Welcome back to the Her Fertility podcast. I am so excited to be bringing you a new series here on the Her Fertility podcast. We are going to walk through the fertility journey step by step from the moment you decide to have a baby and you want to get pregnant. All the way through the different paths that this journey may bring you.
I realized after talking with so many people about fertility, that a lot of people don't understand all of the different nuances that are involved with the fertility journey. And if you are somebody who. Is on their own fertility journey. There can be a lot of anxiety around the unknown of what's next.
So in this series, I'm going to walk you through step by step what to expect. I'm gonna bring you real stories from women and couples who have experienced these different stages of the fertility journey, and I'm going to bring you resources to support you so that no matter what stage you're at on the fertility journey, you have exactly what you need.
When you need it.
Welcome to the Her Fertility podcast. If you've been told to just trust the medical system, or on the flip side to only focus on holistic healing and neither feels like the full picture, this space is for you. I'm your host, Jess Tims. After navigating my own infertility journey, I left my corporate career to create Her Fertility support.
Because women deserve more than rushed appointments and one dimensional answers. Here we bridge the gap between clinical care and holistic healing, combining science and research with nervous system mindset and deep human connection. Because you don't have to choose one path. You get to use all of it, and when you do, everything changes.
Let's begin. If you have been trying to get pregnant and it's not happening in the time that you thought it would, then you might be diagnosed with infertility. And if you are like me, this diagnosis can feel like a kick in the stomach.
I will never forget when I first heard my doctor say, well, since you have infertility, and I was like, wait. What I'm just here trying to get pregnant, it really felt like a very defining moment. And for that reason, I don't use the word infertility a lot. I choose to use the word fertility or fertility journey.
Because I understand the power of language and what it does to not only the mind, but the body as well. So medically speaking, infertility is a diagnosis that a medical provider will give you if you've been trying for 12 months or longer. Or if you're over 35, 6 months or longer, but it isn't something that needs to define you.
Instead, I like to use infertility as more of a data source. Once you have the diagnosis, you are more likely to be prescribed advanced fertility testing and screenings, which we will be deep diving in the next episode of this Fertility Journey series. But today we're gonna focus on the experience of having infertility or unexplained infertility because there are some key things that you need to know if you've received this diagnosis.
So if infertility is not getting pregnant, unexplained infertility is not getting pregnant, and having no medical reason why that's happening. Now, in some cases there is. Medical reason why you might not be getting pregnant through a test or some other diagnostic work, you might be given a reason why when?
There's no reason why when all of your labs come back within normal ranges, when you fallopian tubes are open, when the male partner's semen analysis comes back within normal markers and you're still not getting pregnant. Then that is diagnosed as unexplained infertility. And I know this diagnosis very well.
Unexplained infertility is one of the most frustrating diagnoses because our minds like to make sense of things. We like to understand why something isn't happening, and often we create a story in our mind around.
Why something happened. And so if you don't have the information for your story, it can be really frustrating and you will continue to seek out answers to explain why this thing isn't happening for you. So with unexplained infertility, everything looks totally normal. You have no reason why medically you should not be getting.
Pregnant, and this is one of the biggest mistakes people make when they have unexplained infertility, is they wait too long to seek out compliments to Western medicine. Now some people say alternatives to western medicine, and there's a big debate online around. medical versus holistic, and it can feel like you have to choose one.
Like you're going only to your doctor and you're all in on western medicine, or you are going all in holistically and using alternative medicine or natural remedies. And I live in the world of. Both. I believe that we are in an age where we have more information than we know what to do with, and we can actually use that to our benefit, especially when we are solving complex problems like unexplained infertility and truly unexplained infertility just means that it's unexplained in.
Western medicine that there's not a test that's telling you what's going on, but if you are not getting pregnant, there is something going on. Which again is why this is so frustrating. And so what I see most people doing is waiting to long to start exploring these compliments to Western medicine.
Of course we want to work with our doctor and get information and data about the body, and we want to explore that with a trusted healthcare practitioner, while at the same time acknowledging that we are whole self beings. There is a physical body. You have an emotional body. We have an energetic system that is running throughout the whole body.
All of it being governed by our nervous system, and there is stuff living in your body from your past experiences in life, your subconscious mind, remembering things that have happened in your past and. All of your systems are connected. We cannot remove fertility from the rest of our systems. Our hormones play like a symphony.
I like to think of hormones as the individual instruments that are making up this beautiful symphony in the body. And when one of those instruments is off, the whole song sounds off, right? And so in getting to know. Your body and yourself on this fertility journey, you might start to look into compliments to Western medicine.
Now it's a bit of a rabbit hole, right? Like when you start to look into, you know, more natural ways of supporting yourself, it is a bit of a rabbit hole. And what's tricky is there's not a lot of research to support some natural methods. And you might try something that's not for you.
And I know this experience firsthand. I tried anything I could to get pregnant and some things felt like they didn't do anything and other things actually worked against me and my body. In fact, after trying fasting for my body, I didn't have a cycle for over 100 days.
My body was like on protest. It was like, do not restrict nutrients from me, and I didn't have a cycle. And it was so frustrating because here I am trying to get pregnant and then I destroyed my beautiful cycle which just felt like many steps in the wrong direction. And so how do you know what is best for you?
And this is something I work with clients on one-to-one all the time because it can be tricky on getting clarity around what you should and shouldn't try. And there are so many people out there online selling you things around your fertility. When you're just looking for answers, you're like, sure, I'll try it.
But you don't know whether it is for you. And so if you're in that boat, if you are like, I wanna get pregnant yesterday, I don't know what to try next, the number one piece of advice that I can give you is to listen to your inner guidance. Now, I know this sounds a bit abstract and unfortunately in our society we are not very much used to listening to our inner guidance.
In fact, a lot of us don't know what our inner guidance even sounds like, you might be one of those people who just goes with the flow of everyone else who's a people pleaser, who, it doesn't matter if somebody asks what you want for dinner, you're just like, oh, whatever you want.
That is a sign that you need to start listening to your own inner guidance because in there somewhere, you do know what you want for dinner and there is an answer that you can give back. And I say this with so much love and compassion because this was me, I was a pupil pleaser to the max.
I did everything for everyone else, but not in the way of like, you know, bending over backwards. But it just was always like, yeah, sure, whatever you want, or. Like again, I'll do anything to get pregnant, but the reality is my inner guidance and what my body needed from me wasn't everything. I didn't need everything to get pregnant.
I needed specific things. For me, and doing this on a podcast is a little tricky because I can't sit down with you and go through your whole fertility puzzle and say, okay. Let's look into this part. Let's look into that part, but I do wanna give you some guidance. So I created the Her Fertility framework.
It's a framework that we teach in the Her Fertility certification around how to support someone with their fertility journey. And her stands for HER, which is hormones, energy and Research. So we have to start with the hormones. This is where western medicine. Is absolutely benefiting you. You can understand your hormones from hormone tests and different exams, which we're gonna go into detail into in the next episode.
But you wanna get as much data on your body as possible, and sometimes this looks like advocating for yourself to get it. because not all practitioners do this by default, and so you wanna get as much information about, your physical body as possible for both the male and the female partners.
Now, once you have all the information you can get, then we wanna start looking at the E or the energy bucket. And this is where your inner guidance comes in, but also the energy centers of the body. And energy is interesting because it is a whole self system. There might be energy stuck in a different place in your body that's impacting your fertility center, but in general, start listening to what your body is already telling you.
Our bodies are these magnificent systems, but we were never given the language to understand what they're telling us, but in general. Your body wants to be in a state of wellbeing. It wants to feel good. It wants to wake up every day with energy before caffeine or exercise. It wants to sleep really well at night.
It wants to have a digestive system that is optimizing the nutrients that you're putting in and regularly eliminating the things that it doesn't need, without loading and without constipation. Your digestive systems should be something that is running with like flow, things like. Tension, headaches, anxiety in the heart or the upper belly.
These are all little key indicators from your body, from the different systems in your body, and it really takes discipline to tune into them because we have. So normalized not listening to our body. We have also so normalized things that suppress or repress those sensations. Things like alcohol or like unplugging.
And detaching and just watching TV because you feel so exhausted and you just wanna unplug. These are all little tools that we are adopting to not listen internally to what's going on. And there's nothing wrong with this. I wanna be very clear. This is not. The shame game or to point out the flaws. It's just one, it's just one of the biggest mistakes that people make is they go and they spend all this time and all this money on things that might work for them before listening internally to themself
and it can be tricky to know what is a yes or a no for you. And I work with people all the time on this. In fact, my fertility unplugged sessions, we go into how can you learn about your inner yes or no?
And we go through these exercises that seem a little silly, but they absolutely work because if you're like me, I was never taught what my internal Yes sounds like and feels like in my body. And it's different for everyone. And so that is the. E bucket of the Her Fertility method and then we move into the R or the research we wanna be doing things that's grounded in the research.
And again, not everything has research around it. In fact, women's health is one of the most under-researched fields in our country.
And that's why having your inner guidance is important. But if we can say that in general, this thing supports fertility, it gives us a little more information than we had. Before. And so with unexplained infertility, it really becomes a game of making it about you
this is a place you never expected to be. You did not ask to have unexplained infertility. You so badly want to be pregnant. And there is absolutely a time and a space to grieve that, right, to allow the emotions that come up in that. And then it's important to move forward in a way that honors. You and what feels good for you.
I'm going to share with you three examples of clients that I've supported who all had unexplained infertility so that you can see three different ways in which this manifests, and often unexplained infertility isn't one thing that's keeping you from getting pregnant.
And instead it's a combination of a few things that might be, not as explicit or apparent that are all adding together to create infertility in your body. So this is where really a holistic view of your fertility can support you.
And I don't just mean alternatives to western medicine, I also mean looking at your whole self. So. Of course your body, but your mind, your energy, your past experiences, your current, you know, lifestyle, all of the things that create, you can all contribute to unexplained infertility. And sometimes it's just like suboptimal levels of something that's contributing, coupled with nervous system dysregulation, let me share these three stories with you, and then I'm gonna give you some resources that you can consider for your own fertility journey so that you have a place to go if this is where you find yourself. So the first story I wanna share with you is a client who had regular cycles. She was in her late thirties and a business owner. So she came to me and she was like, Hey, I wanna get pregnant. I know that I have a lot of stress as a business owner, so I wanna work with you to find ways to manage that stress I encouraged her to track her cycle according to her basal body temperature and her cervical fluid. If you're not familiar with that, I have a free video series on YouTube that teaches you how to track your cycle.
Um, I'll link all of that below in the show notes. But she started to track her cycle and what we noticed was she was ovulating very late in her cycle. And then also she had really heavy periods, and so. I just told her like, Hey, it's great that you're having a cycle, but what we're seeing in the health of your cycle isn't what we want to be seeing, right? We wanna be seeing a luteal phase that's at least 10 days or longer after ovulation, and we don't love seeing a super heavy period.
That's not something that's showing that we have a really healthy cycle. And so with that data, she was able to go back to her doctor and say, Hey, like, can we do some more testing? And through our work together, she was able to get really clear on exactly what to ask and how to ask for it.
And through the series of tests, it turned out that she had this huge cyst right at her cervix. Now, the cyst itself was not problematic. She could have gone on living. A long time, right? Like with that cyst with no problems. However, once the cyst was removed, she was able to get pregnant very quickly and her body was telling her like, Hey, there's something going on here through the other symptoms that we were noticing.
Now, again, this isn't something that came up in her regular, protocols with her doctor. It was something that was showing up more discreetly, and when we started to ask more questions, she was starting to get more answers. And today she is a mom to a beautiful baby girl. And I love her example because on paper everything was normal.
All of her tests were normal. Even her cycle was, she had a normal cycle, but there was something else going on. And it wasn't until we started asking more questions, did she get. The answers. Now let me give you an example of another client. So story number two, and. I specifically keep the names of my clients anonymous.
Um, it's a confidentiality thing I keep with my clients unless they've asked me to share their full story and they're, you know, here on the Her Fertility podcast or, or on a social media video with me. Um, but this, this second story is, is one of my favorites, um, because the answer was so simple.
However, the couple didn't know to ask for this. So this amazing couple had been trying for over a year without getting pregnant. They were growing really frustrated, and they started working with me and you know, again, everything looked normal on paper
and in working with them, I just had the sense that there was something going on with his sperm, even though his semen analysis came back totally normal and within normal ranges. So they got a DNA fragmentation. Of his sperm, which is an additional test you can do with sperm. And even though his other levels were normal, he had a normal sperm count.
The motility was fine, and the morphology or the shape of the sperm were fine. The DNA fragmentation showed that there was challenges with. The makeup of the sperm
so in other words, his sperm quality was the problem. With that one test, they got their answer. Um, and so if you haven't done a DNA fragmentation, the company Legacy, who I'm just a huge fan of, they're an at-home sperm test kit company. They include DNA fragmentation, and so you can get. I'll put the link to them there.
It's not an affiliate link. They give us a discount here at Her Fertility, but I don't get any money from them. I'm just a huge fan of their product, and so I'll link that there. But you can also ask your provider for DNA fragmentation of sperm and once he was able to make.
Some changes for his sperm quality, they were able to get pregnant. Here's the last story from a client who had unexplained infertility. She had been trying for just under a year, but. Was very proactive, had done all of her research, and she reached out to me 'cause she's like, I just feel like there's something else going on here.
And the more we dug into her lifestyle and really what she was doing on a day-to-day basis, it became apparent that her nervous system was just being stretched to capacity over and over again. She's working at a really high level as most of the people I work with are right. As women. We take on a lot of things in our life and we can do it all. And she was doing it all. She would wake up every morning and exercise
she was very disciplined about her diet and ate a very healthy, clean diet. Um, she knew a lot about fertility and she had this really high performing job. And when we started to look at her day to day, her lifestyle is what we'll call it, but really what she was doing day to day. There was never time for her nervous system to come out of its go mode and into rest and digest unless she was sleeping and even then she didn't get great sleep.
And not getting great sleep is an indicator of your nervous system being. Overloaded. And so it was a real simple protocol for her to give herself the container to unplug, to bring her nervous system down into its parasympathetic state, which it's the rest and digest state, so that it's almost like a hack where she was giving her nervous system that.
Like unplug so that it wasn't always in fight and flight and wasn't always on, wasn't always going. And once she did that and really committed to it, it was as if her body felt safe enough to conceive. And today she's pregnant, which is wonderful. And so you can see that the fertility journey is really unique to each person and.
You know, unfortunately on social media and really like out in any media and in anything you read, we do a lot of like blanket statements. Like, this will work for everyone when in reality it is something that's really specific to you. Listening to your inner voice becomes really important, and I'm gonna give you a list of resources of alternatives to Western medicine that might be supportive for your fertility.
And now some of these modalities have research to support them. And I think they're all worth looking into and asking, you know, internally, does this feel like it could support me? And so the first is Reiki. Um, as you may know, I am, I'm Reiki trained.
I love. Reiki has an energy healing modality, and Reiki can absolutely support your fertility. So if you have questions about reiki, please reach out to me. I do fertility reiki sessions with people virtually, so it doesn't matter where in the world you live, we can do a Reiki session, and Reiki can absolutely support your energy body.
The next is acupuncture. And acupuncture has been proven to increase IVF success and acupuncture taps into the same energy systems in the body, as reiki just in a different way. Next is chiropractic. Chiropractic. Also, we're tapping into the nervous system, the system along the spine, and really opening up all of the channels that your body is using to communicate.
And then there's naturopathic medicine, and I'm a huge fan of naturopathic medicine because at its core, naturopathic medicine looks at the body as a self-healing connected system. And so it can give you a new perspective on your fertility journey. It is important to find one that specializes in fertility, and if you need any references, then working with a fertility doula is a great way to find someone in your area that could support you. And when you have unexplained infertility, then you know the struggle of wanting this so bad, right? Like wanting the pregnancy so bad, wanting this baby so bad, and then also managing. That energy around that. Now, some people say the stress and sometimes it does feel like stress, like you're managing the stress around this and you feel like.
Wanting and trying and tracking and doing all these things causes you stress. But there's also just an added energy around this, right? Like it might be stress, but some days it might. Like an energy of optimism. Sometimes it might be an energy of doubt or grief or jealousy, right?
Like there's these other. Emotions that become involved, especially with unexplained infertility. And there's two important things to note here. One is your nervous system is absolutely feeling that and responding to it. And then two is your subconscious mind gets involved. And if you've been around here.
Or any of my content for a while. Then you've likely heard me talk about the subconscious mind, but just in case you haven't, I'm gonna put this here because I think it's really important for people with unexplained infertility to hear this information. It's something I wish I knew when I had unexplained infertility because your mind will take you down so fast.
But all it is is the way that your subconscious mind is designed. So the subconscious mind is designed to keep you safe, and it is always scanning for threats or things that hurt in order to keep you safe. So when you're a small child and you touch a hot stove, your subconscious mind records that as.
Yikes, that's hot. Don't do that again. And then in the future, you won't touch the hot stove. Well, with unexplained infertility, you take a negative pregnancy test and you are disappointed by that, and you are bummed and your subconscious mind records that as yikes, that hurts. Let's not do that again. And in order to avoid feeling the pain again, your mind will start to feed you thoughts of doubt.
It can sound like this will never work. Why do you think you can get pregnant? This is not meant for you. And if you've ever had those thoughts, it's simply the function of your subconscious mind trying to keep you safe from the pain that it doesn't want to experience that negative pregnancy test again.
When you can hear the thought of like, oh, this is never gonna work, and you can understand that this is just your subconscious mind trying to keep you safe, you can stop identifying with that thought and really start to give it a lot of compassion and love of like, okay, great.
Thanks mind for trying to keep me safe. I still really want this baby. And then you find ways to support yourself through it. So for some people that's finding a support group. And we have the free fertility support circle that meets once a month. We now have two times for the support circle, so we have an East Coast time and a west coast time.
And if a group feels supportive for you right now, please join us at the next circle for you. For you support might look like one-on-one support, where we work together with me as your fertility doula and we hold the space for the energy of this journey so that you have a container to put.
It all in, right? Like when we have our sessions together, you have this space where you can get all that energy out, you can get clarity and then you can move on with your life as normal so that you continue to stay true to who you are and you don't lose yourself on this journey.
That's really what one-to-one sessions gives you. Or you might be someone who likes more of a self-paced, self-guided type of support, and that's why I've created the Fertility Frequency Collective inside the collective. It is a full. A body of resources for you to support yourself as you're moving through your fertility journey so that you can manage the energy of this thing that you're navigating.
And like my client, who is able to carve out the time for her nervous system, you will have scientific proven tools for your nervous system inside the collective. So. All of those resources are linked in the show notes, but if you have questions or you just don't know where to start, then please contact me on social media.
At Her Fertility support.
And in the next episode, we're gonna dive into the different exams and tests that you can do to get more information.
Thank you for joining me on this week's episode of the Her Fertility podcast. I am so grateful you're here. If you found this episode valuable, then I'd love for you to join me on the next one, share it with a friend, and rate the episode with a five star review so that the podcast can reach the women who need it most.
If you have any questions about what you just heard, please connect with me on social media. At Her Fertility support, find the right type of support for your fertility journey in the show notes below.