Liberated

It was the consolation prize to the llama packing trip. We could not convince the teenagers to go more than a few days on a trip, so we bagged the llama packing, much to Magic's chagrin, and decided to take a yoga class at a local retreat center with this gal. It was a really great getaway, but I definitely could have gone longer. Our trip was not quite long enough to de-stress entirely, but long enough to recognize how stressed out I have been.

Our yoga workshop focused on dealing with anxiety and depression. Hmmm, this might be good for dealing with IF treatments, eh? I actually went with an attitude of "I'm not going to learn anything, but it will be a good review". Not that I'm any kind of yogi, by any stretch of the imagination. I actually learned some interesting things. One was that you can have a yoga workshop with 75 people in a large tent outdoors. We froze our asses off the first night at 8000 feet and were roasting the next day. Welcome to the Rockies.

The workshop focused on restorative yoga. I kinda poo-pooed restorative yoga in the past since I wasn't getting much of a workout. I have been so stressed about this "Mission Impossible" IVF that I do need something to de-stress. Working out is important, but so is taking time to relax. I often times feel like I don't have time to relax. Time. It feels like it is constantly slipping away from me as my body parts head south. I know time is an illusion, based on my premonitions of my car accident (how could I have seen it coming?).

The highlight of the trip was this:

This is the Great_Stupa_of_Dharmakhaya which_liberates_upon_seeing. I never got tired of visiting it. We made many hikes up to see the stupa, at least a couple of times a day. It was breathtaking at night. Even the Dalai_Lama has been here, but you don't have to be Buddhist to appreciate the stupa. It was build as a symbol of peace to inspire people from all kinds of backgrounds.

I'm happy to be back to my juicer though. No juice of any kind to be found at the retreat center. I definitely noticed a difference, with less energy by the end of the trip.

I'm on CD25 today! Another slightly longer than normal cycle. Let's see how long this one goes for. I'm guessing AF will be coming tomorrow. Maybe in time for the lunar eclipse?

It's in the Cards

I use cards as an oracle to get guidance. The deck that I have been using for the last couple of months has been the "Magical_Messages_from_the_Faires". Some of the backstory of how I came to use this deck is here. I recently discovered that Weebles Wobblog's sister, Sheri, who also happens to be an intuitive, does weekly readings on her blog, Wild Women of the Universe, pulling cards from various tarot decks and interpreting them! She did a wonderful reading for me on Wednesday. Go check it out!

Part of my inspiration for juicing was brought on by cards I was pulling from the deck. When asking about what I could do for my health/fertility, I pulled the "Vegetarian" card. I thought, I'm not going to go back to being a vegetarian. I knew that I needed to get more vegetables in my diet. I was already eating as many vegetables as I could cook in a day and was frustrated by trying to figure out how to eat more. The only way I could practically get more vegetables in my diet was to juice them!

I recently used my deck again for this question, "what guidance do you have about my fertility and having a baby at my age?" (or something along those lines)

I drew this card from the deck, "Travel". I didn't get much out of the message, which was

An upcoming trip proves to be life-changing in positive ways.

I was actually disappointed in the card.

What I have learned about this oracle deck is that the words are not always what I should be paying attention to. As I stared at the beautiful artwork, I realized that there was a very profound message for me. Click over to this page to see the image. Do you see what the amazing message is? Please tell me how you interpret the Elk_and_Fairy artwork. I'll follow up with an update on what the message I interpreted was!

Hint: only women who have had frequent ultrasounds on their girly parts will probably pick up on this one.

As the Uterus Turns

This morning, I woke up feeling good. I lay in bed, with some hope. I knew I had to get up for my beta. I did not POAS. When I got in the shower, those all too familiar cramps came back. I had already done some grieving, but as the day wore on, and as the time I knew I would get the call got closer, time seemed to slow down and hope crept in. I got to the point yesterday where I was tired trying to figure it out. I just wanted to know so that I could move on, one direction or the other.

In retrospect, I had a sign that something was wrong. It happened around the time we moved our embryos. I can't remember if it was before or after. One evening, when Magic and I were doing our evening ritual to connect with our spirit_baby, I had a vision of her. She surprised me because she was so in my face. I really am not used to these types of visions, but they seem to be coming more frequent. I didn't know what to think, though. She appeared wild eyed and her hair was all disheveled. I thought it was a good sign, and she was ready to come, though I was a bit worried that it meant she would be a wild child. Now, I think that something was bothering her and she was trying to tell me. I don't know what. Now that I think back, was it the night before we moved the embryos? Oh, I wish I had written it down!

I haven't felt her around for a few days. Last night, I felt particularly empty, but we did the ritual anyways. While I wasn't surprised that the result was negative, I am still sad. I'm not as sad about not being pregnant as I'm sad because I don't know where our spirit_baby went. I'm afraid she left. I'm hoping she just had to take a break. I don't know if it was her or the embryos. I don't know if something went wrong when we transferred the embryos or if she got cold feet. There is one way to find out, though it may be awhile.

In some way, I feel like this is all part of a grander plan. I don't know what that plan is. I had to do the FET before I could move on. I don't know what moving on means, but I know that I would have been haunted by leaving our embryos frozen if we had not transferred them. I couldn't bear the thought of thawing them and letting them perish.

What I am haunted by now is not knowing where our spirit_baby is.
I don't feel lost. I feel heartbroken.

Transfer Details

I was kicking myself that I hadn't figured out the right day for the new moon, which is actually today. Somehow, I screwed it up and thought it was Tuesday, the day of my transfer. The new moon is the special time that I am most fertile in my cycle. It has something to do with the phase of the moon when I was born. A big snow storm threatened for Tuesday, but it totally missed us and it turned out to be a lovely sunny spring day. A second storm is hitting us now. After months of drought and one piddly snowfall, we desperately need this. I intentionally kept my snow tires on my car in case we had to drive down to The Mall in a snow storm. So I guess I'm glad we didn't have our transfer today or tomorrow to avoid this nasty weather.

As you know, I'm not particularly fond of The Mall, my nickname for the BigShotFertilityClinic HQ. I enjoy it even less after our transfer, but I made the best of it. First, The Mall looks all mall-like in the hallways, but once you go in to get your blood drawn or to the "Surgery Center", it feels like a freaking hospital. With all the money they spent on this place, I would have picked a better interior decorator. First, calling the place where you get retrievals and transfers a "Surgery Center" is not all that comforting. It was nice to have everything brought to us in our special little transfer room, but the thing felt like a cave and a hospital room all rolled into one. I suppose I could pretend like the brown walls and the windows that were too high to look out of were like planting seeds in the soil, but I was so happy to get home to my own bed after laying on the hospital bed made for midgets for over an hour. I'm not that tall and my feet were hanging off the edge getting cold.

Dr. BloSunMyCha was a ray of sunshine, as usual, during the transfer. Even his sparkly white teeth radiated! It was surreal seeing the image of our embryos projected on the flat screen monitor. After a parade of nurses that came through when we initially arrived in our transfer room, they did finally leave us alone. I asked to wait to take the valium until we had talked with our doctor. Then, no one remembered to give it to me later. I'm glad I wasn't all doped up on valium, though I was open to taking it. I was a nervous wreck when I woke up. I was having palpatations in my acupuncturist's office that morning, but a half hour after the acupuncture, I was all calm and mellow again. After I told the doc I was fine after the acupuncture, it's like he didn't care if I took the valium. I guess they are used to their patients who do have acupuncture being calm. Passing on the valium allowed me to be present to my spirit_baby in the "earthy" transfer room. I was chanting away to Deva Premal's version of "Om Namo Bhagavate" in our hour of rest time after transfer, which I think of as the Divine Love song, sending divine love to the Snow Peas. I love the images someone put together in this YouTube video. This is what I was chanting:

Om Namo Bhagavate Vasudevaya

The good news is that the Snow Peas thawed just fine. I was told the grading is different on frozen embryos. Ours had 80% cell survival. Anything above 70% is considered good. My first thought was, what happens to the other 20%? Since the cells are not differentiated at this point in the embryo, it's not like you lose an arm or a leg. Still, it makes me feel a bit uncomfortable. Twenty percent sounds like a lot. I suppose the numbers don't really mean much on the big scheme of things. I'll try not to worry.

I loved the image from your last comments about seeds taking root. I will visualize that today when I'm sending implantation energy to our spirit_baby. It takes time for the little sprout to emerge from it's seed, just like the embryo has to hatch out of it's zona pellucida at the blastocyst stage. Although I'm "officially" done with bed rest, I think I'll go back to bed. Thanks for all your well wishes. It does raise my spirits.

At this point there doesn't seem to be much to do anymore, except continuing to send love to our spirit_baby. You know what I'll be chanting!

Enlightenment Training 101

This past weekend was very uplifting. After my self-indulgent wallowing last post, I thought I might return to more self-pity, but it was quite the contrary.

First, let me take a moment to glow in step-motherhood. Yes, you heard it right. I am so amazingly proud of my stepson who completed his first enlightenment training this weekend. He started meditating recently on his own. I wanted to encourage him, so I told him I would accompany him and a friend on a weekend enlightenment 101 training. These courageous seventeen year-olds braved their minds and sat on their butts all weekend. I felt the gap in our ages shorten greatly after this weekend.

Having done this training before, I qualified to staff the weekend, being a kind of enlightenment training gopher. Part of my gopher activities was to escort participants to interviews with a meditation instructor. I could not help but overhear comments of some of the interviews. I thought one woman said she was pregnant, and I thought "oh, no, pregnant-woman-magnet returns". However, I would later put my proverbial foot-in-mouth. Later in a discussion group, I looked at this woman and thought, "but she doesn't look pregnant". Shortly after I had that thought, she talked about how she had had an ideal pregnancy and had lost her daughter two days after her due date. One day she had a heartbeat, and the next day none. Her daughter's cord was wrapped around her neck. I felt so heartbroken for this woman, but she talked about it with such grace and acceptance. It had only been a few months. This weekend was helping her and her husband deal with their loss. She was so cheerful about it, embodying the teachings of the weekend. There is a lot to be cheerful about, even though there is loss, depression, and despair. I think it's part of our basic nature, cheerfulness, if we let it shine. Perhaps that is what I have been experiencing lately, that cheerfulness in spite of a devastating loss. I think I have been mistaken again. I thought it was because I was happy not having children. Maybe it's just because I am.

Typical, my mind is always trying to find an answer - like picking at a daisy - she wants children, she doesn't want children, she wants children... Again, I just have to resist letting my mind take over like a wild horse.

Tomorrow is a big day for me. I have told myself that I will not make anymore decisions until tomorrow. I have come to the conclusion that I will never come to a decision from my mind. I have been trying to engage my heart, but it's so much harder for me to listen to her wisdom. I have a hard time discerning what she is trying to tell me anymore. There is too much residual trauma for me to know what are my true feelings and what is a trauma reaction. I hope that tomorrow will bring some clarity and resolution. But maybe it will just bring more questions?

Cabin in the Hills

Here I sit on the porch of the small cabin I spent the weekend in solitary retreat. Small is the operative word here. Join me on a tour of my 250 square footish cabin. The name of the cabin is fitting for me. Can you read it?

This is where I spent most of my day meditating. I also had a wonderful private circular path for walking meditation in the pinyon juniper forest surrounding my cabin. You'll see the table on the right in the next picture. Again, think small.

My bed overlooked the meditation room. You can see the wood stove to the left of the bed in the kitchen area.

The kitchen had a propane stove. There was no running water, but a pump with delicious spring water was just outside the cabin. I did have a sink that went nowhere. A five gallon bucket is underneath the sink, that I periodically had to manually dump out. It was a bit annoying having to deal with that detail. I've spared you pictures of the outhouse. The cabin had solar lighting for the evenings, which was a really nice feature.

For not being able to watch TV, talk to others, or pet my cat, I was really quite busy the whole time. The practice and prayer I had been given to do for nine hours one of the days was challenging. I can't say I did it perfectly, but that wasn't really the point. It's amazing how busy your mind can be when your life is really simple. The gift of simplicity is appreciated more now that I am back to the craziness of work. As challenging as the simplicity was, I miss it.

I did take the opportunity to do some meditating on a future child. I followed the meditations out of the book "Spirit Babies", by Walter Makichen. That is the book I refer to in a previous post. I had some interesting revelations from those meditations. I was not ready to meditate on a future child until I dealt with the ones who had passed. I thought I had already done that, but I discovered there was some unfinished business to take care of first.

Forgiveness is a theme that came up over the weekend. I have a hard time forgiving myself. That could mean a lot of things. For one, I distract myself from my true spirit a lot. As painful as that is, I really like doing it. I got in touch with the simplicity of my true self this past weekend. My ego had a revolt at the same time, saying, what a waste of time, but I didn't listen to her. My true self knew better. I think I'll be doing a solitary retreat again.

Enlightenment Training

Sunset at Asilomar State Beach

I've been gone, working on the long neglected spiritual side of myself. Before I was gone, it was the usual whirlwind of getting ready to leave. That combined with late evenings watching the Olympics accounts for my drought here of late.

The operative word here is training. This is not "Enlightenment Finished". It's not like you go off to college, get a degree and you're done. Enlightenment Training is a lifetime of work, or many lifetimes, if you believe in that kind of thing.

Yesterday morning, I was getting my last fix of enjoying the natural surroundings of my spiritual retreat. I took advantage of low tide and got my fill of searching for starfish. It's odd that in the four years I've gone to Asilomar, I haven't ever seen a starfish before. It wasn't until this year that I really looked. I'd been too busy looking for sea otters. The same is true of myself. If I'm always looking for one particular aspect of myself that I like that plays effortlessly in the waves, I miss the other gems that are tenaciously holding to the rocks while getting bashed by the impact of the waves.


I was able to recharge my batteries at the retreat and take a rest from all the craziness of the world, including the internet. I was able to connect with my spirit again, and drop the story of my recent trauma, if only for a short while. If you want a summary of what we learned in the retreat, you can read a book that my teacher wrote that came out a few months ago.


A. H. Almaas is the name my teacher writes under, like Phoebe is my writer's name. This book was written based on a retreat I attended five years ago. While we covered other topics in our retreat this year, the content is basically the same as this book. It all comes down to living in the present.

Coming soon: Life springs from the ashes of the Big Sur wildfire.

The Phoenix Process

...and then the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
-Anais Nin

I'm reading a book called Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow by Elizabeth Lesser, recommended to me by another wonderful member of my Resolve support group. The opening to this book has the above poem, the same one that is on the cover of my personal journal. I bought the journal and started writing in it after my first IUI failed. At that point, I was very scared to do IVF. I thought the blossoming might be the risk to do IVF to have a child. I express what the journal means to me in my first entry, saying it's "my personal exploration journal, expressing itself through fertility."

"The Phoenix Process" is the book's term for going through any major life change, like divorce, illness, or death, and using it as a way of transforming your life. This book came to me after I started this blog. I feel like I am going through a Phoenix Process. I felt burned by IVF. Because of what I experienced, I feel a crack in my usual way of thinking. I have been broken.

The first crack was realizing that kids will not make me happy. This does not mean I will not have kids, but I do not want to have children from an egoic desire or instinctual drive. Is it possible to have children from an egoless state? Can there be any other purpose in having children other than the instinctual drive to procreate or the ego's desire to have children? Am I just looking for one more thing to fill the holes in my life and make myself "happy"?

I am now wondering if the "risk" to blossom is the risk to find my True Self, my True Nature? Is it the risk to throw all my dreams and desires away and live a life from True Nature and Being, rather than filling it with one more thing, like children?

I have the perspective of growing up in a household with many children and seeing that it did not make my mother happy. My mom always talks about how she wanted a dozen children, though she can barely stand to have us and her grandchildren around now. I honestly feel that my parents should have stopped at child #4. I'm #6 at the end of the line. Sometimes, I do not think I should have been born. My parents were burned out by the time they had me.

I have lived with a lot of depression in my life, even as a teenager and probably as a child too, though I was not aware of it then. In the womb, I was searching for my mother's absent heart - I was born breech, the only one of the six. I've been searching for meaning for a long time. My career has brought me happiness and a sense that I am doing something positive for the earth, but I long for something more. I thought children would fulfill that meaning and longing, but I am no longer convinced of that.

I am reading about this Phoenix Process at the same time I am reading about living a life from the present moment in Eckhart Tolle's books The Power of Now and A New Earth, Awakening to Your Life's Purpose. I am reading these books as if I have never heard of living in the present moment, but I have! I've been on a spiritual path for the last nine years that focuses on this same teaching. I left my spiritual group between my two IVFs because I felt that it wasn't supporting me, and that the teaching was becoming stale.

I have been enlightened, or I should say, I have had an experience of enlightenment. I remember how I felt that Being was enough. I did not desire anything else. I did not need a purpose in life. But that feeling did not last long. I was not truly transformed. What will it take to completely let go? Do I have it in me to go there? Do I have the same drive and passion for the Truth as I did to have a child? These are the questions I have.

Who will I be when I emerge from this Phoenix Process? How long does this process take? Several months or several years? I feel that I have not been completely consumed by the flames. I do feel a little crisp around the edges, but on days like today, I feel that part of me is still burning.

Broken Open has many inspirational stories and passages. This one spoke to me in particular:

"I do not wish upon anyone a descent into hell. But if your life has to be turned inside out in order for you to know yourself...I pray that you use its force wisely. I hope that you take the ultimate responsibility for your actions and that you consecrate any destruction to the rebuilding of your higher self and a more radiant life."

I hope that what I have written will inspire you to share with me your stories of your Phoenix Process.