Unable to Get Pregnant, She Turned East in Quest of Fertility
I stand in a hotel conference room with 15 other women simultaneously bending down to scoop up imaginary piles of dirt. In unison, we bring the make-believe soil to our pelvic regions and then, as instructed, reach up as high as possible to funnel energy from the skies through our heads and down to our uteruses.
"Collect the yin energies from earth and the yang energies from heaven, then blend them in your center, where all life begins," directs Randine Lewis, creator of the five-day alternative fertility retreat in which we are taking part.
This ancient Taoist moving meditation Lewis has us doing, part of a discipline called qi gong, is an integral part of our healing process, apparently, and so we wake to scoop and reach every morning at the crack of 7:30. Most of us can't really envision yin in the dirt or yang in the sky, but we try. Oh, man, do we try.
If someone had told me a year ago that I would soon combat my infertility by tossing myself headlong into an ancient Chinese regimen including herbs, acupuncture, daily meditation and sweeping changes in my diet, I would have wondered what kind of herb she was smoking.
But she would have laughed last. Because earlier this year, at the age of 37 and after 2 1/2 years of very conventional, very Western attempts to conceive, I threw myself into such a program.
And why not? Six months on fertility drugs, two inseminations and one $13,000 attempt at vitro fertilization (IVF) had all failed me -- or I them. I felt I had to try something else. In February, minutes after I realized the IVF hadn't worked, and knowing my husband and I would have a rough time financing a second round of treatment, I hit the Internet looking for an alternative.
Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13240-2004Jun28.html
