Tag Archives: pregnancy

Toxins, Preparing for Conception, and Simplicity

Do you know what's in your products

It’s really all about simplicity. When I interviewed Dr. Laurel Standley for the Creating Fertile Ground Conference, she shared that even as a scientist, she doesn’t know what all of the ingredients in our products are. After all, there are over 6000!

So what are we supposed to do?

Memorize lists of ever-changing chemicals to be concerned with? I tried that; it’s not so easy.

Ignore the issue and hope for the best? The stakes seem too high for that, as we’re talking about not just our health, but also the health of generations to come.

As I’ve learned more and more over the years, especially when it comes to toxins and the childbearing years, I’ve come to discover a way to do the best you can without getting yourself overwhelmed by tons of information – keep it simple.

I recently had an in person session with a client. She and her husband are planning to start trying to conceive soon, and she is thinking about what’s in her products in an entirely new way now that she’s thinking about her future baby. It was a deep dive into this topic, and after our time together she said, “Thanks again! It was all really helpful and encouraging.” Encouraging. That’s key. You can gather all the information you want online, and you’ll likely find some of it to be helpful and much of it to be scary. That’s not really my idea of helpful, simple, or empowering at all.

Here’s what I taught her about simplicity when it comes to the products we’re using on a daily basis:

Use fewer products. On average, women use a dozen products daily. How many do you use? Often, many of them are ancillary to our needs, and they come at a huge price. One thing that my client realized was that she was seeing the same ingredients again and again as she checked her labels. Not only are we exposing ourselves to these chemicals, but we’re getting exposed multiple times by our products. How can you use fewer products in your routine?

Keep the ingredients list short and readable. One exercise that I have my clients do is you write out all of the ingredients that are in their products. For each one, they make two columns – the ingredients that they recognize and know what purpose they serve and the ingredients that they don’t recognize. The same reaction comes up again and again – so many of the ingredients are difficult to spell, let alone understand. Looking for products that have simple ingredients (ideally 10 or fewer ingredients and that you can recognize) is a great way to release the fear and overwhelm about your products. Check your labels. Do you know what you’re putting in and on your body?

Don’t feel like you need to do all the research on your own. We are surrounded by so much information these days, much of it full of unnecessary fear, much of it contradictory, and it can easily be overwhelming and confusing. Getting lost in a sea of information is not my idea of simplicity. Is it yours? If not, choose simplicity by starting where you can and finding support from those who have a passion for digging for the information and sharing just what you need to make this journey an empowering one. How can you reach out to get support so you can find more simplicity?

I’d love to know what was most helpful and how you plan to bring more simplicity to your daily routine. Join the conversation by sharing in the comments below.

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,

Releasing Expectations So You Can Flow Instead of Struggle

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Expectations. We all have them, for ourselves and for others. Mostly, they lead to frustration, disappointment, anger and miscommunication.

When you are thinking about starting a family (or you are just dreaming of it for some time in your future), these expectations can be painful.

You have expectations about what needs to be in place, how long it will take you to get pregnant, what pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood will look like for you.

At each point on this journey, there are numerous opportunities for not meeting these expectations, these high ideals that you have come to believe must be true.

What if you could flip this? What if you could shift your expectations so you are open and receiving instead of closed off and fighting?

Shifting expectations continues to come up in my life, so I know that it is a lesson I have not yet fully learned. As I have been hit on the head with this lesson a lot this week, I realized something – it’s not about my expectations of others but of myself.

As I have worked on shifting my expectations, this has meant accepting that I need support to make my dreams, passions, and desires flourish. I reached out for this support, invested in myself, and I can feel the shift.

It has taken some of the pressure off of me and helped me create space to put my focus to where it needs to be. I am able to focus on what flows naturally, while getting support with the pieces that feel more difficult and tend to cause a lot of frustration and stress. This is invaluable!

Are you ready? Release those expectations so you can flourish and grow.

Peace, Love, and Wellness,

Shifting into Trust for a Healthy and Empowered Conception and Pregnancy

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I’ve shared 4 keys to empowered conception and pregnancy with you this week – toxins, food and nourishment, relationships and communication, and self care and stress reduction. Trust holds all of this together. We’ll be exploring all of these more deeply next week during the Creating Fertile Ground Virtual Conference, but for now, let’s explore trust.

If you’ve been following me for a while, you know that I strive to come from a place of love and not fear, but let’s talk for a minute about what can happen when you don’t have trust.

You doubt the choices you make, sending you into an anxious tailspin.

You lose confidence in your ability to have what you want.

You fall back into old habits that keep you from moving forward.

You give up your power and hand it over to others.

You regret shifting out of alignment with your core values.

When you take the time and do the work necessary to cultivate trust, firstly in yourself and then in others, you can create an environment for the experience that you want, even if things don’t go according to plan.

With the foundation of trust,

You know what you want and take action to making it happen.

Your surround yourself with people who will support you in your choices.

You learn from your old habits as they remind you why you are moving forward.

You excavate a deeper power than you may have known you had.

You live in alignment with your authentic self, creating what you most desire.

When you create a strong foundation of trust, all of these other pieces fall into place because you know you can do it. If you doubt in your ability to follow through, you will continue to fall short of your dreams. When you can step into your place of power and fully trust, then the magic happens….

Peace, Love, and Wellness,

Why Self Care Matters for Conception, Pregnancy and Motherhood

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I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it, because we all need the reminder quite regularly – it all starts with you.

You are the foundation for your family.

So many of us give give give yet we struggle with the idea of being open to receiving.

The energy of creating life calls for a receptive energy. It is a space of surrender, of trust, of pure love. If you have given all you have to give and have nothing left, there is no energy left for creation.

By not taking care of yourself, by refusing to treat yourself as sacred ground in which to plant the seed of life, you send a message that you are not deserving of this care, and that you are not open to receiving more.

The greatest disservice we can do to our family, current and future, is to consider self care to be selfish. It is the opposite. If we do not carve out the time to take care of ourselves, we become overwhelmed, overstressed, resentful, and often we make ourselves physically sick because it is the only way our body can get the message across that we need to slow down.

In The Gift of the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh writes, “For the most part, we, who could choose simplicity, choose complication.”

Let’s choose simplicity with self-care.

Self-care is about carving out space just for you.
Self-care can be as simple as slow, deep breathing.
Self-care can take moments or hours; it is timeless.
Self-care has no right or wrong.
Self-care is an act of self-empowerment.

I encourage you to think about who you want to be as you prepare to step into the role of mama.

Do you want to be the woman who constantly feels like you’re falling apart, like you have to add one more thing to your list constantly but that you’re always at the bottom of it, and you’re growing resentful?

Or do you want to be the woman who has the energy to be fully present and joy-filled with your family, knowing can find gratitude within the small moments, and who can model the importance of caring for yourself for your children?

The choice is yours.

Peace, Love, and Wellness,

Why the Health of Your Relationships Matters before You Start Trying to Conceive

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Anxiety. Waiting. Insecurities. Hormones. Fears. Excitement. Identity. Big Changes.

I could keep this post as simple as that. With any of those, it’s important to have a partner you can lean on, trust, and communicate with as challenges and triumphs arise.

All of us, even when we’re in the best and healthiest relationships of our lives, have things that we can be working on and so do our partners. You are about to embark on a life changing adventure together, and it can be incredibly helpful to work out some of the kinks before diving into this time.

Before you start trying to conceive, a phase of this journey that no one can predict how long it will last.

Before your hormones are all over the place and you struggle to keep your emotions in check.

Before baby comes and you find yourselves overjoyed and sleep deprived all at once.

Before it sets in how much has changed, it’s important to be able to communicate what’s most important to you, individually and as a couple, and it’s important to know that you can always count on each other.

Your relationship will shift.

Your communication skills will need to be clearer than ever.

Your money stories will come up and possibly collide.

Your sex life will change but it can be in positive ways.

That’s why I am bringing 4 experts to share with you next week during the Creating Fertile Ground Virtual Conference. They will cover these key pieces and share with you what you can be doing now so you have a strong foundation, built together, from the very beginning of this journey.

While you wait to soak up their knowledge, I encourage you to start thinking about one thing in your partnership that you would like to strengthen. If you feel comfortable, please share it in the comments below and get the conversation started!

Peace, Love, and Wellness,

Food, Flavor, and Your Future Baby

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As I sat down to write this post for you, I was really excited because I was going to write about something that fascinates me. It fascinates me so much that I wrote about it 2 years ago here!

Instead of rehashing what I already wrote, I hope you’ll read that old post to discover the incredible connection between your food choices and the food preferences of your future baby. Feel free to comment on that post and let me know what you think!

That also frees me up to write to you about another really interesting and important fact about the importance of food before you start trying to conceive. You can actually reduce a lot of potential stress and anxiety by making conscious and healthy choices, and I’m not even talking about fertility boosting foods specifically.

I’m talking about what nutrient rich foods can do for you when it comes to a topic that leads to so much stress in pregnant women – morning sickness. Next week, during the Creating Fertile Ground Virtual Conference, you’re going to learn about the connection between food and your hormones, gut health, and fertility, as well as how herbs can help you get the nutrients you need. Today, let’s talk about how right now is the perfect time to start caring for that future baby of yours.

Once your baby is growing inside you, you are relegated to the #2 spot when it comes to who gets nutrients first. Your baby is doing some intense growing, especially in those early weeks, but all throughout pregnancy, and baby needs those nutrients to grow and develop in a healthy way.

When faced with morning sickness, many women worry about whether their baby is getting enough nutrients. Unless you are told by your trusted health care provider that there is cause for concern (hyperemesis gravidarum for example), you can release that anxiety if you’ve been taking good care of yourself and getting the nutrients that you need to be healthy.

Why is this?

Well, your baby will actually pull from your nutrient stores, so even if you’re not taking in as many nutrients when you are experiencing morning sickness, if you’ve built a healthy foundation, baby can borrow from that for a while.

Next week you are going to learn some really important information that connects to this (including what you need to know to make sure you are absorbing the nutrients from the food you are eating and a great way to get powerful doses of nutrients without the need for a search through shelves and shelves of supplements).

You can register here and I hope that you join us!

Peace, Love, and Wellness,

Why Toxins are Key to Healthy Conception and Pregnancy

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Peace lilies are great for cleaning toxins out of the air. Note: Toxic to cats.

There is a balance of energy in our bodies – that which creates life and that which impedes it. At the beginning of my journey to prepare myself for my future baby, I recognized the importance of focusing on the energy that creates life but I saw that I needed to clear out the negative energy, the clutter, and the toxins before I could create a sacred and luscious space where my child could grow.

Toxins can be a scary and overwhelming topic, but the risks that we open ourselves to unnecessarily on a daily basis are far scarier and more overwhelming. In fact, when we can be in service of our best health, and therefore our baby’s best health, the topic of toxins becomes one of empowerment. You learn what you can begin to control and in doing so you let go of so much fear.

So many of our fears – infertility, miscarriage, pregnancy and birth complications, birth defects and health related issues as our child grows up – are often deeply connected to the toxicity that has found its way into our bodies. By taking the steps towards learning about the connections between toxins and your health, you see what steps are in your control to reducing the risks of so many of your fears.

And it’s easy. That’s right, I’m starting off the week of the Creating Fertile Ground Virtual Conference with the easy first step. That’s not to say that it’s easy to eliminate all toxins from your life – that’s impossible. It’s easy to begin to take the steps that fit into your lifestyle and that fit into the vision of the world that you want to see flourish for your family.

In many cases, a few simple changes to the products you use can significantly reduce your toxic burden. In some cases, the changes are not practical right now, but there are actions you can take to mitigate the impact. In all cases, you step into a place of empowerment.

This is something that you can do right away, to treat yourself as sacred ground as you begin to prepare for baby. You want to reduce your exposure now so the environment you grow your baby in, from the very moment of conception, is comprised of as much energy that creates and nourishes life as possible. You can do this by reducing the negative toxic energy, both physically and mentally.

The women who will be sharing with you are going to teach you what you can be doing now and why it’s important, but you also might hear suggestions that feel like too much to implement right now, and that’s okay. You’ve empowered yourself with knowledge and you can put it into practice whenever you feel ready.

Clearing out the toxins is a beautiful foundation on which to grow everything that comes next. In order for plants to grow and thrive, they much have fertile and nontoxic soil. That is where it all begins.

If you’re ready to learn more about what you need to know and what you can do about toxins and your fertile health, join us for the Creating Fertile Ground Virtual Conference by registering here.

Peace, Love, and Wellness,