If you’re trying to navigate the emotional and physical battering of infertility’s rough waters, come ashore. The Fertile Female, Julia Indichova’s most recent book, is a verdant island of tranquility and hope. Indichova survived those waters herself years ago; her first book, Inconceivable, recounts her travails in search of motherhood. That search included standard pharmacological and technological interventions (just shy of in vitro fertilization)—to no avail. Instead of pregnancy, she got a diagnosis that her personal biochemistry would never support baby-making. But through her days of panic and despair, she continued to explore alternative approaches that might turn things around: excellent food choices, herbal support, exercise, spiritual discovery, emotional clearing, and other tactics that would “at the least,” she says, “give me the healthiest body I ever had.” And she trusted, for the first time ever, that she might know best how to discover what her body needed, and cultivated faith in her inner wisdom.
Now living in Woodstock with her husband and two daughters—both conceived without medical intervention—Indichova has compiled what worked for her into books, a CD, workshops, and supportive phone circles. She has done so not to be a self-promoting guru, but out of compassion for others. From across the US, Canada, and Europe, people call and write in distress after medical interventions have failed; they also call and write in ecstasy to tell her of children conceived after implementing her strategies. Those strategies have been endorsed by leading specialists in reproductive endocrinology.
Indichova never imagined such a role for herself.
A child of Holocaust survivors living in a small Czechoslovakian community, this humble woman has spent many years making the best of a difficult personal and cultural history. She emigrated to New York City at age 20 and worked as an actress, dancer, director, producer, and teacher of English to non-native speakers at Columbia University. During that time, her journey to become pregnant evolved. When she succeeded, word spread. “I found myself on the phone a lot,” she recalls of the people who sought her counsel. She had to help. Starting with support circles in her Manhattan apartment, today Indichova continues a support circle in the city and holds phone-support circles of international scope. She also has developed a seven-hour intensive workshop, The Fertile Heart Approach to Conception, which she offers locally in Woodstock at the Fertile Heart Studio—“a pretty, healthy place where I could teach.”
Medicine and miracles
Indichova is clear to not denounce medical technology when needed. “It is undeniably a powerful tool,” she says. “But because it is, we must be very conscious about how we use technology. If you do an in vitro cycle, my hope is that you do it once—not seven or even dozens of times.” She has seen couples try medical intervention over and over, driving themselves deeper into despair each time it doesn’t work.
And she also doesn’t promise a baby if you follow her guidelines—a promise many fertility books or gurus make, only to disappoint. “When we are lured into thinking that this or that thing will do it for us,” she explains, “and that all we need to do is yoga every day, or meditate, or drink wheat grass, we reinforce the false notion that we are less than a miracle.” Instead, The Fertile Heart tools are meant to guide people in choosing the remedies and practices that match each person’s temperament. She also believes we each are part of the great Oneness; miracles, magic, and deep wisdom are always with us. Some of us are out of practice experiencing those, or believing in them. Indichova teaches how to regain faith, not only for the chance of creating a new being, but to first birth a happier, more receptive self, as if our own life depended on it. During that process, a baby may come.
If you still don’t conceive a baby, don’t berate yourself. “We are cocreators of our lives,” says Indichova, “but cocreators only. Saying that our actions can make a difference doesn’t mean we’re omnipotent. Our lives have been shaped by countless forces, and we always do the best we can. To paraphrase a famous line of Winston Churchill’s: Never, never, never, never, never blame yourself. Never! You’d be giving yourself too much credit.” Sometimes parenthood means adopting, and people who have followed Indichova’s guidance know that that is a miracle, too.
Inconceivable to fertility
The Fertile Female explores physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual areas of one’s life that deserve attention in preparation for a new life, whether yours or a baby’s. With abundant exercises and supportive explanation and stories from clients, Indichova teaches imagery, dreamwork, listening to and supporting the physical self through words and movement, nourishment through healthful foods, and even recipes. Her experiential one-day workshops teach these, too, as well as chants that are “gorgeous tools in softening the heart—an important piece of the process.”
Besides being specific and practical, the techniques nurture a deep trust in oneself and one’s body. Many women in the course of trying to conceive have lost that, if they ever had it. They feel helpless and powerless, to put it mildly, especially when handed medical diagnoses imbued with defeating language: incompetent cervix, premature ovarian failure, advanced maternal age, hostile mucus. These are not words to empower.
“There is a palpable desperation when you want to get pregnant and can’t,” says Mariann Durkin, who attended a workshop at Indichova’s Fertile Heart studio after a dozen years of trying to get pregnant. “It’s a want beyond anything. The desperation drives you. You go places you don’t think you would go.” She says it was wonderful at the workshop to be among women who felt the same. “We all had that common thread—that deep ache, as I call it.”
Durkin heard about the workshop some months earlier from a friend. “I had just turned 40. Biologically, I felt my opportunity was waning. I was really in this zone, saying to myself, I’m either going to give this [getting pregnant] one more shot, or get on with my life.” Durkin started researching Indichova’s approach. “I got her book, logged onto her website, read things that different people had written.” Durkin found she was already doing a lot of things “right,” by Indichova’s reckoning, to prepare herself for a healthy pregnancy, and no medical test had ever uncovered a reason she couldn’t get pregnant.
Durkin then arranged a consultation with Indichova in person. “The shift happened when I spoke to her in the spring,” Durkin recalls. “I liked Julia energetically; she was very open to listening. She posed a lot of questions, and I really thought about them.” Durkin considered trying in vitro, but realized she just couldn’t “commit to that level of medical intervention, of drugs in my body, stress on my marriage, and the financial burden.” Instead, a few months later, she went to Indichova’s workshop. There she learned, among other things, to trust her body.
“I had always felt as though my body was letting me down,” Durkin says. “Why couldn’t it just work like normal? The guided imagery with the CD was really helpful to shift me into a more gentle place, accepting that this is the body that I have, it’s a healthy body, and it just may not ovulate every 30 days. For the first time, I listened my body at a deep level, as a close friend. It was very powerful.” Her body gave her a healthy baby; the timing indicates she had conceived between her consultation with Julia and the workshop.
How do you spell ovum?
Indichova sees each of us as a delicious mixture of flesh, intellect, mystery, and passion, all ignited with currents of energy—something she calls the Holy Human Loaf. Fertility is influenced by all its ingredients, not just the biological ones. “What’s totally fascinating to me,” she says, “is when psychiatrists and psychologists come to the workshops. Their work is about how important it is to know ourselves, and about the heart. But when we talk about the idea of the Holy Human Loaf—how every morsel of that loaf plays a role [in biology and fertility]—on a practical experiential level, even for them it’s new.”
Indichova speaks of three aspects we each carry in our hearts that contribute to the loaf: the orphan(s), the visionary, and the ultimate mom. Serendipitously, the first letters of each word—o from orphan, v from visionary, and um from ultimate mom—together spell ovum. “That is certainly not something I manipulated!” says Indichova in wonderment. Through her exercises, especially in meditation, imagery, and dreamwork, these aspects can become as allies for fertility. How?
Using orphans as an example, Indichova explains. “The orphans are the parts of us that are terrified of all kinds of things. They have been wounded in various battles and still have shrapnel lodged in the body that we don’t know about. Longing for a child comes from such a deep place that it’s also the place where all these forgotten orphans lie. So they get stirred up.” For many women, orphans that need attention seem to be blocking pregnancy. One of Indichova’s goals is to help women, as she herself learned, to be skillful at recognizing those orphans and taking care of them in a loving fashion so they don’t impede the fertility journey.
Denise Kunisch of Warwick had been trying to conceive for nearly three years and was just beginning to research in vitro options when she came across Inconceivable. “I was very drawn to it. It was a hopeful story, which I was really looking for,” Kunisch says. “It clicked with so many things I believed in.” She carefully followed many aspects of Indichova’s protocol: “Yoga, wheat grass, organic foods, no sugar, very little meat—and organic and grass-fed when I did eat it. I felt fantastic, both physically and emotionally.” But she didn’t get pregnant. “There was nothing physically wrong with me or my husband that anybody could find,” she says. “The doctors had told me I was pretty much done—I was 36 years old. I decided to do IVF because I fell back into desperation.” But that didn’t work, either.
Kunisch hadn’t yet explored one area of Indichova’s approach: the emotional aspect. “I thought, ‘How important could it be?’” Yet she knew something lingered there. “As a child, it seemed like being a mother was really awful. My parents were divorced when I was two, and my mom, with three children, was very unhappy and stressed out,” she says. “So I think subconsciously that was very significant in my difficulties.” Through using imagery exercises in the book and attending The Fertile Heart workshop, Kunisch came to understand that her mother had experienced a bad childhood, too, and could forgive her. What’s more, she says, “I was able to separate my experience from my mother’s, and realize how different my life is. I have a wonderful husband, a fantastic relationship, and a peaceful home. She never had that.” A month after the workshop, Kunisch became pregnant (as we go to print, she will be a mom at any moment).
Embracing the mystery
Quoting philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, Indichova rejoices that “Life is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved.” So it is for fertility, in Indichova’s view (and opposite the approach of medical fertility intervention, which seeks a problem and prescribes a fix). “One of the incredible gifts of being faced with an allegedly insurmountable diagnosis of infertility is that it finally brought me to faith,” she says. “I had taken a lot of workshops without finding it. Now I have a closer experience of what faith is, and I live from that place.” This is not faith in any particular god, but in one’s inner wisdom and own miraculous self. It’s about creating a fertile life in myriad ways. “There is no assignment more gorgeous,” Indichova stresses, “than to ponder what it is that creates life.” Workshop attendees and clients concur that Indichova’s approach is about turning a very difficult, painful situation into a positive one.
Indichova delights that doctors admit that fertility and pregnancy are mysterious. “All the physicians and reproductive endocrinologists I’ve interviewed speak about the fact that there is so much they don’t understand,” she says. “To me, it’s really good news that there is so much that obviously is unexplainable. There’s a huge opportunity with this particular challenge in people’s lives, and in our culture generally, to bring us back to reverence for creation.”
In addition, people seeking a baby will find a welcome, much-needed community among others doing the same. “I congratulate everyone who wants a baby and finds themselves in the midst of searching,” Indichova says. “We form a beautiful community, where looking at truth is an essential piece. I’m so grateful to everyone for doing this work with me.”
To learn more about Julia Indichova and about The Fertile Heart Approach to Conception workshops, low-cost phone support circles, and circles hosted by women under Indichova’s guidance, call (845) 679-5469 or visit www.fertileheart.com.
This article appears in August 2007.
