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The "So Now What?" Podcast


I am a Fertility Survivor.  The kind you enter into treatments hoping you will never be... childless.  After several rounds of IUI and IVF, at some of the leading Fertility Centers, I was told I was no longer a candidate for fertility treatment.  It left me asking myself...

So now what?

For the years that followed, I tried to put myself back together and tell myself I would be OK, but I wasn't.  I was shattered - I felt alone and failed by the whole process and especially, my body.  I yearned for others that felt the pain I felt and someone that could help me navigate a life without a child. 

I didn't find it, so I decide to create it.  

Fast forward to today. I am still childless, but my beliefs about my life have changed.  I decided that I can create meaning and purpose in my life even though I am not a mother.  I've learned to love myself and the body I felt failed me as a woman.

If you've been on this journey, hop on and join me as we create something we were not offered.  Let's create a sisterhood for the bravest women I know.  We brush ourselves off and don't let terms like: Failed, Unexplained, Miscarriage, Not-viable or Advanced Maternal Age define us anymore.  

 

Nov 30, 2021

Guide to Meaningful Holidays:

Guide to Meaningful Holidays – Stitch Coaching | Higher Awareness Coaching

It's hard to believe like we're looking at the beginning of December here and just a few days. Thank you all for the great feedback on the guide to meaningful holidays. So many of you actually used it to prep for your Thanksgiving holidays. And I just love getting to hear all about the feedback of how you used it, how it offered you a greater opportunity to plan for your holiday celebration, how you're able to plan ahead for how you'd handle a specific interaction with someone. And some of you even shared the plan you put together for handling the words that may have been asked to view about your journey to motherhood. And if you're wondering what this guide is, and you have not heard about it, you can go over to stitch coaching.com and download the guide to meaningful holidays. It's basically a great opportunity for you to become more aware of how you want to handle the holidays this year. And start to plan and make sure that you can have meaningful holidays and not get so tripped up on things that are said to you or asked to view or feelings that you might carry. Going into this holiday season knowing that you're not a mother, and you're not able to share it with a child, check out the guide. And please keep the comments coming because I've absolutely loved hearing what all of you had to say. This week, we are going to talk about living in the past, wanting to be who we once were, wanting to go back to a life that we loved so much. And let me start by saying that one of my biggest beliefs in my coaching practice is to capitalize on the accomplishments we see in our lives. And for many of us, those are accomplishments that we have achieved in our past. And as we discussed in Episode 12, it is so easy for us to focus on what we don't have or what we couldn't do, or what our bodies wouldn't do. And when we work together, I help my clients start to create their life of meaning I will pry every damn accomplishment out of them. I mean, it could be anything as small as making their bed or going to celebrate that. Possibly it's journaling, working out, going for a walk or something, but my clients really get very comfortable over time pointing out these types of things. And in the so now, what community, we transition our focus away from all of the failure that we associate with ourselves and our bodies because we failed fertility treatments. And we learn to see that a failure doesn't have to be a huge deal in our lives. It just basically means that there's something else out there that we are going to try or something that we're going to approach differently and that we do so many more things on a daily basis that go right or go as planned or go as we desired. But somehow we just take away the thing that was catastrophically wrong in our day and that is what we choose to focus on. And I want to talk a little bit today about how living in our past really seems so comforting to many of us. But what it does is it actually hinders our ability to have future accomplishments. So I'm going to call my client Anna in air quotes who When we started working together was really struggling with seeing what her life could look like without children. And when we started working together, she'd always say, I just want to be who I was before I started my IVF treatments. She felt like she really lost herself in the process. And she just wanted to be who she used to be. And I find that so many of us struggle so much with the expectations that we have for ourselves, and the failure we feel when we have a diagnosis of unexplained infertility or endometriosis, PCOS, and we feel so betrayed by our bodies. So we'd rather go back to our past, because it seems so carefree. And yes, maybe it was carefree. But why would you want to go back to your past.

Because when you get to the point in your journey, when you decide that you're ready to discover a life of meaning, as a woman, without children, you'll see that there is excitement, and this sense of rebirth and change. And you can certainly look back at your past and have so much gratitude and love for it. But not want to necessarily revert back to it. Because what you'll do is you'll start to learn and start to understand that trying to recreate your past or live in your past will only hold you back from living a life with meaning and intention. And when you think of your past, what about it? Are you most drawn to? Is it possible to look back at the past of who you were then and see that it's propelled you into who you are now in the version of who you're going to be in the future. And by no means does Anna tell me she is so glad that she has an fertility and couldn't have children, she just started to decide that she doesn't want to live a life that she's already experienced, and has this warm comfort around. Because when we start to see that we have the ability to do more and see more for ourselves, the true opportunity to discover our meaning will unfold. It's like the people we talked about last episode that want to go back to living their college years and how great college was an absolutely it was. But when we live in that past of who we used to be, we never give ourselves the opportunity to do more and see more. Because we're so focused on how great those times were. As we come to a close, if I could circle back to how this relates to the holidays, there's so many of us that have such beautiful and fond and fun memories of what Christmas was like or what the holidays were like when we were children. And as we age and as things morph in our lives, and people move, people pass away, or even in light of COVID where the large gatherings of 30 some I know in my family just have become a bit smaller over these last couple celebrations. There's such a sense of solemness or sadness that some people carry forth, because things aren't what they used to be in the celebrations are different than we once knew. But one thing I could tell you is that whatever thought you're having about your celebrations and how they might not be what they once were and how it just doesn't seem like the vibrancy Is there anymore. You're going to feel a certain way because what we do know is that our thoughts create our feelings. And our feelings then create the actions that we take. We might spend so much of our time sitting there and wishing we had things differently, or not engaging with the people that are around us. Or not taking notice of an opportunity to build new traditions together and new memories together because we're spending so much time thinking this isn't what it used to be. Take this away and see how you can apply it as you do your work with the guide this week. Because as you know you have the amazing power and the amazing wear with all to choose the thoughts that you want to have and regardless of what your past used to be like or what celebrations used to Be like you can move forward into this year's celebration, having so much love in your heart for the way that you felt, or maybe your holidays historically haven't been great. You can also choose to think differently now about the holidays that you want to have. And with this mind of yours and this ability that you have to choose your thoughts on purpose, you can create or whatever it is that you want to create. And you can create such a special feeling and warmth and love in your heart. Regardless if it's you celebrating alone, or a room of 35 people. So now that you always have the power to choose the thoughts that you want to have.

And as you do your work this week, just know that only you can choose the thoughts that you want to have. They don't need to make sense to anybody. They don't need to be relatable to anybody. But as long as they make sense to you, and create the feelings that you want to have. That's all that really matters. And as we come to a close to 2021, we have one full month, a month with 31 days that you can still make so much impact and how you want to relate back to 2021. What you want to think of what you've accomplished in 2021. There's no need to give up now, because you've done some awesome things this year. And just take a few minutes to start to recognize all that you have done and all that you've accomplished this year. 

Have an awesome week and remember, it's never too late to discover your meaning.