If you’re currently considering using an egg donor or you’ve been advised by your doctor you need to use an egg donor, and you’re feeling totally overwhelmed by the prospect, you’re not alone. Turning to egg donation to have a baby involves complex emotional, psychological, and practical considerations. There is the grief around the loss of your DNA, worries about whether you’ll still feel like the REAL mother of your baby, feelings of guilt and shame, concerns about what other people will think, and fears about how your child will feel as they grow up. This is before you even get to the finan ..read more

The struggle with New Year when you’re going through infertility can be hard. As everyone around you ushers in The New Year with celebrations and plans for the year ahead, for anyone going through infertility, it’s common for feelings such as uncertainty and frustration to surface, alongside a sense of futility about investing any time in setting goals or making plans for the future. This can be difficult when you’re surrounded by people who are setting career and health goals, planning family holidays or making big plans for the future. For many women who are going through infertility, it can ..read more

Pregnancy announcements are one of the things that any woman going through infertility dreads. Not only do they amplify the gulf between other people’s joy and your harsh reality, but there is an expectation that you should feel joyous about the news as well, particularly if it’s a close friend or family member. This sets off a cascade of emotions, such as shame and guilt, that compound feelings of grief and anxiety you may be feeling due to infertility. In this episode, I discuss: The specific dynamics of what makes pregnancy announcements so hard (so you're not left feeling it's because you ..read more

A common theme that I see amongst women going through infertility is how their self-worth is significantly impacted by what they’re going through. There are many aspects of infertility that contribute to low self-worth. There’s the societal messages that cause women to feel less worthy if they are not mothers, the sense of shame and guilt women feel if they can’t provide a child for their partner or a grandchild for their parents, or the sense of failure that’s fuelled by insensitive comments and unsolicited advice from people around them that suggest that what they’re doing is not good enough ..read more

There is a unique form of heartache associated with a failed fertility cycle. Aside from the significant financial investment, there is a huge amount of mental, physical and emotional investment for each cycle. Add to this the challenge of trying to fit everything that a fertility cycle demands of you on a practical level in amongst showing up as you normally would at work and in your everyday life. Then of course, there is the dream of having your baby slip through your fingers and heart strings.   It's no wonder that it’s so crushing when a cycle doesn’t turn out as you’d hoped. Wheth ..read more

When you’re going through infertility, it can turn your life upside down on every level. Whether it’s the roller coaster of emotions, the constant stream of thoughts ranging from rumination over what you could have done differently through to fears about how things might pan out. Add to this all of the medical appointments, the health practitioners, the invasive fertility treatments that need to be slotted in amongst work and in everyday life, punctuated by late nights spent Googling the latest information about how to boost your fertility. It's no wonder so many women experiencing infertility ..read more

The grief of infertility that women go through on their fertility journey is something that’s so hard to contend. It’s intense, it’s overwhelming and it’s all-consuming. But what makes it even harder to deal with is the fact that not only is infertility grief something that most women have never been taught the skills to deal with, but it’s a completely unique form of grief that society doesn’t understand nor recognise appropriately. This creates a very isolating dynamic for women going through infertility, as they fail to receive the kind of support and understanding they need & deserve ..read more

If you ask a woman going through infertility to name an emotion that describes how she feels, one of the most common emotions cited is stress. That’s why learning the skills to cope with all of the stress that accompanies a challenging fertility journey is so vital. The problem for most women struggling to have a baby is that they have never been taught the life skills required to deal with the kind of life crisis that infertility is. In this episode, we’re going to look at: - What stress actually is, and why infertility stress in particular is so challenging - Some common strategies that may ..read more

Navigating a challenging infertility journey throws most people a curve-ball because it demands the kind of life skills that most women going through infertility have never been taught. This is really challenging because trying to conceive and have a baby already demands so much from women, on top of needing to function in their daily life, so having to then research, learn and adopt skills to stay afloat mentally and emotionally can feel like an impossible task. This is why I love to share with women the number 1 life skill I adopted when I was going through infertility that’s also backed up ..read more

One of the most common questions I get asked as an infertility coach is “What’s all the fuss about meditation for infertility?” followed closely by “What do I do when I’ve tried meditating but can’t?” Tune into this episode to learn about what both the research AND my first-hand experience with meditation on my fertility journey reveals about the profound benefits of meditation for infertility. I’ll share with you: - How I arrived at the practice of meditation & what my meditation journey was like (including how I used meditation on my fertility journey, and the profound experience that ca ..read more