Tag Archives: preconception

Why Nurturing Others Starts with Nurturing You

When Sheila Pai of A Living Family asked me to participate in her Nurturing You Virtual Retreat, I was honored. I had the pleasure of coaching her for the first half of 2014 and it is so exciting to see everything that she was working towards during that time come together – her book, her retreat, and the community that she is growing with such love. She is a beautiful example of what it means to not only find but live your passion in an authentic way.

The idea behind Nurturing You is one that resonates deeply with me, and you know that if you’ve been part of this community for a while. I wrote about it here where I shared this photo that sums it up well:

We are so good at convincing ourselves that we must put others’ needs before our own, but it’s simply not true. When we do that, we’re actually doing a great disservice not only to ourselves but to those we love because we are coming into those relationships feeling drained, resentful, and with the message that we don’t deserve to be taken care of.

On September 15th, you’ll get to hear me share with Sheila’s community about Clearing Toxins (both mental and physical) and Creating Space so that you can step more fully into your dreams. This is one of many ways that you can begin to more deeply take care of yourself and your family. I am looking forward to this chance to connect with others and to be part of an incredible line up of speakers who will be sharing their wisdom about mindful self-care, what it means to them and how you can begin to incorporate it into your life.

I hope that you’ll join us!

Peace, Love, and Wellness,

Conscious Conception: What It Means to Me, and Why It’s So Important

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A few months ago in a group that I’m part of, someone asked what conscious conception was.

Here is what I said:

“To me, conscious conception is about approaching the time before you start trying to conceive as a sacred time of growth and preparation.

As your baby’s first home, there is much you can do to ready yourself – emotionally, physically, and spiritually.

So often the conversation begins once you are ready to start trying to conceive, or even more commonly once struggles arise or you become pregnant.

There is so much beautiful and transformative work that can happen before that point that can open up the entire experience on an even deeper level.

It’s a really magical time.”

This is my invitation to you to get curious about what your journey could look like if you brought consciousness and awareness into your life starting right now.

What would you keep exactly as it is?
What would you tweak so it felt just right?
What would you want to completely overhaul?

How could you be okay with where you are right now?
How could you make this moment the place of shift?
How could you see yourself now as this sacred vessel?

Your future baby is already growing in your heart. Why wait to create the perfect first home for her?

I’d love to hear what conscious conception means to you. Please join the conversation in the comments below.

Peace, Love, and Wellness,

Growing Every Day by Pushing Your Edges

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I held her in my arms and she felt safe. As I slowly lowered her into the water, I could feel her excitement and trepidation build.

“This is funny but I don’t like it,” she said through nervous laughter, and I picked her up again.

“This is funny but I still don’t like it,” she said when we tried again.

“I can do it!” she said with excitement, and by the next day, she was walking around the pool without even holding my hand. “I just learned how to do this yesterday!” she exclaimed with pride.

New things, especially when they involve water up to your chin, feel scary at first. It is the trust and pushing through the fear, which allows you to experience the empowered excitement of accomplishment.

You grow when you push your edges. You stay the same, and sometimes even wither, when you stay in the safety of the arms you have always known. I wrote about this last year and it’s a lesson that I try to teach my clients and myself all the time.

This can be a hard lesson when it feels like the ground is shifting underneath you and everything feels like it is somehow outside of your comfort zone. It can feel easy to run back to the things that give you comfort – old patterns, safety nets that you know are holding you back, and decisions that seem okay in the moment but that you end up regretting.

So what can you do to keep stretching yourself without feeling like you are about to drown? You reach out for someone’s hand, hold on just as long as you need to, and then let go so you can experience your own freedom.

Peace, Love, and Wellness,

Simplicity is Practice

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This week in my love note to my email list I’m talking about simplicity. Here with you, I am going to share what I do on a (mostly) daily basis to invite simplicity into my life, and to try to encourage it to stay.

When you’re first getting started with practicing simplicity, it can feel hard. If you’re anything like me, you can pause now, look back over your life, and realize how unnecessarily complicated you’ve made most things.

Simplicity allows you the space to focus on your desires without getting tangled up in overwhelm, fear, and anxiety. Simplicity is a breath of fresh air. It opens your eyes to what’s most important because your vision becomes less clouded.

When you can infuse your journey towards motherhood with simplicity you create more space for empowerment, ease, and enjoyment.

As with most things, simplicity is a practice, and to keep it going strong, to weave it into the fiber of who you are, it can help to have a few guiding practices. Here are some of mine.

Start small :: Make the bed. Morning pages. Lemon water.

Create space :: No technology for the first and last 2 hours of the day. Clear clutter.

Be grateful :: Remember the good. Release the not so good.

Nourish :: Whole, fresh foods. Uncomplicated and delicious.

Move your body :: Walk. Sun salutations. Dance party.

As you ease into your day, begin with the things that make you feel amazing. Be fully present in the moment. Enjoy the warm water rushing over your body. Hold that hot mug between your hands. Feel the cool breeze on your face.

Simplicity lives in the moments. That means that at any point, you can begin again. You can choose simplicity right now and know that you are giving yourself the gift of a simplicity practice.

How can you choose simplicity today? Share with us in the comments below.

Peace, Love, and Wellness,

Birthing Your Dream through Visioning

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I create vision pages in chunks. When I participate in one of Hannah’s programs, I find myself catching up with 10 prompts in one night, scraps of paper flying, recycling bag filling, as I rip, cut, glue, repeat. Again and again. And then, when I stop to take a breath hours later and look back at what I’ve done, I’m in awe.

Sometimes it’s a few days later, sometimes a few months, that the messages on the pages begin to have meaning for me. During the recent intense full moon energy (did you feel it?), I didn’t know what the messages coming across meant. At one point I did something unusual for me – I pulled off some words that I had glued down. Suddenly, they didn’t feel right.

The next day the energy was still with me, and two more pages came out, in black and white, and they terrified me. I’ve kept them open on my desk. As I shared with friends my fear in these words, they helped me peel back the layers so I could begin to uncover the meaning. I was scared because of what I thought they could mean. Then I opened up and accepted what they did mean.

“Look, it’s hard to let go, take the leap…”

And just like that, I hired an amazing virtual assistant (who I know in real life) to help me with parts of my business that drain me so I could let them go.

“The making of magic, search for excellence…”

And then I had a conversation with an incredible woman who has worked in the infertility field for 30+ years (and probably held me in the NICU when I was born) and we are meeting for lunch to discuss how we can work together to support women during this incredibly intense time.

“Authentic life, designed by you.”

Another women signed up to work with me and I was so aware of how freeing it feels to get to create my own schedule and work with women who are ready to do what it takes to see their dreams fulfilled.

This all came just from the last two pages, black and white, from a couple of days ago.

I’ve been so enthralled with these pages that I have barely begun to comb over the 16 pages that led to this. Well, except for my favorite. Here’s C.C.:

And here’s one that I created a while ago for you but finally glued down the other night:

When we open ourselves up to the process of visioning, we get to imagine and begin to create the life we want to be living. We get to breathe life into our dreams.

The soulwork around visioning is an incredibly powerful place to start your journey (or the next leg of your journey) because you get to throw out all of your preconceived ideas, what you think you should be doing or thinking or feeling, what others think you should be doing or thinking or feeling, and you get to play. You get to step into that place of possibility and say this is what I want. You get to claim it.

When we gather for the Creating Fertile Ground Circle at the beginning of June, our first month will be all about stepping into the vision. From there, we’ll get to explore how to bring that vision to life, bit by bit, as we explore deeper each month.

Visioning will continue throughout the 6 months because there are always new messages, new layers to uncover and explore.

If you are ready to begin to breathe life into your dreams, if you’re curious about what creating a vision for your future can help your manifest, I encourage you to join us for the Circle.

Peace, Love, and Wellness,

What the Process of Growing a Business Has Taught Me about Preparing to Grow a Baby

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When I started Womb to World Wellness in 2011, I already knew the feeling of desire very well, as I had experienced it through the desire for a baby. I learned a lot along that journey, but sometimes we need to learn lessons more than once before we can fully begin to integrate them into our lives. As I open the Creating Fertile Ground Circle, some of that vulnerability comes back for me, and I wanted to share that with you today.

This is not the first time I have launched a group program. I have now run a few successful programs (my favorite until now being Growing with Gratitude), but back in 2012 I tried for the first time, and what felt then like failure left me feeling raw and unsure of myself.

I had just run I Want One (or another one) for the first time, and it was amazing. More women than I had expected joined me for that week of gentle emails, welcoming them to see what this journey could be like. I was excited at the idea of having some of them join me as we dove deeper into that content, exploring and beginning to flesh out how they could start creating these changes with ease. So I opened registration, spread the word, and waited. Crickets. Nothing. Nada. And as quickly as my excitement had risen, it deflated.

I questioned myself, I questioned the work I was doing, I questioned my business, and I looked for new paths to travel. I ran a couple of programs geared towards mamas instead of those dreaming about becoming mamas, and while they were well received, they didn’t light me up like this preconception work does.

As I just shared with my mastermind group, “we drive ourselves crazy with expectations.” This is true whether our expectations are about our businesses, our future babies, or simply our daily lives.

Everything shifted for me when I surrendered, released the expectations and let myself be guided by my passion.

Surrender means to cease resistance. Do you often find yourself fighting, struggling, and working what feels like too hard to reach your dream? That is the resistance, and I can promise you that most of the time it will keep you stuck. When you surrender to what is, you gain a clearer vision of what is possible, what needs to happen to get you unstuck and moving with flow towards your dream.

Releasing expectations means to open up and let go. Let go for a moment of what you expect this journey to look like. Let go for a moment of what others expect of you. Open up to understanding that your path is unfolding as it is for some reason. It might suck. It might hurt like hell. It might make you question what you’re doing right or wrong. And I’m sorry if you’re feeling that – I know those feelings too. It is about trust.

Being guided by your passion means focusing your energy on what makes you thrive. When you create the space to fill your life with what lights you up, what brings you joy, and what brings you happiness, you create an energy about you that attracts what you most desire, because you are in flow.

It was awful when I put myself out there 2 years ago and heard crickets, but you know what? I wasn’t ready like I am now.

I wasn’t ready like I am now to hold space for those women.

I wasn’t ready like I am now to run a program that feels completely in flow.

I wasn’t ready like I am now to surrender to the process.

I wasn’t ready like I am now to release the expectations and enjoy the journey.

I wasn’t really like I am now to trust in my passion and let it guide me.

I just spent a day at a mini-retreat, creating much of the content for the Creating Fertile Ground Circle, and let me tell you, it’s nothing like I could have created two years ago. And I’m so excited that you’re here with me now to have the chance to experience it.

I know now that the women who are meant to Circle together in this group will be drawn to it and know that it is what is the right next step for them. If you are one of them, I look forward to connecting with you more deeply soon! You can learn more and join us here.

Peace, Love, and Wellness,

The $368 Lesson that Will Guide You to Empowered Conception, Pregnancy, and Motherhood

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May Day collage wtww This weekend was going to be about leading a visioning workshop, spending time in the woods eating healthy food, practicing yoga and mediation, and connecting with a group of women. Instead, it ended up being about trusting my intuition, practicing intimacy, growing connection, creating space, middle of the night epiphanies and spending time outside but at home instead of in the woods.

In the end, it was a soul-filled weekend, but it was a long road to get there and the path looked completely different than my calendar told me it would.

It all started a month or two ago, and it was felt full-force last week through a series of panic attacks that served to bring me back to center in what felt like a painful, confusing, and roundabout way.

This lesson had a $368 price tag that I agonized over, but in the end, what I learned was priceless and it’s important for you to understand on your journey, wherever you are as you travel closer to your dreams.

Here’s what $368 got me in the end:

A reminder that it’s sometimes important to say no

When my friend asked if I’d be interested in leading a visioning workshop to kick off her yoga retreat, I thought it sounded like an incredible opportunity, and while I thought about it a little bit before saying yes, I now realize, I didn’t spend enough time listening to myself while I was trying to make my decision.

A visioning workshop is a big and heartfelt yes for me. A retreat in the middle of the woods with mostly women I don’t know is a big and heartfelt no. As I came to realize during last week’s panic attacks, there were many possible reasons that I was feeling anxiety, but the bottom line was that the event itself wasn’t lighting me up inside.

I love the yoga teachers who ran the retreat, they are two of my favorites, but the atmosphere was not conducive to me being me.

If it doesn’t light you up from head to toe, it’s okay, and probably best, to say no. Tweet This.

The realization that it’s always important to trust your intuition

As the first wave of panic came over me last Monday, I just felt a big no in my body. Has that ever happened to you? Even if you don’t know why, you can feel that something is off. For me, it felt heavy and restricting, and as the panic attacks kept recurring throughout the week, I kept trying to figure out why.

As one of my coaches reminded me recently, I tend to over think things, and this was a perfect example of that over thinking in action.

What I eventually realized as I rationalized my fears away one by one was that the why didn’t matter. What mattered that there was something within me saying no. Once I listened to that inner voice and surrendered to its message, the panic attacks ended and peace and calm returned.

Sometimes you just need to create space

The decision to stay home this weekend, despite already having paid for the non-refundable retreat created space in a variety of ways that would not have happened if I had been away for the weekend.

I created space for open communication and flow with my husband as I gave up my “me time” for the weekend to allow him to accept a great opportunity, and in return, I got that much needed time for myself and my creativity rescheduled in a way that feels much more authentic to what I need right now.

I created space within my home as my daughter played a new game, “From Wall to Window” in which we completely cleaned part of our living space and created an environment that truly feels like home, and that gives us space to be present with one another in ways that we couldn’t have been previously.

I created space in myself by getting to practice trusting my intuition and to honor and care for myself even when I was coming up against feelings of shame, embarrassment and confusion. I also created the opportunity to realize that my needs are valued at much more than $368. That is no easy lesson.

So what does this have to do with your journey through conception, pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood? Everything.

It comes back to the idea of trusting yourself, your intuition, your body. When you learn to use your body as a tool to deeper understanding of yourself, you can release a lot of unnecessary anxiety, but you have to be aware of it.

I had to go through it to be reminded of that lesson this week, and I hope that in sharing this part of my journey with you, when you notice your body saying yes or no, you will be able to honor that, release the why, and let it guide you.

Peace, Love, and Wellness,

What Can You Do to Create Fertility for Your Future Self?

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In this week’s video I answer an important question – what can you do now if you’re thinking about having a baby in 5-7 years.

Check it out and be sure to join the conversation when you’re done!

If you’re ready to get started on your journey to motherhood, you can join us here!

Peace, Love, and Wellness,

What To Do When Your Fertile Energy is Feeling Stuck

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I am so excited to be bringing a new feature to this space!

Sometimes I get questions from women that I know they are not alone in wondering about, and I thought it would be a wonderful idea to share some of those questions and answers with you.

If you’ve got a question that you’d like to hear me answer, whether it’s about your own journey or you’d like to know more about my journey, please send an email to xandra at wombtoworldwellness dot com with the subject line I’ve got a question for you, and you might see it featured here!

Please join the conversation by leaving a comment below after you watch today’s video.

Peace, Love, and Wellness,

What’s Holding You Back from Your Dreams?

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As I write this, I’m looking out my window onto a beautifully sunny day – no clouds, and the trees are beginning to bloom. We live on the 6^th floor of a building, and I often joke about how this is the closest I will ever be to living in a tree house. Although there are times when I long to feel more grounded and connected to the earth than I do from the 6^th floor, I am grateful for the vantage point that I have from here as well. It’s a reminder that while staying grounded is important, so is soaring towards our dreams.

In our lives, it’s really important to remember that we have the ability to view our current situation from various vantage points, and we can learn lessons from all of them.

Have you ever noticed that your energy feels different in these situations…

At night versus in the morning?

After a yoga or exercise class versus after you’ve been sitting on your couch all day?

After eating a nourishing meal versus a big bowl of ice cream?

These are all different vantage points, and they can tell you about the situation you are facing, as well as what is most supportive to you as you navigate what’s coming your way.

Recognizing how a situation looks from various vantage points is only part of the journey though – the next step is figuring out from which place inside, from which version of yourself, you want to respond.

Will it serve you to respond from a place of anger? Probably not.

Will it serve you to respond from a place of resentment? That’s not likely the best choice either.

Will it serve you to respond from a place of empathy? Possibly, but you have to be mindful of your own boundaries.

Will it serve you to respond from a place of compassion? Absolutely, especially if the compassion is for yourself.

Here’s the thing – if you’re anything like me (and most people I know), you make most of your decisions based on what others think – or might think, even if this is happening subconsciously. Sometimes this works out okay, but most of the time it leads to hurt, frustration, and a lot of negativity.

Especially when you are preparing yourself for conceiving a baby (but also when you’re conceiving anything in your life, even if it’s just your plan for tomorrow), it is so important to surround yourself and engage with positive energy. This is the energy of growth and creativity. When you focus on the negative, or you allow the negativity to seep into your life, it can stifle you. It can actually keep your dreams from growing.

When you begin to make decisions from a place of compassion and positivity, those feelings expand, and you will find yourself manifesting what you’ve most desired.

Here’s my challenge to you – find one place in your life where you know negativity is seeping in, and fill that space with something positive instead. Be part of the community by sharing an area where you are ready to release the negativity in the comments below.

Peace, Love, and Wellness,