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 when 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 favorite box. 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. I've recently joined one of her offerings called the Devotional Leadership Council, and it's a group of women from all over the world, different backgrounds, ethnicities, cultures, just really, really brilliant, wise, compassionate women who are choosing to come together in circle many times over this coming year, online and in person, to share with each other and really relate to each other and be a part of creating a better world. And the reason I'm sharing this is the episode topic today, this little quickie conversation that I'm having is around the idea that conscious parenting starts with conscious conception. And I'll be hosting a lot of conversations around conscious conception this year. So I wanted to begin with this conversation and an experience that we had on this retreat that just really cracked me wide open. And that was a cacao ceremony that was hosted at the retreat. And you know, I've been a part of cacao ceremonies before here locally that were like, you know, they they were nice. And, you know, you sit around and you drink cacao, and it's not quite as sweet as hot cocoa. And it's, you know, it's just kind of a nice, cozy experience. But this, my friends, this was so incredible. We were hosted in the cacao ceremony by a woman named Lupita, who is an Indian in goodness gracious, mouth, let's cooperate, an indigenous elder in the community that we were in in Mexico, whose family has worked with cacao for generations, and to really view cacao as a plant medicine and something that can allow you to connect to the earth and the soul of your work and your ancestors and the way that she spoke about cacao. And we were so lucky that one of the women in our group is um, her family of origin is actually not far from where we were in Mexico, and she was able to translate for us. And thank you, Emma, if you ever happen to listen. But we were able to, you know, hear Lupita in her own voice, in her native voice, and to have like that deep, like emotional understanding of what she was communicating and why it was so important for us women to be gathering in circle and creating this relationship with each other and the land and our elders as part of creating a better world. Uh, Lupita said something to the effect, and like our translation of it may not be perfect, but the women that men want no longer exist, and the men that we need have not been created yet. And gosh, I would love to sit down and have like an hour-long conversation with her just about that statement. But how I took that to mean was not just that these men that we need have not been birthed yet, but that we have not invited men to the table, perhaps in a way that we could to be a part of conscious creation. And I know that may be true for me. Maybe that's it, maybe it's just a me thing, but a couple of the other women and I had conversations around this, um, where you know, we've been doing so much of our own work to clear trauma, both in our own lives and in our generational histories, uh, to process emotions in a new way, in a in a way that maybe we were not given tools for as children and young adults. And that is part of the path of conscious parenting. So even before someone gets pregnant and births a child, you can already be starting that journey of conscious parenting by clearing your own trauma, by relating to people in ways that maybe you hadn't had the capacity to relate to earlier in life. And I know that for me, there have been junctions in life where I was like, oh my goodness, I just do not have the bandwidth to deal with this person and their shame and how they're showing up to this. And the more personal work, the more inner work, the more clearing work that I have done, the more I can relate to them with compassion. And that's it's a really it kind of a nuanced, sometimes fluid, sometimes very murky area to be in as a human, because we may have parents or elders who are are just completely unwilling to ever acknowledge their trauma, their shame, that the way they show up in the world is very hurtful to others. And one of the women uh on the retreat and I talked a lot about her work, which is in the realm of somatic healing and um healing through sensual movement, and she works with people who are in these life thresholds, so big life transitions, big life changes, life and death situations, literally, and how you know her experience in the world is that so much of what we are witness to right now is just the unhealed trauma, the unhealed shame of so many men who were never given opportunities to heal and be present to hurt that has been put upon them. And not that we can, you know, heal the world in one go. Uh I've I've really begun to release that. I've I've typically been someone who like just carries it all on my shoulders, like, oh my God, it's all my responsibility. And that can be very paralyzing. So as we know venture deeper into the conversations around conscious conception, conscious parenting, when that begins, how that begins, I don't know that there's any one, there's there's not like a perfect timeline, a perfect starting point. You don't have to clear all your trauma perfectly in order to get pregnant or stay pregnant or be a good loving parent, but there has to be some acknowledgement of it. And ideally, the minute you think I might want to be a parent, is when you can also say, I wonder what types of healing may be required for me to be the best parent that I can be. Not a perfect parent because that doesn't exist. And Lord knows, even just, you know, getting my kids out the door in the morning, I have moments that I look back on and be like, I could have handled that more gracefully. But in the big moments, you know, the moments when they are processing hard things in life, I'm so proud of the person that I have become to allow them to have their big feelings in ways that feel safe. And it's still like there's still so much learning and growing to be done around this. But the sooner we can get very real about how we are showing up in the world, um, the sooner we can decide to relate to our traumas differently, the better parents we're gonna be. That I just know for a fact. There may be some of you who are listening and wondering, like, where would I even begin, or feeling overwhelmed? And I've got a few other episodes about trauma. You can go back and listen to the episode with Dr. Julie Vaughn, and please know that her book, Spiritual Fertility, is just such a lovely introduction to relating to trauma differently as it relates to the fertility journey. And you can also begin with one of the tools that is my absolute favorite, which is EFT tapping. But I also want to just hold a really high value for how how am I gonna put this? How value, how valuable it can be to be in a group container that is with such high intention and integrity. And it's it's been a little bit since I've hosted my group program, the Brilliant Fertility Program. I had to take a pause on that this past few months as we got our brick and mortar new office building opened and settled. And as I was you know, really leaning into what's the next chapter of my work and the soul of my work, and I joined this very lovely wise council of women and got to sit in circle with them, it was a reminder of how uniquely powerful that is to be with other women of high intention and to know that even though we all have different goals, different backgrounds, different traumas, that we can hold each other. And having that co-regulation piece is just so impactful. And I know I've mentioned this before in the podcast. Part of healing fertility on a collective level is remembering that we are human beings who are meant to be in community. We are meant to be relating to other people. And when we take this, you know, very vulnerable scenario of fertility struggles, which can be very, very isolating, I do believe that that's that's going to end up just exacerbating all the fertility issues that we are seeing on a collective level. So when we can relate to other humans, even if we can't always be with them in person, that frequency, like you can feel a frequency even across the screen. And it's even better if you can sit next to someone, if you can hug someone, if you can hold space for someone who is going through something hard. And what's so beautiful is when it's done effectively and you have the right framework and agreements and tools, you can hold space for someone who's going through something really challenging without taking it on. And that is such a really powerful element of conscious parenting as well, because when your child, and so many of you, are going to have your child in your arms within the next year or two. And those children are gonna go on to have tantrums and meltdowns and outbursts and big, big feelings. And it is going to hold up a mirror for you in a way that you were like, holy shit, I thought I'd done the work, and now it's really staring me in the face. And when you have already practiced holding space and being true about where you are, like how are you doing really, and being very honest with yourself and learning how to hold that space for someone without taking all their stuff on. Gosh, it makes those tantrums just go by a lot more fluidly. You'll feel much more skilled at that work of parenthood. And you'll realize that this is this is just a moment, and it doesn't mean that I'm doing anything wrong. It's just a little human who hasn't learned how to regulate their nervous system yet. But because I practiced regulating mine even before I got pregnant, I am so much more skilled at this. And please know that I am not speaking from some high and mighty place because I had just scratched the surface of understanding my own traumas before my first son was born, before I conceived him. And it truly wasn't until uh my first son was, he would have been four, and my second one was one, when I really had to face my own nervous system dysregulation, my own, like the isolation that happened that first year of you know, COVID with 2020. It just, you know, goodness, I think so many of us came face to face with a lot during that time. And I just want to help you now before you get to that place where I was in 2020, 2021, of just feeling like I had no skills and everything that I felt like like there was no pause, right? There was there was only capacity to react. So as we step into conscious conception, conscious parenting, know that there's no perfection necessary. And we do have to find our tools to have the pause, to have the capacity to respond differently, to ask better questions, and to have community that we can co-regulate in. So you may have already been able to tell that I did not follow any of uh any of my bullet points for today. But I hope that this quickie got you just sitting with some questions of how you can relate to your own emotions, your own traumas, what you notice about what's happening in the world, and how, like, you know, what is what is that pulling up for you? And what kind of world do you want your children to live in? What kind of knowing that we can't change the entire world in one generation, that it may take generations and generations. Uh, Lupita's statement at the end of our cacao ceremony was that it's we're we're probably about five generations off from seeing really big change. And that felt both very hopeful to me and also I I noticed some real grief in that. Like my human ego was like, but I want to live to see the change. I want to live to see a radically different, loving, peaceful world. And the fact that that just may not happen in my lifetime and my children's lifetime. It's like I have to honor the grief of that and also maintain the hope that three to five generations from now we could be in a very different place as humans, living in a more peaceful world and really honoring the planet that we live on, this beautiful earth that provides so much for us. That was a huge takeaway from this retreat for me, it was just the deep unending gratitude for this planet and the life that she provides for us, and how we also honor her in our journeys as humans. Um yeah, there's so much more there that I will weave into this year of content. And I I just I know that we humans have it within us to do better. I I hope we do. I'm really standing in that right now. And that part of it will come from how we choose to treat each other, how we choose to deal with our own shit so that our children don't have to be the cycle breakers, if you will, which I know so many of you are, and it simultaneously. hurts and is also so liberating and so empowering and if you have chosen to be the cycle breaker I'm so proud of you and if you are like what the hell is a cycle breaker and you want to know more about that shoot me a DM and we can open up more conversation around that or um do a couple episodes around it as well. All right I am sending you so much love so much gratitude for listening and um hope you can give yourself some grace today and send some love to yourself and maybe this is a call to action to just um you know see who you can relate to this week who can you grab lunch with grab a coffee with go for a walk with call on the phone and just say how are you doing really and what it feels like to hold space for them without taking any of their stuff on and just being present all right friends until next time sending you truly so much love