Lorne Brown:
By listening to the Conscious Fertility Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition in either yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guest or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to Conscious Fertility, the show that listens to all of your fertility questions so that you can move from fear and suffering to peace of mind and joy. My name is Lorne Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. I’m on a mission to explore all the paths to peak fertility and joyful living. It’s time to learn how to be and receive so that you can create life on purpose.
Today on the Conscious Fertility Podcast, I have my colleague and good friend Laura Erlich, and I want to give a formal introduction to Laura. She began her career in holistic wellness after studying traditional Chinese medicine with an emphasis on fertility and obstetric care. She actually has a background as a doula and after graduating a Summa km Lara from Emperors College, she founded Mother Nurture Wellness and it’s a Los Angeles based women’s health practice specializing in infertility, optimization, pregnancy and postpartum care. And as an integrative health professional for over 20 years, Laura’s helped thousands of families grow by creating a custom roadmap that targets each individual’s needs from nutrition supplementation, herbal medicine, acupuncture, meditation, mentorship and beyond. And she wrote a book that she co-authored in 2015 called Feed Your Fertility, A Guide to Cultivating a Healthy Pregnancy with Chinese Medicine, real Food and Healthy Living.
Now, I’ve gotten to know Laura quite well because we’re both part of the A BRM, that acupuncture board of traditional Chinese Medicine of reproductive health, and Laura teaches a lot of courses on this other platform that I’m involved in called Healthy Seminar. She runs a mentorship. So this idea of this conversation was Laura, when you did that talk, you have six or seven modules and there was that module on the nervous system. I’m looking here, I have it open up on my computer, the actual slide, but I just thought it was so brilliant, not only for our colleagues, but I think just the people going through the fertility journey to just kind of understand this and why they’d want to take care of themselves from a mental emotional level. Yeah, it was actually ma jaw one that you talk about, the menstrual cycle nervous system and mental health and how it impacts his fertility. I thought we should talk a little bit about stress and fertility and we can pull from that course, but let’s just pull from your brain since you’re with me today.

Laura Erlich:
That sounds good. Yeah, and I think there’s a reason why it’s module one.
I really when I thought through how am I going to do this mentorship, and I’m actually in the process of turning it into a public facing course as well, and in the public facing course, module one is also about the nervous system and there’s a reason for that, right? We can all figure out how to optimize our periods and help people with some of the specific symptoms until an individual person decides to regulate their nervous system with tools that I provide that you provide that as holistic healthcare professionals, we provide, but they have to actually do the homework part. That’s not something you come in once a week, get some needles and all is well, right? So I start with the nervous system, with everyone, with my patients, with my students because that is the bottom line of it all. Until our autonomic nervous system, the fight or flight and the rest and relax part of our nervous system is regulated. It’s hard for the physiology to fall into place.

Lorne Brown:
That’s what I want to talk about. And what is fascinating is in conventional medicine and science today we have this understanding of neural immunology that how your thoughts and feelings can impact your nervous system, your hormonal system, your immune system. Chinese medicine acknowledged this 2000 plus years ago, I mean you and I have been in practice for a while. I remember back in the day in the early two thousands where they said stress can impact. Stress doesn’t affect fertility. That now at the time of this recording and we have a podcast by Alice Domar, fertility does cause stress, but stress also impacts your fertility. Can you talk about reproduction and the autonomic nervous system so people get the idea of how thoughts and emotions chronic stress can impact our autonomic nervous system? Why that’s important, and I got to say this, I know for those that are listening that are trying to get pregnant, it’s stressful to find out that your stress impacts your fertility. So now you’re like, I’m going to ruin my fertility. There are so many tools to help you manage metabolize, digest these stress hormones. So we would never say this is a bad thing without saying that there’s a way for you to alchemize it.

Laura Erlich:
That’s totally correct. And we don’t want to compound stress by saying it’s your fault that you’re stressed. The world is so stressful right now. There is no way to come into this process, especially for people who are coming into this process kind of on their heels, finding out there’s an issue, there’s not enough follicles. FSH is high. There’s some factor that is actually impeding or even worse, we don’t even know why, but it’s been a long time. And then there’s this unexplained aspect of infertility that adds its own huge level of stress. So the first thing is to say that stress is no one’s fault. It’s not your fault that you are overwhelmed by this. It’s not your fault that you’re wired the way that you’re wired either. One of the conversations I frequently have with my patients, and it sounds a little crazy, but it’s really true. I always say, what’s going on with you physiology wise and nervous system wise to a certain extent, has nothing to do with you. You are a product of your ancestral lineage. You are made up of all the parts and pieces of the people who came before you, including the trauma they experienced, including the anxiety that they suffered, including the famines.

Lorne Brown:
I want to, because you’re talking my language here, this is the Conscious Utility Podcast, so I often say it this way, but sometimes if it’s okay, I want to unpack it just so it doesn’t just pass to me. This is so important. So the language I use to understand is kind of like we have our subconscious programs and we see the world through the lenses of our subconscious. So that’s how we perceive what’s happening through our programs, our beliefs, and like you just said, this lens comes through you, so your ancestors, so a couple generations back, what they went through that we now know that transgenerational trauma can get passed on, and then where you’re born, your sex, your culture, what you were surrounded with, your parents, all that gets imprinted on you and eventually that becomes your lens. So your history is how you view the world, and like you said, you didn’t choose it that we’re aware of.
I mean, some people believe you choose it, but we’re not going to go that far into it today. Some people say that, I can’t confirm or dispel that, but there is some pretty cool information, data stuff about that you do perceive reality through your lens. So there is a reality out there, but all of us have our own lens, so we all experience it differently, and it’s not your fault. However, accountability, responsibility, there are things that Laura’s going to share with you that you can do to start to change that program. So you get a new lens, and so now you experience it differently.

Laura Erlich:
And I would go so far to say is that makes the process of going through a fertility struggle, an opportunity to heal your nervous system, and that instead of just kind of wanting to get to the point where I’m getting eggs and I’m getting embryos and I’m going to have a baby and then I’m going to pass all of this stuff on that, there becomes a period of time during this journey where people can start to get a little bit more conscious about it as you’re talking about and kind of go, oh, I see that my anxiety is a product of X, y, or Z, and I’m going to actually address those things while I’m trying to conceive, while I’m starting my family, so that maybe I can make it a little softer and gentler for my child as they come into this world. I can help them experience life through the lens of a regulated nervous system.
If your parents’ written nervous systems weren’t regulated, your infancy wasn’t either. So how can we shift it and help? And this is the doula in me. I became a doula because of the babies, because I wanted so much to bring a little more peace into the process and help families navigate that in a way that they’re able to help their child transition earth side into a world that is a little bit less on fire for them, at least in their tiny little microcosm. So that’s part of this is my greatest pleasure is not just seeing people achieve their family goals, but actually see them do it and go, oh my gosh, and I feel like a different person now because I’m not triggered by everything that comes my way because I’ve learned how to navigate my stress response essentially.

Lorne Brown:
And this is so important about the healthy baby, and you shared that fertility, this diagnosis is an opportunity. And in the conscious world, a lot of people say, let’s change our mindset from this is happening to me where we get into a victim mindset, which causes more alarm, more stress into this is happening for me, as you called it, an opportunity. So this is what is, so how do I work with this? And this was kind of the birth, if we can use this word of the Conscious Fertility podcast. We have two episodes that kind of relate to this Gila Gola episode number 10, and Vanessa LA point, I don’t remember the episode number, but she’s the one Laura that said to me when I met her ages ago that if parents could attach to their children in a healthy attached way, the planet would heal under the sensor idea that because we were raised by behaviorists versus developmentalists and that we didn’t get our attachment needs met, we grow up needing to do drugs and alcohol to numb it, or we join gangs or we do cutting or we do suicide.
And if one generation, if you’re raised by at least one adult that can attach to you so it can be apparent or it could be a grandparent or it could be a caregiver, then those attachment needs get met and she says, then you grow up filling whole and complete and you don’t feel separate, and now you don’t need to do gangs, drugs cut. And so the Conscious Fertility Podcast goes from, as you said, it’s an opportunity, so conscious fertility to conscious conception, to conscious pregnancy, to conscious parenting. So that is the idea is I’m aware that the agenda of the people that I see and you see is, oh, if I do this with you, maybe I’ll get pregnant. My agenda is that if you do this, that you’ll feel whole and complete whether you have baby or not. And if you do, you’re going to be able to attach to your child because you’ve done your healing.

Laura Erlich:
That’s right. That’s exactly how I view it. And I would add one more thing to your list, which is conscious childbirth.
And that doesn’t mean that childbirth has to be without any intervention or epidurals or there can still be consciousness in the choices that are made and choosing to give birth in a way that is with the intention of transitioning that baby earth side with as little trauma as possible. And that’s a whole other conversation to have, but it’s one that often gets missed. We kind of put, especially in the states, childbirth goes into this sort of parentheses, it’s just one day, whatever, but that’s the first imprint, right? That’s the first experience that a newborn has. So what does that look like and feel like? And if it didn’t go the way you hoped it would, what can you do to help that baby also heal their nervous system from that experience? Because birth is trauma no matter how you do it in a pool and in the ocean, in a hospital, in an operating room, it’s trauma.

Lorne Brown:
And I’m being sensitive here. I’m a man that can’t give birth counsel me, Lord. I’m asking that as in, I’m going to put it this way. Everything happens is an event and then we perceive it so that event could become a traumatic experience. Can birth not be a traumatic experience? I know it’s a big opening. One of the podcasts episode with Yap Vanderwal is an embryologist says that birth is the first dying you die out of the placenta. So there’s a birth death experience that happens.

Laura Erlich:
Yes.

Lorne Brown:
So it’s a big event, but does it have to be traumatic if you’re conscious of the war? Think

Laura Erlich:
I would say that. Well, if we can take trauma out of the bad category for a second

Lorne Brown:
For

Laura Erlich:
This and say that to some extent the process for an infant, for a fetus transitioning from this cozy little environment with they know nothing of the world, having to squeeze through the birth canal and come out and start breathing, there is an element of trauma associated with that. It is a total energetic flip, right? It’s like a polarization that has to shift. You’re also experiencing as the birthing individual, the transition from pregnancy to parenthood, which I mean even under the very best of circumstances, home birth midwife, easy labor, it’s intense. There is a traumatic element to it. And so that’s okay, we can heal from that if we Right. It’s that whole thing about allostatic load and how do you recover. So for people who are going into the process, extremely dysregulated, already anxious, already freaked out, already worried that they’re not going to be able to take care of their baby properly, or when the autonomy of childbirth is sort of overtaken from a woman or a mother, and then she kind of loses her sense of self through the process and has to regain that in early infancy, that can also create trauma that can lead to postpartum depression and anxiety.
So the experience of birth and just giving birthing people the autonomy to feel like every step of the way, the choice is theirs and every step of the way what happens to their child, they’re a part of it. They’re included, they are making decisions. As a parent, you can mitigate that trauma to some extent, but I think that the experience in and of itself carries a certain, I mean, it is gnarly. It’s intense no matter how you do it.

Lorne Brown:
Okay, thank you. Stress. So does infertility cause stress or does stress cause infertility?

Laura Erlich:
That’s the famous Dr. Domar question, right?

Lorne Brown:
Yes,

Laura Erlich:
Yes. The answer is yes. Early in my practice, I teamed up with a therapist and we use the Harvard Mind Body Method in support groups and worked through this a lot with several groups of women. And I mean, yes, the answer is yes, stress causes infertility to a degree. I think that we can got to stay out of what we talked about at the beginning, the idea that there’s some blame in that or that of your job or it’s because of,

Lorne Brown:
It’s a spectrum though. It’s not a switch.

Laura Erlich:
That’s correct. Yeah,
Right. Certainly infertility causes stress. We know that the data says that infertility, a protracted infertility journey is as stressful as metastatic cancer as being HIV positive or having coronary artery disease. It’s not a joke. It is as stressful as it gets because it’s a biological imperative. That’s sort of the way that I view it, is that we have only two actual biological imperatives, survival and procreation as far as our primal brain is concerned. We can override the procreation part if we want to, but there is a physiological imperative to do that. And so for people who are tugged by that imperative, if it is thwarted by infertility, then the question of really who am I starts to come up for people, it becomes an existential crisis. And so how do we keep moving forward in the face of that existential crisis and help them navigate it so it stops being that. So it starts being, okay, this is my true story, my authentic reality. I can’t be pie in the sky. I have to be real about what my options are, and then find a way to walk through that options, those options without your hair on fire basically.

Lorne Brown:
Can you share what it is by our brain on stress? You talk about that a lot in your modules. And I want to let my, I know our colleagues watch this. Laura has a series of fertility modules for acupuncturists, and then she also, she talked about conscious birth. She has a whole series on that as well, on healthy seminars for my colleagues. Your brain on stress, and can you tie this into reproduction? So stress, and can you work with this definition? Stress is not necessarily the situation. People go, there’s stress at work or there’s this stress. Stress is how we perceive it. So there’s the situation and then there’s the perception that causes this stressful reaction, which is what I’d love you to talk about. So what is that when the alarm bell goes off, because you’ve now perceived the situation as an alarm, can you tell us what our brain is like when it’s on stress?

Laura Erlich:
Sure. So there’s two tracks of stress, right? Stress is actually healthy and normal. A normal response to stress is a stressor comes my way. I think it’s sometimes easier to think of long ago when we were hunter gatherers and living out in communities and tribes and we’re all functioning and everything is happening and the day is going on, and then all of a sudden a giant pack of hyenas is coming our way. We have to stop what we’re doing, get out of harm’s way. That stressor causes a release of hormones in your brain that leads to the release of cortisol and adrenaline. Those two chemicals are designed to make us run from danger. That is the job of those chemicals. You hear about women being able to lift the car up because a baby gets pinned underneath it. Superhuman FETs can happen when that stress signal takes place in order to get us out of danger.
And it’s something we share with all animals, right? Animals sense fear, they bolt, they get to safety. In the modern world, we never quite get to safety and the stressors never quite cease. So we find ourselves in a scenario where there’s this perpetual sort of pulsing of these stress hormones that are going on all day long. I’m late for work, I forgot to send my kids lunch, or I left it in the fridge. Now I got to go back. I missed my meeting. I got in a road rage confrontation, what people are experiencing in modern life. And that’s not to mention that in between that I got to do my shots because I’m doing IVF or whatever the case may be. So Dr. Delmar talks about allostatic load, and I teach about that in that first module that allostasis is the state of being in a neutral place, being able to manage stressors and then resolve them quickly kind of the way you would if you were running away from danger and getting back to safety, allostatic load is when one stressor after another starts to pile on, and you don’t have the tools to manage each one so that by the end of the day or the end of the week or the end of the year, you’re ready to just fall apart.
So that impacts fertility in really specific ways because again, going back to those two biological imperatives, survival is always going to trump procreation, right? We can’t have a baby if we’re running for our lives, but so many people in our society are figuratively running for their lives day in and day out. So the body on a physiological level, that fight or flight nervous system is like, Hey, oh, this is not a good time to have a baby. Why would I want to make myself vulnerable? Why would I want to put myself in a physical state that requires other people to look out for me? If I don’t feel safe enough to care for myself, how can I care for someone else? And so I would say personally, the primary way that I see fertility being impacted by excess amounts of stress is through dysregulated ovulation, because there’s a bit of competition going on there among these hormones.
If stress is the primary thing on tap, if adrenaline and cortisol are what are running the show day after day, and that’s the case. If you’re waking up in the middle of the night and can’t go back to sleep or waking up at 5:00 AM feeling your heart racing or finding yourself totally and exhausted in the afternoon, but wide awake at night, if your body is not functioning in a way that is kind of physiologically, I guess, ideal, you’re having a bowel movement every day, you’re going to sleep okay, you’re hungry at normal intervals, your relationships are stable, or you’re working through conflicts in a way that is healthy and not leading to episodes of rage, all of those things start to tell you, yeah, my nervous system’s better. I feel a little more calm in the day to day. I feel like I’m handling my allostatic load.
And if it’s not manageable, then something has to change. The other thing that we talk about in my courses is making space for a baby. And some of, in the modern world, at least in my patient population, there’s a lot of people who are high level executives or film producers, or I have a lot of television writers and showrunners in my practice. The kind of stress that those people go through in their jobs is not usual. It’s not a typical nine to five experience. There’s tremendous pressure on them, and sometimes they just literally don’t have this space. They want the child, but they’re trying to squeeze it into a life that doesn’t really have room for it. And so that the solution, at least in their mind becomes, I’m going to do IVF and I’ll have embryos, and then I’ll find a way to get pregnant in some tiny interval of time where that’s possible. And while that might be okay for somebody who’s 25, when women start getting into their later years 40, 41, it becomes a lot harder because now the ovaries are a little bit less inclined to participate in their plan. You know what I mean? They need a little bit more space. They need to reduce that stress. They need to find a way to make this a priority so it can physically occur.

Lorne Brown:
You tell me, yes, check, check, we’re aligned in this, but long-term exposure to stress hormones then leads to, or the consequences are inflammation,

Laura Erlich:
Correct?

Lorne Brown:
Hormonal imbalances,

Laura Erlich:
Check

Lorne Brown:
Blood sugar dysregulation,

Laura Erlich:
Check

Lorne Brown:
Adrenal dysregulation, right? And then when you have that wreaks havoc on your immune system as well. So can we talk a little bit about how this chronic stress then, how does it show up, for example, in digestion or why? Because you talked about that reproduction is not a priority and survival is so if you’re chronically being stressed, what’s happening to our blood flow then under stress? And why do people often show up when they’re on a chronic stress with digestive issues?

Laura Erlich:
I think there’s a handful of reasons. Reason one is that the release of cortisol into the bloodstream compels the liver to release a whole bunch of glucose into the bloodstream to convert the glucose. It’s stored as a glucagon into glucose. And the reason for that is because when you’re stressed, you’re supposed to be stressed because you’re running from the hyenas. So we need this extra dose of glucose in our bloodstreams in order to bolt. But most of us, when we’re having that surge of glucose from cortisol, thanks to that cortisol flood are not like getting up and running a marathon, right? It’s a call to yang when we have this, it’s a call to move. Most people aren’t doing that. They’re just sitting with these high levels of cortisol experiencing palpitations. Maybe they’re taking Ativan or a medication to try to calm down, or in our world, they’re taking popping some jaw shaan to try to calm it down.
But they’re not dealing with the underlying issue, which is that the stress is causing this release of cortisol, which is causing a spike in glucose, which is causing a spike in insulin, which over time leads to insulin resistance. Insulin resistance then leads to inflammation, systemic inflammation, but also specifically at the level of the ovaries can dysregulate the hormone production because too much blood sugar makes the ovaries make more testosterone. And again, I feel like I love the Chinese medicine links that I can, I feel like they’re so clearly visible. Why would the body make more testosterone? Again, testosterone is a young hormone, is a hormone designed to create motive force in the body. It makes us physically capable of lifting things that are heavy or just knocking everything off the table to get what we need. It is a hormone of movement, and at the level of the ovaries, it makes a mess.
It disregulates follicular development. It can lead to the development of cysts. And that’s especially detrimental for people with PCOS in the first place. But even people who don’t have PCOS are still going to be impacted by these stress hormones impacting their ovaries. And that’s when you start to see dysregulation like the ovaries and the uterus kind of get desynchronized from each other. So you have follicles that are too big early in the cycle, or you’re not ovulating until too late in the cycle. They’re postma mature. And some of these things are age related, and we can’t entirely stop it, but we can mitigate it by learning to manage our own reactions. And that’s really, I know you’ve talked about this. I listened to recently to your interview with Dr. Domar as well, and she talked about it a lot. We can’t stop the stress. Stress, just stress is part of life. All that we can do is find a way to manage the stressors that come our way in a manner that doesn’t damage our physiology. And that is hard work. It doesn’t happen overnight. We have to really take it on.

Lorne Brown:
Yeah, life happens. So you’re not going to control life. Your free will is how you perceive and metabolize the situation inside. And there’s an expression, the longer you do it, the easier it becomes, the easier it becomes the longer you do it. So you just develop these practices to help you work with these experiences that you’re having. And there’s ways to do this, and we’re going to talk about that. We will not stop this podcast until we talk about that. I really loved in this module that you did on the nervous system, the deep dive of the stress hormones from the western perspective, how there’s the autoimmune reaction, the digestion, the hormonal. It was amazing. So deep dive. And then you went and did a deep dive on how Chinese medicine view stress, and you’re talking about the hypothalamus pituitary ovarian axis, hypothalamus pituitary adrenal axis. So we got the brain hormones and the adrenal ovarian hormones. That was like a six or seven hour course. So we don’t have that time to go through it, but I would love to hear, how do you explain this to your patients, the public who mostly listen to this stress response, and how do you bring in the Chinese understanding of this? Because there is this understanding, there’s a vessel between the uterus and the heart, and between the heart and the brain. Can you talk a little bit about that or uterus and the heart and uterus and the kidney? I said brain, the

Laura Erlich:
Heart and the kidney and the uterus and the heart and the brain and the kidneys, and it’s all connected, right? And it’s all connected in a very, so what I think is so amazing about Chinese medicine, when you really look at the classic writings and read cases from ancient times, you find that their understanding of the body, from my perspective, is so similar to the allopathic understanding of the body. It’s just written in really beautiful metaphor and takes a little bit of time to kind of decipher exactly what those parallels are. But I say to my students all the time, we don’t have two bodies. You don’t have a Chinese medicine body and a western medicine body. And Chinese medicine isn’t claiming that the things that it kind of ascribes to are creating different physiological functioning in your body than western medicine is suggesting. So there’s a tremendous alignment between eastern and western perspectives in terms of just the actual pathophysiology of the way the body functions.
We just talk about it differently. So in western medicine, we have the hypothalamic pituitary, ovarian adrenal axis, which is essentially a loop or a conversation that takes place between the primal brain, the pituitary, which is kind of like the one that sends off the signals that the primal brain told it to send off down to all of our other glands, the thyroid, the ovaries, the adrenals, the pancreas. So it all comes from the signaling from the command center of the hypothalamus, and it’s the job of the hypothalamus to decide are we in a stressful moment or are in a relaxed moment? And if we’re in a stressful moment, it’s going to signal release, cortisol, release adrenaline, be on guard, all those things that happen when we’re stressed, blood flows out to the periphery, we’re ready to run. Or are we in a moment of tranquility? I don’t necessarily want to say you’re relaxed. I think the rest and relax is a little bit of a misnomer. It’s more like, are you chill?

Lorne Brown:
Are you at peace?

Laura Erlich:
Are you at peace in this moment? Can you just let life flow? And without having palpitations or having waking up gasping in the middle of the night, is life in flow for you? That means that that part of your nervous system is the one that is predominant. Of course, it’s a balance. And of course, you’re going to go into stressful moments if you almost get in a car accident, but do you have a tool to get yourself out of that moment of the car accident, almost having a car accident, or you’re going to relive it all day long? That’s the difference. Can you get yourself back to a place of calm after stressful events occur? And so it is truly based on that conversation, the command center of the hypothalamus speaking to the pituitary, who then disseminates that information to the rest of the body.
And in Chinese medicine, we have an almost perfect overlay of that system, which is kind of based on this Daoist concept of the microcosmic orbit. And the microcosmic orbit says that we are a microcosm of the cosmos or the greater universe. And as that microcosm, we have within us this energetic pathway that allows our brain to speak to our heart, to speak to our uterus, to speak to our adrenals, and to essentially control the system in the same way that the western HPOA axis would suggest this through this feedback loop. But we call it the microcosmic orbit. And the two vessels that are primarily involved in the microcosmic orbit are the ma and the Duma. And the Duma are the vessels of primal yin and primal yang. So they represent yin and yang in their ever changing relationship to one another. Right? We talk about yin and yang. There’s a kind of misnomer that Chinese medicine is about balancing as though balancing means. I’ve got five weights on five pound weights on both sides of the scale, and that’s not the case. It’s balance for the moment that you’re in. So when you’re sleeping, your yin energy is more dominant. When we’re awake and exercising, our young energy is more dominant. When we’re sitting in meditation, we’re seeking balance between those two things

Lorne Brown:
Like homeostasis, the thermostat, when the room gets warm, it turns on the cool air. When the room gets cool, it turns on the warm air, so it’s never stagnant. It’ll pass through that five pound weights on each side, but it doesn’t stay there. It’s constantly going up and down. And

Laura Erlich:
So that’s

Lorne Brown:
Homeostasis. And I think of it as a pendulum also, Laura is

Laura Erlich:
What was like that

Lorne Brown:
The pendulum is always, if it’s just moving near the center that’s health, it’s when life throws you and the pendulum swings far to one side. If it keeps swinging out far to either side or stays on one side, then you’re in disease imbalance. But if it swings out and then over time, hours, days, a week, it comes back to that back and forth with a small swing, then you’re back and into health. So it’s not like if you got sick and you were sick for 48 hours, that doesn’t make you an ill person. You had an acute illness, can your body recover from it? Because some people get an illness and then they develop chronic fatigue or other issues. So that shows you the body had some imbalances. Sorry to interrupt there, but No, no, I’m talking about That’s

Laura Erlich:
Exactly right.

Lorne Brown:
But the homeostasis you’re talking about because people think, oh, balance, I should feel perfect all the time,

Laura Erlich:
Right?

Lorne Brown:
No,

Laura Erlich:
Homeostasis is all the things, right? Homeostasis is feeling hungry and then eating
Or feeling tired, and then going to sleep and sleeping in a restful manner. It’s having normal body functions. It’s at whatever time of day my body triggers me to have a bowel movement. And if I skip that, that’s not balance. That’s my body holding onto something that is maybe not going to make me feel as great as I did yesterday. So it’s all the little tiny things, but as practitioners, we can at least begin to initiate that conversation by utilizing the microcosmic orbit in treatment and by, I teach my patients frequently microcosmic orbit meditation where they just kind of close their eyes and imagine that flow. And I frequently talk about it in the context of I want you to imagine that conversation that’s happening between your brain and your pituitary and your ovaries, and that your job is to feel that circular energy taking place, that everything is flowing as it should, and all the signals are going to the right places and being interpreted properly, things so that you can ovulate properly, which is another example of homeostasis or so that you can have a less painful or non-painful period. That’s another example of homeostasis. So it’s like all those places where things are stuck, whether it is painful periods or heavy bleeding or infertility or PMDD, whatever it is, something is happening at that point in time that is preventing the system from flowing as it should. That’s where Chinese medicine sinks because we can find those little spots and try to smooth it out.

Lorne Brown:
I’m always in awe because in the West, in the last a hundred, a hundred, 20, 50 years, we have this understanding of how stress can impact the body. Chinese medicine, 2000 to 5,000 years ago, they say they map the body, this terrain we call the body and the vessel that goes between the heart center, our emotional center, and the uterus. And there’s a map for how it goes to that, to the kidney systems, not your western kidneys is so much as kidneys govern reproduction, that it was so obvious in Chinese medicine how emotional dysfunction will impact your receptivity and reproduction fertility. You want to talk a little bit about that? Are you amazed by, I’m still today, 25 years into practice, I still go. It’s just incredible how they understood at that level.

Laura Erlich:
Yes, yes. And also managed to amass this incredible material medica of herbs to help us regulate these things. As well as mapping out the acupuncture meridians, which really do directly correlate to a lot of these things that we’re talking about, ways to specifically manage a stress response or help the body conjugate hormones better, which is another kind of stress response or make digestion run more smoothly, make things actually go down and out, which is again, another type of stress response and how that clear understanding was there, and even the connections between the different organ systems that the heart and the kidney is connected. And what that’s really to me saying is that there’s the connection between the lower jaw and the upper jaw, the lower part of the body and the upper part of the body. The heart and mind have a direct link to the uterus that the Chinese perspective on the uterus is that it’s the lower mansion of blood and the heart is the upper mansion of blood. And so a woman’s emotional state, a mother’s emotional state, will send those emotions or chemicals or however you want to perceive it, right down to the fetus itself. And we know that to be true.
We know that people who are experiencing a lot of stress and trauma in pregnancy are likely to pass on that stress to their child, and that child nervous system will have to be worked on to be regulated because they’re bathing in cortisol throughout their pregnancy. Those things pass through the placenta.

Lorne Brown:
Let’s talk about some of the things that you do to help your patients mediate that stress response. Then you talked about there’s an incredible mature medica. So you use herbal medicine in your practice with your fertility patients?

Laura Erlich:
I do, yeah. Almost all of them. I use herbal medicine.

Lorne Brown:
Same. Let’s go through the list of things. So acupuncture, you’re doing the acupuncture? I have to. I was just thinking, have you ever had where somebody comes in and they’re stressed, the type A, and they’re stressed. We’ve all been there, so me too. I’ve been there and they’re talking really intense, and as they’re talking, you start to put in a few points like the hir Yin, some of those calming points. And as they’re talking, they’re like, they can’t talk anymore. Have you ever had that where you’ve really just right on the table, they’re like, they can’t even get the words out. They’re just like,

Laura Erlich:
Yeah. And my favorite thing is after a few weeks of treatment, I do have people coming in and saying, I do just feel generally more calm where I’m less agitated or I’m less likely to pick that fight or whatever it is. So I do acupuncture. I also work with people who can’t come in and see me, and there’s lots of tools and techniques to kind of replicate activating the channels without acupuncture, whether it’s acupressure, gu, or teaching people to use moxa. So I send my patients home with homework and with my distance patients, I give them lots of homework to do so that they are trying to activate that sense of calm within themselves on a daily basis.

Lorne Brown:
Because

Laura Erlich:
You don’t take medicine once a week. You take it every day for it to be effective. I found it interesting when I went to China to study that people receiving acupuncture go every single day sometimes for six weeks, and that’s just not what we do here in the west. So I view the herbs as a way of carrying the treatment to the next session because they are energetically aligned with whatever treatment I’m using on that individual. But there still has to be stuff so that they do for themselves. So I am a big fan of, again, having worked with the Dr. Domers Harvard Mind Body program with the mini meditations,
Where I will say to somebody, if a stressful thing takes place, you’re going to do a short meditation, whether that’s box breathing is one of my favorites, just in for four, hold for four out for four, hold for four. Or there’s variations of that. You can do it for six. You do infra four out for eight, but 30 to 60 seconds. This is truly a mini meditation. It doesn’t mean you have to sit down and light candles and sit in front of an altar. You are just doing an exercise to try to pull yourself out of whatever that thing is, the car that beeped at you or the nasty message you got from somebody so that there’s an active intent behind starting to identify the stressors as they arise, small as they may be, and then in that moment, doing something to consciously mitigate it.
So whether that’s a little mini meditation or sometimes it’s as simple as taking a Hershey’s kiss and spending a minute unwrapping it and feeling the what’s that stuff tinfoil and pulling out the piece of paper and looking at it and tasting it and going super slowly on the process of consuming something mindfully. That is a way to alter that feeling of fight or flight. We’re sitting down and literally drawing something or coloring for a couple of minutes or writing a few sentences that reframe whatever it is that’s stressing you out, that cognitive behavioral stuff where I worked a lot with my support group folks and do with my patients sometimes. What are those repeat thoughts? Whether it’s, I’m never going to get pregnant or this isn’t going to work for me, or I was never meant to be a mother. And literally rewriting them, reframing them when that thought comes in, I will be a mother in my own time the way it is intended for me, or I know my family will grow.
So when you start to actually consciously change the narrative in your brain, you also start to reduce that allostatic load over time. But that’s why it is not just a come in once a week, I’ll give you some needles and here take these herbs. But rather there’s this lifestyle piece to it where we have to take responsibility for the fact that we do live in a world that is constantly trying to poke us and make us freak out, and that we have to take decisive steps to not let that be our reality, because otherwise there’s so many downstream physical issues that come from letting the stress of life be the thing that

Lorne Brown:
Dominates. Yeah. So you’ve talked about herbal medicine and acupuncture, and often the acupuncture is done more often than once a week in China, however, in the west, people are doing it once or twice a week. And so you’re using herbal medicine as another modality to continue with that support. And I think of this like the meditation, the acupuncture, the herbal, to me, it’s like you have a carriage and your destination is having a healthy baby. And depending on the journey, you could be 20 or you could be 42. That journey, you want to make it there in one piece and as quickly as possible. So if you had one horse at age 20, that may be all you need. That’s the mindfulness. But at 42, you may need multiple horses to make sure you make that journey all the way to the end and as quickly as possible.
So then you add acupuncture, then you add herbal. In my practice, the laser therapy, the mind body stuff, I have a cute story about acupuncture. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this, but back in the day when I was a chartered accountant and using acupuncture for my own health, whenever I would get my acupuncture treatment, I was exhausted, wasted after I couldn’t function and learned later. And what I’ll share is I was functioning in chronic stress, so I had all this energy, but it was from the stress hormones. And when I had acupuncture, it put me into that relaxation, parasympathetic it shut down that sympathetic response. And so I got to feel what I really felt like, which was burnt out, exhausted, right? I didn’t have that nervous coffee energy. I didn’t drink coffee back then, but I had the stress hormone, so I felt energized and acupuncture took me out of it. Do you ever have that experience where your patients

Laura Erlich:
Absolutely. In fact, I have a patient right now who, he comes in for acupuncture. He always leaves feeling great. And then he didn’t come in for a while and I’m asked his wife, Hey, what’s going on? And she said, oh, he thinks acupuncture makes it worse. Acupuncture is pretty, I mean, the word I use is adaptogenic. It doesn’t make things worse, it just shows you what is,

Lorne Brown:
But

Laura Erlich:
He comes out of treatment, then the next day feels completely exhausted and sore. And I’m like, well, that’s because he’s exhausted and his muscles are sore. And that he is spending his life overriding that, allowing his nervous system to be in that state of fight or flight in order to function, in order to move forward. This is somebody who has some autoimmune stuff, some issues going on that are creating chronic disease. And absolutely, I was taught that that is a healing crisis, essentially, that it is your body’s way of showing you, Hey, in order to heal, we need to honor the fact that when your nervous system lays down as weapons, you are zonked and you need to rest and you need to nourish yourself. And the other piece that I would add to that list of all the things, probably most fundamental is nutrition

Lorne Brown:
And

Laura Erlich:
Getting people to eat three meals a day. And I love in Chinese medicine, the spleen represents that. Our capacity to take things in and assimilate them, both in terms of food, but also in terms of life. How are you taking it in and how are you assimilating it? And if we’re not eating properly and we’re not giving our spleen the literal chi that it needs to assimilate nourishment, we’re also going to lose out When it comes to assimilating thoughts, assimilating stress, assimilating, all of the big things that come at us, because we’ve lost our center, we’ve lost our ability to literally digest.

Lorne Brown:
And so let’s talking about things that help you have the resilience that everybody can do, and you cannot ignore nutrition, movement, sleep, hydration. Those are, we’re assuming you’re doing that. And if you’re not, then we want to do that because no herb or acupuncture is going to fix that. No drug as in the drug’s, a bandaid, right? Soon as you stop the medication, your life falls apart. So just reminding people that to have that resilience, you’re having good nutrition. As Laura mentioned, this comes from her. Laura talks about this in her courses all the time. Movement. Some people call it exercise, but you got to move, staying hydrated, getting good sleep, that part’s really important. And then developing a mindful practice. My patients know that I have the practice that I call notice, except choose again, which you were talking about earlier about noticing these emotions and how to digest them so they don’t have a negative impact on you. And then we add herbal medicine, we can add acupuncture, low level laser therapy. There’s lots of things that can be added. And there’s so many meditations out there. And Laura, you mentioned you have the inner orbit that you offer your patient

Laura Erlich:
Microcosmic orbit. Yeah, the

Lorne Brown:
Microcosmic orbit. And there’s just so many apps now that help you elicit the relaxation response. One thing that I wanted to emphasize is it’s not like this once a week thing. Like you said, acupuncture is, acupuncture is a catalyst, it’s going to help. But in between your visits, are you moving? Are you doing your meditative practices, guided meditations? These are the things that are going to take you to that finish line.

Laura Erlich:
Exactly. Exactly. And the finish line is what it is. We don’t exactly know what that’s going to be either. And I think one of the things that gets people stuck, almost like that burning rubber internally where things are just the stress is to some extent self-generated because the focus is in the future. The focus is in what is the outcome of this going to be? Am I going to be able to have a child? How much is it going to cost? What does the future hold for me in this immediate phase? And that in and of itself creates so much stress and tension. So can we find a way to get ourselves back into the moment and get present with what is, and then move towards what we desire with an understanding that life’s going to unfold and how it’s going to unfold. We don’t get the guarantee of the thing that we’re seeking.
And that’s hard for Westerners, right? I mean, we are used to that. We’re used to getting what we want when we say, oh, I’m going to go get this degree, or I’m going to go out and achieve this thing. We’ve even talked to be go-getters and go get it. And then fertility challenges come along and it’s like smacking into a brick wall because suddenly life is not, it’s not as easy as I want it. I will work hard for it, therefore it will happen as I desire it to. So we have to find a way to get okay with the uncertainty. The uncertainty that is often the major generator of the stress.

Lorne Brown:
So that’s developing the tools and the support system because like you said, you can’t guarantee what’s going to happen, whether you’re going to have the child or not. And you’re not saying that you’re resigned to it, like you’re not going to stop trying or working towards it. It’s just whether you’re kicking and screaming on the journey or whether you’re at peace in an unhappy situation. And that quote, peace in an unhappy situation comes from our local conscious of teacher here in Vancouver, Eckhart, who wrote New Earth in the power of now that when you’re present, you can be at peace in an unhappy situation. And that keeps you open out of the reptilian brain, whole brain, so you can change or improve the situations. And so this journey is a journey. It is a brick wall for so many, it is so difficult that it motivates you to develop these tools to support systems and find people like Laura because it’s really hard to do this on your own.

Laura Erlich:
And then the gift is what you give your child afterwards. I mean, to me, that’s just always the fundamental thing too, is that when you get to that place of conscious acceptance and peace in a difficult situation, then when the time comes that you do start your family, you get to pass all those tools on right away, right away to this newborn infant and help them come into the world with a regulated nervous system. I worked really hard to give that to my child who’s now a senior in high school, and I see it playing out, and I’m so happy that I had those tools early on in my own mothering. And so that is my overriding wish for everyone, that they are not only able to achieve their family goals, but that they’re able to imbue their children with the fact that, with the reality in which they understand that it doesn’t have to be this way. Life doesn’t have to be hair on fire all the time.

Lorne Brown:
Yeah.
Thank you for this. So to find Laura and she does coaching and she has her practice in la, it’s mother nurture la.com, and we’ll put that in the show notes for my colleagues that want to learn more about her Herbal acupuncture supplement mindfulness approach to both fertility. She has her mentorship and those modules are also available on healthy seminars. And she also has the conscious pregnancy birth courses as well for those that are interested to use acupuncture during the fertility journey and throughout pregnancy and birth. And again, her website is Mother Nurtures Wellness and it’s mother nurture la.com to find Laura. Laura, thanks so much for joining me today on the Conscious Fertility Podcast.

Laura Erlich:
Thank you for having me.

Lorne Brown:
Alright, so just a quick wrap up here for my colleagues, go to healthyseminars.com if you want to do a deep dive with Laura Erlich, for those in the public checkout Laura’s website. And then if you’re interested in digesting, metabolizing, a form of alchemy of these fear, shame, guilt, worried, lack, just the suffering that we experience, I invite you to check out on the acubalance.ca website, our blogs under the mood section, and I do have some blogs on Conscious Work and my practice The notice, except Choose Again. And also we talked about nutrition. There is a free download of the Acubalance Fertility Diet, which includes 21 days of recipes. And these recipes taste good. Thank you.

Speaker 3:
If you’re looking for support to grow your family contact Acubalance Wellness Center at Acubalance, they help you reach your peak fertility potential through their integrative approach using low level laser therapy, fertility, acupuncture, and naturopathic medicine. Download the Acubalance Fertility Diet and Dr. Brown’s video for mastering manifestation and clearing subconscious blocks. Go to acubalance ca. That’s acubalance.ca.

Lorne Brown:
Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of Conscious Fertility, the show that helps you receive life on purpose. Please take a moment to subscribe to the show and join the community of women and men on their path to peak fertility and choosing to live consciously on purpose. I would love to continue this conversation with you, so please direct message me on Instagram at Lorne Brown official. That’s Instagram, Lorne Brown official, or you can visit my websites, Lornebrown.com and Acubalance.ca. Until the next episode, stay curious and for a few moments, bring your awareness to your heart center and breathe.