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 favorite. 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. Oh, I am excited about this lunar new year. Yeah, we've been in 2026 now for what six and a half weeks, but this transition from the wood snake to the fire horse in the traditional Chinese lunar calendar is a pretty significant shift in energy. And if you felt like most of 2025 was just like lesson after lesson, and so much shedding, and it was uncomfortable and disorienting, and you felt untethered, and it was just like one thing after another. You're not alone. I know I went through it. So many of my patients and clients went through it. And I am I am excited about the energy shift. There were some rituals that I did on the cusp of this lunar new year to just kind of you know plant a stake in the ground of like this is what I'm here for. And and one of those, one of those things as we get into the meat of this podcast episode is just realizing and honoring that I do not have the capacity for shallow anything anymore. Um, I cannot, I can't tolerate inauthenticity. Like I can feel it in my body, and it feels physically so wrong. Um, you know, I I understand that there are time and places for a little bit of small talk to just create rapport, perhaps. But um I just I just can't I can't do like anything shallow. I just I can't I can't do it. And so that's something that I'm like, okay, I need to really find the rituals and uh practices to honor that and to invite the depth in from others as well. So that's just that's one little piece of the intentions that I wrote down as we enter this fire horse here. Um, but it's also a bolder energy, and it got me thinking about like what do I really want to share? What would deeply serve you in this energetic transition? And I mean, there's there's so many things. But what came to mind is, you know, a few months ago, there was that trend on Instagram floating around of you know, the like what I would tell you if I wasn't afraid to hurt your feelings. And I am such a slow mover on Instagram that I just I never really end up catching trends. And that's just is what it is. I have to make peace with my trendiness or my lack thereof. But it this one stuck with me because so often when we're seeking advice, there's the thing that we want to hear, but then there's the things that we need to hear that maybe we don't want to hear. And I think I spent many of my earlier years as a practitioner being afraid of hurting people's feelings or scaring them off. And I have to wonder like at what cost to results, at what cost to their healing? And of course, I don't intentionally go into a situation wanting to hurt someone's feelings, but I'm I I tread really gently in my work because I know that an infertility journey often comes with a lot of trauma and having a safe space to explore that and find perspective and healing is so deeply important. And I'm also aware that sometimes hearing the deeper truths are uncomfortable, and sometimes part of healing is hearing a deeper truth that is uncomfortable, right? Because we can't just skate by on shallow intentions and superficial treatments. And if we weren't afraid of hurting feelings, there might be some uncomfortable truths that I would share with you. So I'm gonna do that today. And I just invite you to take these as offerings or suggestions. Like when I say truth, like this has been my truth in practice for 13 years, helping hundreds of patients and clients all over the world. And it's not like I'm not God, I didn't write this in the sky. So, you know, I invite you to just listen, kind of like notice what happens in your body when I name these. And like for me, oftentimes I will feel like like when I know that I've just been skirting around an issue and avoiding it and doing all the things to procrastinate, dealing with it. I know that when someone names that truth, it kind of feels like oh, all of my armor has been stripped away and I have just been punched in the stomach, and I feel really vulnerable and uncomfortable for a moment. But then there's also this like deep sense of like, oh yeah, that's the thing. So I just invite you to notice today what comes up, and um let's get into it. So if I wasn't afraid of hurting your feelings, number one, I would tell you that your baby, your future baby, doesn't need you to be perfect, they need you to be present, and you practicing what presence is now, maybe one of the things that helps you invite your baby in. And so what I mean by this is I think oftentimes we're so focused on doing it right, doing it perfectly, whether that means you know you're supposed to be getting 30 grams of protein at each meal. And so you hyper focus on did I get my 30 grams? And while I'm sitting there eating my breakfast, I'm thinking about how am I gonna get it at lunchtime and what is dinner gonna look like, and how am I how do I do this perfectly? And if I got 70 grams one day, then I'm beating myself up for it the next day, and it's like, whoo, okay, yes, we should definitely be getting adequate protein. And also, can we observe how we are coming into that experience? Are you able to be fully present with your meal? Are are you present while you're grocery shopping? And what do I what do we even mean by be present? It's that place of just being okay in the moment where you are, not kicking yourself for what did or didn't happen yesterday, and not going out into the future anxiously thinking about all the things that could go wrong or the ways that you're gonna mess it up. It's just, I am here now. That's what your baby needs. More than you getting the perfect amount of protein, more than you checking off everything on your list. And I would even invite you to look at how are you using perfectionism as a coping mechanism? What is it causing you to run away from? I can't remember what I talked about in the first or second episode when we covered perfectionism, though maybe we all go back and listen to that. But I often joke, but it's like not a joke, that if if my husband sees me starting to organize my closet by color and sleeve length, it is time to ask some deeper questions. Not like, oh wow, you're doing such a great job organizing, but like, oh, hey, what are you what are you coping with right now? Or what are you avoiding coping with right now? What do you actually need? Because that is it is a coping mechanism. It is a way that we learned to distract ourselves from feeling. And sometimes that, you know, being present feels a little dangerous because it also means like, oh, if I'm present, I'm gonna feel the feelings that I have been avoiding for a long time. So if that one felt like a little gut punch to you, I just invite you to take a breath and notice your feet on the ground. And please know that you can come back to work on this. We can work on this together if that feels like an orienting safe place for you. All right. Number two thing that I would tell you if I weren't afraid of hurting your feelings, that your timeline and the pressure you are putting on your timeline, like trying to put an end date on when you're gonna get pregnant, or putting so much pressure around, like it has to happen by this age, or I need it to happen this month, because if I get pregnant and ended up giving birth on this month, that month's already too busy for me. Like, this is not helping. That's that's the lesson here, that this is not helping. Um, that level of pressure, it's is a form of ultimately trying to control an outcome. And I know, I know from my personal experience, I know from my you know, hundreds of patients working through this, that we want nothing more than just to know when this is gonna happen and how it's gonna happen. And those are the two things that like there, we just we have no way of knowing. And so, how can we co-create in that uncertainty? That that might be like the big question of life, right? Not even just the big question of when am I gonna get pregnant? How am I gonna get pregnant? How is how is this baby gonna come to us? How can I co-create with this uncertainty? Instead of if I don't get pregnant by X date, then you know what are what are all the things that you're making that mean? Then I am a failure, then we we are gonna give up, um, and I'm too old, then I've wasted too much time, like all of those stories are not helping. So what do we do instead? Because it's all well and good to realize, like, okay, yes, I've been putting all this pressure on the timeline, and I'm feeling like like I'm gonna be 40 next week. Holy shit balls, like I'm and I'm realizing that there is so much good that comes from having some wisdom under our belts, and that all that pressure that we have about like I should have been at this point, I should have been further, and life somehow, like none of that is helping you get to your goals now. So there's some tension in there, right? Between the here is what I want for myself, and here is where I am right now. And you know, as we talked about being present, part of this is, you know, with the timeline, like learning how to be present while also calling in what you do desire and doing that in a way where you can sit back and go, okay, I trust that I've done my part, I trust that I've done everything I can to influence this scenario. And whenever this baby, however, this baby is meant to reach us, we are open arms, ready to love unconditionally. And that part that that wants to chime in and talk about how much time it's taking, or your age, or any of these, like you can you can thank it for it's wanting to be logical about these things, but it's also worth getting curious, like how much of that is yours, how much of that is societal, you know, the expectations, the opinions of others, like doesn't have to be for you. And as I was um reading a little bit more about the energy of this year, of the fire horse year, and the uh elements of like our organ systems that really need to be nourished, like the the fire organs. So heart um is the main one, but then like what are the supportive organs in the TCM system of the heart? So it's the small intestine, the triple warmer, which is the Sanjiao, and the pericardium. So I want to talk about the small intestine here for a moment, because one of the gifts of the small intestine energetically is discernment. So realizing what's mine, what belongs to someone else? So if you are turning 40 this year, like me, and you are sitting in that question mark of, am I too old, is that really a worry that you have? Or did you pick that up from someone else? And I want to reassure you that if you are 40 or 41 or 43 and you still feel deeply called to mothering, then mothering is meant for you. We won't know exactly how it's gonna come in or the timeline it's gonna come in on. But I believe that it's meant for you. And especially if you have been practicing being present, which allows you to connect to your intuition, that also sharpens your discernment. It also helps you understand like what is for me versus what has been put on me. And this is a good question about parenting in general, because there have been a few times in my career when someone came to me, like, okay, we're supposed to, we we want to get pregnant, we've been trying for four years, I'm gonna be 40 next year. And I just feel like, you know, if it hasn't happened now, it's not gonna happen. And you know, we start to have a conversation about why do you why do you want to have a baby? What is it going to give you to have a baby? What is life gonna look like once that baby is here? And this has only happened a couple of times because most people get to me after a long journey of like really having this yearning. But every once in a while, someone's like, you know what? I don't think I actually want this, and I don't think I actually ever wanted this. And I think I was just told that that was the next best, that was the next step in life. And my parents have always said they want grandchildren. And I've just felt this pressure that like I'm supposed to do that. And what a relief it is for them to realize that their body was doing exactly what they actually wanted it to was to not have a baby. Now, if you're listening to this podcast, it's probably not you. And if you found some like, ooh, like, ouch, resistance to that, or you just said, like, that's not mine, then great, your discernment is working. Um, but I do invite you to explore any of the pressure that you put on yourself around time, and know that there we have we have our ways of supporting the releasing of that pressure, the releasing of the fear of it not happening, the anxieties around it not happening at the time that you had wanted it to happen. And you know, part of that is you tuning in, finding what practices and rituals help you tune into your intuition and stay present and practice discernment. And some of it is also connecting to your baby's spirit and learning from them and listening to them and trusting their timeline because we don't consciously know when they're supposed to arrive and what they're here for, and the timing of their arrival does matter in their greater purpose. So, can you also learn how to trust their timing? Okay, number three. If I was not afraid to hurt your feelings, I would tell you that all of the negative feelings you are having are valid. But if you don't have ways of processing these feelings, they will absolutely get in the way. And whether that means get in the way of you actually getting pregnant and staying pregnant, or getting in the way of you living your life to the fullest, um, either way, we need to learn how to process our feelings. So um we've gone into a little bit of, you know, just the the need to be present and release the timelines, but the the feelings around fertility, like goodness, it just it runs the gamut. And I think the most often ones that I see, at least that have risen to the surface for people are fear, fear that it hasn't happened yet, fear that it's not going to happen, fear if they've had a previous loss, that it's gonna happen again. And then we have grief. Like this is not what my life was supposed to look like. This is not what I had imagined for myself at this point, and all of that sadness is absolutely valid. And then we have all the flavors of anger, resentment, frustration, jealousy, watching everyone around you get pregnant. Watching people get pregnant easily when it seems like their lifestyle shouldn't be supportive of that. Watching people flippantly describe how it happened so easily, like again, it's all valid. And what I often see is that when people weren't given ways to name and feel and fully move through an emotion. And you know, in often that happens in childhood as we're really learning, like, what are what is this feeling that I'm having when my friend stole my toy? What is this feeling that I'm having when I feel like someone betrayed me after telling a secret that I had told them? Like when the people surrounding us aren't setting the example, when they're not giving us those tools, we just learn other coping mechanisms. And if you've gotten this far and you're listening to the podcast, you're clearly alive. And so all of your survival mechanisms worked, but we have to remember that your brain, the parts of your brain that just want you to survive, don't give two shits about your happiness or the dreams that you have for yourself. They care about your survival. So if you care about your dreams and if you care about your happiness, then it is time to learn better systems, better tools, and better coping mechanisms. I've talked about my favorites in the past, emotional freedom technique being one of them. We have a whole episode about it. An episode with journaling prompts. Those are really wonderful tools. I've talked about hypnosis. We've done somatics with Stacey Ramsaur. So this podcast has a lot of good resourcing to begin that journey of processing feelings. One of my favorites to use in practice, one-to-one with someone. This is not something that I have seen done in any sort of self-paced or self-study way, is something called timeline therapy. And it's a way of asking the unconscious mind when it first associated with an emotion, so that we can go back to that time. It is a hypnotic tool, but go back to that time and ask the subconscious mind or the higher self, what can we learn from this? That learning that will allow us to leave that emotion in the past so that we're not just carrying it for the rest of our lives. And what I love about this technique is that it does not mean you have to go in to the traumatic event and talk about the thing that happened and get stuck in it. It allows you to have perspective and gain wisdom. And there's a lot of other techniques that you can use during a timeline session, like parts integration and inner child healing and somatic release. So it's a very versatile tool that, when used under the guidance of someone who's professionally trained, can be so helpful in processing trauma in a way that is not really draining, which I know there people have everyone has their own experience with these different tools. This has been my experience with timeline therapy, is that it's so gentle and really great with like lightening the load. So please know that your feelings are valid. It is very crucial that you learn how to be safe to feel your feelings so that you can release them from the body, so that they're not getting in the way of what you want. Whether that means like literally getting in the way of you getting pregnant or getting in the way of you being able to just live with deep presence and have the full spectrum of the human experience. Because oftentimes when we are, you know, living in a state of just constant suppression of the emotions, like not only do we avoid the anger and the fear, but we also miss out on the joy and the depth of connection and the sustained feeling of, yeah, even when things are not okay, like my soul is gonna be okay. Um so just really being able to lean into the human experience and feel like, all right, no matter what happens, I'm gonna look back and know that like I sucked the marrow out of life. So I hope this gave you some good stuff to marinate on for the next week or so. Um share this with a friend if you think they need it. Um especially, especially the friends who maybe need to hear some uncomfortable truths, but are kind of like ready to go there. I think we we all know who we all know who some of those are. Um, I was very much one of those five, six years ago. And uh I'm sending you so much love as always. I hope that this new lunar year is such a gift to your journey and your soul, and and I'm here for you. If there's anything you want to chat about, we've got the discovery call link book of discovery booking link in the show notes. If you feel like having a deeper conversation, be supportive about the next steps on your journey. And we have some amazing episodes coming up this spring around conscious conception and the continuation of that conversation. And I'm really I'm looking forward to personally really just digging into life and asking, like, how can how can we make fertility conversations fun and sexy? So if you uh feel called to take a moment to pause, rate, review the podcast, that just helps it get into more ears and more lives and hopefully help us live better lives and create a better world. Until next time, lots of love.