I spent an hour this morning with my strawberries. They had been completely overtaken by weeds. What is my excuse for that? I had been busy, had no time. But the garden had waited long enough, and so I got to work.
As I was working and clearing, the strawberries began to actually show and I saw they werw struggling. They weren’t growing and producing, they are depressed. Stunted. All their energy had been going into surviving rather than into bearing fruit.
It struck me, as it often does in the garden, how much this mirrors what happens in our own bodies and lives.
We are constantly being asked to give – to our families and friends, at work and for the community. We are often so busy giving that we stop weeding our own gardens and with time we become overwhelmed – emotionally, mentally and physically. Exhausted, unproductive.
The thing is too, once your garden is overgrown, it becomes much harder to clean. First, the job seems too big to even start. And then, when you muster the determination, it is much harder to do – you can barely make the distinction between friends and foes and they are so entangled that sometimes we pull what we have planted.
Growth – in a garden or in the womb – requires the right conditions. Space, nourishment, and the absence of too much competition for resources. The body cannot pour resources into conception when it is in survival mode.
Yoga is one of the most accessible tools for beginning that clearing process for ourselves.
In yoga we move, breathe and we do less. We are downregulating the stress response that so many of us on a fertility journey are quietly running in the background. We brings ourselves back into our bodies at a time when it is easy to feel estranged from it.
The rewards are not just physical. A consistent yoga practice tends to return a sense of grounding and openness — a feeling of having been genuinely tended to, perhaps for the first time in a long while.
If you are trying to conceive and feel that your inner garden has been neglected, maybe it’s time to clear a little space — and see what grows.
Photo by Charly Seyler on Unsplash
