Welcome to the Brilliant Fertility Podcast. I'm your host, dr Katie Rose, and this podcast exists to help illuminate the path ahead of you. With expert interviews, clinical pearls and real client success stories, my intention is to bring you hope for what's possible on this journey and to give you tools and resources to navigate the ups and downs on the road before you. If you find this podcast helpful, don't forget to subscribe on your favorite listening platform. And I have a big request If you have a minute, can you leave us a five-star review and let us know what did you learn? What did you come away with? Did you leave with that spark of hope? This helps more people like you find the podcast. My mission is to support as many humans as possible on their path to become parents, and by you sharing and subscribing, you're part of that mission too, and I'm so grateful for you for being here.

Welcome back to the Brilliant Fertility Podcast. We're going to be doing a little solo riff today on something I'm hearing a lot of questions about in our virtual fertility retreat, which we're about halfway through right now, and it's so funny because we've got about 200 people signed up for this retreat and our Facebook group has been really quiet. I'm getting most of my questions behind the scenes. So if you are in the retreat, I encourage you to open up just a little bit, because that allowing yourself to ask questions, allowing yourself to be vulnerable, is also an opportunity to receive and my intention is to really give and serve so much in this retreat and part of that being, you know, answering the questions in depth on the podcast. That we don't, we haven't had time yet to dive into in the retreat itself yet.

So this question that's been coming through as we started talking about how emotion gets stored in the body and, in the traditional Chinese medicine perspective, how we're holding on to emotion in a way that can actually impact us physically often. So the liver tends to be impacted most by anger and we tend to then see issues like PMS and headaches and painful periods arise as a result of that. The kidneys tend to be most impacted by fear and, of course, on a fertility journey, there are numerous fears that could arise and shame and grief, and I mean really there's no end to the emotions that are possible on this journey. Some people may be more prone to experiencing one emotion over the others and often there are layers. We are nuanced, complex creatures, but, at the end of the day, processing emotions doesn't have to be as brutal as we might make it out to be. So this question that is coming through a lot within the retreat and my emails, my DMs, is how do I get rid of this fear? How do I process this fear? And there may be very specific fears. There may be very specific fears like I'm running out of time, I've waited too long, I'm too old, I'm too X, y, z, insert what your brain comes up with. And some of those fears we have to acknowledge are coming from outside of us. What's that saying? It's coming from outside the house? No, it's coming from inside the house. I don't actually watch horror movies, I just have seen clips. It's coming from inside the house.

We have to recognize what is really from us and what is coming from outside of us, what was passed down generationally, what's coming in from society and the pressures that society puts on us. I mean it's really bullshit in some sense how many expectations around childbearing there are. From the start of puberty we are told like oh my gosh, don't have sex, you'll get pregnant, and we're not actually taught what's going on in our bodies. And then you get to a certain age. You get to be 30 and people are asking you, when are you going to have babies? And then you get to be 40 and people are like, oh well, now you're too old, what are you doing? Why are you trying?

So I think first and foremost, if we want to get rid of fear or emotions or limiting beliefs, is we have to start differentiating Clearly. I've been talking a lot today because words just made up a whole new word. Differentiating Words will come more smoothly as I breathe Okay, reset. Come more smoothly as I breathe Okay, reset. We have to start differentiating between what is ours and what is coming from outside of us. Sometimes that's not always clear right out the gate, especially if you're not used to sitting with your emotions, to sitting in the discomfort, used to sitting with your emotions, to sitting in the discomfort. So the next step, or maybe even the first step if I'm really following my own advice and systems that I use in practice is to sit with the discomfort.

We humans do not like to be uncomfortable, so we will tend to push something away, distract ourselves from it. God, isn't it so much more fun to just go like scroll on Instagram and see what kind of cake decorating or cute kitten videos are happening right now, versus go, sit with our uncomfortable emotions and try to feel why we feel the way we do and try to feel why we feel the way we do. I avoided that for decades, literally decades. I found so many ways to numb and some of those behaviors were supposedly healthy things like exercise. I used exercise and I used eating perfectly as ways to avoid actually sitting with my uncomfortable emotions, and I wonder how many of you have experienced similar patterns. So if we want to get rid of fear, if we want to release anger, if we want to let go of shame, then we have to be willing to actually sit in the discomfort of it, and it doesn't have to take as long as you might think. We did an exercise within the retreat today of just practicing that feeling, communication with the body and somewhere along the lines.

In this podcast I've recorded an episode about tapping into your body's wisdom. I highly recommend. I think everyone, and their mother literally, should listen to that episode. I have actually sent that episode to my mother, which she used the practice of to tap into something that was going on with her body regarding some pain. And it's so interesting what wisdom our body has. And there's wisdom in your emotions too, even in the emotions that we've labeled as bad. There's truly no such thing as a bad emotion. It's all a compass, it's all guiding us somewhere. There's lessons in all of it and with the one-to-one work that I do, or even right now in the Brilliant Fertility Program, we've actually had an opportunity to do some breakthrough sessions.

So working one-to-one but with some of our group members also holding space and observing the process to see how we release limiting beliefs and negative emotions. And this process is so much gentler than I think people anticipate it being. And one of the ways that we do this is through somatics, and this is an observation so noticing, like when I have a hard time slowing down because maybe I'm carrying this belief that if I am not always productive, if things don't get done, then the tasks are going to pile up, it's going to create problems in my life, it's going to get more stressful. So, heaven forbid I slow down and feel something I don't have time for that. That's an old operating system that I've carried around and have really intentionally started to unwind.

And when I start to feel that urgency, that pressure, that anxiety that might come with. Oh my God, I have to do X, y, z, just taking 90 seconds to pause and ask where am I feeling this in my body right now? I tend to feel things in my chest most frequently, but you may have an experience somewhere else in your body of tension, constriction, heaviness, pain. 90 seconds pause. Where is that in my body? Can I give it a name? Can I give this feeling a label? So if I feel that anxiety or fear and we some people, I included may have a tendency towards giving it characteristics instead Like it feels like pressure Great, I can appreciate that. Can you name an emotion?

Sometimes, when we have been numbing for so long, it's like I don't know what emotion that is. I have not felt my feelings in so long that I'm not particularly aware, and it took me really a few years to come to a place where I go like oh, that's anxiety, that's fear, that's grief, that's shame, and notice how that feels in my body, and then to sit in curiosity, imagining that I could just set aside judgment and the urge to run away or push it away or push it down, and to just breathe with it for 90 seconds Maybe then ask what are you here to teach me? Is there anything you need to say to me before I can move through this and let go? You may be surprised at how much wisdom and ease and release can come from just 90 seconds of awareness and breathing. It sounds almost too simple to be possible, but that's where we begin.

And sure there are some patterns that are more deeply embedded and tangled up, and I use the metaphor frequently of if you have a tangled wire. I still often use headphones that are wired because I am a sensitive unicorn and I do not like all the EMFs from the Bluetooth. I get headaches when I'm exposed to that too frequently. So my lines get all tangled up at times and when we look at that and we're like, oh, that's kind of like that negative emotion, like oh, I hate when that happens and we want to just like yank it apart to detangle it. But you know it doesn't actually work that way. Right, you almost have to slow down and be present as you untangle that type of line or wire, because if you pull too hard in the wrong way, it just knots up even tighter. But if instead you can slow down and breathe and just sort of gently tease out one little area of that knotted wire at a time. You eventually find more space within it. You eventually can untangle the whole thing and the more presence you bring to it, the easier it becomes and the more space you create. And the same is true of our emotions. And really this is such a valuable, critical step towards building your stress resilience, building your capacity, because you don't have to be calm all the time, but what we do want is to have more capacity, more resilience, more ability to process what's coming our way.

I give one of the examples in the three-day retreat of an inspiration story a client of mine who had come to me at 39 years old. She had been through an ectopic pregnancy, had multiple IVF retrievals that resulted in only one viable embryo and when it came time to transfer that embryo they had a very hard time getting her lining thick enough to actually transfer. And by the time they did get it to a thickness that they were like borderline okay with and they did the transfer. The transfer didn't work and when we evaluated after that fact what was going on in her life, there was a ton of stressful events. Totally outside of her control was a ton of stressful events totally outside of her control, and when I started asking her more curious questions, it came to light that she just didn't believe it was possible to get pregnant when she had all of this stress and it began. We discovered that it started actually when she was a teenager, and all of the emotion that she was carrying from that and the way that that stayed in her body may have been influencing how able she was to respond to those IVF medications. We'll never truly know exactly what she responded to, but soon after we did this session, rewiring this belief and releasing all the negative emotion around it, she conceived unassisted and went on to have a very healthy baby boy who is one year old as of right now.

And I think it's just incredible to witness how resilient we humans truly are when we are willing to look a little bit deeper, when we are willing to get comfortable with the uncomfortable. So that's a long answer for this question of how do I release fear, how do I get rid of these fears, but I hope it gives some insight into the process that I use in my practice and how simple it can be. It doesn't have to mean that you revisit every painful moment of your life, but when you can pause for 90 seconds and observe how you experience that emotion in your body and give yourself that time and space to really feel it and understand it, not from a conscious trying to logicize or make it rational, but to ask the body how it's experiencing that and what wisdom is in it. This is where we have major breakthroughs. If you are listening to this and you haven't signed up for the three-day virtual fertility retreat yet, we will, at the time of this recording, be releasing the last day of the retreat, but the replays will be available until July 1st. So sign up to watch the replays, let me know what questions you have and I just hope you know everything that is possible for you. I want to leave you today with a message that one of our Brilliant Fertility program members sent over about a week ago. About a week ago, she actually began with us in the three-day retreat back in like August, september timeframe, and so here's what she says Our fertility journey has been anything but linear.

We were blessed to conceive our son without difficulty and naively assumed it would be the same the second time around. Aside from a traumatic delivery, everything seemed to return normal. However, as the years passed and pregnancy didn't come, I began to realize just how unpredictable and painful the road could be. What followed were two different fertility clinics, multiple egg retrievals, five failed IVF transfers, laparoscopy a hyster retrievals five failed IVF transfers laparoscopy a hysteroscopy. And countless tears. Despite following every protocol perfectly and doing everything right, we remained a statistical anomaly.

At our fertility clinic, my morale, trust in my body, intuition, faith and hope were depleted. As a final attempt to try everything, I found Dr Rose and attended her three-day fertility retreat. Instead of more checklists, I found moments of peace, reflection and the realization that healing and nurturing myself outside of the outcome was possible. That retreat shifted something in me. I joined the Brilliant Fertility Program, where Dr Rose helped me begin regulating my cycle after it had been disrupted by years of medications. For the first time in a long time, I had someone to turn to with questions, someone who brought clarity and calm rather than fear and spirals of endless Googling. She guided me through self-reflection, tapping into intuition, supplements, cycle tracking and ultimately reviewed a biopsy that pointed towards potentially untreated endometritis, something that hadn't been addressed at my fertility clinic.

As I focused on more healing, my faith and intuition began to return.

I found peace in the journey itself, not just the destination. And then, in my third month of the program, I saw my first positive pregnancy test in three years. I'm now seven months pregnant, something that for many years didn't feel possible. Now, obviously, I could never give guarantees because that would not be ethical, but stories like this are not uncommon in our practice. In fact, this is the 27th pregnancy of the year and it's pretty phenomenal to know where this client started, how burnt out she was, how hopeless she felt, how much unprocessed grief and fear was present, that she was able to move through with more ease than she thought. So I hope that gives you a glimmer of hope for what's possible, and I hope today's episode gave you just a little bit of space and idea for how you too can let go of fear and process all of the emotions that are asking to be seen and felt, so that you can move forward and closer to your dreams. I'm sending you so much love Until next time.