Central to mind-body medicine is the practice of mindfulness. Simply defined, mindfulness is the practice of paying neutral attention to what is happening right now. Why is mindfulness helpful for infertility? Infertility tends to overshadow everything else in life, keep you focused on past and future events, exacerbate negative self-judgment, and place your mind and body on red-alert mode. By cultivating mindfulness, you can develop new perspectives out of which better strategies and stronger options emerge. You discover qualities that you never knew were there.
Through mindfulness, you learn how to come off “automatic pilot” and cultivate such qualities as compassion, patience, acceptance, non-judgment, trust, and non-striving. These attributes will not only support you through your fertility challenge, but through the rest of your life!
