levels, which can interfere with ovulation.

Many women have unprocessed emotional issues that are blocking their ability to conceive and only when they identify and process these issues will they be able to become pregnant. These issues are deeply ingrained in the subconscious mind and that is where the healing must take place.  

Often the true sources of stress in people’s lives are issues from the past such as abortions, miscarriages, perfectionism, fear of failure, and feelings of inadequacy. These are often generating stress at a much higher level than day-to-day stresses like your job or paying the bills.

An example of this might be a woman who has experienced a couple of miscarriages. Miscarriages can instil the fear of losing another baby in a subsequent pregnancy. That fear of loss might go so much deeper and have roots that began long before the miscarriages.  

The fear of loss and feeling unsupported may be rooted in feelings of loneliness and abandonment that she experienced as a child as she watched her alcoholic parents disappear emotionally into their drinking. Perhaps, as a teenager, she lost her grandmother, who was the only person in her youth who gave her unconditional love. That generated more feelings of loss and separation. Perhaps there was a relationship in her early twenties where the boyfriend she thought was her true love left her without much explanation. Add to that scenario, trying to have a baby with a husband who can sometimes be “distant”. Perhaps he buried himself in his work – at the time of the miscarriages – because he didn’t know how to process his grief or how to support his wife during that difficult time. Not only is there loss and separation from the miscarriage, but those losses are reinforcing a history of loss and separation. The miscarriages, which are tremendously difficult in and of themselves, added to what was already an open wound.  

Suddenly having a family begins to feel scary and uncomfortable at a deep subconscious level. Based on her past experiences, that woman’s subconscious mind might believe that if she gets pregnant, she may have to do everything on her own because people in her life have never been there for her with any consistency. For someone in this situation cutting down on the work hours to lessen her stress may temporarily relieve one component of stress, but it does nothing to relieve the internal accumulation of the deeper, ongoing emotional anxiety.

Our bodies reflect our emotions. The significance of that concept is that the issues, and the subsequent stress, are a culmination of life experiences and are not simply due to our day-to-day activities and workload. The stress from old wounds is always with us until we process and heal it. Homeopathic treatment is holistic; therefore it can help to release our emotions as well as heal our physical body. I have seen it work wonders with releasing old trauma and buried emotional stress from the past that could be blocking your fertility. Click here to book a free Zoom call with me to explore how homoeopathy could help you.