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 a yoga for fertility teacher and also author Lynn Jensen, who’s really close to us. I’m here in Vancouver, bc. She’s also in the Pacific Northwest. She’s just over the border in Seattle. Little background about Lynn. She founded her Seattle based Yoga for Fertility program back in 2002, and she has helped over thousands of women and couples become parents. She’s a registered yoga and prenatal yoga teacher. She’s a yoga therapist and holds her teacher certification, energy medicine, yoga, as well as an MBA from the University of Washington in Seattle. Now we do share some similarities. Many of you know I used to be a CPA, went into Chinese medicine and energy medicine, and Lynn also kind of had a different life before she got into yoga. So as I mentioned, she has co-authored the Yoga and Fertility: A Journey to Health and Healing book.

That’s the first book that I’m aware of devoted to the topic of yoga and fertility. She currently teaches weekly yoga for fertility classes and energy yoga classes and studio and online, which leads yoga for fertility teacher training programs and offers one-on-one fertility coaching off camera. Lynn and I were actually talking maybe since it’s only a two hour drive that we’re talking about organizing a yoga for fertility, and I suggest hot flashes or perimenopause, menopause because the yoga poses will help both on a hormonal balance, whether you’re trying to grow your family or experiencing menopausal or premenopausal symptoms here in Vancouver. So stay tuned. We may get to be able to organize that for our community. She has for over a decade. She’s had the opportunity to merge her software. As I mentioned, she had a past life, her software and yoga careers, while teaching yoga for women classes at Microsoft headquarters. She’s also applied her expertise in yoga for hormonal health, hence why I want to talk about perimenopause as well while designing the yoga program for a National Institute of Health study on yoga and hot flashes. Lynn, welcome to the Conscious Fertility Podcast.

Lynn Jensen 

Thanks a lot. Thanks for that long intro and it’s great. Again, it’s good to meet you sort of in person here because I’ve known about you up there practicing over the border for a long time.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah. Well, it’s good to know Canadian American, so we’re not too far away. And again, we’ve set the intention. So let’s see if we can manifest that and have you do something here in Vancouver. Now I think of you as one of the pioneers of teaching yoga for fertility because you’ve been doing this since back in 2002. I’m curious, your own personal journey. I know a little bit about you. I’d love to hear about your fertility journey and your old career and just kind of how this all came together. So today you’re known as one of the experts for yoga, for fertility. Can you share a little bit about that?

Lynn Jensen 

Yeah, sure. So you alluded to my previous career pre yoga, and I really started out this whole fertility journey probably very similar to a lot of my students being here in Seattle. I have a lot of students who work in the tech industry, pretty high powered jobs. So I started to try to conceive in the midst of that and I was in a job where that required international travel at least 50% of the time. So I was in and out of the country, different time zones, a constantly nonstop fun job, really exciting job, super stressful job. So in hindsight, of course, that was probably not a terrifically good time to try to conceive, and in fact, it didn’t work very well. Eventually, my other fertility doctor said, well, you two need to be in the same country. This is not going to work out very well. But anyway, after several years of trying, we eventually ended up doing all the things. So

Lorne Brown 

What were some of the things, because you had, I mean your story’s out there, so you had endometriosis I think as part of your

Lynn Jensen 

That was the diagnosis that I really got. Initially it was unexplained. Unexplained. And then as we tried more things, that’s eventually the diagnosis I got. But we did do the IUI courses. We did the IVF courses. I did the surgery for endometriosis eventually. And then

Lorne Brown 

How many IVF cycles did you do Lynn?

Lynn Jensen 

Yeah, my husband and I had an agreement that we would do three because we saw what would happen with some people as they would just keep going and going. So we did the three. But that was quite an interesting thing too. That was kind of at the end of this, and really this whole journey that I’m talking about was six or seven years altogether, a long time. But of course since I was traveling in the meantime, we weren’t able to do this in a very efficient manner, let’s say. Well, just to end the fertility story, we did the three IVF cycles, but after the first IVF cycle failed, we just got the news that it failed. I had this very strong vision of an Asian featured baby. Well, this is probably not going to come out of an IVS cycle because neither my husband and I were Asian, unless they get something mixed up in the lab.

So maybe this is coming from somewhere else. It was such a strong vision that I had a strong feeling that these other IVF cycles were not going to work, but we had made this agreement ahead of time, and so we went ahead and did the other two cycles pretty much back to back and they didn’t work. And then really about maybe two weeks after we got the final no, on that last IVF cycle, we got a call from a friend of ours who is an OBGYN in another state saying, I have these birth parents who are interested in talking to you. Are you at that stage? And we said, yes, we are. He said, well, but I’m thinking to myself, well, this is a small rural town in this other state and it’s not really matching up. I had been thinking maybe we were going to go to international adoption at this point because of my Asian featured baby. And then he says to me on the phone, well, I should probably tell you that the birth father is

Lorne Brown 

Korean. Wow.

Lynn Jensen 

It’s right. So it was pretty amazing and pretty miraculous because we literally had the baby within about three months after switching from that whole long program we were on. And it just was a reminder to me that you really need to be open when you’re wanting to become a parent, because it was clear when we finally got to that path that that was the path, right? Because it happened easily, it happened quickly, it happened just like I had the vision of it happening.

Lorne Brown 

It’s true. When we’re attached to form one outcome, we often say it puts resistance into the field. It slows things down. When the resistance is low, there’s flow and receptivity. And so when we’re going through this journey, often a kind of fun mantra is this or better like this, IVF or Better will work. And in your case, it’s just interesting when you can’t explain this. So not the materialistic linear Newtonian world where you have a strong vision that this is how this baby’s going to come to you, and then all the things just line up, not how you would ever expected, but lined up. And I know people that go through donor cycles to get their baby go through adoption and at the end their parents and they love their babies,

Lynn Jensen 

And you get exactly the right baby, you get exactly however it comes to you. So yeah, so it’s just a reminder. And I like to remind my students of that too, that the less specific details you put around it, it’s fine to put your intention out. I want to be a thoughtful parent, but if you put out your intention, I only want to have a biological child, and really I’d like to have a boy first and I’d like to have it in the summer. I have time off and all these things as you’re saying, it’s not helping because the universe might have a different plan and your details are getting in the way of it.

Lorne Brown 

And I’m curious, we’ll get to it. I don’t want to get there yet, but I want to get to how yoga helps with fertility, but I’m curious, how did you go from marketing and sales and being in that tech world to yoga? Did you yoga during your IVF and would you do it differently now? So many styles of yoga. So I’d love to hear a little bit about how you found yoga, and again, based on the different styles that are out there, would you have done it differently because of what you know now?

Lynn Jensen 

Yes. I had been already doing yoga, studying yoga, and for, I don’t know, probably 10 years maybe at the time that I was trying to conceive, or at least all during that time, I was doing a yoga practice. And since I was traveling all the time, I was doing yoga in hotel rooms and airports. And it really helped me with that high stress job for sure. But then also when I started trying to conceive and really when I was going through the IVF cycles, what I noticed was I had another couple of friends who were going through the similar thing at that time, and their emotional rollercoaster was like this, and mine was more like this, and I know that it was the yoga practice that helped with that. So kind of when we finished with the fertility journey, I just started to think that despite the fact that I didn’t end up conceiving, I know that yoga was helpful in getting through that process.

And I started to think that perhaps the yoga that I was doing was not exactly appropriate from a fertility standpoint. It was pretty strenuous yoga practice that I was doing. So then I started to think about whether there should be some kind of yoga that’s really tailored for people who were trying to conceive and what would that look like, what would be included in that? And so I just started to do a lot of research about that, knowing the effects of yoga as I did, and then what do we need to work on from a fertility standpoint? And initially I was looking at the endocrine system saying, okay, well yoga just really does support the endocrine system because it’s designed to support the chakra system. And those two pretty much line up side to side, if you look at the chakras in the endocrine system, there’s at least one or two endocrine glands in each chakra.

So I started to just research that and initially I thought, well, there’s probably one or two glands in the endocrine system we should focus on, maybe the ovaries obviously and the thyroid or something. But the more I researched, the more I realized, no, it’s really everything, all of the endocrine system is important in this. So I did a fair amount of research. There wasn’t much written at all on yoga for fertility at the time, and I just ended up putting together all that knowledge about yoga that I had come in with. I’d already been teaching yoga for about five years before I started the Yoga for Fertility program and putting together a program that really was more specifically tailored for what the goals of fertility are rather than a lot of the kinds of yoga that are out there that are more like yoga aerobics or getting fit yoga, which aren’t necessarily well tailored for fertility support.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah, because so much of it, as you call it, this aerobic yoga where tight abs get really fit is also great for your physicality and great mental emotional. You did that kind and you shared how it did help with your journey. Right? You can IVF clinics often say they can look in their waiting room and they often tell me, they can tell which ones are getting acupuncture, they’re a little bit more chilled, calm, and I think yoga as well, whoever’s engaging the parasympathetic response, the moats is going to benefit when you get into what we call yin yoga. So this different style of yoga, we want to open up the pelvis, we want blood flow. We don’t want abs of steel necessarily. So can you talk a little bit about how yoga can help with fertility? You shared about just the endocrine system and how it’s not just the thyroid and the ovaries, the adrenals, it’s holistic, the body’s constantly communicating with all the cells, with all the glands, all the organs.

It’s not like in the west we often think of ourselves as machines, these little parts, because our specialties in the west are all separate, but from yoga, from Chinese medicine, from Ayervetic, there’s this deep understanding that everything is connected. We know this now, the microbiome, if you’ve got microbiomes off, it can lead to skin issues, gut issues, obviously mental, emotional issues, fertility issues. So I would love to hear a little bit about how yoga can help with fertility and feel free to bring in any, you mentioned there weren’t a lot of papers back then, but what’s the data sharing? What kind of evidence is coming out now with yoga to support fertility?

Lynn Jensen 

Yeah, sure. So I think yoga really helps with fertility on a lot of different levels. So there’s the physical level, what it’s doing to the body, the endocrine system and all of that. And then the mental level, what it’s doing here, because there’s a lot fertility wise going on here. And emotionally also I talked about the roller coaster, helping to flatten that out. And then also spiritually, because yoga is at its core, it’s a spiritual practice too. So from a physical standpoint, we’re doing the things that you might expect, like stimulating the reproductive organs, increasing blood flow to the pelvic area. We also work with opening the heart center because the heart is important, although it’s not as intuitive to think about that, but it’s important from a fertility standpoint. We talked about hormones. So yoga just works on the endocrine system naturally and then reduces the stress hormone level in the bloodstream and freeing up those building blocks that could be making reproductive hormones, but instead they’re busy making cortisol all the time.

So bringing that stress level down is super important. And then from a mental standpoint, yoga, at least the way we do yoga in my yoga for fertility classes, calms the mind and it reduces anxiety. There’s been studies showing that yoga increases the levels of gaba, which is a neurotransmitter that helps with calming the mind and preventing anxiety mentally. I also think we do a lot of work with counteracting negative thinking because I see that at least in my student population, there’s a lot of negative thinking going on. This is never going to happen, this is never going to work. So working with that, also working on a two way yoga helps with this where we create a two way communication channel between the mind and the body. I think a lot of the time the communication is only one way. It’s the mind telling the body, you’re going to do this, and then if the body protests, it’s just shut down.

So you can think about when you’re sitting at your computer working and your body’s going and sitting here for three or four hours, my neck is, but your mind says, well, we got to finish this project, so just shut up and keep sitting there. But yoga helps to get that two-way communication going. So those messages from the body can come back to the mind and then maybe the mind will agree to do something, mouth them, but get up from your computer or walk around for a little bit or something like that. But this is really important in infertility because your body has a lot of messages. Your body really knows it has the wisdom of what’s going on and what’s going wrong. But if the mind is busy, busy, busy, those messages are never going to get through.

Lorne Brown 

So you talked about some of the benefits of just relaxing, engaging that parasympathetic nervous system. When you’re in that alarm, what we call a fight or flight, we say resources are diverted from your reproductive system, and when you engage the parasympathetic, you free up the resources for healing, creativity, reproduction, get that blood flow back, and those stress hormones over time lead to chronic systemic inflammation, which they often call inflammaging, right? This chronic systemic inflammation, inflammaging, which leads to accelerated biological aging, which is what we don’t want fertility, we want to be as biologically young as possible. So this is where yoga is so good, bringing blood flow, massaging in quotes, those endocrines and system and the organs and relaxing the body going into that parasympathetic, which is the rest and digest. And I’ve also heard it lin called the feed and breed nervous system. I love that. Right.

Lynn Jensen 

Nice. I haven’t heard that. And that’s perfect for what we’re doing. Yeah,

Lorne Brown 

So you started in 2002. It’s funny, that’s the same year I started going on site for IVF acupuncture in Vancouver. We started it back in 2002 where the originators, you’re the one of the early adopters of yoga for fertility. Now it’s so many years later, more than two decades later. What evidence have you looked at and seen that shows positive support using yoga, infertility? And then we’re going to get into different styles during different phases of the cycle and different IVF cycles. I know some poses probably aren’t beneficial if you’re on an IVF stimulation cycle. But first can you just share, is there any data for this yet? And I want to say to our audience, that doesn’t mean it works or doesn’t work things work data just confirms that it works. It doesn’t mean all of a sudden it starts working. They’ve been doing yoga well before science Western science ever came to fruition, right? Yoga is a very old practice. So the benefits from yoga have been since the beginning of time. Data just confirms what the traditional or the sages of old had said. So that’s what I’m looking for. This. I just want to say one more time. People think, oh, if there’s research, if there’s no research, it doesn’t work. No. If there’s no research, it just means we haven’t confirmed. Whether it does or does not mean

Lynn Jensen 

It means there’s no research is what it means

Lorne Brown 

Theres no research, but we like in this day and age, it helps us with the credibility factor, and we like to know what the data say. So do you have any data on using yoga for fertility?

Lynn Jensen 

Well, really I think that the best study that was done was done about 20 years ago by Dr. Alice Domar, who I know you’ve talked to on this show.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah, I want to give her a shout out then. Let people know that Alice Domer has a, does stress cause infertility or does infertility cause stress? She has a great podcast on the Conscious Fertility podcast. So do search her out, but go ahead. Yeah, so she did a study years back. I remember this study.

Lynn Jensen 

Yeah, she did a study that was published in the journal Fertility and Sterility, and it was published I think in the two thousands. So yeah, it’s been a while ago, but I think it’s the best study that has been done on this topic of really all inclusive study. She looked at 184 women who had been trying to get pregnant for one to two years. These were women who were out of fertility clinics, so they were getting fertility treatments, and what she did was separate them into three groups. So she had one group that was the control group that was just going through the regular clinic process, but doing their treatment cycles. She had a support group. So they met once a week to talk about what was going on, and then she had a third group that was in the MINDBODY program. So they were doing yoga, they were doing meditation, they were learning mindfulness, MINDBODY kind of things.

Lorne Brown 

So I want to recap that. So you had a control group, so this is just people going through fertility treatments. Then you had a support group where people came and got to support each other’s community, and then the other one had a little bit more involvement where they were doing yoga and mind body, what I call conscious work, basically doing mind body techniques and doing yoga. So that’s the three different groups and what were the results.

Lynn Jensen 

And so the results of that worked, and I think her goal was to get pregnant within a year or something like that. That was, so the control group, 20% got pregnant within a year. The support group, 54% got pregnant within a year. So that’s a huge leap right there just by talking about it, right?

Lorne Brown 

Yeah. Control group to the support group, 20% for just doing nothing. And data shows that on average 20% of the people within a year will get pregnant. Then 54% who came together was, I think it was at least once a week that they did this

Lynn Jensen

Once a week they sat and met and just talked,

Lorne Brown

And then the mind

Lynn Jensen 

Just that support

Lorne Brown 

And then the mind body group that included yoga

Lynn Jensen 

And then the mind body group, 55% got pregnant within

Lorne Brown 

oh, so pretty much similar to the support group,

Lynn Jensen 

Similar to the support group, except that there was another data point that she looked at, which was how many of each of those groups conceived naturally. So in the control group, 20% conceived naturally, who conceived

Lorne Brown 

Of that group? 20% of them conceived naturally versus going into a medicated cycle

Lynn Jensen 

Of the total who did conceive 20%

Lorne Brown 

And then of the support group that got pregnant

Lynn Jensen 

Of the support group, 11% conceived naturally

Lorne Brown 

11% of the support group conceived naturally.

Lynn Jensen 

So less than that, the control group, actually, I don’t know how statistically significant that is, but the mind body group, 42% can see naturally.

Lorne Brown 

And so a much larger group when they added the mind body, and to me, that’s where you add a little bit more intention to it as well, right?

Lynn Jensen 

Well, and also you’re involving the body in it. The support group.

Lorne Brown 

Somatic

Lynn Jensen 

It was helpful, but it wasn’t including the body in the process.

Lorne Brown 

Can’t remember the name, but the book, the body keeps the score. That’s where talk therapy or support groups, there’s some benefit there. But when you get into yoga, when you get into what I call conscious work acupuncture, you’re now getting the body to be able to release this old trauma, these old programs, the stuff that’s stuck in the tissues. And that’s why I would suspect that the group that does the somatic work, the body work like yoga and the MINDBODY stuff would see some benefit that way.

Lynn Jensen

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And just the learning to, I mean the support groups talking about it, but the mind body groups learning to shift those mental structures that are going on. Like I mentioned earlier, a lot of people get into this negative thinking mode and that is not helpful. The body’s hearing that and understanding that if the mind is thinking, we’re never, it’s never going to work. I’m never going to get pregnant, the body’s hearing that. So we need to shift that and we need to have the mind body working together on this. Yeah.

Lorne Brown 

You’re speaking my language, Lynn. The whole conscious work in my practice is to change those subconscious programs. Getting together and falling into your wounds, becoming victims and having a negative group probably isn’t as beneficial, but if it’s really supportive and the community is healing, right? Feeling heard, feeling seen. So it depends how the support groups are run and Alice Dormer knows how to run a support group, but when you bring in the mind body stuff, I think there’s another level of healing that’s happening. You’re getting support, but there’s a whole other level that you’re starting to change that it’s hard to measure, but you saw the change in that data from Alice do Mar’s work.

Lynn Jensen 

So I think that’s really powerful information. And to me, it’s surprising if somebody had done a study like that and showed that doing this one thing or giving this one drug would boost the success rates for this fertility clinics program from 20% to 55%, wouldn’t you think that all the fertility clinics would jump on that and be, wow, we got to do this, right? We want to get our statistics up and all that. But that doesn’t seem to have happened. But I do want to say that we talked about, I mean those two groups, the support group and the MINDBODY group, my thinking is for my yoga for fertility classes, why not bring in that support piece to the yoga classes that I’m doing? So that’s a big part actually of the yoga for fertility classes. We do check in at the beginning of every class so everyone in the class knows what’s going on with other folks in the class. We have a yoga buddy program where I match them up with somebody in the class to check in with them during the week. So just having that community support within the yoga class is really super important for a lot of people. Add those two things together

Lorne Brown 

Now. We ask people on our Instagram some questions they want to hear from you. And so some of the common questions we get in our clinic, and then people asking in advance, they want to know, just like with exercise during an IVF cycle, they say certain exercises are careful with your exercise. I’m curious about yoga, let’s start with IVF. You have the stimulation phase where they’re taking injections to grow multiple follicles, and then we have post retrieval, and then we have a transfer date, which could be fresh or frozen. And we have that two week wait, can you break that down and just tell us, do you change your style of yoga based on the IVF cycle?

Lynn Jensen 

The short answer is yes. Yes, I do. First of all, my classes are small. I mean, I count my classes at 16 with about as many people as I can help track because I might have people in all different parts of different kinds of cycles. So it’s pretty common to have people in IBM cycles in my classes. If someone’s in that STEM phase after about day five or six, then we want to really be careful about what we’re doing because we don’t want to put torque on the ovaries, we don’t want to compress the ovaries. We just want to be very, very careful.

Lorne Brown 

Can we unpack that a little bit just for in general? So your ovaries get overweighted because they usually have a follicle in it that gets released. A dominant follicle, maybe two, but usually it’s one and an IVF cycle, there’s multiple follicles. So these ovaries are enlarged, they’re much heavier, and certain movements twisting can cause the ligaments to kind of get wrapped around. And you can strangle the ovary. You can seriously hurt or injure yourself, which is why they don’t want a lot of subtle movements or twisting. So that’s the idea behind the why,

Lynn Jensen 

And this is why if you ask your fertility doctor, is it okay if I do yoga? They’re probably going to say no, because most yoga classes, you would not want to go to them during your stem cycle. Twisting is kind of a thing we do in yoga. So if someone’s in their STEM cycle, then I’m really monitoring carefully what they’re doing and they’re pretty limited, but there are a lot of things they can do and do gently. My classes are gentle in any way, but we can keep an eye on that. And then also post retrieval, same thing because it takes up to a week usually for the overs to get back to their regular normal size,

Lorne Brown 

Even longer, I believe. Even longer. So even a week maybe too soon for some,

Lynn Jensen 

Yeah. So because in the class with folks, I can ask them how they are feeling? Are they still feeling discomfort or not? But basically those people in post retrieval are on the same program as someone on a STEM cycle. We don’t keep those modifications. And then post transfer, I usually say fertility clinics are different. What they say post transfer, some fertility clinics, there are fertility clinics that still say bedrest for a couple of days.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah, not here. Yeah. So bedrest currently at the time of this recording bedrest is not recommended. Bedrest has been shown to actually negatively impact the success rate. And when I think about it, I always like to try and think of it through my head. Most of the transfers now are frozen in BC anyhow. Same thing for you guys in Seattle at Laura’s clinic. Yeah. So you’re usually full of hormones like estrogen, right? The ashtrays, which is kind of like a clotting hormone. So we do want some circulation. So if you’re fully bedrest, that’s not so good either.

Lynn Jensen 

I agree with that. And I have had students go to clinics where they told them bedrest, and I said, okay, bedrest with legs up the wall and your bed, then we need to keep some circulation.

Lorne Brown 

And again, at this time of recording, we may find new studies, stuff that changes, but at this time, this is the thinking behind why they want you to move, not do bedrest. And there is some small study or studies on that. So I always tell my listeners, listen to your clinic, and I don’t know when people are listening to us right now, but there could be new data. So definitely check what your clinic says, but so what are you like for a yoga pose then? If somebody’s in that two week wait, what are you recommending for people after they’ve had a transfer?

Lynn Jensen 

Well, usually I just say the first two to three days post transfer, you’re doing pretty much just gentle things, relaxation poses, legs up the wall, yes. So to keep the circulation going, breathing practice. And then after those two or three days where we’re just doing a little more calm practice, then they can go back to what in my class is called kind of second half poses. So the second half of the cycle because, and that’s, I mean, it’s a quite gentle practice because we have to assume that anyone who’s in my class could be in early pregnancy in the post ovulation part of their cycle. Well, there are some poses that I really like just in general for the fertility support cobbler pose where you’re sitting with your soles in your feet together or laying on your back with the soles of their feet together, the knees are opening.

That’s a really good one for relaxing the whole pelvic area. So it’s great also for cramping, pelvic discomfort if you’re on your back, well, either way you could have support underneath your knees, but especially if you’re on your back doing that for any length of time, have some support under the thighs and the knees. So that’s one of my favorites. I already mentioned legs up the wall. That’s kind of my take to a desert island yoga pose. So she can only have one, and you’re trying to get pregnant legs up the wall. And you could do that anytime during the cycle except on your periods. Not such a great time to do it. But any other time during your cycle, that’s a really powerful pose. When we get into talking about perimenopause, I’ll tell you a little story about that, but it’s a very powerful pose, bringing a lot of nourishment and blood flow and energy to the pelvic area. And I love cat count, which is the one on hands and knees where you’re doing around the spine and wide opening. And that also opens the pelvic area and opens the heart area. So those are two areas that we do focus on a lot.

Lorne Brown

And I’ll remind our listeners that Lynn does this online as well. You can go in person in Seattle, but she also does it online. So in the show notes, we’ll have your website, but you want to just do a shout out so they hear it now as well.

Lynn Jensen 

Sure, yeah. So I offer weekly classes. My website is yogaforfertility.net.

Lorne Brown 

Hey, I’m hoping to bring Lynn to Vancouver for a nice class and people can be in all stages and we’ll work with you guys. I’ll bring my really cool sound tables and other toys I have as well for people to experience a full on

Lynn Jensen 

Autonomic. It’s a play shop, not a workshop, it’s a play shop.

Lorne Brown 

It’s going to be a play shop, a wellbeing play shop. But I wanted to ask you a few more things, and we’re going to talk about perimenopause and menopause and people sometimes, wait, this is fertility. We’re trying to grow our family. I want to share from my perspective, and I’m curious Linda if you’re aligned with this, but from the practitioner’s perspective, not the patients, but from my perspective, when I’m practicing Chinese medicine and MINDBODY work, we’re looking to help you reach your peak fertility potential. And part of that is good blood flow, balanced hormones, good endocrine system functioning. And a lot of the women I see are in their early forties, and they may have some irregular cycles happening. They may notice their FSH is elevated, they may have hot sweats, hot flashes, night sweats, so they’re perimenopause 43, you’re perimenopause. And the difference between the women I see that are perimenopause, menopause and my people trying to grow my family is we treat them very similar.

The only difference from their patient’s perspective is they want a baby at the end of my treatments where the other ones just want to have no more symptoms. We’re pretty good at getting both groups to be symptom free. As you know, the elusive baby, that’s a little bit harder, but we feel pretty good at balancing hormones. Is that what you find with yoga as well? You did do a study where you looked at yoga for hot flashes, but I’m curious when people are coming for menopause or premenopausal symptoms for yoga, it’s not like it’s a whole new yoga style from what you do for yoga, for fertility, I’m imagining,

Lynn Jensen 

Right? Yeah, absolutely. So because we’re working on the endocrine system, doing the poses that help to balance the endocrine system, we’re definitely still doing those if we’re working with perimenopause legs, up the wall is another great pose. And I mentioned I was going to tell a little story about that. So when we were doing this study, it was a professor at the University of Washington that started this study and she asked me to design the yoga program for it, but she wanted to measure the effect. She was also a yoga teacher, certified yoga teacher. She wanted to measure the effect of yoga on hot flashes and could you get the hot flashes to diminish by doing a particular yoga practice. So she recruited amazingly. So this was quite a few, I mean a number of years ago, she was able to recruit a lot of women who had not done yoga ever before.

So it was Fran Fresh coming into this practice and we did a 10 week program with them. And of course they were supposed to do it at home multiple times a week, and some of them did and some of them did. What she did was just to tell them about the study, she actually wired them up to objectively measure their hot flash intensity and frequency and everything at the beginning of the study. And she did that again at the end of the study. And then she also did a subjective questionnaire where she asked them about their hot flashes and how disturbing they were to them. Anyway, during the study, at one point during the study, this woman came to me probably five weeks into the study and she said, well, I’ve never done any of the practice at home. I know I’m supposed to be, but this past week I decided I was at least going to do legs up the wall every day. She said, and so I did legs up the wall every day and she said at the end of that final day, she said, I started my period and I haven’t had a period in a year and I’m not very happy about it.

And I said, well, you want your period or you want hot flashes,

Lorne Brown 

You rejuvenated her ovaries. And people have heard that story, but I use the photobiomodulation low level laser therapy. And in the nineties, so this is a way back, Dr. Oshiro, a medical doctor out of Japan, long story short. He was treating women with back pain who was in menopause, and her cycle came back and she too wasn’t happy. And after it happened again, they ended up doing a study like, oh, we must be bringing more blood flow to the ovaries and somehow rejuvenating them. And they did do a study showing that low level laser therapy for BIM modulation, their protocol increased pregnancy rates. So same thing, this woman that didn’t have hot flashes, but her period came back. But it’s because you’ve kind of replenished the postnatal jing or the Jing, the essence, which is necessary for fertility. And because of that, she started menstruating again.

Lynn Jensen 

Right? So that’s an instance of that same pose that I would take to a desert island or fertility,

Lorne Brown 

The legs up pose.

Lynn Jensen 

Yeah, also really powerful and effective then.

Lorne Brown 

So it helps with, again, that hormonal balance. And if you’re having perimenopause or menopausal symptoms, yoga is something to look into. And if you’re looking to smooth out that rollercoaster ride, you have personal experience. You did multiple IUIs, you did three IVF cycles, you went on the Lupron, which is common, which puts you in hot flashes and which brings you to yoga. And then you’ve evolved and now you have yoga for fertility because as you said, not all yoga is the same. And there’s certain styles that are more beneficial for perimenopause, for fertility.

Lynn Jensen 

Well, really it’s key, as you said earlier, to activate the parasympathetic nervous system. And definitely not all yoga practices do that. I had a private student a couple years ago who had been a yoga teacher for five years. She was in Tennessee back there anyway, and after working with me and doing the practice that I gave her, she was very disciplined about doing it. She came back and she said, I’ve been teaching yoga for five years and I’ve never done a yoga practice that activated my parasympathetic nervous system before. She said, this is just a completely different change, and I’m like a different person. She went on and on about the benefits for her. But so it’s very true that yoga doesn’t necessarily do that. A lot of the practices that are out there, as I said, they’re more yoga aerobic kind of things, but for us from a fertility standpoint, and I would also say from this perimenopausal standpoint, because stress is one of the things that we found in that study makes your hot flashes worse. So that aspect of yoga that helps us get into the parasympathetic nervous system that feeds and breeds, as she said, mode is something that really helps with both of these areas.

Lorne Brown

And if someone is considering trying yoga to support their fertility, what would you suggest is a good place to start?

Lynn Jensen 

Well, I think it’s important to find somebody who, I find a teacher who can teach and has experience teaching yoga for fertility specifically because of what I just mentioned, all yoga is not going to help in the same way. And yoga for fertility is not part of regular yoga teacher training, not even in the prenatal teacher training in most cases. So if you go to a yoga class and say, I’m trying to get pregnant, can you advise me? They’re not going to be able to do that unless they have specific training in yoga for fertility. And I’ve been running teacher training programs since 2014, so there are teachers across the US who’ve been trained and outside the US too, who’ve been trained in my Yoga for fertility program. And as Lorne mentioned, my classes are online now and other teacher’s classes are online. So even if you can’t find yoga for a fertility teacher teaching live classes in your area, you should be able to find someone teaching online in a time zone that you can do hopefully. My classes are also offered on demand, so if you aren’t able to join the scheduled classes, you can just get the recordings of the classes and do ’em when it’s convenient for you.

Lorne Brown 

You can find Lynn at yogaforfertility.net to find these online courses, in-person courses and on-demand courses. And I will put out to our listeners, if you follow me on Instagram, there’s the Lorne Brown official or the Conscious Fertility or even the Acubalance. I got a few resources that I am involved in as you can see, and you want to see Lynn do some yoga here. You want to experience it here in Vancouver, let me know because we’ll start taking names and then if there’s an interest, we’ll organize a class for you guys, and I’ll bring my sound tables and my neuro visors because Lynn, you’re talking about that parasympathetic, the rest and digest breed and feed. I got some cool toys that I like to use with my acupuncture laser and the mind body work I do. So I like a little bit of technology to support brain engagement, getting us into alpha theta, setting that parasympathetic, and I want you to come and experience it anyhow, so anytime you come into Vancouver, you let me know. I’ll put my little chi machine, I have on the table the neuroVIZR. I’ll give you a blist out moment.

Lynn Jensen

This all sounds super fun

Lorne Brown 

and if we can organize a yoga class. So that’s the invitation to the listeners. Let me know through my Instagram, either Acubalance, Lorne Brown official or Conscious Fertility Podcast, Instagram. If we have some interest, then I will organize. I have a great space and I’ll make sure we have a space, Lynn, where you can do at least 16. I think the space will probably hold a little bit more for that, but 16 to 20 people that will come and get to experience your yoga, and also they’ll have the opportunity to experience some of the cool little toys I’ll bring with them as well. Maybe we’ll have you even bring some needles so they can really have a blist out day with us. Sounds good.

Lynn Jensen 

Sounds really fun. I should also mention that another way to approach this is to buy my book, because there are routines in the book. It tells you what is each pose doing to help with your fertility, and there’s routines for different parts of the cycle in there, so that’s another way to,

Lorne Brown 

Can they find that to buy your book on the website, or is that just through the regular online Amazons and things?

Lynn Jensen 

It’s on my website, but it’s also on Amazon. Yeah, Yoga and Fertility: A Journey to Health and Healing. I co-authored it with Jill Petigara, who is a teacher in Atlanta

Lorne Brown 

I collect books signed by authors. So when we meet, because we’re going to meet, because I go to Seattle once in a while, so I’m going to look you up and I’ll bring a copy of your book for you to sign, or if we get you to come into Vancouver, even come in just to have a bliss out, I want you to experience this. I think you’re going to love it, but listeners, let us know if you want us to organize something, we’ll kind of create a yoga workshop where you can have a few other wellbeing treatments where we can bring in the acupuncture if you want, we can bring in the sound tables and the neuro visor, but the focus will be on yoga fertility because we’re bringing Lynn over to Canada here at Vancouver. So that will be the focus with a few extra little things for people to play with.

Lynn Jensen 

Sounds great. That’s a great invitation.

Lorne Brown 

Lynn, thank you so much for your time today, everybody. Thank you for joining us on the Conscious Fertility Podcast. One more time. Do check out Lynn’s website, yogaforfertility.net. We’re her, you can find her book, you can find her online classes and on-demand classes as well. Thanks, Lynn. I appreciate your time today.

Lynn Jensen 

Lorne, thanks for having me. Hope to see you in Vancouver before too long.

Lorne Brown 

Yes.

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, 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, Lorne brown.com and accu balance.ca. Until the next episode, stay curious and for a few moments, bring your awareness to your heart center and breathe.