Free The Headspace Guide To … A Mindful Pregnancy by Andy Puddicombe

BABY
    Our journey actually begins the moment we start trying for a baby.
    For some couples, the ‘trying’ doesn’t last long: the woman conceives at the first or second attempt and all the lights turn green. For others though, not everything falls into place quite so easily, leading to frustration, heartache and despair. A diagnosis of infertility can, for many women, feel like the end of the world, as they are unable to contemplate a life without children.
    I don’t think anyone who wants a family starts out thinking it will be remotely difficult. After years of taking precautions, experimenting with different types of contraception and having endured lectures from teachers at school and parents at home about the risks of getting pregnant, it can seem almost nonsensical that the result of engaging in unprotected sex could be anything other than a stork swooping down from the skies.
    The phrase ‘trying for a baby’ is so loaded. It suggests effort, expectation, and the idea of a goal or result. It also hints at the concept of success and failure. But what if no amount of trying produces a result? How do we begin to process that, let alone embrace it?
    In researching this book, I was astonished to discover how many couples struggle to conceive at first, and just how many pregnancies end in miscarriage. But while it can be an incredibly isolating time, and it may well seem as though everyone else but you is getting pregnant, you are truly not alone.
    Experiences such as this one, from a woman in her thirties, are common:
    My husband and I decided to make a baby and couldn’t have been more thrilled. I had this dream that it would be a magical, wonderful experience – that it would be as easy as a baby falling from the sky into my lap. I was crestfallen when I still wasn’t pregnant six months later.
    It is difficult to imagine another time in life when that voice of how we think life should be, can be so at odds and so much in conflict with life as it is .
    Let’s go back to that very first idea of mindfulness: it cannot necessarily change what happens to us, but it can fundamentally transform how we experience it. Yes, there are steps we can take to promote a more fertile environment and increase the possibility of conception, extending all the way through to multiple rounds of IVF and even surrogacy. Beyond that though, it seems we are at the mercy of nature. But wait, that suggests we are separate from nature – that it has control over us. It does not. We are part of nature, we are nature; there is no separation and the journey we’re on is part of something so much bigger.
    Early in 2013, I had the opportunity to meet a number of couples going through fertility treatment. I had just been diagnosed with testicular cancer, losing one of my crown jewels in the process. Cancer is another one of those life events that accentuates just how little control we have over this precious human life, and I remember the prognosis just as vividly as the diagnosis. As I sat with Lucinda in a doctor’s office and he outlined the surgery, the weight of the news fell heavily on us both. When he described the operation, I squeezed my wife’s hand a little tighter; when he discussed our future fertility, she squeezed mine that little bit harder. Our best hope, it seemed at the time, was in making a deposit at the local sperm bank because the chemotherapy that would follow the operation could quite possibly leave me infertile. This all happened just one month after Lucinda and I had decided we would like to ‘try for a baby’.
    I cannot even pretend to imagine what it must be like for couples who try for years and are unable to conceive. In the end, we were fortunate enough to have a beautiful baby boy, but, in those first few months of cancer, I felt as though I had a small insight, perhaps a faint glimmer, of what life might look like without the prospect of children, or at the very least, needing to explore more unorthodox