(client in her late 30’s wanting to have a baby. She is a lawyer doing a very high powered job. Her partner and her were trying for a baby for 2 years and had done 1 round of IVF with no success.)
When a woman can’t conceive it could be for many reasons so it’s useful to get all the checks done first to see if there’s anytihng physiological that could be stopping the sperm and egg igniting.
My client came to me because there was no ‘apparent’ medical reason for why she wasn’t pregnant yet. Usually, we start our work together by laying out the map and landscape of the person from brith to where they find themselves today. It gives both me and my client a space to note or intuit anything perhaps left ‘unsaid’.
In this particular story the client never mentioned her mother, she was there in her family but was very much in the background as a supportive, loving. quiet energy who was often ignored by her husband and never valued for the love and gentle support she brought to the family as a whole. My client was the eldest of 3 girls, the apple of her father’s eye, one could say the ‘son’ he never had. They spent a lot of time together in her youth, he would teach her fishing, hunting, golf (those things perhaps thought of as for ‘men’ a generation ago).
Through our work together we met very strong ‘mind’ energetics in her which in my work are often ‘masucline’ in energy ie. dynamic, logical, pragmatic, achieveing, goal-oreintated. Great energies to have to get you high up in career that was at that time very male-dominated. Her strongest ‘muscles’ in her psyche were these analysing, doing, active, achieveing energetics and when we went to unravel the polarity (the shadow) of these strong muscles ie. the being, feeling, intuitive, more present time energetics within her psyche she noticed how hard it was for her to connect to them. Literally she said “I’m scared to go there into feeling incase I don’t come back and then I won’t be able to function in my job,”
It’s important in our work together that we never over-ride these ‘primary’ parts - the parts of us that are out there in the world functioning and getting things done. However, without the understanding and integration of both of these polarities - the doing with the being, the feeling with the thinking etc. it can be incredibly hard to create a baby because the nature of making a baby requires time, space, feeling deeply, softening. Getting pregnant/giving birth is not something you can just cram into a diary like any other social event. In one of our sessions it was very beautiful to have her trust enough in the work and process with me to connect to her deepest vulnerabilty.
It came up in a most remarkable way. Literally the part of her that was dynamic, goal-orientated, a strong patriarch (as in an inner patriarch doesn’t particularly value women for more than keeping a home) stood up one day and said “Look there’s no way we have worked our balls off to get her to the position we are today only to have her stop and have a baby and get her head all mushed up with emotions and touchy-feely stuff!” Bham! The subconscious had spoken, the beliefs of those energetics inside of her that were limiting her life and keeping it all career based had spoken their truth out loud.
The session followed with my client having a very poignant dream: “I’m at my age now and I am in a beautiful garden. My father (who died 5 years’ ago) is there in the garden with me looking frail and old. He asks me to take a seat and to hold out my hands. He gives me a black bird with a broken wing and says he’s been trying to fix the bird for a long time but it won’t fly. I look down at the exhausted bird and I feel its heart trembling. I hold it close to my own heart and I feel love pouring from my heart down through my hands. Suddenly the bird starts to move and opens its wings wide and takes flight. I wake up feeling freer than I have ever felt in my entire life.”
A few weeks’ later my client announced she was pregnant.
