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Randine Lewis on Reclaiming Our Reproductive Capability: A Paradigm Shift |
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| by Randine Lewis, Ph.D., Lic.Ac. | |||
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Let’s think about what we, as nice girls, as young ladies, as good wives learn about what we are supposed to be: These messages are imprinted subtly, not only those that we are told, but we learn to model the behavior of our mothers, our friends and other female role models. I was told by the massage therapists at the spa that they have never seen such helpful women. You helped them to lift your own head, lift your own arm, turn yourself over ... all the things that they are supposed to be doing for you. You are just natural helpers and nurturers … of others! appealing, charming, voluptuous We become very skilled at subtle forms of attraction. Like a flower, we get our needs met passively at best. We learn to manipulate the world to notice us. Maybe then we can be fulfilled. We find our security in love, through sexually fulfilling relationships, through having children. Throughout the ages, natural selection determined that the prettiest, most alluring women were the ones who reproduced earliest, most, best. The women with the most children triumphed. Their futures were assured. Their children would take care of them when their husbands were gone. In some primitive Eastern cultures, however, females had the power. True matriarchal societies chose their males. The men would have to attract the women. Only the worthiest of males were allowed to copulate and donate their sperm so that the women could conceive. The children took on their mothers’ names, and the male offspring left home when they were of age, and went out to make their living. They had to learn to attract women through their prowess. Women often chose multiple partners, but it was the women who lived together, who raised the children, and who governed the society. The men were on their own, living off the land in a nomadic fashion, and supplying meat to bargain for the hope of sexual fulfillment. These women grew up with messages like: capable, adept, clever, strong, influential Fertility wasn’t such an enormous, weighted issue in these societies because all women were capable of being sexual, and they together raised each others’ children. These women embodied personal strength and potency just through their gender. Let’s look at how these ideas impact our fertility. I’ll give you a list of new words: These are the words that should describe how we feel about ourselves and our reproductive capacity. Yet, we are often so caught up in the fear that our submissiveness produces, we become more and more disconnected from ourselves, discouraged, and even angry at our bodies. We are told that the problem is, after all, our fault. Even if the inability to conceive is due to male factors, we are the ones who pay the price. We go through the treatment, the therapy, the injections, the mood swings, the hormonal storms, the pain, the disappointment, the agony. Look at the messages that reproductive terminology conveys: Male factor vs. infertile, barren, poor quality eggs, too old, poor responder ... Back to the evolutionary development of our present conception misconceptions: Sometimes the inability to conceive is physiologic, adaptive, and “normal”. Fitness and long term survival of the species has to do with our ability to reproduce offspring when the time and circumstances warrant. When our existence is threatened, our stress hormones physiologically protect us from having to sustain a pregnancy. Carrying a child when we are in physical danger potentially endangers our life and our ability to produce more children when circumstances are more favorable. Other animals share this adaptive mechanism. In the natural world, stressed females just don’t go into heat. Women with high pressure lifestyles adapt to modern Western stressors in the same manner that our primitive ancestors did – they secrete the hormone prolactin to make them stop ovulating; their bodies constrict the blood supply to their reproductive hormones. In extreme cases, their FSH levels may rise as their ovaries become less able to do their job. Since Western medicine can’t change biology’s adaptive response, it tries to override it. It uses drugs to inhibit prolactin production; it tries to force our stifled ovaries to ovulate more eggs, in spite of the fact that they have been virtually asphyxiated; and it extracts our eggs which have been conditioned to be temporarily unresponsive. When its attempts to override our body’s adaptive response can’t force a baby, they say that we have failed. Remember that our biology is perfect. As the flower, the snowflake, the doe and the sow are created in perfection, so at least are women. Perhaps the “problem” does not reside within us. Perhaps the solution does. Just suppose for a moment that our temporary inability to reproduce is also a part of our perfect response. It may be our poor diet, chaotic lifestyle, stressful job, ill-suited relationship, or our whole outer surroundings which are putting our flawless physiologies into a natural state of adaptation. Maybe also it’s the way we have been conditioned to look at ourselves as passive and inherently flawed, and needing to be fixed by someone else. As we have lost touch with the essence of our re-creative capacity, we have become submissive recipients of reproductive technology. Our male reproductive doctors have become our saviors. We acquiesce to their sometimes unseemly plans in the hopes that they can undo our passive state of malfunction. We have become conditioned to prefer the thought of massive hormonal stimulation, egg extraction, sperm injection, and embryo transfer into a synthetically prepared uterus in the hopes that life will come. Usually it doesn’t, unfortunately. But, let’s not be ashamed of the situation we have gotten ourselves into; let’s just see how we got here, and let’s get out of it. When humankind became aware of things called eggs and sperm, they imagined all kinds of ideas about the creation of life. Seventeenth century male scholars excitedly viewed their own reproductive essence, sperm, through a microscope, and imagined that they saw little homunculi swimming about, tiny little fully formed men, ready to propel themselves into our awaiting orbs, so they could become new beings. Come on! Even until recently, our ovaries were seen as housing a multitude of ever degenerating germ cells, all programmed to destruct if we didn’t catch the little buggers early enough, while fresh male germ cells are seen as being continually reproduced. If the eggs don’t fertilize, it’s usually because the outer covering is too tough. Not because the sperm aren’t strong enough penetrate them, but because there is something wrong with the egg. If IVF isn’t successful, it’s blamed on poor egg quality, not poor sperm quality. What about hostile cervical mucus? We don’t ever hear about wimpy sperm. It’s our fluids which are to blame. Here’s the most repulsive description I’ve found: Jonathan Miller’s The Facts of Life describe sperm as carrying out a “perilous” journey” into the “warm darkness,” where some fall away “exhausted.” “Survivors” “assault” the egg, the successful candidates “surrounding the prize.” All scientific descriptions of the egg portray it as fragile and dependent, while the sperm is seen as propelling, having velocity, powerfully lurching toward the awaiting egg, where it burrows through the egg coat and penetrates it. Sperm are conveyed as weapons, warheads, programmed to slay their target, which provides nourishment so the sperm can survive! We all know that the egg has adherent molecules on its surface, which allows the sperm in, and traps the rest out. I don’t mean to convey the egg as a black widow spider, either, but perhaps we can give our germ cells a little more credit. Maybe the oocyte and its environment has a much more active role in determining its fate and whether a pregnancy can be achieved or sustained. Why do we blindly accept the negative views of Western medicine, which convinces us we are by nature, flawed and unclean? It convinces us we are just waiting to manifest disease, so the proven, all-powerful double-blinded placebo controlled “truths” can fix us. Look how the uterus’ process of menstruation is viewed – definitely one of embarrassment at best, but more often of shame and failure. Perhaps there is no brighter organ in the human body. The uterus is responsive to environmental cues, from electromagnetic tidal influences to emotional fluctuations. I suggest that the Uterus, the culmination of our Kidney Essence’s energies, the basic division which gave life to us, which produced the communicating channel which allows life to be manifest through us, is all these things: and is also perfect! When we pay attention to how active, how critical, how powerful our role is in reproduction, perhaps we won’t be so prone to accept our lithotomy positioned capitulation (which would be that lovely "in the stirrups" position) that we need technology to make us pregnant. This isn’t a process of struggle, of swimming upstream against all odds, of “forcing” a pregnancy. You can’t force a pregnancy, I can’t force a pregnancy, and your RE can’t create a life without the cooperation of the same universal forces that our bodies respond go. Life is allowed to manifest, which is a process of acceptance. We hear examples of this universal truth all the time. When we let go of our tight hold, and loosen up our grip on the outcome, (through giving up, through adoption, through being told we’re hopeless, too old, or whatever else ends the struggle), we can finally unclench; we can lift up our hands and let go. Only then does the space open up for the penetrating meridian to become receptive. Only then can Life say, “O.K., now you’re ready!” © Copyright 2004, Dr. Randine Lewis. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted here by permission of the author. to be notified of new additions to this site. |
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| ...More from Dr. Randine Lewis | |||
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