"Have you ever heard of a man with such bad luck," the townspeople rubbed their foreheads with amazement.
That week, as the son, weary and aching, rested in bed to heal his leg, the Emperor declared war on the neighboring province and conscripted all able-bodied young men to serve in his army. The entire empire knew this would be a bloody battle, but, obediently, they sent off their sons. Except one.
Bad luck-good luck?
It is not always so easy to tell.
The Mind/Body Mystery "When hard and rigid, we consort with death. When soft and flexible we affirm greater life." (Tao 76)
Gary Zukav, in his wonderful book, The Seat of the Soul, talks about the importance of acceptance. When we fight the way it is, when we deny reality, and resist the truth of our circumstances or feelings, he suggests that what we are doing is guaranteeing that we stay stuck. The truth shall set you free, he reminds us, and it is only by recognizing and accepting our reality that we can ultimately change it. On an Oprah show this past year, he told a woman, "If you want to be free of this problem, instead of saying, 'Why me?' ask, 'Now what?'" Acceptance does not mean passivity, he clarifies. It is the gateway for true, conscious action. Acceptance is a spiritual surrender to the way it is. Only from there can we make sound, productive decisions-whether to continue with fertility procedures or not, whether to pursue adoption or not, whether we want to be free to choose something entirely different or not.
In social work school, a colleague by the name of Rosemarie used to say, "When you resist, it persists." A novice and an oppositionalist at heart, I dismissed the idea. I believed, like so many others, that it was good and proper to resist. After all, we were a whole generation born on "fighting the good fight." If there was injustice, I argued with her, we were honor-bound to resist! But the years have taught me the real (non-political) wisdom of her words, the urgency of her message, and the secret magic behind it.
For there's an even more interesting sub-text to "coming to terms" and acceptance: For some reason, when women are able to relax into their life and relinquish some of the frenzy and struggle for control, they get pregnant.
According to Judith Prager, Ph.D., a hypnotherapist and author in Los Angeles, California, "We give our power away to anything we desire too much. And that desire has the effect of pushing things away from us by its very intensity."
One woman, LM, is now a single mother of an eight-year-old girl, something she never, ever expected to be:
They told me when I had P.I.D. that I would never conceive, to just forget about it. And, with time, I did. I forgot about it, until I missed two periods. It was not supposed to happen. I'm glad it did, but it's still a mystery.
Aerodynamically, bumble bees should not be able to fly. But they do.
What can possibly explain these "spontaneous" pregnancies? What happens to these women?
This more subtle aspect to fertility has less to do with biological parts and pieces than it does with spirit and attitude.
The mind/body is not, as many mistakenly conceive, two parts of us (like valves and crank shafts) in some form of linear communication with one another. The concept is more comprehensive and extraordinary than that. The mind/body is one, an entirety, a living, mutable, responsive organism. It is not an entirely new idea, for that matter. Before the reductionist scenario gained the dominant foothold in the medical schools, there was a school that believed in vitalistic medicine-that there was a vital force, a life essence, that was at work in us all. Samuel Hahnemann, the father of homeopathic medicine and the physician after whom the medical college in Philadelphia was named, refers to the wesen, the life force as the source of the human being and the place to aim the treatment of disease. "The totality of ... symptoms is the outwardly reflected image of the inner wesen of the disease, that is, of the suffering of the life force." (Organon of the Medical Art, ed., Wenda O'Reilly, Ph.D.)
In mind/body medicine and psychotherapy, the mind and body cannot be separated at all. What happens to one happens to the other. It is all connected in a fiber so fine, comprising a tapestry so complex, that if you pull one thread the whole picture changes.
For women struggling with fertility, this understanding can be both daunting and relieving. They have another option that can both enhance any further procedures that are medically indicated and, when procedures and technology have proved ineffective or when there are no biologically evident causes for the problem, can help facilitate conception itself.
J. Acosta is a writer and practicing clinical psychotherapist. She has written two books: THE WORST IS OVER (2002, Jodere) and THE NEXT OSAMA (2006). Her third is due to come out some time next year and she is currently in the middle of her fourth.
She has her practice in New Mexico with her canine therapeutic assistants. She has worked with anxiety and fear in patients for twenty years. She has watched it, felt it, wrote about it, and helped heal people from it. As a result, she has learned a few things about fear, particularly that growing epidemic she calls VIRAL FEAR.
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