Treating Infertility With Yoga - Yoga to Help Conceive

It is possible to increase fertility with yoga poses: restorative fertility yoga postures encourage human body to be more open to conception. It is not about being more flexible and being able to curl your left leg over your right shoulder: this will not boost your fertility: yoga is about balancing body and mind and not only improving your physical conditional and body flexibility. There are additional external factors that contribute to the fact you might have problems trying to conceive, and these include caffeine, alcohol, smoking, stress, including communication between partners and financial worries etc.

Many people are diagnosed with unexplained infertility, treating infertility with yoga can change that diagnoses. Usually a contributing factor for infertility is anxiety and stress related issues. Yoga not only tones your body but it is an excellent stress reliever. It also targets specific areas of the body including organs, glandular and circulatory systems. If you start using a yoga practice for fertility your chances of overcoming infertility are three times greater than not using yoga at all. A practice specific for fertility will focus on stress relief, strengthening and toning muscles, and balancing the reproductive organs and hormones.

Stress and anxiety has been shown to reduce the probability of conception. Alice Domar, who has a Ph.D. in health psychology and is the director of mind-body services at the Harvard-affiliated center Boston IVF, said of yoga: “It’s a very effective relaxation technique, and a great way to get women in the door to get support. In 2000, she, published the results of a study in Fertility and Sterility (Vol. 73, No. 4) that showed women who participated in her program, which included relaxation and yoga, were almost three times more likely to get pregnant than women who didn't.

A Gentler Form of Exercise

Dr. Domar has an interesting theory about one of the ways that some women seem to benefit from yoga. "I believe that vigorous exercise may reduce fertility in some women," she says. "We can't predict whose fertility is exercise sensitive. Yoga is something they can do that will reduce stress without impacting their fertility. For really habitual exercisers, my clinical impression is that at least half that stop get pregnant. Yoga is the best tool I have for these women."

According to Rahul Sachdev, M.D., a specialist in Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, New Jersey, incorporating the health-enhancing benefits of yoga with traditional and innovative medical intervention can relieve the stress and pressure associated with infertility, thus vastly increasing the chances for conception.

Treating infertility with yoga is a natural and cost effective way to conceive. Did you know that the treatment for infertility business is $2 billion dollar business. Many couples spend thousands of dollars for various treatments that can cause painful side effects, financial strain, and additional stress. Many of these treatments are not successful and the couple continues trying different treatments becoming more frustrated and financially troubled.

The Mayo Clinic recently acknowledged that chronic stress can lead to a variety of health and emotional problems. Yoga is an effective method to reduce stress and anxiety. But in addition, yoga for fertility can help to detoxify the body while relaxing tight muscles and connective tissue. The specific areas in Yoga for fertility of the low back (sacral plexus) hips, groins and pelvis begin to improve in blood flow and circulation-which can aid in healthier gynecological function. As the body relaxes, the mind calms and the nervous system is aided by the breath to help lower stress hormones like cortisol, which can impede reproductive hormone function. This can potentially be beneficial for fertility. Learning to listen to the body’s natural rhythms through yoga and breathing can bring a deep sense of peace and connection to our own innate healing capacity, helping women and couples feel more empowered on their journey.

To treat infertility with yoga there a some basic steps you can take to get you started. This first thing is to make a commitment to incorporate certain daily practices such as meditation, positive visualization or breath work to reduce your stress level. Stress can cause your hormones and organs to become off balance. When you are not in balance your body is not working to it's full potential. Yogic breathing will help calm the body and mind replacing the negative thoughts with positive.

There are specific poses in yoga that focus on your reproductive organs and pelvic area to increase blood flow and stimulate energy. There are also poses that soften the abdominal area clearing tension from the uterus, ovaries and fallopian tubes which will increase their productivity.

Yoga will bring balance to your body, mind, and soul specifically your hormone levels. These poses will improve your glandular function which will stabilize hormones. In order for the reproductive process to occur your hormones must be in balance.

Yoga is a natural way to treat your infertility by decreasing the stress from month after month of trying to conceive. When your body is stressed and tense so are your organs causing them not to work properly. Yoga will calm and release the tension specifically in the pelvic region which brings increased blood flow to your reproductive organs and allows the energy to flow freely opening and softening the pelvic organs.

Breathing and Conceiving? Yoga and Fertility.

Breath is Life. The first thing we do when we are born is inhale, the last thing we do when we die, is exhale. Our lives are made up of all the breaths in between. Breathing is essential to life, but it is also essential to creating life.

Stress and Infertility

When we go through infertility we are often stressed, we breathe shallowly and our body starts to hold inside all the disappointment, hurt and fear. Both physical and emotional pain gets stored in our bodies as stress. When we are stressed - cortisol is released in the brain, which impedes our ability to conceive by affecting the hormones that are responsible for ovulation and healthy gynecological function. Yoga teaches us to open the body with the breath, creating the ability to arrest the stress response, balance hormones and return the body, emotions and mind to a relaxed state.

You can literally learn to “breathe to conceive” as breath affects your state of being on every level, you learn to receive life literally and figuratively. The breath is the most effective tool we have to stop the “fight or flight” stress response of the sympathetic nervous system and return it to “the relaxation response” of the parasympathetic nervous system.

Improved Physical Health

Yoga can also impact the general reproductive health of women trying to conceive. Yoga tones and strengthens the muscles that support reproductive organs and improves spinal alignment, enabling better circulation and improved capacity and quality of respiration. For women who are taking infertility drugs, better respiratory health can also help the body fight off any potential dangerous side effects of those drugs.

Reducing the Physical Effects of Stress

Yoga is perfect for dealing with one of the most pervasive mind/body fertility challenges: stress, often stress caused by the inability to get or stay pregnant. Women experiencing infertility are often stress and pain-filled, saddened and angry. These emotions generate chemicals in the body that weaken immunity and make for a less hospitable environment for a new life. Yoga, because of its use of relaxation breathing techniques, combined with the flushing out of physical toxins, provides an antidote to the negative physical impacts of anxiety, anger and depression. It also helps to change your perspective to a more objective, detached state of mind so you start to view your challenges with more calm and control.

Yoga Is Not the Cure-all

This is not to say that yoga is an instant fertility potion, or that it works for everyone. It is not a quick-fix. It does aid to keep your inner peace, which can be very hard when struggling with infertility due to the frustration, anxiety, sadness and despair that infertility can produce.