The spiritual lessons of infertility

My dear friend Shannon has a blog called Infertility Awakening about her experience with infertility. It is a truly inspirational account of her pathway to healing and wholeness in the very midst of the infertility struggle. Today, for example, she was writing about the importance of listening to one’s intuition. What makes her blog so unique is that much of what she writes about applies to all women, not just those with infertility. Reading it today, I was struck that so much of what she has learned about how to cope and even to live well in the midst of infertility has been from the emotional healing she has experienced by viewing her infertility as a spiritual journey.

In the spiritual practices of yoga and meditation you hear about the concept of attachment a lot. It hasn’t always been terribly clear to me exactly what that meant, but the experience of infertility is a powerful illustration of this concept. To put it simply, when life doesn’t turn out the way you expected it to, the degree to which you suffer is in direct correlation to how attached you were to your idea of how it ought to have been. With infertility, not only is the picture of how things should be so deeply ingrained into the very fabric of society but there is a biological, hormonal dimension; our physical bodies are holding the imprint of how things should be. No wonder it feels so painfully wrong when life does not follow the long-anticipated prescribed route. A dream is dying. We could say that infertility is the experience of grieving for life un-lived.

I see a parallel with traditional bereavement, in the way that some people experience what in hospice we refer to as complicated grief. Difficulty accepting the discrepancy between hopes and reality can become toxic. I feel deeply saddened when I see the pain of the empty cradle inside a woman’s heart grow bigger and bigger, taking up so much room that it obliterates the possibility to experience other joys in her life. This experience is not unique to women suffering with infertility. Depression, anxiety, and stress are all frequently attributable by the way in which we cope or don’t cope with life not turning out the way we hoped it would.

In different ways, we are all susceptible to the malignant growth of an unmet need to the point that it destroys our ability to feel present joy and contentment. A daily contemplative practice such as yoga, meditation, gratitude journaling, or prayer is a powerful antidote to medicine to such spiritual sickness and I have also found The Work of Byron Katie to be an incredibly useful tool in this regard. Much suffering can be alleviated if we are able to deal with what we need to each day without the additional emotional toll of resisting the reality we face. Freeing up our energy from dwelling in how things should be different, gives us much more energy to heal and make the best of how things are.