We don't need no education - at least not as we know it!

“We don't need no education

We don't need no thought control

No dark sarcasm in the class room

Teachers leave those kids alone

(yells) Hey, teachers! Leave those kids alone!

All in all, it's just a

Nother brick in the wall”

(Pink Floyd)

It’s been a challenging autumn thus far; it was perhaps inevitable really as the change in season from Summer to Autumn has brought with it some pretty intense moon cycles. Not only that but Autumn always brings with it new beginnings, which affects so many of us as our routines change to accommodate the new school and University terms.  I don’t know about you but there is a smell in the air in early September that still catches me from time to time and reminds me of that feeling of getting ready to go back to school again.

For many years I also used to get this in late September too with the arrival of the University term and it used to throw me a bit.  School I loved but University was a little more challenging for me as I used to get really homesick and would miss my family and friends and our life on Guernsey. For a few years afterwards, I’d smell that smell and find myself feeling a little anxious – it was a relief when I got over this and the smell of Autumn meant nothing more than exactly that – a change in season, all negative associations gone.

This September was an interesting one for us as Elijah was booked to begin pre-school, which would not only bring with it a change in routine for all of us, but would herald the beginning of integration into the main stream conforming world of education and all that entails. I can’t say I have ever been comfortable with the idea of him going to pre-school, not only does he still seem so little but he has lots of fun in his existing daily schedule and I wasn’t convinced that pre-school was going to add any value to his current life experiences, at least not in a positive way.

Needless to say I held off for as long as I could (he will be turning 3 in November) but I was very aware that most of the toddlers we have mixed with through baby yoga and playgroup etc. were either already in pre-school or due to start this September too. It’s been a popular subject for a while now, most conversations with other mothers involve a question about pre-school so you could say that I felt some societal pressure to ensure he was signed up for one before all spaces got filled.  It’s been a huge lesson in that actually, the doing things just because others expect it of you and tell you it’s the right thing to do even though your innate wisdom as a mother tells you otherwise.  Bad Emma, I should know better!

So we signed Elijah up at a lovely pre-school recommended to us, and with a heavy heart we awaited D-day and the new chapter in all our lives.  We weren’t the only ones with heavy hearts though and while some of these heavy hearts were also to do with pre-school, I have a work colleague and some friends who were also experiencing heavy hearts on account of their children heading off to University for the first time, right at the other end of the educational system.

We laughed about the different experiences us mother’s experience (this separation and togetherness is complex indeed) what with toddlers not wanting you to leave them at pre-school and clinging on for dear life, and on the other side, University students desperate for you to leave them so that they can get on with their new lives apart from you as you try to cling on to them instead! I remember this only too well from my own experience as my own family had to adjust to life without me back in the day.

My poor Mum was bereft and even the cat was sad on account of the fact (or so the vet said) that I had died as my Mum stripped my bed and did all my washing immediately I left, so there was no smell of me left for the cat to expect me to return – it was a lesson learned quickly, thereafter my bedding remained unwashed every time I returned to Uni until the morning of my return! My brother was thrown amiss too by the changes, he’d lost not only his partner in crime but also his driver and was stuck surfing at Vazon unless he could get a list to the other surfing breaks with my parents! 

D-day finally arrived, Elijah’s new Tractor Ted rucksack was packed and the obligatory photo was taken before we all piled into the car and journeyed to the Pre-School together.  Even now thinking back makes me feel a little uncomfortable because I honestly don’t know what I was thinking.  There was my poor innocent little boy sitting in the back of the car completely unaware of what lay ahead of him while we tried to keep things jovial but were consumed by a sense of trepidation in the background. The truth is we hadn’t really considered the enormous change about to take place. 

Now we are absolutely not fans of parenting labels, we have never read a parenting book between us and certainly haven’t done any research on the supposed long term effects of various approaches, we’ve simply done what has felt right for us all, as a family, and checked into our innate wisdom along the way.  This is not to say that I am not aware that parenting styles exist – you have only to google, “how can I get my toddler to sleep?” to be bombarded with a variety of viewpoints on the best way to achieve this depending upon parenting approach, but we have never followed any of them for the sake of following any one them – the fact he still doesn’t sleep is probably proof of that!

But that aside, if I was forced to define our parenting approach, I guess you could say it is gentle and slightly along the attachment parenting lines, but unintentionally so! This means that in practice we have fairly much co-slept from day one with no sleep training (any attempt to get him in his bed for the whole night fails miserably, he always ends up in ours at some point during the evening), extended breast-feeding until he was 2 (and the only reason I stopped was due to IVF treatment), lots of carrying (the pushchair has sat fairly empty this whole time) and lots of one –to-one attention simply because our schedules and extended family allow this.

We are lucky in this regard, we have flexible jobs so that we can manage childcare with more ease than most, and more importantly we have free childcare courtesy of my parents who are fortunate to have a small holding and lots of outdoor space so Elijah gets to do a lot of outdoor play – not only that but all three grandparents are ex-teachers so there is a degree of learning that comes from them simply because that’s how they’ve lived their lives; educating!

Thus Elijah has never been left with anyone other than me, E, my parents or E’s Mum. No one has ever put him to bed other than one of the 5 of us. This is not unusual as such, just that expecting him to just fit into an alien environment with children and adults he doesn’t know was a little, hmm, naïve of us I guess. In fact, it was plain right stupid and I gave myself a bit of a hard time about it for a while, although I appreciate that everything happens for a reason now that we’re coming through the other side of it!

That first morning Elijah ran straight into the pre-school distracted by all the toys as we said our goodbyes and left him to it figuring that we’d gotten away with it all very lightly as other children were dropped off crying. However, when we came to pick him up 3 hours later he was very upset, in shock if anything actually.  Let me just make the point that this was not the fault of the pre-school, they were great and were doing all they could to ease the situation, there is a recognised settling in period and I hold my hat off to the staff for trying to manage this.

He sat sobbing in his car seat all the way back to my parent’s house clinging onto my bra straps as I sat beside him cuddling him as best I could with him sitting in his car seat.  The bra strap thing started when he was breastfeeding, its like his comfort blanket and I always know he is out of sorts when he starts reaching for them! He carried on this way for a little while longer back at my parents’ house before he eventually bounced back to his normal self thankfully.

During that first session he had stubbed his toe on account of not wearing his shoes outside. We live in a shoe-free house and he is not a fan of shoes at the best of times and has spent most of the summer barefoot, we’re all totally comfortable with this as it is better for his physical development (or so we feel), and its up to him essentially, it’s his body wisdom.  He also doesn’t like to wear jumpers unless absolutely essential as he is rather warm blooded and we all honour this.  

Still, I realised as we picked him up that second day crying again and wearing his shoes and jumper that here he was beginning societal conditioning before he’s even reached the age of 3.  I totally understand the pre-school’s need to do this as they have health and safety regulations they need to follow, but I guess perhaps it just served as a reminder of the world we live in, not only from a health and safety perspective, but in terms of how, from such a young age, we have our own innate wisdom knocked out of us because we are told that to be a fully functioning member of society we absolutely must do certain things – like wear shoes and jumpers when we go outside to play.

The next week he was rather sombre in the morning and it was an effort to get him to eat anything.  He complained that he missed Mummy and didn’t want to go to school, and he started to get tearful in the car on the way to the pre-school.  At the pre-school itself he got very upset and I felt sorry for the poor ladies trying to comfort him (and the other children) as he would take one look at them and howl into my chest.  To say it was heart-breaking leaving him is an understatement and I know I was not alone – there were other mothers looking equally upset in the carpark.

The pre-school staff were kind enough to send me texts each morning, although sadly on this third session it seemed he was struggling to settle, albeit that they didn’t think it warranted my early collection of him, there were just tears on and off all morning. Suffice it to say he was upset when I collected him and I felt dreadful because something just wasn’t feeling right about all this regardless of the fact all the other mother’s I talked to about it said it was normal and you just have to go with it, it can take weeks to settle them in apparently.

The trouble was, he was worse the following session, the tears started upon waking and he cried his way to the pre-school and howled on entering to the extent that I actually wondered if I should take him back home with me.  The ladies were busy comforting other children and as lovely as they are and as much as they tried to make it easier for me to leave him, it just felt so counter intuitive to leave him distressed and howling with – essentially – a complete stranger while I returned home to an empty house and my parents sat around awaiting for his return at lunchtime.

As I’ve tried to stress, none of this was the fault of the pre-school, absolutely none.  It is a popular and happy place, only that my son was not enjoying it.  He was crying when I collected him and while one of the ladies had been kind enough to show me a photo she had taken of Elijah playing on his own and not crying, this almost made me feel worse because he was on his own and he can be on his own at home – one of the reasons I felt pressured to put him to pre-school was to encourage the social interaction which everyone tells me is so essential to his development.

The fact he was not thriving with the new arrangements, however, became apparent over the weekend. The mere mention of the word ‘school’ set his bottom lip trembling and the tears would quickly follow as he told me and my parents (E was away) that he didn’t want to go to school. He started grinding his teeth which he had never done previously.  He also became ridiculously clingy and was very restless at night, difficult to settle and insistent on sleeping with me but requiring “big cuddles” on an hourly basis. He wasn’t even sure about being left with his grandparents, simply because he needed the extra reassurance that I would return for him.

It was a little traumatic for all of us to witness the change in him like this, he was usually such a happy go lucky and cheeky little monkey and now all of sudden he was anxious and clingy, and a little sad really. I guess in his eyes we’d abandoned him and he really didn’t understand the reason for this. We had hoped that by putting him into pre-school he would thrive but he seemed to be wilting instead and while, yes, it was early days, there was something telling me that this was not right.

So I spent that weekend doing lots of online research on pre-schools and schooling generally and my parents and I discussed the matter at length. As previously mentioned, my parents are both ex-teachers, my Dad having headed up a local Guernsey primary school before he left education to pursue an alterative – and less exhausting – career. He remains very passionate about education, and had come across an article on “unschooling” which even he had found interesting and did make him question his perspective on education, especially now witnessing the effect of pre-school on Elijah.

I have to say that I found the article on unschooling very interesting too as it gave me a name for something that has been on my mind for a while now.  While I have looked into home schooling and joined on occasion the local home schooling community, there is something about this that doesn’t resonate quite so much with me.  It has been explained that all unschooling is home schooling but not all home schooling is unschooling because while home schooler children follow a structured curriculum, unschoolers have almost total autonomy over their days.

But what does this mean in practice?  Well Earl Stevens, whose children are “unschooled”, writes the following: “Our son has never had an academic lesson, has never been told to read or to learn mathematics, science, or history. Nobody has told him about phonics. He has never taken a test or been asked to study or memorize anything. When people ask, "What do you do?" My answer is that we follow our interests - and our interests inevitably lead to science, literature, history, mathematics, music - all the things that have interested people before anybody thought of them as "subjects".

A large component of unschooling is grounded in doing real things, not because we hope they will be good for us, but because they are intrinsically fascinating. There is an energy that comes from this that you can't buy with a curriculum. Children do real things all day long, and in a trusting and supportive home environment, "doing real things" invariably brings about healthy mental development and valuable knowledge. It is natural for children to read, write, play with numbers, learn about society, find out about the past, think, wonder and do all those things that society so unsuccessfully attempts to force upon them in the context of schooling.”

I have to say that I recognise some truth in this. We too follow our interests, me with yoga, E with gardening and Elijah with tractors and together we learn.  I have learned so much from E about nature since I met him and have developed a complete love of being outdoors at every opportunity, I can even name a few trees!  From me he has developed a love of sea swimming and even learnt stuff about yoga, crystals, healing and angels (whether he’s wanted to or not!)! From Elijah we have learned an enormous amount about tractors and diggers and farming; where once a tractor was a tractor, now it’s a Massey Ferguson or a New Holland and we know about telehandlers and combines let alone about harvesting the maize and what happens on farms!

With my parents Elijah learns a lot about growing and working outside, my Mum cooks and paints with him and reads to him, my Dad plays with him at length, both lost in the moment of their imaginary world, making incredible train tracks that stretch through the living room and beyond, and spending hours on their electric/petrol fuelled tractors out on the land. This summer we’ve spent hours on the beach playing and collecting shells, and also identifying the type of sand we need to make the optimum sandcastle, let alone the rather impressive tractors that my Dad now specialises in.

With his grandma he sings and sits plonking at the piano, they spend time watering all her hundreds of potted plants in the garden and they go to the Model Yacht Pond and identify the boats – he knows them better than I do! They go out on the bus and into town. When out with Daddy and Grandma together there are regular visits to garden centres and to the parks, let alone shopping and going to the Bank and all that stuff that teaches them a little about how life works.

I absolutely know we are not alone, that is not my reason for sharing, more so just to explain that for us, we love doing and experiencing things, whether that be on Guernsey or on our travels off Island.  This way of living has provided me with an opportunity to witness how much children learn from just being – from playing essentially, not only on their own but with others, albeit that those persons are older than them! In many respects why would Elijah want to go to pre-school when he has his grandparent’s undivided attention and gets to do so much playing whether that be on their land, in the house or on the beach.

Of course the unschooling approach is not for everyone, and I’m not saying we’ll be doing this, more so that I can understand the reason that parents decide to offer this style of “education” to their children. It does massively go against the grain though, especially as we are so conditioned to believe that education has to be a certain way.  The truth is there are many different ways to educate children, it really should depend on the individual and what works best for them.

I am fascinated by the Finnish education system for example. For the past decade Finland has consistently performed among the top Nation’s on the programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardised test given to 15-16 year olds in 65 nations and territories around the world.  Yet here their education system is very different to ours in the UK.  The children do not start school until 7, and can attend voluntary play-based kindergartens prior to this where all they do, quite simply, is play. The idea is that children learn far more from play than being forced to learn in the more traditional sense, and by the age of 7 they are said to be like sponges, absolutely thirsty to learn.

Furthermore, there are no school inspectors or league tables, no examinations for any child under the age of 16, there is no private tuition industry and charging school fees is illegal. Teachers are all educated to master’s level and have autonomy, they are called by their first name and there are no school uniforms. There is no homework either, children are encouraged to get outside and play.

Not only that but I like the whole “equality” ethos behind the system where they support everyone and don’t waste anyone’s skills. Regardless of a person’s gender, background or social welfare status, everyone is given an equal chance to make the most of their schools. They really believe that for young people cooking, creative pursuits and sports are really important. They teach the meaning of life and community skills so that they recognise their role in the greater whole.

Essentially therefore, the Finnish have created a school system based on the concept that we are all one, that we all have a gift, a strength, a thing (whatever it may be) to offer to the world however different that may be, and they do their best to help children tap into this so that the whole community and indeed society can benefit – let alone helping to empower that individual and provide a way for them to express themselves, regardless of whether this is academic or non-academic.

This is at odds with our own education system here in the UK, which has a strong focus on testing and academic results.  Now please don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that this works for many – it worked for me for example, but there are lots of children who suffer as a result of this approach to educating, my brother being one such case. While I thrived with my Grammar School education and absolutely loved studying (I know, crazy), my brother “failed” his 11+ (despite having a higher IQ than me, but he had to contend with dyslexia) and has considered himself a bit of a failure academically ever since then.

The truth is his education at Les Beaucamps was far better than mine at the Grammar School in many respects.  I may have been able to pass exams, but I certainly couldn’t retain the knowledge and I left school with very few life skills - I went to University unable to cook and therefore feed myself, I had no idea how to work a washing machine and clean my clothes, I didn’t know how to change a light bulb or sort out bills, I had no idea how to budget or to manage my money, I couldn’t sew a button let alone darn a sock, it was a miracle really that I made it through those three years, it was certainly a massive shock for me.

My brother on the other hand had been better prepared.  He knew how to cook for a start and has been good at it ever since.  He also knew how to exist outside the academic bubble – to this day my best friend’s husband still jokes about the bubble I live in, because I missed out on so much life experience in my earlier years due to spending so many hours sitting in my room or a library studying – and was far more sociable and well rounded in his general knowledge, the fact he had a general knowledge was a step up from me!

Now you could argue that my parents should have better prepared me for the big wide world and perhaps they should have done, but I truly believe that school should have been doing this too. I’m not convinced there’s much advantage to answering questions and writing essays on Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale” (I know, I’m sorry all your English literature lovers) when I couldn’t even feed myself at University.  And yes, I’m sure there must be some merit to learning how to make a pink fluffy seal in my first year of home economics, but the fact I can’t really sew a button indicates that perhaps we should have been focusing on the basic – and indeed important – stuff before trying our hand at something as, hmm, well, as interesting a seal then!

Actually the list goes on, because I’m not convinced that Algebra has ever really helped me in the real world, and to be honest it never helped me in school either, apart from making me feel very inadequate because I didn’t understand it or have any interest in studying it. Geography on the other hand, well that was a different matter, it was relevant to real life, it taught me about people and places and was very much alive, that’s probably the reason I went on to study it at University and have spent quite a lot of my adult life travelling and embracing different ways of life and culture. 

But history and learning about the Peel government, yawn, yawn, yawn, and as for physics, well that was an utter turn off. The funny thing is I now spend quite a lot of my life working with energy so I have developed a keen interest in physics, well at least from a metaphysical perspective, and am quite sure that if I studied it now – and with relevance to the energy work particularly –I would be thoroughly engaged.

And that really is the ethos behind the unschooling.  The fact that you learn what you’re interested in when you’re ready to learn it rather than being forced to learn something just because someone has decided that that’s the curriculum. I recall an incident in chemistry that I shall never forget that supports a little this theory – I absolutely loathed chemistry too at school, I was useless at it to be honest, but there was one time that my brother and I got our hands on one of those home chemistry sets and we got really into it, learning through playing with it. 

We happened to be studying a similar thing in class and all of a sudden I was far more engaged than I’d ever been previously and for the first time ever I put my hand up to answer a question – and I got it right. The teacher was understandably surprised and that term I got a D2 for chemistry which made me laugh because I usually got a D4 (I only ever got Ds in chemistry, even physics I managed a C!) and it made me chuckle because while I was still useless at the subject, at least that term I started to put in a bit more effort, simply because I had the freedom to learn from my own mistakes as I played around with a chemistry set at home.

I think that the word “freedom” is the bit that stands out for me in terms of education – and indeed how I like to live my life generally, perhaps it’s a yogic thing!  And I like very much what Ben Hewitt writes about this when explaining the price his children pay to be unschooled “...perhaps the best answer I can give to the question of what price my children might pay is in the form of another question: What price do school-going children pay for their confinement? The physical toll is easy enough to quantify. Diabetes rates among school-age children are sky-high, and the percentage of 6-to-11-year-olds who qualify as obese has nearly tripled since 1980. And what do children do in school? Exactly. They sit.”,

But, in truth, what I most want for my boys can’t be charted or graphed. It can’t be measured, at least not by common metrics. There is no standardized test that will tell me if it has been achieved, and there is no specific curriculum that will lead to its realization.

This is what I want for my sons: freedom. Not just physical freedom, but intellectual and emotional freedom from the formulaic learning that prevails in our schools. I want for them the freedom to immerse themselves in the fields and forest that surround our home, to wander aimlessly or with purpose.

 I want for them the freedom to develop at whatever pace is etched into their DNA, not the pace dictated by an institution looking to meet the benchmarks that will in part determine its funding. I want them to be free to love learning for its own sake, the way that all children love learning for its own sake when it is not forced on them or attached to reward. I want them to remain free of social pressures to look, act, or think any way but that which feels most natural to them. I want for them the freedom to be children. And no one can teach them how to do that.”

Too often in life I can’t help thinking that we are forced to be and to live a way that isn’t natural to us, that doesn’t bring out the best in us.  I know first hand how this can be detrimental to our long term health and wellbeing, I suffered with depression for years until I finally managed to align my life a little closer with my inner truth and live in a way that felt more harmonious to my heart and soul.  I know that sounds awfully flaky to some, but there is a lot of truth in how we have been conditioned by our upbringing based on someone else’s concept of what they deemed right/wrong for us and how this later may negatively impact on the choices we make in our lives and how this then impacts on our general health and wellbeing.

For many economic success has been the motivator for life choices from pre-school through to University and onwards into careers whether those careers suit or not. I know an awful number of people who studied hard to get the good career to earn the good money, but who are essentially very unhappy. For many they have to work long hours to sustain their “success” and miss out on seeing their children growing up, or having any connection to themselves, to nature and/or the wider world we live in and compromise their health and wellbeing in the process. 

It is only when something goes wrong be that with their health, their relationships or perhaps the blessing of redundancy, that they “wake up” and consider that there may be another way of living and that economic success is not always the path to inner peace and happiness. While this may be hard to come to terms with initially, it is often the point where people suddenly find this renewed energy for life and their lives take on an entirely different direction that they may not have considered possible previously – some even start living the dreams that they gave up on years previously.

Still it takes all sorts and I appreciate that we all have different motivating factors for the choices we make in life.  For some they absolutely thrive in pre-school and the current UK/Guernsey educational system while for others there is an awful amount of struggling and unhappiness that comes with it. It is not for me to judge anyone else’s choices just as it is not for anyone else to judge our choice, we all make decisions based on what we believe works best for our individual children and for us as parents and families too.

I truly believe that there will be shifts in how we educate our children as more and more people begin to realise that there are options and that the current system is not working for everyone. In Guernsey we are certainly being forced to address this as we battle on with the 11+ issue. For us, for now at least, we are happy with the decision we have made to take Elijah out of pre-school and we’ll see where this takes us in the future, as long as he’s happy then that’s all that matters really.

References

Earl Stevens http://www.naturalchild.org/guest/earl_stevens.html

Ben Hewitt (http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/why-you-should-take-your-kids-out-of-school/)

Photography - courtesy of Rosemary Després

The Sark Folk Festival and Nesting!

At sixteen weeks, just like a light switch being switched, the sickness disappeared as quickly as it had arrived, and life returned to some semblance of normality again, whatever that is! Well for two weeks at least, because strangely, at eighteen weeks, that familiar nausea sensation returned, albeit not as all consuming as it had been previously, thankfully.

It coincided with us attending the Sark Folk Festival so I concluded that it was probably due to this. But sadly it has continued a little ever since.  Hormones. Or perhaps tiredness.  Because let’s face it, festival-ling is exhausting at the best of times, let alone when you’re pregnant and have a toddler in tow, and you’re cycling everywhere!

It was a strange weekend really. My parents were meant to accompany us for the first night, but they had to cancel at the last minute.  This was a real shame, although it did mean that we were kindly given their room at Stocks, one of the few hotels on Sark and a very lovely and indeed expensive one at that.  It was an absolute treat for us really, most definitely the highlight of the weekend (thank you Mum and Dad!).

Not only was it lovely to chill out at the hotel before the festival on the Friday, but it was really rather amazing to cycle back there with Elijah that early evening freezing cold and tired, and enjoy such un-expected festival luxury - a warm, clean and comfortable room, the opportunity to make endless cups of tea at the flick of a button (rather than having to boil water on the campsite!), take a shower and lie back on that huge bed, all the while knowing my poor friends were camping in a field instead (tee hee, sorry Vic!)

Waking the next morning was pretty amazing too; it’s blissfully peaceful at the hotel, not a sound in the air, well aside from our squeals as we attempted to make the most of the outdoor swimming pool, albeit the air temperature at 14 degrees at that stage! But we warmed up with a free breakfast and all in all I managed to squeeze in four showers while we were staying there, not just because I have an OCD shower thing but because I was at a festival and I could. Ha!

The weather was a little challenging over the weekend to say the least, the intense wind grew very waring and the air temperature was much cooler than you would expect at this time of year. Plus, the rain arrived, which I guess is part and parcel of festival-ling but an irritation nonetheless! Still we managed to go ahead with the pre-planned festival yoga classes and I’m very grateful to those who made the effort to attend.

The Saturday class was a particular highlight as I was joined by a number of yogis and yoginis on the bottom field, near to the hedge, which provided some relief from the incessant wind, and provided incredible views out to sea and of Guernsey in the distance. It doesn’t get much better than that, a yoga class with a view and a yoga class in the great outdoors too. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, spending time in nature is essential, in my humble opinion, for the happiness of our soul. It makes us feel alive. 

And practicing yoga in the elements like this, on uneven earth – the real earth with all its energy and earthiness – in the sunshine, with the wind blowing against our skin and the sound of the birds and the insects crawling on us, well it doesn’t get more special, more uplifting for the soul, than this. I certainly felt better for it, and it’s always lovely to share yoga outdoors like this.

The Sunday morning the weather was not so kind and I was amazed that so many braved the wet weather to join me for a class back on the earth, in the corner of the two main tents, with a lovely man playing his music and singing his songs on one of the stages and the sound guys setting up for ‘Big Sheep’ (I LOVE this band) on the other, so that voice projection was a bit of an issue. But we still managed a good forty minutes of yoga to stretch away the aches and pains from the camping and all the cycling and walking.  Nothing like yoga at a festival to make the spirit shine!

I’m not so sure that camping on the Saturday made the spirit shine though. Returning to our tent at La Valette campsite that Saturday lunchtime from Stock’s was a bit of a low point, what with the intense winds blowing across the field so that it was really rather unpleasant, and indeed cold, sitting outside! And I don’t know who I was kidding thinking that we could get Elijah to take his lunchtime nap in a tent. It was bright, hot and very noisy what with all the wind.  He looked at me, laughed and proceeded to jump around on the airbeds, what fun, Mummy and Daddy had brought a trampoline along camping with them!!

So we thought we’d get him to sleep out on the bikes, but our tractor-crazy son just laughed at us again as he pointed out all the tractors and the bumpy roads and all the tractor and bike tracks on the roads itself – this funny boy is also obsessed by tracks, utterly obsessed.  Sigh. We had a lovely cycle around the Island however, albeit the wind making it a bit of a mission and a little chilly at that so that it was actually quite a relief to return to our hot and bright tent, even with the now-hyper-child-who-was-missing-a-nap in tow!

Typically, he fell asleep on the way back to the festival that later afternoon, a massive ‘no. no’ in the world of napping, and he napped his way through the next hour or so while we sat in one of the tents, enjoying the relief of finally escaping the wind and hearing some music in the background - mind you not that the music was appreciated by my fellow festival-goers this year.  While Elijah found the music too loud the others concluded that folk music was just not their thing, which was a bit of a pity as I love it!!

So while our friends drank their way through the festival, all Elijah wanted to do was get outside and hang around the tractors parked up around the side of the field.  This was not what I had had in mind when I booked the tickets for the weekend, I had hoped for a lot more sitting around watching, and perhaps a little dancing to, music rather than standing around checking out the tractors in the freezing cold wind but one does what one does – I’m going on my own next year though!

We returned to the campsite that evening with a sense of resignation. After a night in Stock’s it was a little disappointing to say the least, although there was a positive because it was a lovely evening and we were on our own to enjoy it.  So while Elijah played with his toy tractor making tracks along, well the track, I took myself off to the bench on the edge of the cliff by the Lighthouse to enjoy the solitude and tranquillity of being all on my own and watching nature unfold before my very eyes, bliss.

All three of us were in bed before darkness had fallen, and I laugh when I reflect back on this now, because E and I were exhausted and desperate to go to sleep and just get on with it, the night in the tent that is, but Elijah was having none of it and was bouncing and jumping around having lots of fun on his ‘trampoline’ and I was desperately trying not to chuckle as E was trying to be stern with him but Elijah just ignored him and continued jumping and giggling.

Still all good things must come to an end and finally we settled Elijah down between us and there followed a rather long night for E and I, where neither of us felt like we got any sleep what with the noise of the festival revellers returning, the discomfort of the blow-up mattress (really not very comfortable at the best of times, let alone while pregnant!) and the sound of the wind and the rain, yes rain, outside the tent. Sigh.

It was with some relief to reach 6am and feel like we could get up and get on with the day – there’s nothing quite like waking in a tent to find that there is sheet rain and fog outside, and knowing that you need to take the tent down in it however, yuck!  Still there was a positive, the queue for the shower was short as a result of this so Elijah and I managed our sixth shower of the weekend and dressed in our waterproofs (well done E for making sure we had these with us!) we took down the tent – after a cup of tea boiled on the camp stove of course!

By 9.30am it was done, tent packed, rain easing and we were back at the festival site for the Sunday morning yoga class and a few hours of music before returning home.  It was a lovely Sunday actually, the festival takes on a more leisurely pace in my opinion and we very much enjoyed – even Elijah – listening to ‘The Big Sheep’.  Still, it was good to get back home and unpack from the weekend, and take a quick dip in the sea to clear the energy of a rather lumpy boat journey and then collapse – ah yes festival-going, camping and all that outdoor air certainly got the better of me!

Still, aside from the tiredness and the nausea, returning home from the Festival heralded a new beginning for me – nesting! It just happened really.  All of a sudden I had this intense desire to bake. Now don’t get me wrong, I do go through phases where I like to bake, but within one week I’d made my first ever cheesecake which was so well received at work that I never got a chance to give it a try any, a banana loaf, two batches of fairy cakes, a French chocolate cake thing which sadly looked nothing like the one my Mum makes, some disastrous healthy oatmeal cookies (what is it with healthy cookies, they never stick together!) and those wonderfully delicious energy balls – not that they are strictly baking, more so mixing!

I’ve also gotten right back into my cooking and my ‘Deliciously Ella’ cookbook is off the book shelf and back in the kitchen again. I know she’s a bit of a cliché and everyone went a little crazy for her last year but there are some yummy recipes in there.  I particularly like the lentil and butternut squash dhal and the brazil nut, avocado and basil pesto, yum, yum!  Cravings are now back to normal again, its hummus all the way and I rather like her recipe for this. My mixer doesn’t know what’s happening, for months it has been sat there doing nothing and now it’s used at least once a day.  It’s funny how pregnancy brings out these things in us.

Nesting may have taken hold of the kitchen but sadly not the rest of the cottage itself as we have some quite major building work going on.  Two of the front rooms have been dug up for damp proofing, which means we are living in one main room with stuff all over the place and the dust, oh my gosh, I had no idea dust could travel so far!  Arghhh! It’s certainly challenging my cleaning OCD, albeit easier to maintain one main room than a whole cottage, but nonetheless, I am reminded constantly to take a deep breath in and out and let it all go…

And that really was the message of my week last week really.  All the signs were pointing to the need to let go and go with the flow.  Helped a little by a healing from a cranial-sacral session, I found that there were times where there was nothing I could do but let go, chill out, make sandcastles on the beach (when the sun’s been shining), bake cakes, enjoy yoga nidra, sit in silence, enjoy nature and try and get some sleep (Elijah dependant).  Oh and the other message, loud and clear?  To put all summer camping trips on hold for the time being!

Morning sickness? Day sickness more like!

So I still have every intention of writing and sharing more about IVF, about ICSI and preparing for egg retrieval, about embryo transfer and patiently (and anxiously) waiting to take a pregnancy test, about preparing for a frozen embryo cycle, that failing, healing and preparing for another final embryo cycle.  But before I do all that, I’m keen to write about morning sickness, simply because I am still in the throes of it, so it seems appropriate to share from my current experience.

Morning sickness sucks!  Yes, I know, I know, I should be very grateful for the fact that I’m even experiencing morning sickness because that means I’m pregnant! Yes, I get that, and I’m quite sure that when I was having trouble conceiving, I got sick of hearing other pregnant ladies moan about their sickness and about their indigestion and tiredness and all the other stuff that pregnancy entails.

But the truth is, morning sickness is the most debilitating thing I have ever experienced.  And to be honest unless you’ve gone through it, I don’t think you can ever quite understand how absolutely awful a feeling it is.

For a start, the term “morning sickness” is utterly ridiculously.  Yes, whoever thought this one up was clearly someone who has never experienced it because I am feeling pretty sick most of the day, from say 11am (if I’m lucky) right through to bed time, with things peaking sometime around tea time. 

And please, no advice for things I can do to alleviate it – I know you only mean well but I’ve tried all sorts of things and absolutely nothing has made a difference, and no, please no ginger, even the thought of this makes me feel sick, let alone a ginger biscuit, and as for flat coke, or flat anything for that matter, no, no, no!!

Saying all that, some stuff has helped a little bit but in a temporary way.  Not the homeopathic remedies, nor the Bach floral remedies sadly, but teaching yoga, probably because I am totally distracted and in the moment (although I tend to crash a few hours later), swimming in the sea (this is probably due to the shock of the 12 degree Celcius water) and sleeping. Yes, sleeping is the key, in fact all I really want to do is sleep, sleep and more sleep!

This time the sickness arrived almost as quickly as the pregnancy, at only five weeks.  I just started having this slight sense of nausea and aversion to certain smells and foods that quickly became all encompassing so that by week six I was really feeling it.  All of a sudden going to the supermarket became a very unpleasant experience as certain foods absolutely repulsed me and made me feel instantly sick, while others totally draw me in, it’s the strangest thing!

I remember towards the end of week six forcing myself into the Coop – it literally becomes an absolute effort to go food shopping as you know you’ll feel like you may have to vomit at least once - to find something for dinner and finding myself putting a can of Heinz tomato soup, a packet of Uncle Ben’s golden vegetable rice, a pack of those filled spinach and ricotta tortellini and ready made tomato sauce into my basket, four items that I‘d never usually give the time of day, let alone put in my shopping bag.

I was quite intrigued by this, not least discovering how much cheaper it is to buy what I class as processed/junk food than the normal heathier food that I would usually buy – think brown rice, organic broccoli, coconut milk, organic chickpeas, fresh vegetables blah blah blah – but also the fact that in that moment all my body wanted was this strange food. However, by the time I got home, a mere five minutes later, I’d lost my urge for the soup and the rice and they are still sitting in my cupboard right now and the thought of them makes me feel a little bit sick!

I did succumb to the tortellini though, but after that fix, I haven’t craved them since.  I’ve noticed this happening quite a bit during this pregnancy, these strange cravings (for me at least) that I satisfy and then don’t have again.  I don’t usually eat dairy cheese for example, (it doesn’t like me, I love cows and I don’t really like the industry) but one day I absolutely had to eat cauliflower cheese, another time I absolutely had to have cheese filled vegetable lasagne and another time I absolutely had to have cheddar cheese on crackers.  None of this have I eaten since.

There’s been other stuff too.  Two days on the trot I absolutely had to have baked beans on toast, like it was this all consuming need, while another few days all I could stomach – quite literally - was chips and mayonnaise! For a few days I couldn’t stomach anything, which is most unusual, I couldn’t even force soup down my throat and the idea of toast made me feel desperately sick.  A few days later absolutely all I wanted was goat’s cheese and tomatoes and French bread smothered with real butter, so much for my disdain for the dairy industry, but you see the cravings become all consuming!

It’s funny because during my first pregnancy I really struggled with this, the thought of eating things I would never ordinarily eat, that represented something I didn’t like or I knew would ordinarily make me feel a little out of sorts, sluggish then, and I resisted it and gave myself a bit of a hard time about it.  Not to say I didn’t eventually give in to it, the craving for cheddar cheese and tomato sandwiches, packets of Doritos and sparkling sugar based lemon or orange drinks was all consuming and was the only thing I could stomach during many of the sickness days.  I even found myself eating fruity Mentos sweets, and believe you me I’m not usually someone who touches refined sugar!

During that first pregnancy, when I was just eight weeks pregnant and in the real throes of the sickness, we spent two weeks staying in a rather lovely private house outside of Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand with an in-house Thai chef.  Well usually I love Thai food but I just could not stomach the smell of it, and each evening meal was a real trial.  It didn’t help that my brother’s fiancé developed a love of textured soya protein, so we ended up having various kinds of it as the base (if not the only constituent part) of our vegetarian meals throughout our stay, and I just absolutely could not stand it.  Even now the thought of it makes my stomach turn.  Thankfully I was able to eat rice!

So this time around I decided I was not going to give myself a hard time and just eat whatever my body was telling me it needed, however random that appeared to be.  And while some of it has been random, the main cravings have been much more acceptable than last time, mainly a huge amount of tropical fruits and cherries, which has been a bit costly but my saviour at many a meal, wholegrain brown baguette, cherry tomatoes and a whole heap of fruit juice. It could be worse right!

Food aside, morning sickness is just incredibly challenging what with the whole sensitivity to smell thing. For a few weeks I absolutely couldn’t stand the smell of the cottage, as soon as I walked in the front door it made me feel rather sick, and actually even now there’s something about the cottage that smells funny and believe you me, I have cleaned everywhere, even behind and under all the furniture, but still the smell has persisted!

I have also developed an aversion to my usual loved aromatherapy oil scented candle, and that has had to go in the wing, because even the slightest whiff of it was making me feel a teeny bit sick – ok, quite a little bit sick! And as for the fridge, well I developed an absolute aversion to this, so that it has been an absolute effort opening this, crazy isn’t it, imagine feeling sick every time you go to your fridge.

Needless to say cooking has been a trial of sorts, to the extent that actually I’ve had to stop doing it, it makes me feel sick and I cannot stomach the thought of vegetables, let alone cooking meat for the boys. Thankfully my Mum is amazing, not only does she love cooking (like LOVE cooking) but she is also very kind so she has been doing meals on wheels, which Ewan is delighted about because her cooking is much better than mine so he’s enjoying lots of yummy dishes, and probably hoping my sickness will continue for a long while!!

I have to admit, that I’ve also struggled with the smell of his meals on wheels dishes cooking, so I’ve had to remove myself from the room when he is eating! Sadly, I don’t have that luxury in the office and believe you me, that has often been the most challenging experience. The air conditioning was broken for a few weeks which didn’t help matters, but oh my gosh, I don’t think people have any idea how awful the smell of chilli chicken and garlic chicken baguettes can be at the best of times, let alone when one of your colleagues is suffering with morning sickness.  Yuck. 

Because the morning sickness arrived so early in the pregnancy – or so it seemed - I became a little obsessed with the concept of it peaking and thereafter easing.  You see at seven weeks when it was cranking up a gear so that I suffered with diarrhea and everything seemed to go through me (still not sure if that was a virus or the sickness) I also experienced a miscarriage scare which found me signed off work and on bed rest for a week. In many respects this was a blessing because I felt so dreadful, what with the inability to stomach anything, the concern about the miscarriage and the acute tiredness (think body hitting wall tiredness) that it was all I could do to leave my bed. 

If I’m honest I felt right proper sorry for myself and did some google searching to find that I was not alone.  I came across a blog where the lady was honest enough to say that at week seven too and in the throes of acute sickness, she was actually questioning whether she wanted to be pregnant after all and you know what, I felt exactly the same.  It sounds awful to say that and I certainly didn’t want to tempt fate, what with everything we had been through, and of course the recent miscarriage scare, but I felt so dreadful, so utterly sick to my skin that I just couldn’t see how I could carry on like that for a further nine weeks (working on the basis it would ease at sixteen weeks as it had done with Elijah).

And the thing is I’m pretty hardy and strong, but it was certainly getting the better of me.  Thankfully, by the end of week seven, the diarrhea eased, and while I still felt nauseas 90% of the time, it became slightly more manageable, certainly because I had now surrendered to the intense tiredness and was not checking emails/doing any work in the evening and was going to be by 9pm, a real shift for me – and what a revelation, if only I had experienced the joy of early nights many years previously!

By week eight I was really beginning to question how long this sickness malarkey was going to hang around.  I was due to run a weekend yoga retreat at a centre near Glastonbury at the end of week nine and I was beginning to wonder how I was going to do this - it wasn’t the teaching that concerned me as such, as I already mentioned this made me feel strangely better, well temporarily, but more so the holding it all together, especially with no one meant to be knowing.

And that’s the other crazy thing about this morning sickness malarkey.  The one time in your pregnancy that you absolutely need sympathy and people to cut you some slack, when you’re feeling totally out of sorts and desperately trying to get through the day, and you can’t tell anyone!  I mean I understand the reason for this, not wanting to tempt fate and all that, but its so unfair because you feel so rubbish and yet somehow you just have to get through it, put on a brave face and pretend all is well with the world.  Pants!

So I did some google searching on peak sickness times and while some ladies said their sickness peaked at week seven to eight, the majority said week ten.  No!!!!! This was not what I wanted to read and as the retreat approached I tried to convince myself that week seven to eight had absolutely been the worst for me and things were only getting to improve so I’d breeze through the rest of this dreaded first trimester.

If only. Week nine arrived and off we flew to the UK – flying and morning sickness absolutely do not compliment one another, I felt rubbish. We hired a car and I quickly discovered that driving distances at a speed above the local speed limit of 25mph/35mph with morning sickness absolutely do not compliment one another either, I felt rubbish on every journey and it was all I could do not to have to vomit then and there – I’m lucky by the way I know some ladies who have vomited driving to work.

If I’m honest all I wanted to do on that trip was sleep. And this is the other thing about the sickness, especially on your second pregnancy (I don’t even want to think about multiple pregnancies).  First time around, one has all the time in the world to indulge in the pregnancy, to loll around in bed with morning sickness and to lie on the sofa when you can. Second time around you do not have such a luxury – well I certainly don’t in any case. You’ve still got another child to fuss over and if you have a non-sleeper like we have, then you still get woken during the night, at least once incidentally, let alone him being in bed for longer than 10 hours at a time (“this too shall pass”).

In any event the yoga retreat came around and amazingly, there was an answered prayer, (no Elijah did not sleep any better), but mind over matter meant that I just got on with it and did not give in, or even acknowledge, not even to myself, that underneath it all the nausea was still there. I just had it in my head that while I desperately wanted to enjoy the weekend (and I did), I absolutely just had to get through it too. And I did! And actually it was a joy to have someone cook and to eat healthy food without feeling too sick.

And rather foolishly I figured that perhaps that meant the sickness was now going to ease. But alas not.  The day after the yoga retreat, back home in Guernsey, the acute tiredness and all consuming sickness returned with a vengeance and somehow I managed to crawl my way through that week, virtually collapsing into bed at any available opportunity, just feeling so desperately sick.

Still fourteen and a half weeks on now and and as I reflect back I see can see that things are changing.  At eight weeks I honestly did not know how I could get through another week, let alone another six weeks, but you do somehow.  You have no choice.  Even if some days all you do is wake up and long for your bed again, you just somehow get through the day, however trying that may be and however much you are struggling.  And while it is all for the greater good, it’s tough, it’s probably one of the the toughest things I’ve ever had to do.

Now I have good days and and not so good days, and the good days are slowly increasing – I don’t want to jinx it though!  Some women are not so lucky and are sick throughout their entire pregnancy, it must be soul destroying. Others are like me and suffer for the first sixteen weeks and even then our suffering is different – I have a friend who has vomited every morning and then felt fine the rest of the day, another who vomits repeatedly at various stages of the day and another friend who wasn’t sick at all and wonders what all the fuss is about.

I honestly struggle with the idea that there can be any lesson to be learned or any hidden blessing behind all this pregnancy sickness. It certainly hasn’t been eased by my own yoga practice – and I can tell you once thing, attempting to meditate while experiencing morning sickness is just pointless, your mind is utterly distracted by this faint dizzy feeling and the unsettling nausea.  Yoga Nidra on the other hand, can help, but more often than not I’ve just ended up falling asleep!

So you see I’m struggling with the advice on this one.  I can’t even suggest drinking lots of water as that made me feel sick too.  All I can say is perhaps take some comfort in the fact that you are not alone, and that it will end, even if that is around forty weeks when the baby arrives, but what I can say is that you do forget, which is just as well as we wouldn’t continue to pro-create, the human body and indeed mind is amazing in that respect!

So I don’t have too many tips really. But you could try the following:

·      Sleeping at any available opportunity!

·      Pray!

·      Making no plans to socialise or see anyone other than essential appointments.

·      Eat what your body craves, however crazy that may seem.

·      Try and stay hydrated, whether that by drinking juice or sparkling water.  Be prepared to go to the toilet numerous times throughout the night regardless!

·      Encourage your partner to cook for him/herself and ask for help with the shopping.

·      Ask for help/accept help from anyone who is willing to help whether that be food preparation or child minding so you can sleep.

·      Know that it’s not forever, even if it doesn’t feel like that at the time!

The Quest for Conception: A Journey of Self-discovery

Since I wrote my last post I have been contacted by a number of ladies (in the strictest of confidence) who have all shared a little of their personal stories in their quest to become pregnant, whether that be naturally or through IVF, and others still investigating their options.

Some ladies are really lucky and conceive immediately, I have a couple of friends for whom this happened and my Mum apparently knew the exact moment I was conceived, but for others of us it is not so easy and can take years of heartache and anguish until we finally hold that bundle of joy (and life changer) in our arms.

I truly believe that the quest for conception has the potential to take us on a journey of self-discovery, at least that was certainly my experience and if you view it like this, well it becomes a little less scary and a little more intimate, spiritual and meaningful somehow. I can assure you that you are not alone and while there are times when it may feel really lonely out there, take comfort that others are going through it too.

There is a huge amount of fear that accompanies fertility: the fear of never conceiving and never having a baby of your own is the biggest one of course.  If only you had the certainty that one day it would come true, then how much more you’d be able to enjoy the journey it takes you on.  But here’s the thing, if you absolutely align yourself to the Divine and to your crystal clear intention to get pregnant, stepping into the heart and away from the fear, then you’ll be absolutely fine.  You absolutely have to believe in yourself and your ability to create the life you desire.

There were a number of things I learned during my quest for conception and I truly believe that many of them helped me to finally become pregnant, and whether you are trying to conceive naturally or through IVF, it’s possible that some of these may help you too.  They work on the basis that you are committing to an outcome and the more you can do to align every part of your being to the outcome the better.

However, I’m keen to stress that these were my experiences and the whole point of all of this, the journey to conception then, is for you to dig deep, listen in, connect with your soul and allow it to be your guide to realising your dream. In life we are so used to being told what to do that we often don’t listen to this little voice inside us which is doing all it can to guide us through. There are a lot of suggestions listed below so listen in to your soul and if what I say doesn’t resonate with you, well then its not for you simple as that, and please do not think you have to do all of them to achieve a happy outcome!

So here we go:

Pray. Now I’m not religious, not in the slightest, but I prayed every single day during my quest to become pregnant and I pray every single day now too. Prayer changed my life, it strengthened my spirituality and it absolutely strengthened my connection to the Divine.  Try it.  Drop to the floor and pray, direct your focus to that which you want to bring into your life and ask for guidance, give thanks and listen, absolutely listen to what comes back – there’ll be a message somewhere for you. I truly believe our prayers are always answered but NOT always in the way we imagine. You have to surrender a little to the process you are guided through.  Notice your resistance to prayer because that can be telling too (more on this further down).

Stay positive.  The best piece of advice anyone ever gave me (and she had been through IVF herself) was to not give in to self-pity. If you have to go down the IVF route then this is absolutely essential.  Self-pity will not help. You are not the only one going through this and you will not be the last.  Do whatever you can to stay absolutely positive about the process and about a positive result.  Keep the faith high.

Zita West. Invest in a copy of Zita West’s book entitled, “Fertility and Conception”. It’s brilliant and probably some of what I learned from there I’m repeating here. Some of it, of course, didn’t resonate with me, and that’s that I mean about only doing what feels right for you. She also has an IVF clinic, which is more holistic than most, have a look on the internet if you are interested in this.

“The Stork Club” – If you need reminding that you are not alone, then read Imogen Edward-Jones’ “The Stork Club”, it’s a funny and yet interesting read.

Yoga. Perhaps it won’t come as any surprise to know that I dug super deep into my practice.  There were times when I needed to be gentle and quiet and restorative yoga was ideal and other times when I needed to move actively and keep the energy high. I already have a daily practice, but I would often take to my mat a little more than usual when we were going through IVF especially. Lots of hip work can be beneficial, to really work with the sacral chakra, but so too some grounding work, and also heart opening, and at other times forward folding and inwardly reflective.  A balance really! And if the tears come then let them flow, your mat is an ideal place to process and let the healing work come through.

Meditation. Fertility issues really helped me to commit to a daily meditation practice. Just 10-20 minutes a day made such a difference, especially when I was going through IVF, not only did it make my mind stronger but it helped me to maintain a positive outlook and stay focused on the end result.  I absolutely encourage this, you’ll notice a wavering mind and this should give you the opportunity to do something about it – much trickier to find the time when you already have a child/children however so just do what you can!

Ayurveda.  Ayurveda is the science of life.  I have been seeing an Ayurvedic doctor, Dr Deepika, for nine years now and coincidentally she is a fertility expert and has helped hundreds if not thousands of ladies conceive.  Ayurveda is holistic and works on all levels of your being, physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. I went over to the UK and did a three day pancha karma at her clinic, which was just wonderful.  Based at Purley Oaks near Gatwick, Dr Deepika also offers skype appointments. You can find out more about here at http://www.theayurvedicclinic.com

Yoga Nidra – working with a Sankalpa; in practical terms, a Sankalpa is a declarative statement, resolution or intention in which you vow to commit to fulfil a specific goal, in this instance to become pregnant with a healthy baby – “I am pregnant with a healthy baby”. Sankalpa or resolution holds a special and highly esteemed place in the ancient teachings. The concept of Sankalpa appears even as early as the Rig Veda, the most ancient of all the Vedic texts. The ancient concept of sankalpa is based on the principle that your mind has measureless capacity to effect the quality and content of your life. As the Buddha said, “The mind is everything. What you think you become”. So start practicing Yoga Nidra regularly, a couple of times a week if you can, not only to consciously rest but to implant, like a seed, your Sankalpa deep within. Needless to say I produced my own recording for this and you can obtain a copy of this from my website, but there are plenty of others out there, just check Amazon or You tube.

Fertility bracelet – I love fertility bracelets. They incorporate crystals that are known to promote fertility and pregnancy such as moonstone, rose quartz and fresh water pearls. Other crystals are often incorporated to alleviate stress and encourage a calm state of being.  I have one which was made by Athene Sholl (www.athenesholl.com) but my cousin Yo also makes them (you can find her on facebook as Yolande Ifold). Just wearing these crystals will help, not least in invoking the energy of fertility but making your intention even clearer to the Universe and encouraging the law of attraction to bestow you with a babe in arms!

Sculpture of whatever it is you are trying to create – for me the first time around it was a sculpture of a man, woman and baby all hugging together.  The second time around there was a child in it too.  I sit it on my altar so that I look at it every day and every day as I look at it I remember what it is I am intending to bring into, and create in, my life.

Vision board – ok so the jury’s out on vision boards but for me they have always been very powerful in again making my intentions clear and reminding me of this visually. So in this case an image of a pregnant lady and a baby works a treat, or a photo of you holding a baby.  And notice any resistance you feel seeing/imagining yourself pregnant or holding a baby (more on this below).

A healthy diet – this goes without saying right, lots of fresh fruits and vegetables (seasonal and organic where you can), wholegrains and protein. Lots of fresh water too. Limit the caffeine and alcohol, everything in moderation – I like a cup or two of black tea in the morning and the odd glass or two of wine in the evening and certainly didn’t stop either during IVF.

Reiki – I received a lot of Reiki in preparation for, and during, all my IVF cycles and beyond. Reiki really helps to release energetic blocks and can enhance fertility. It is also deeply healing, relaxing and calming. I can’t recommend it enough.  I’m not practicing at the moment but can recommend practitioners on Guernsey.  Even better if you can give yourself Reiki though and this is ideal for pregnancy and channelling Reiki to the baby in utero.

Acupuncture – I did a lot of acupuncture in preparation for egg retrieval, whether this helped me to produce the number of quality eggs that were produced on that first cycle I will never know, but it kept my energy high during that first cycle.

Holistic therapies generally – As a holistic therapist, I love holistic therapies and I am fortunate that I’m able to swap yoga for therapies with some of my friends.  Thus throughout both positive IVF cycles (both egg retrieval and embryo transfer) I’ve done a number of different ones in varying degrees depending on what I felt I needed.  I’ve received Bowen and osteopathy to realign me physically, lymphatic draining to clear my lymph, reflexology to support the uterus and to relax, Ki massage to clear energetic and emotional blockages and holistic massage to chill out. I’m happy to recommend practitioners here in Guernsey.

Angels.  I love the angels and talk to them daily.  I’d encourage you to invite them into your life.  Ask the angels to help you and they will by pointing you in the direction of people, therapies, books or whatever it may be that will help support you on your journey.  I’m a massive fan of the Doreen Virtue Angel cards (you can buy these from Amazon) and I find that this is a wonderful way to communicate with them and get much more in touch with your intuition and what your soul’s messages. They’ll leave you feathers so you know they are with you and you’ll start noticing more robins too (these are angels in form).  You may see an owl too.

Intimacy.  Keep it intimate, between you and your partner.  You can easily give your energy away discussing it with others.  It’s your journey no one else’s and it certainly shouldn’t be a drama or source of gossip for others. The fact you have to become so conscious about conception can lose the intimacy, sex becomes all about getting pregnant, and IVF of course doesn’t even have the sexual element, so do what you can to retain some intimacy to the whole process. I think its more special that way.

She Oak – often an inability to conceive can be due to emotional issues, emotions that you haven’t yet processed and are holding on to in one form or another, perhaps something is eating away at you, or you haven’t made peace with childhood trauma. To help with this take She Oak tincture, which encourages the individual to be emotionally open and receptive to conceive. It also helps with the female balancing of hormones. You can order this from Amazon.

Have fun – don’t forget to have some fun.  Life can become very structured and dull, what with ovulation dates and then waiting for the dreaded period or the joyful lack of period.  And for those doing IVF, well it is one big treadmill of dates and times for injections and pills and blood tests and scans, so that it is all too easy for life to become very glum.  Make sure you allow some time to have fun, even if that’s just going for swim in the sea or getting out walking in nature, laughing at a comedy, or going for a meal with friends. Keep the energy high!!!

Rest – yes, I’ve never been very good at this but it is really helpful if you can rest.  The Yoga Nidra and treatments can help with this, but you’ll be trying to grow a healthy egg naturally or eggs with IVF and you need your energy to do this.  So try and rest when you can, early nights and relaxing soaks in the bath!

Drop the energy vampires – we’ve all got them, people in our life who suck the energy right out of us what with their constant dramas or their constant demands on us.  We don’t need them, and they probably don’t really need us, only that we’ve gotten into this dynamic which we feel we can’t get out of.  But you can.  And while sometimes it takes some adjustment, it is essential that all your energy goes to you, not those who take it all away from you.  You know the people I mean and you’re probably feeling a little uncomfortable at the thought of how you are going to extricate yourself from the relationship, but you can.  Let them go and perhaps you’ll be doing them a favour in the long run. Nature abhors a vacuum after all.

Activities which exhaust your energy – identify areas of your life where you are losing energy.  For me Facebook has always been the major one, it draws you in and before you know it you’ve lost hours of your life.  Not only that but it is filled with insecurity and opinions and judgments that don’t always serve the higher purpose, but of course that’s just my take on things, you’ll have other activities that drain you.

Bach Rescue Remedy – if things start getting a little stressful and you’re feeling a little emotional and out of balance then take some Bach Rescue Remedy, which is a wonderfully natural way to help you calm down, it works with flower essences and is marvellous.

The moon – I love the moon, especially as she is the Goddess of Fertility.  So go and embrace her energy.  When the moon is full, go outside and bathe in her rays and pray to her and ask her to bestow you with a child and remove the obstacles in your way.  Remember to give thanks, especially when you achieve your outcome!

Resistance – this is HUGE. The most telling and powerful steps you can take to reduce your internal resistance to achieving your desire is to identify what we call in the Vedic tradition “vikalpas”. These are your unconscious sankalpas (intentions or resolutions, see above), but ones that move you in any one of countless directions away from the destiny your soul is here to lead you to. It is very important that you realise your unconscious mind is significantly more powerful than your conscious mind. You need to do what you can to recognise and become aware of your unconscious patterns and how they are sabotaging your conscious desires and to increase the intensity of your conscious desires. If you find that your actions are contrary to, or less than supportive of your goal and intention to conceive and give birth to a healthy baby, then there will be a vikalpa, an internal resistance at work here.

Perhaps you don’t think you’re worthy of having a baby, perhaps – unconsciously – you’re not sure you can cope with a baby, perhaps you’re worried about the effects of pregnancy on your body, perhaps you’re holding on to resentment from the past, from your own childhood etc, perhaps you’re worried you won’t make a good mother, perhaps you have a habit of sabotaging the good things in your life. So perhaps you need to identify your resistance and if necessary forgive and move on.

Stay grounded – hug a tree, go walk barefoot in the garden, sit on the beach, take a bath with natural sea salts, dry-brush, do whatever you can to stay rooted to this earth.  You need to have your feet firmly on the ground to bring that spirit in.  Don’t let yourself float around in the ethers, caught in your head.

Avoid online fertility/IVF forums – There is a ton of stuff out there on the internet about fertility and IVF and those forums are just plain awful, based on a whole heap of fear.  My advice is to stay away from these at all costs, do not buy into negativity!

So my conclusion really is to continue being kind to yourself and absolutely do not give yourself (or anyone else) a hard time about all this.  It is what it is.  No point fighting it or fighting yourself over it. You’ll get your dream, the Divine may just have another plan of the route, the journey then, that you need to take there is all – remain patient, trust in the process and keep believing in yourself, its a journey of self-discovery, embrace it!!

Bringing another Spirit into the World: New Life!

Life is full of challenges isn’t it.  So its always a relief when you surmount one of these and your dreams become a little bit more real.

Four years ago now, I remember sitting in the specialist’s office here in Guernsey listening to the specialist tell Ewan and I that we may never have children of our own.  I’ve done an awful lot of praying and growing since then and I am delighted that we are now one step closer to realising our dream of bringing another spirit into the world, creating new life and giving Elijah a sibling.

Yes, that’s right, I’m pregnant again! And for this I am eternally grateful to science for without its advances we wouldn’t be in the position we are in today – and I’ll be honest, I’ve never been particularly interested in science, unless it’s the science of yoga of course, but science is, in my opinion, amazing!

It’s been a long old journey. We had ICSI 4 years ago now, where individual sperm are injected into individual eggs and embryos grown from this.  We were lucky, with that initial treatment back in 2013 I produced a number of quality eggs which resulted in two embryos (grown to three days) and three blastocysts (grown to five days and meant to have a greater chance of taking when implanted within the uterus).

Two of those blastocysts, both of which were good quality, were implanted and while one of them didn’t make it, the other resulted in the birth of Elijah – IVF is not an exact science, some take, some don’t, what I’ve come to recognise is that there is more to bringing spirit into this world than merely science alone, incredible as is it in creating the opportunity in the first place.

The same day that those two blastocysts were implanted in me, the remaining blastocyst was frozen, together with the two embryos. I can still remember the moment the consultant told us that they were doing this because I experienced this incredibly strong feeling, a knowing then (as confident as one can ever have a knowing with IVF) that the remaining frozen blastocyst was going to result in a second pregnancy one day, and at least we would have to give it a try.

Last October we went through our first frozen embryo cycle where the two frozen embryos were defrosted, one of them didn’t survive the thawing process while the other survived and was left to grow a further two days in the laboratory to form a quality blastocyst.  This was implanted but sadly never made it – this wasn’t a surprise as such, I felt a pressure due to our ages to get on with it but deep down neither of us were ready –I was still breastfeeding Elijah (a big ‘no, no’ in the IVF world), sleep deprived, exhausted and certainly not ready mentally for another baby.  It was still sad though and I wrote about it at the time.

This meant that we had one remaining blastocyst, the one frozen four years ago now. We knew it would be our last chance – IVF, while a miracle in so many ways, is in my experience an expensive, invasive, emotionally exhausting and stressful process to go through – and we weren’t prepared to go through it again. Its not just the drugs, which put an enormous strain on your liver and on your body generally, but all the blood tests and scans and making sure you follow an exact schedule with all its demands and the need for secrecy.

Plus, being such a clinical procedure it lacks heart and a holistic approach, which I found particularly tough. And its crazy really because you can do exactly what you are told to do by the clinic and it may well still fail, hence it not being an exact science, so that actually something else has to be involved.  That’s the reason I’m a true believer that the Divine plays a role in this and that you have to be mentally and emotionally in the right place – you know how it is with life, there’s a timing to everything and once you’re aligned to this, well it makes it easier going.

So following our failed cycle, as with the initial ICSI cycle, I dug deep into my practice and re-established my connection with the Divine, which had faltered a little following the full grade Placenta Previa I experienced with Elijah and the resulting interventional birth so that absolutely nothing about Elijah’s arrival into the world, from conception to birth was in any way natural or as I had hoped, although he did receive a lot of Reiki! I lost a lot of blood during the birth so that I almost needed a blood transfusion and I was angry for a long old time over that as I felt so dreadful.

So I lost my way a little.  I was delighted to have Elijah obviously, but I was sick for a good few months and I struggled with the ongoing sleep deprivation of a baby who didn’t want to sleep, and woke every 3 hours for a good two years until I stopped breastfeeding. He still doesn’t sleep through the night at two and a half years old, I’m woken at least once and he is a late settler and early riser so its been tough. Anyone who’s been through this or is going through this will know how debilitating sleep deprivation can be, especially when you’re working.

Furthermore, compounded by the sleep deprivation, I struggled to adjust to the demands of this motherhood malarkey. I absolutely love spending time with Elijah but I also love spending time on my yoga mat and writing, plus I’m very driven and love working! It was a struggle fitting it all in, what with the day job. That said, being a Mum is tough whether you are working or not, women don’t usually talk about that, we’re all trying so hard to hold it together! So I made some adjustments along the way, but if I’m honest, I was still doing far too much and getting a little stressed and exhausted from time to time.

Thus I realised that I needed to make some changes to my lifestyle and to my way of thinking – its all very well saying you’ll do less but if it has become a behaviour pattern, as it had for me, then it can be quite a challenge to change things. So there needs to be a recognition of where you are losing energy, time wasting and making life harder for yourself, and once you’ve identified that (Facebook was a big one for me believe it or not, not only time wasting but energy draining too) you have to reach a level of acceptance to let that go and move on – well in theory anyway, I’m sure there’s still room for improvement!

So I looked honestly at my life and started to change things, I started writing again which makes my soul happy, and I did a whole heap of healing work including an Ayurvedic Pancha Karma with my Ayurvedic doctor who specialises in fertility, Ki massage, Reiki, Bowen and I retreated a little from the world, from my friends and from socialising generally!

Plus, I dug deep into my practice, re-establishing a daily sitting practice, doing a whole heap of restorative yoga to re-energise, a whole heap of Yoga Nidra working with the ancient and well tested Sankalpa (and Vikalpa to notice resistance), embraced my fertility crystals and did a whole heap of praying both to the Divine and to the moon, the Goddess of Fertility so that I was well and truly focused on a positive outcome.  As a result, I deepened my connection to the Divine and increased my faith again – and I give thanks, Amen.

So by the time late January arrived and second and last frozen embryo cycle began I was more than ready – we had timed this with Spring, when we’d done our initial treatment in 2013, to tap into that Spring energy of fertility. I had to go through seven weeks of treatment (both pills and injections) before we sneaked off to the UK for the transfer a few days after the Herm retreat. 

Fortunately, the blastocyst survived the thawing process (there is always the risk you do all that treatment and then it doesn’t survive the thawing process) and was implanted. It’s a clinical experience but the consultant was lovely and we saw the star of the blastocyst going into my uterus, which we’d seen with Elijah but not with the failed cycle.

I felt the energy in my tummy immediately, its expansive and new and light, its an incredible energy if you are ever fortunate to feel it. Its just so new and so alive and so vibrant that I can’t liken it to anything else.  Its new life essentially and that is pretty powerful, you’ll know a little that feeling from Spring, which abounds with this energy but this is something a little different too.

It changes within a few days and the only way I can describe it is to say that it feels like pearls, at least that’s what I kept feeling and seeing in my head.  The energy is like running your hand over a run of strung pearls.  Its like the energy becomes a little more contained, a little heavier, but with movement, circular movement as I guess, the cells divide.  I really wish every lady who undertakes IVF could feel this, because at least you know then that its still alive and growing inside you.

While I could feel it, and while the signs were there – oh my gosh the signs were there; three days before we were due to take the dreaded test someone at work made an offhand comment about me getting pregnant next, and two days before we took the test, again at work, on a course this time, we were given these UBS sticks and one of the guys mentioned that it looked like a pregnancy testing stick and he accidentally dropped it on the floor and it landed just by me so he reached down to pick it up and said to me, “oh it says you’re pregnant Emma”.  I laughed inside because little did he know that in two day’s time I would be taking a test that would tell me this!

There were other signs too - my angel cards flung up child related cards and robins and feathers were everywhere I looked so I knew the angels were surrounding me – not to say there’s anything special with me by the way, just that I had aligned myself on that level and was feeling the support of the Universe, which really helps.

You may already know this from previous ramblings, but I’m a massive fan of angels, I talk to them daily (I’m not mad honest!) and I had this feeling that the angels were like, “oh come on Emma, you can feel the energy, you know its worked, we’re sending you all these signs, so heck let go of your anxiety”! You see the faith was strong, the energy I could feel and the signs were everywhere and yet still it was an incredibly anxious ten days.

Anyone who has gone through IVF will know what I mean about this being a hugely anxious time.  And the silly thing is, you’re told to try and stay as calm and stress-free as possible and yet it’s probably one of the most stressful times of the whole treatment, waiting to see if its worked – because let’s remember again its not an exact science – ‘its like a roll of the dice’, a nurse told me when I was starting treatment for the second time.

So I had this full on nauseating and stomach churning feeling going on, so that I had to consciously remind myself to get out of the fear and into the heart.  Fear does no one any favours but the trouble is we enter into that state so easily that we can lose ourselves in it and forget that fear is essentially, ‘false evidence appearing real’. This is the reason sitting can be so helpful, because you can feel the fear deep in the pit of your stomach and you can shift your awareness up into your heart instead and change the energy of it all a little and allow the anxiety to dissipate.

I think that it is during this waiting time that people begin to wish they hadn’t told anyone else about what they are going through.  The first time with the ICSI we told all our close friends and family as we felt we needed the support and I was so confident about it working that I don’t remember feeling too anxious, more so excited. But once you’ve had a failed cycle, well that all changes, because you know how awful it is, how disappointing and sad it is then, to have gone through that whole process and for it not to work.

I made this mistake during our first frozen embryo cycle and really wished I hadn’t when we got the results. I knew that I wasn’t pregnant before I took the test, I couldn’t feel the energy of the blastocyst anymore and my head was elsewhere, but it didn’t help knowing that everyone else wanted to know.  And while some undoubtedly wanted to know because they cared, others inevitably wanted to know because it s a bit of news, a bit of drama, a bit of gossip, and that made me very determined not to tell a soul, not even our parents, about our final attempt.

So it was much more intimate for us and while the parents had to be told eventually because we were going off Island, we enjoyed it just being about us this time.  Not only did this keep the energy high but it felt like our own little journey that we managed to do all on our own without any negativity or influence from anyone else. And let’s face it, aside from perhaps telling our closest friend, how many people do tell others that they are having sex to make a baby that particular day, if you know what I mean!

So the result was positive, which I had expected but nonetheless this was a relief. The sickness arrived quickly this time, at 5 weeks and I’ve been feeling pretty rotten since then.  Whoever named it morning sickness was having a joke, and please no one suggest to me to have a ginger biscuit, it makes no difference!  I don’t think anyone can really understand the debilitating nature of pregnancy sickness unless you have experienced it for yourself.

Fortunately, I haven’t vomited, but I have felt nauseous from 11am until bed time absolutely every day for the last 7 weeks now.  Some weeks have been worse than others, its true how this happens, weeks 7-9 were awful and week 10-11 was dreadful too.  The only thing that has made me feel better is teaching yoga and going to bed early so I’m grateful that the Glastonbury retreat arose during this period as it gave me a weekend of distraction, even if I did feel utterly rotten the week afterwards!!

But it is all for the greater good.  And feeling the baby’s energy and noticing my changing body is a blessing really. A dream coming true. And what we’ve been through doesn’t make me an expert in any way, but I’ve learnt quite a lot over the last four years and I am keen to share this with others who may find themselves in a similar situation to us.  There is a lot out there already, a huge amount of this is fear based, and this does no one any favours.  So I’ll be keeping things positive, because to be honest that’s the only way. 

So if you’re having trouble conceiving and you’ve been told you may have fertility issues, well maybe my sharing will help, maybe not, but I feel compelled to share a little more nonetheless.  It may take some time though; my energy levels are not quite what they were!!

I’m due 28 November by the way, two days before Ewan’s big birthday, and I’m intending to continue teaching until then – we have the Herm retreat in October after all and I’m very much looking forward to that!

"Big cuddles", sleep deprivation and slowing things down

Big cuddles are all the rage in our house at the moment.  Elijah invented them.  Well not the big cuddle per se (obviously!), but his big cuddle. He likes to throw him arms around us and nestle in for a big one, “big cuddle Mummy”, is a regular request during my days and nights now.

Putting him to bed at night can often result in a good 5-10 big cuddles, in between all the tossing and turning and time wasting that is involved in the ‘going to sleep and not mucking around’ process, where he resists sleep and mucks around and the whole process can sometimes take a very long time!

It was for this reason that I invented the squidgy cuddle, which is exactly that, a big old squidgy cuddle, nice and cosy so that he feels fully safe and protected.  I channel some Reiki through my hands onto his back and the combination of the two seems to result in him finally nodding off to sleep.

Not that Elijah falling asleep means that we are done with the big cuddles for the night.  No, no, no. Last night, for example, he called out for me at 2.30am because a big cuddle with Mummy was absolutely essential in that moment.  This was followed by a further call at about 4.30am although this time the big cuddle with Mummy had to take place in Mummy and Daddy’s bed.

So into our bed he came and proceeded to ‘big cuddle’ me on and off for the next few hours. Every time I tried to turn away from him and retreated for space, he would awaken and demand yet another big cuddle so that to be honest by 6.30am, well I was all big cuddled out and it was time to get up in any event.

We’ve always had a problem with Elijah’s inability to sleep the whole night through in or out of his own bed.  He’s 27 months and still hasn’t managed it yet.  I wasn’t aware before having Elijah that this degree of sleep deprivation was possible without you dying or collapsing or being totally incapable of functioning as a sane human being.

The initial three months were ok, the seemingly endless night time feeding was followed by seemingly endless day time feeding where not a lot else was demanded or expected apart from teaching a few yoga classes, making some food and staying on top of the washing. But going back to the office job at three months, albeit part-time was a challenge to say the least.

I felt permanently jet lagged and existed on black tea and dark chocolate in quantities I had never before consumed or indeed since.  The job was demanding as I had to catch up from three months absence and we were buying and selling companies and it was all rather busy and I now had to factor in time away from my desk to express milk and a baby brain and sleep deprivation which created an inability to retain information for longer than 5 minutes.

At times it was embarrassing as I simply could not recall decisions which had been made only a day earlier. Sometimes I would just sit there staring at my screen completely lost, no idea what I was meant to be doing, or what I had just done and incapable of remembering words to form sentences let alone writing detailed emails with paragraphs. I began to think I was going mad.

And I guess I did go mad.  Well not mad in the sense that I lost my mind, just mad in the sense that as the months went on and the night feeding continued at regular  2-3 hourly intervals, I found myself a little on edge and a little impatient and a teensy weeny bit angry at life generally.  Essentially I was angry that having gone through IVF, Placenta Previa and a horrible C-section, I still hadn’t been given a break, I may well have my baby, but he didn’t like to sleep! I had forgotten that every cloud has a silver lining.

There was always hope that the sleep would improve, or so people kept telling me, there were supposed milestones when everything would shift in a positive sleepy direction: when he ate solids, when he finished teething, when he started crawling, when he started walking and when he started talking. But his second birthday arrived and we were still on the 3 hourly wake-ups and I was still breastfeeding and I was constantly exhausted and drained and longing for sleep and a full night’s sleep.

It was at this point that I realised that something had to shift and that I needed a few nights away on my own.  It’s funny really because pre-Elijah I was a bit of a free spirit who regularly attended yoga training courses on my own in the UK and would travel regularly overseas, be that to Nepal or Canada or wherever it may be to see my friends and immerse myself in the local yoga scene. But for 2 whole years I only ever had one single night away from Elijah and that was with my Dad to watch a Mark Knopler concert in London, how things change!

So to say I was excited about 2 nights on my own in a hotel to undertake a 3 day Ayurvedic Pancha Karma with my Ayurvedic Doctor was an understatement, the fact it was in East Croydon of all places did nothing to dampen my spirits.  I have such fond memories of my time there that I think East Croydon is a fabulous place to visit; I loved the silence of not really talking to anyone for 2 whole days, I loved the Ayurvedic treatments and I loved having a bed to myself with all that space for 2 whole nights.

Only that I couldn’t sleep, not properly, it was like my body had forgotten! I automatically awoke every few hours wondering why Elijah hadn’t woken me, so that I almost awoke in a state of panic.  Now how crazy is that?!  Still the trip was restful, healing and necessary and helped me to come to terms with the fact that it was time to wean Elijah, as resistant as I was to this I reluctantly agreed with my Ayurvedic doctor that it was sapping my vital energy.

Fortunately and whether I smelt differently from all the Ayurvedic oils and pastes I’ll never know but Elijah decided that he no longer wanted any breastmilk and self-weaned, which was always my wish. I can’t tell you how many times over that 2 year period people told me it was the breastfeeding that was causing him to keep waking up at night, so I figured that now surely, he would sleep through the night right?

But no, he didn’t.  He still kept waking so that I was in and out of his room as much as I had been previously, only now I didn’t have to spend so much time feeding and settling him, and now Ewan could help too.  So there was some improvement and not breastfeeding certainly helped to improve my energy levels and gave me a little more freedom again. But I was still keen to get a full night’s sleep.

I took Elijah for some Osteopathy and Bowen, I massaged his legs and channelled Reiki on his feet and shoulders, we made sure to get some fresh air each afternoon and lots of walking, I put salts in the bath and burned lavender and pine essential oils, we kept with the bed time routine and we even resorted to “In the Night Garden” to try and encourage that sleepy state.  But he was still waking a couple of times a night, regardless of what we did.

E had been the same apparently, and I finally came to accept that this was just Elijah’s temperament. He has a huge amount of energy and doesn’t like to miss out - a bit like his Mummy in that respect really! Plus he likes to sleep with his Mummy and Daddy, like all my Nepali friends, who think us most strange in the West for sleeping in separate beds let alone separate rooms. And before anyone mentions it, the "crying it out" method...nope, that's never going to resonate with us, you just have to read the latest research on this, let alone notice how it makes your heart feel...

It was at this time, at the beginning of this year, that I realised I had turned into one of those rather tiresome friends who constantly talked about how tired I was, in fact one of those tiresome girlfriends because E was also getting tired of hearing how tired I was.  And actually I was getting tired of hearing me say how tired I was, so that I noticed how ingrained it was in me, to be tired.

And when I reflected I struggled to remember a time in my life when I wasn’t tired. And the more I thought about it, the more I realised that it had become a behaviour pattern, a result of my upbringing and the belief system I had adopted into my way of thinking, my conditioning then.  It was no one’s fault, that’s just what happens, and it is often only year’s later that you realise that there is another way of being from the one you have grown up believing.

I came to recognise that in my life, being lazy was actively discouraged, it was a bad thing. Busy being, therefore, was a good thing; it meant you were being productive and useful. Success (whatever that actually means) was measured by monetary gain and study/career advancement and that meant working hard.  So working hard was what I did.  It was all I knew to do. It came naturally to me. But that didn’t necessarily mean it was healthy (I have suffered with bouts of glandular fever and adrenal fatigue) and it certainly didn’t always make me happy.

Furthermore I was well aware that like attracts like and the more I talked about being tired, the more tiredness I would undoubtedly attract into my life. Not only that but I am also very well aware that our reality is a reflection of our thinking, so the more I thought about being tired and kept saying the word “tired”, the more I would live life in a way that created tiredness and the more I would continue to feel tired, a self-fulfilling prophecy then!

There is this fabulous Chinese proverb about this: “Be careful of your thoughts, for your thoughts become your words. Be careful of your words, for your words become your actions. Be careful of your actions, for your actions become your habits. Be careful of your habits, for your habits become your character. Be careful of your character, for your character becomes your destiny.”

Well I was at the point where I was sick of my character being defined by tiredness and busyness. I began to notice that people would say to me, “I know you are busy and tired but…” I was done with being both! I was tired of being tired and I was tired of being stressed and I was tired of chasing my tail. So it was time to shift the thinking, change what was becoming a habitual way of seeing things and bring some humour and lightness back into life again. 

Plus, if Elijah was going to continue waking then I just had to suck it up and look for the silver lining, he wasn't going to change, so I had rot change my approach to dealing with the sleep deprivation instead.  It was then that it properly dawned on me that I had tried to do as much and a little bit more as I was doing before Elijah, but with Elijah now in my life to manage too.  No wonder I was always so tired! I’d positioned the busyness and productivity Police well and truly in my life, I didn’t want them to catch me being unproductive or lazy so I kept going just in case!  Ha, ha, ha!  How we create our own suffering.  Ha, Ha, ha!  

Well things had to change.  I was done with it. There had to be another way.

Fortunately, it was at this point the Universe intervened, as it always does when we are ready to change things.  Into my life flowed a whole heap of beautiful books written by inspiring ladies who had also pushed themselves that little bit too much in a masculine and linear way before they discovered, embraced and embodied the Divine Feminine into their lives and have never looked back since.

And just for good measure, just to make sure I too embodied all that I was reading (I believe this is essential for a true shift to take place), I managed to crack a few ribs, just like that, right at the end of a skiing trip in France. Now I don’t know if you have ever broken a rib but if you have you will know that it is impossible to do very much so that physically things had to slow down and with that an opportunity to transition into a new way of being.

In came the restorative yoga, extended relaxation and Yoga Nidra (guided relaxation) and out went the dynamic yoga practices and never finding time to rest at the end of them. In came the Reiki and Shen and Bowen and out went giving so much of my energy away to others.  In came more time spent sitting and meditating and out went unnecessary pottering about and filling every spare minute with some form of activity!

In came making time for my passions and the things that make me happy such as writing, reading, walking in nature with my boys, watching the birds in the garden and swimming in the sea, and out went Facebook and the Ipad (which for me was time wasting and stressful), running (which was exhausting me), working on the laptop late into the evenings and overcommitting myself to others.  In came early nights and out went socialising.

It’s been like a breath of fresh air into my life.  I almost laugh now when I think back to how things were, of how I have made life so difficult for myself since having Elijah, of the trying to be all things at once, Mummy, girlfriend, friend, daughter, Reiki teacher and practitioner, yoga teacher, company secretary, writer, so that there’s been too much doing and not enough being, too much masculine energy and not enough Divine feminine.

I know that I am not alone, not least in the trying to be all things at once (that’s what happens when you try to be an empowered woman in this frenetic world we live in), but also with the sleep deprivation.  And it’s a constant work in progress for old habits die hard but I am learning to recognise the triggers and to trust in the process and to embrace the vulnerability and yet the strength of the feminine and appreciate that She works in creative ways beyond our often restricted linear thinking.

As for the sleep deprivation, well E and I know that we are not alone and that many, many other couples have gone through this themselves. And I am well aware that one day Elijah will sleep through the night and one day he will stop wanting big cuddles and stop wanting to come into our bed and then we will have trouble getting him out of his bed and we will be up half the night waiting for him to come in.

E and I have been blessed with an utterly beautiful little boy who doesn’t sleep so well but comforts and warms us with his gentle heart and “big cuddles” throughout the night, and has taught us that life does not always have to be so tiring. And I have come to recognise the silver lining in all this sleep deprivation, of the manner in which it has encouraged me to slow down and to re-prioritise. But heck please don’t expect me to remember what I did yesterday because my memory may well never be the same again!

My tips for slowing your life down a bit:

• If you have a garden and you don’t already have one, then invest in a bird table.  I just love watching the birds coming in to feed from the bird table, I can’t help but stop and watch them;

• Get yourself a bolster and practice some restorative yoga;

• Enjoy a Yoga Nidra (guided relaxation) where you can also establish a Sankalpa (resolution or intention);

• Get out walking, notice the change in season, the different flowers and the change in light, and splash in the puddles;

• Take a bath with some relaxing and healing bath salts or some lavender oil;

• Limit your screen time and make sure to switch off a few hours before bed;

• Get off Facebook and start living your own life instead;

• Go and sit on the beach and watch the waves.  Get in the sea if you are brave!

• Prioritise your time and learn to say no;

• Cook. Its grounding and meditative in its own way;

• Sit for 5 minutes a day and watch your breath as it comes in and out and witness your thoughts, let them be there, just try not to become engaged in them;

• Enjoy a big cuddle and a squidy cuddle!