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.

I’m excited today to have Dr. Natalie Masson on the Conscious Fertility Podcast, and this is one of those episodes. As you guys know, I often say that a lot of them are just on consciousness where anybody could benefit from listening. It’s just consciousness. Then some are more geared to fertility where we have reproductive endocrinologists. I think this is one that sits in both camps, whether you’re trying to get pregnant or not. I’m guessing that what Natalie’s going to share with us today can benefit anybody. So keep listening because we’re going to talk about Natalie. She’s going to share her personal experience. I also like this when our guests have had their own personal experience, they just can bring a little something extra that says, I can’t, haven’t struggled with infertility myself personally. So it’s just something nice when somebody’s

So let me introduce you to Natalie Masson. She has a PhD in clinical psychology and for over 20 years now, she has supported people dealing with depression, anxiety, and health struggles through her private practice, which is in psychotherapy practice in San Diego, California. That’s why I said anybody can listen to this because whether you’re trying to conceive or not, many people are dealing with depression, anxiety, and health struggles. Her specialty is the MINDBODY connection and she believes in tuning into both the mind and body together to facilitate the best outcomes. And that’s why Natalie, I was interested in having you because I don’t think of it as mind and body. It’s the mind body. You can’t separate them. It’s important to know that she did complete a predoctoral internship in clinical and community psychology at Yale University and was a member of a cardiac rehab team at the Scripp Center for Integrated Medicine in La Jolla, California.

She has training in mindfulness practice in yoga, in cognitive behavior therapy, in breathing practices in clinical hypnosis, and EMDR for trauma processing. And so many of the people I see have fertility, stress and fertility trauma. So I’m really glad we have somebody credentialed as a PhD clinical psychologist talking about this and just a little something about Natalie and hopefully she’s going to dive in and give us more information. But she developed a specialty in fertility coaching following her own experience of going through fertility challenges while trying to conceive her second child. So she had second infertility and she conceived the second child in her mid forties. So she has two daughters, which she conceived naturally, one when she was 41 and the other when she was 45. And she has her fertility from the SOUL online programs, which emphasizes egg quality, stress reduction, and overall healthy living, especially for those that are above 35 and enter their forties. Natalie, welcome to the Conscious Fertility Podcast.

Natalie Masson 

Thank you so much for having me here. I think we are kindred souls in valuing this mind-body connection piece, and so I’m really excited to share and collaborate around mutual perspectives

Lorne Brown 

And that’s why I wanted to have you on the show when we had a discovery call just learning about it. I love it when people have the credentials. So you’ve trained in traditional, you have a PhD in clinical psychology, but you’re also trained in hypnosis and then things that have become more mainstream like EMDR, you just really are. I sometimes like to go outside the lanes and talk about what some people think are weird. I think it’s just reality, just like I’m sure it was weird back in the day when they said the earth was round, but they thought it was still flat. It seemed a little out there. I think what we’re going to talk about is the truth. It’s just maybe not fully mainstream, this mind-body connection. Would you be willing though, to talk a bit about your experience because not too many women conceive babies at 45, and I’m curious just to know what you went through and how has this influenced you? You have a whole coaching program around helping those trying to grow their family.

Natalie Masson 

Yeah, absolutely. I’m happy to share about my personal experiences and I think it’s an interesting perspective to tie in. You’re talking about a lot of times there’s a focus on the body without focus on the mind. And I came into being a provider, focusing on the mind, being trained as a psychologist and all the training was the mind. My program was cognitive behavioral. So the thoughts are going through your mind or get to influence how you feel emotionally so we can influence our emotions by shifting our thoughts. That was kind of the initial introduction to how we feel better. During that time, independent of my formal training, I started exploring breathing and body focused methods toward wellbeing. And I was really stunned by how much we can influence our emotional state through breath awareness and through body awareness. And I was always struggling with the fact that there was this huge gap between feeling well emotionally and focusing on the mind and what we could be doing with the body.

So I was coming from the mental health standpoint going, wow, they’re really leaving the body out of the equation. So I was always looking at how I can be innovative to weave the body into this field that is very mind focused. Now, fast forward to when I’m in my forties. I conceived my first child very easily, no problems at 41. And then when we were working on conceiving our second, I was 44 by this point and I thought, well, we’ll see what happens. And it wasn’t happening for several months and I could see my own psychology getting really stirred up. I was getting more and more stressed and moving toward my natural coping tendencies, which is like, let’s get this under control. I’m going to learn about this, I’m going to manage it, I’m going to fix it and do everything that I can. And as I went down that path, I became more and more upset about this while still realizing that based on all of my training and experience, mindset matters, and if I get all spun up about this, I’m probably not helping my body to move in the direction of optimal fertility.

So I was starting to pay attention to not just what’s going on physically, but what’s happening for me mentally. Eventually, about nine months into this, I did get pregnant and I was like, well, right, this is it. We did it, but everything’s on board. And at nine weeks I had a miscarriage and that really woo, that just threw me sideways at that. In the moment of going through that, I thought, I’m never doing this again. I’m done. I guess we’re just going to have one child. And I’ve seen this happen now that I’m guiding other women so often that is the feeling in the moment. And then this other thing happens mentally, which is nobody’s going to stop me. I’m coming back. I will succeed at this thing. And if I was stressed out before the stress went up like 10 notches and I started having reactions I had been guiding other people through as a therapist without having experienced it myself, I became obsessive.

All I could think about was where I am in my cycle, what I’m doing at this time in my cycle, I recognized that I was kind of going off the rails, and so then I went into my own toolbox and I was like, okay, how would I advise somebody who was coming me for help? And I had found a lot of people were helped by affirmations, positive affirmations to say to yourself the things that you would like to be thinking and feeling. And so I wrote my own affirmations to get me through these phases of the cycle, the start of the cycle when you’re like, oh no, it’s the start of the cycle, the middle of the cycle, I’m ovulating, oh my gosh, the end of the cycle. When can I test? When can I test This whole rollercoaster that repeats every approximately 28 days.

And I wrote affirmations to suggest to myself what I want to be thinking. My lining is shedding and this is the beginning of a new opportunity. My eggs are being released and it’s going to be a healthy egg and we’re going to have fertilization. So I timed that with what I understood about the cycle. I was learning a little bit about Chinese medicine and kind of the energetic flow of the different phases. So I wrote these affirmations for myself. I recorded them and I listened to myself saying them to myself. And it was unbelievable how well and how fast that worked to cut that cycle of spinning up. Within a few minutes I’d be like, okay, okay. My feet are coming back to the ground. And I was so excited that I found that this tool worked so well. I kind of made a note to myself, I bet other women would benefit from this. I was in online communities, I could see everybody doing the spinning up dance together.

Lorne Brown 

It reminds me of how we have such negative inner dialogue, we’re talking, and so it sounds like a tool to interrupt that because you’re judging, criticizing, you’re in hopeless, like you said, you’re in that stressful state really attached to wanting this understandably. And then through your process, your tools of writing these affirmations and then hearing yourself say it, talk to yourself, to me, that is you changing the inner dialogue which seeps into the subconscious, which can change that programming, which your body responds to. That’s how I’m interpreting that. Is that what you think?

Natalie Masson 

Absolute happening. That’s a really nice way of laying that out. And I think about it even on a tangible kind of level, you’re strengthening the neural networks in your brain that fire certain kinds of thoughts. And

The more we’re surrounded by something, the more we hear it, the more we practice it, whether we’re saying it, telling someone else, telling ourselves, journaling it, hearing someone else say it, it’s helping to form a groove in that pathway and it’s strengthening that. So that becomes your habit and it can work in the other direction. If you’re constantly hearing people say, you’re running out of time, your eggs are too old, you’re not going to blah, blah. If you hear that and it keeps repeating itself in your head, now you’re wearing in that pathway of your mind. You’re strengthening it so that when you’re sleeping, that’s kind of what’s firing. So we can use the intentional self-talk through affirmations, one way to do it, to build a new pathway and strengthen that.

Lorne Brown 

I think it’s Dan Siegel who says Synapses that fire together, wire together saying that they’re firing. And usually that’s your subconscious. You’re rewiring your brain, and as you said, you have habitual patterns. And so this part of this work that you’re sharing is how do we interrupt it? What are we? We got these patterns, these habits. So how do we interrupt it? So I want to hear more about your story. So you had the pregnancy loss, unfortunately, you noticed you’re not so nice, and then you came up with affirmations. I love that you recorded it too, so nice to hear it in your voice talking to yourself. I also love that there’s that part of you. What is that part that’s witnessing? There’s a part of you that’s like, Hey, I got to do something about this. What tools do I have? There’s that part of you that came alongside you that’s in here. I’m going to help you.

Natalie Masson

And I like people to know that even when you’re in your decompensated state using your worst tools, you also have the other self, your wiser, more mature self, your more grounded self who can come in to help you. We can be both of these selves and we want to try to recruit the more effective helper.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah, higher self consciousness. That part of you that is tapped in that just knows.

Natalie Masson 

Yeah. So here I was trying to get my mental health in balance and finding that I could do that and getting back into feeling courage and determination without being spun out about it. And at the same time, I wasn’t totally confident that this was going to happen. I remember I was getting acupuncture at the time and I told my acupuncturist, who actually I’ve heard you mention on your podcast, mark.

Lorne Brown 

Oh, Mark and I are very good. We’re not only colleagues and talk shop all the time about fertility because he does in San Diego kind of what I do in Vancouver, but we’re also good friends whenever we’re around, we always go for meals and stuff. So I did not know you saw Mark

Lorne Brown 

That’s great.

Natalie Masson 

We crossed paths for a few months in the middle of this quagmire that I was going through. And I remember telling him, because it was September when I had that miscarriage, and then I came to him right after that and he was helping to support me to understand how to read my charts. I was doing cycle charting and he was doing acupuncture with me, and I said, I’m 45 years old and I don’t think I have forever, and I’m going to be done at the end of this year. If I don’t get pregnant by the end of this year, I’m done. And I remember the look on his face and he was like, we haven’t been doing this very long, but I have.

And I could see just how disappointed he was that I might be throwing in the towel. He was looking at my charts and everything and he felt hopeful for me. And I like to just share that as an example, that there are providers out there who may see hope where others don’t, and it’s so important to surround yourself with people who can look at you and look at the possibilities and not the limitations. And so he was doing that. At that point though, I was kind of closed. I was like, December’s going to be it. I’ve got to move on. But I got pregnant in December, right before my personal cutoff. I got pregnant

Lorne Brown

Right down to the wire, Natalie

Natalie Masson 

Right down to the, I was like, hail Mary, I can’t believe it. I can’t believe this is happening. But nine weeks into that pregnancy, there was no heartbeat. There was a heartbeat and then there wasn’t a heartbeat. And so I was going through another miscarriage and I probably went through the, I’ll never do this again. But then I came back and I was like, well, what else can I do? What can I do to give myself the best chances? And I left an important piece out, which is with both miscarriages, I had miscarriage tissue testing done, and they were able to tell me this was the Nate and Nora test where they could tell me not only that there were chromosomal abnormalities, but whether it came from the sperm or the egg in bold times it came from the egg. So I was empowered with this piece of knowledge. It was really important to me that it wasn’t because of the sperm, it wasn’t because my body was rejecting these embryos. It wasn’t some implantation issue. It was egg quality, which makes sense at age 45, it’s very common to have struggles with egg quality. So I looked into what can be done for egg quality. It wasn’t as much out at that time. This is almost 10 years ago now.

Lorne Brown 

People could be listening to this 10 years from now. So this was back around, so we got to give this,

Natalie Masson 

Yeah, yeah, okay.

Lorne Brown

Around 2014.

Natalie Masson 

Yeah, so this is the end of 2014, the start of 2015. So what I found was there’s this three months before ovulation that it’s really important to resource your energy and your eggs. That’s when they’re developing and have the most likelihood to form proper chromosome alignment or not.

Lorne Brown 

Can we emphasize that? Can we unpack that a bit? I don’t want that to just slide over because that’s not, I think it’s in more awareness, but you’re talking about this preconception care and when we’ve chatted before, I think you’re inspired or you talked about the pediatrician, Dr. Harvey, who talks about how important the fourth trimester is after a pregnancy, and then you’ve named the preconception care, I think you called the pre-master.

Natalie Masson 

Yes, yes.

Lorne Brown 

I often share those a hundred days before the egg and sperm meat, either naturally or in an IVF setting are impacting the epigenetics. So the health blueprint of the egg and the sperm, which are going to impact the health blueprint of the embryo, which will become the baby. Can you just unpack that? You were talking a little bit about how important that is. I’d just love to hear your perspective on that. Unfortunately, and again, for some people this can be triggering. You had a second miscarriage and really you had the heartbeat and then lost it, which is always really difficult.

Natalie Masson

Both times. Both times. I got to that first heartbeat. So this is all important and we’ll get back to this thought in a moment, but go back to the idea of the pre’s and preparation time being so important. And I’m glad you’re calling this out because even though over the last 10 years I hear a lot more people talking about what you can do to improve egg quality, there’s still an old belief that your eggs are just aging and there’s nothing you can do about that. They’re just on this downward decline. And so the idea is that either they’re all done or maybe it’s a numbers game and you have to get a whole bunch of eggs. But there’s other beliefs that, I don’t know how much the research supports this, but I’m going with it because it sounds very plausible that it’s in the last three months that more and more maturation is happening for that egg, and that’s the most critical time.

So I teach that it’s like your eggs are in a deep freezer all your life, and then when it’s time for them to get ready to be released, batches of them are brought out for maturation to get ready to release. And it’s that maturation process where we really need lots of energy, cellular energy to help that maturation happen properly. And so it’s not just that your eggs are aging and aging and aging and whatever falls out falls out. There’s this intense period right before ovulation, approximately three months where what you’re doing, how you’re resourcing your body can make a difference. So I didn’t have all that detail at that time. It was just this broad brush stroke idea that things we do might make a difference. So I was like, I’m running with that and I’m going to do everything that I can to source up my body and my eggs for this time period.

And I’ve come to call this your baby’s pre-master anytime before conception because we get so focused on what happens per cycle for that ovulation, for that two week wait that we don’t think about everything leading up to that as the nourishment and the preparation time. And in my meditation that I made later called Inviting your baby into your wo, I’m using metaphors of a mother bird building a nest, and that is for your bird that she’s building a home for her eggs to lay her eggs. That happens before the eggs are laid. And so in our preconception time, our womb is our nest, and we’re building a nourishment into that nest so that it’s ready when the fertilized egg comes. So all of the pre’s, that could be three or four months, you could think of it any time leading up to conception, but all of that time is time for deep nourishment, circulation, relaxation, all the things that help everything be more energized in our bodies.

So during that time, I decided that I was going to take some time off from trying to conceive by this point because I’d had two back to back first trimesters. I was extremely depleted when I listened to my body. My body said, no way, Jose, are we going to launch into manifesting and feeding a new human inside this vessel? I was so physically and emotionally depleted from the emotional part, the physical part. I said, so I can’t have a pregnancy right now anyway, and I don’t think if this is true about creating better eggs, I don’t think my body’s creating good eggs right now. Obviously the last two weren’t good enough. So I decided to completely change my approach and focus on stepping off the trying to conceive TTC train because that in itself is stressful and just focus on nourishing myself. So I did that for three months.

I made a little calendar. I want to have a plan marked in my calendar, wait, I’m tracking my cycle still. And then I looked at what is going to restore my energy and I like to think in terms of energetic terms of expansiveness versus constricted. And so much of what I’ve been doing for the previous year was very constricted. Try to think, you count, count, count. I’m like, okay, put all that aside. We’re going to reverse 180. We’re going to do expansiveness things. So that was doing things that I enjoyed, connecting with my friends and my hobbies, eating well, sleeping well, resting, exercising, all these things to just thrive. Thrive as a human being. I was focusing on that for three months and I had it on my calendar when the next cycle was going to be to try to conceive. It was the month of my 46th birthday and we conceived my second daughter, our second daughter now she’s eight years old and that’s the story. You

Lorne Brown 

Think you conceived her just before you’re 46 or a month into

Natalie Masson 

A month. So my birthday’s at the end of May, so it was that May cycle.

Lorne Brown 

So you’re close to 46 or 46 when you conceived her.

Natalie Masson 

Yeah, I always say I’m like 45 at 11 months when they conceived her.

Lorne Brown

You’re definitely older than 45 at the time. Well, thanks for sharing that. And I wanted to talk about a few things that you shared that time off the IVF journey and you didn’t go down. That journey is stressful and those that know me, I’m just a fan of a healthy baby, whether it happens in the lab or the bedroom, I just want a healthy baby. So I’m not one of those that have no IVF. I’m like, I just want you to have a healthy baby. I want the parents or parent to be happy and healthy too regardless of how that comes. So that’s how we like to support IVF. It is very stressful though still for many and they show when you work with people like you, there was an acupuncture study that showed that it gives you that emotional resilience. So they continue that one more cycle in IVF or in your case you went beyond December and it gives you the resilience to try again.

And they showed that you had an increase in take home babies because a lot of these people quit the IVF cycle not because of financial reasons but because of emotional. And so this priority even helps you in that sense if you have the emotional resilience to maybe do that one more IVF cycle that brings home the baby. The related part, when you say time H, I’ve seen it and I’m always like, all right, they sometimes say I’m taking a fertility holly, like I’m not going to try to conceive. And they’ve been doing back-to-back IVF cycles and they’ve been coming for us with an acupuncture laser, but they also want to take off all their acupuncture and laser and I get it, they’re tired of their appointments. For my listeners, if you’re one of those people tell me, I want to bring in the mind body stuff because that’s the pre’s that you’re talking about.

When they’re not going through all those hormonal treatments. If I had those a hundred days where we can just work on the soil we call nurse the soil and Chinese medicine where we can look at the body part, nutrition, blood flow, regulating inflammation, those things, and as you and I have discussed and my listeners know, I’m a big fan of conscious work. It’s a mind body work where we can heal the mind and the heart to get to what you’re going to talk about this expansiveness, I think time off from IVF. Yes. And then find that practitioner that can support you in those a hundred days. That three months really is about a hundred days is my understanding from the research you have that as you said, they’re in the freezer. So they’re dormant and then about just under a year before they get recruited, and then the last a hundred days is where they really grow. They get their blood supply FSH receptors. So it’s not really three months, it’s four cycles. Why? Because it’s four folliculars. So it’s three and a half months. So it’s four cycles because a hundred days would be four ovulations that you’ve got to work through up to four. So you’ve worked on three full cycles and then that four cycle you’re working ovulation, there’s a hundred days because you’re working on the A quality. So it would be four ovulatory cycles, which would be about a hundred days.

Lorne Brown 

So since we’ll say three or four months. My background, I’m a bachelor of science in math. I’m a CPA as well. So I’d just like to get a little bit more precise when it comes to numbers. Is it three or four months? It’s actually a hundred days, which would be three and a half cycles or four auditory cycles.

Natalie Masson

Yeah. It’s interesting to hear you describing that. I guess we both have that math bent. My original training was actually electrical engineering. You just have this brain

 

Natalie Masson 

I’m a numbers person too. My mom’s an accountant and so I like the data and the numbers for practical reasons. Now that I’ve been doing this fertility coaching for several years, I like to emphasize people to think of it like a rolling window, whether you want to think of it as three months or four months or six or 12. It’s a rolling window. So whatever’s happening right now can potentially be impacting what’s going to happen 3, 4, 5, 6, 12 months from now. And I like to expand that perspective so that we’re not too attached to things that we might not know for sure. If I have insomnia this week, is that going to kill my eggs two months from now? Let’s not be so exacting and look at the big picture of there’s a cumulative effect of everything that we’re doing and let’s just go with that. It has potential impact, so let’s keep nourishing this. And I don’t want people to get stressed out about, oh no, I did something wrong and now I’ve killed my next six cycles of eggs or that we don’t know that

Lorne Brown 

And the body is so resilient. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t have this conversation. We’d be all dead. Right?

It’s the butterfly effect too. You just said what you’re doing now impacts later. So it just has to be small changes. But the people I see, and I imagine you coach, they’ve read it starts with the eggs. They’ve read the books, read our blogs, our videos that we do. They come in with, they know the physical, they are experts. I think the mind is probably more important than the physical, my personal perspective, it’s a top down system. I think they’re both important. So it’s mind and body. However, I think the mind, at least the mind still seems in this day and age to be neglected.

Natalie Masson

Yes, it gets crowded out

Lorne Brown 

And it’s the greatest pharmacy in the world, the mind. Right? Right. It is, it is. So let’s tap into it. So I’d like to emphasize that part. And like you said, we started going and that’s, I’m guilty I put us in the left brain good at that. But it’s the right brain that I think the miracles happen, right from that stuff that’s not so left brain logical and more on the artsy side. And you talk about it, it’s mindbody, there’s micro macro, there’s yin yang in Chinese medicine. So we are going to do both. We’re not ignoring, I just think we, I’d like to focus on the expansive side that you’re going to talk about and to get into that mind aspect of the mind body if you’re willing.

Natalie Masson 

Yeah, absolutely. And to kind of reflect on what you’re acknowledging about the yin and the yang, the left and the right, I think it’s all really valuable to get into the numbers and the science and the calendars and the charts and then also to shift back. I think the two parts inform each other and we just want to be aware if we get imbalanced and we’re stuck over on this side and we can’t. But I think that the beauty, that real value is when we can draw from the best of both and mix them together so we can talk about all that physical side, which like you said, a lot of people are very much more aware of that now they’re in with that awareness that it’s not just about getting the sperm and the egg together, but there’s a lot of other physical parameters in there.

And coming back to where I started where I said I was trained in the mental emotional part and the physical was neglected, and when I was focusing on mental health, now here I am focusing on fertility and we do discover that the majority of people’s energy and focus goes into the physical side because I just think there’s a natural assumption that making a baby has physical properties and it has to do with your body, so let’s fix your body. But what’s missing in there is that appreciation of how much the body is impacted by the mind. And I do find it can be useful for people to understand that on a more logical level too, because there’s all these different camps, some people don’t think about the mind at all and then other people just think about the mind and they do it in this very esoteric woo woo kind of way.

You’re not believing enough. If you just believe in yourself, then it’s going to happen. And there’s this huge disparity between what the reproductive endocrinologists are trying to do and the spiritual gurus might be trying to guide. I believe there’s something in between that helps to connect these two together. So I kind of like to get into the science of that. We talked about the neural networks and what you’re thinking is firing these thoughts and there’s actually lots of research that shows how you’re thinking about things infiltrates through your body. And I mean this research has been going on for a long time back to can people who meditate change the temperature of their skin? Oh yes they can. And you can envision ice and your skin will get cold and you envision the sun beating down on you and your skin getting warm for people who are really trained in connecting their mind and body together. So it’s not new news. They

Lorne Brown 

Actually, there’s a term for it. And Shani Jane, one of your colleagues is on one of episodes where she goes into psycho neuro immunology, PNI, and now some people call it psycho neuro endocrinology, meaning that your thoughts affect your nervous system and immune system. And now they’re talking about the hormonal system as well. And I think you said it, there’s a top down. Your thoughts affect your body and your body affects your thinking. And a great example is the gut microbiome. If you have a poor gut microbiome, that inflammation we now know can cause certain it impacts Parkinson’s disease, but also depression, anxiety, even autism, mental, emotional, and then those stress hormones negatively impact your gut microbiome, right? So it is a chicken and the egg, right? And you got to figure out where you need to interrupt or a better word is where do you need to come alongside like you did for yourself with affirmations and support yourself

Natalie Masson 

Specifically with fertility? I think there’s many pathways through which the mind-body connection can happen. So the one I was just describing could be literally envisioning warmth in your body, and I have a meditation called warming your womb where we know that circulation in the womb can help your lining build and things like that. And we can envision warmth on the womb and warm that area. So you could be literally directing blood flow to areas of your body that could use circulation and enrichment. And then there’s the whole activating your nervous system piece. People have heard this story a lot is your nervous system in fight or flight mode. If it is your brain that sends signals to your body similar to a physical threat or an emotional threat, it’s a fairly primitive system that says there’s a threat. So if you’re feeling desperate about your chances to conceive because you’re 40 something years old and you feel overwhelmed by this, your strange stress hormones like the cyber juice tiger, it’s chasing you.

Same thing. And the body allocates resources to protect you, to save you, and it’s going to allocate resources to not resting and restoring, not reproducing when you’re under great threat. So that’s another way that stress is going to kick the hormones to say, let’s not ovulate, let’s not do implantation, let’s say no to this thing. We need to reserve these resources for survival, primary survival, not survival of the species, survival of this unit right here. So that’s another really common pathway I think of scientifically where what’s on our minds is impacting what our body says yes to. Then like you said, once your body starts experiencing certain things that then sends other messages to your mind and it becomes a cyclical thing. So there’s many pathways where if we realize that our mental emotional space impact is part of this whole dance, then we have another way to intervene. We can intervene on the physical level. Maybe you need to move some energy by going and getting exercise or maybe you need to listen to a reassuring voice in your ears to help you feel hope and calm. It just opens up more pathways or we want to go to acupuncturists and have some needles and herbs to help to bring balance to the energy in our system. There’s so many pathways when we include mind, body, and the whole connection between them

Lorne Brown 

To unpack that, you said it so well that when you’re in alarm, you feel threatened. Your nervous system, that primordial nervous system goes into fight or flight and the energy, the resources are diverted from reproduction to go into survival. But when you can elicit the nervous system, that parasympathetic one, the rest and digest also, I’ve heard it called breed and feed. So emphasis on breed

Natalie Masson 

Oh, I love that.

Lorne Brown

Then if you can elicit the parasympathetic nervous system by the affirmations or listening to your meditations daily that you’ve created, then you free up those resources as I share for healing for creativity and reproduction. So it’s quite simple I thought because if I’m somebody, I often want to put myself in my patient’s shoes. So if I’m somebody trying to conceive and I hear, oh my God, stress is bad for my fertility, what should I do? I want to share that. I would never, ever bring on anybody or talk about the things that are bad for you if we didn’t have a simple solution. So if you’re listening and you’re feeling a little anxious or nervous, I want to let you know that we’re going to go through a little guided either breathing or meditation, hopefully with Natalie and send you to resources. And when I say simple, there are simple tools to help you rewire, to help you reprogram, to help you elicit the parasympathetic.

It just requires you to do it daily. It’s one of those small actions that lead to big results. And so we’ll do that. I wanted to just share with people because when you have these thoughts, to me it’s like we become cognizant of what we put in our mouth, what we eat. Some people are becoming that way as well as what they see, like they’re doing media fasts or social media fasts. They realize how it’s impacting them. The next layer for me and what I see with the people I get to see is becoming aware of your thoughts and your feelings. So those are foods too. Is it a good feeling of thought or an uncomfortable feeling or thought? And it’s not about spiritual bypass, it’s about developing tools to transform these negative and uncomfortable feelings into peace where they’re not setting up the alarm. And so it’s about rewiring your brain. And so that’s my understanding of it. I’m curious, are you aligned with that? Does that also sound with what you’re, or do you see it differently?

Natalie Masson 

If you don’t mind, I want to comment on, there are a few things you said in there that I just thought were so rich and I appreciate how you’re highlighting how when people in this sphere here that stress could harm your fertility, that alone can send off the alarm bells. And it’s very important to recognize that we have tools to help with that. And I just appreciate how I think you have so much insight and empathy to your clients, to this audience. Even though you have not been personally on this path, you don’t have to be on the path to appreciate it because you’re listening, you’re paying attention, you’re in the room with them. It certainly helps if you’ve had your own journey to say, wow, now I get it on another level. But for example, with IVF, I haven’t been through that, but I listen a lot and I can appreciate and I can develop tools for that too.

And you, I’m supportive of whatever path someone wants to take toward this. My path isn’t the path for other people, but it’s more of the process and the variety of tools. And so when you’re talking about how you’re kind of rewiring things, I really loved that you said you take those negative thoughts and reshape to where you come to peace. And the nuance that I want to highlight there is that you didn’t say take the negative thoughts and turn them into positive ones because that is a very common oversimplification that trips people up. And I come from a mindfulness foundation, which is the most important first step is to be able to sit with what is and develop our ease with being with what is. And sometimes that’s a negative thought to be able to sit and go, wow, my brain is spinning in all kinds of obsessive ways right now.

And surely that’s not helpful, but I’m going to be aware of that and not jump in to go, where are my positive affirmations? I need to railroad these thoughts and turn the wheel. Now we just have another constricted process and we’re not allowing ourselves to be human. And a lot of the human experience has elements of struggle and negativity and suffering and moments of despair and hopelessness. And if we can acknowledge that and not be too frenetic about it and be like, okay, this is part of my human experience, then I feel like we have more room to be open to other ways of seeing things. So that is kind of the nuance that I think I bring in through my guidance on my meditations. That’s a little bit different from what you commonly see out there. I’m not pushing positive thinking. I am nourishing the whole person and coaxing a shift in a new direction.

Lorne Brown 

If you’re open to it, I want to unpack it even more and I’ll share some of the, well, can we even go deeper into what we’re talking about? This is my passion project that we’re talking about. And for my listeners, we’re here interviewing Natalie, apologize if you just want to hear Natalie because I can’t hold back.

Natalie Masson 

This is great. You are bringing in so much back, pulling out so much good stuff here. It’s

Lorne Brown 

One of my own experiences. So part of it is a thank you about holding the space for my patients. And yes, I haven’t struggled with infertility. I’ve become aware of my practice and spiritual journey that fertility is the trigger. It’s the wake up call, but it’s never the event that causes the trauma or the stress is how you perceive it. And so I always say we’re more the same than different. So some people have infertility or miscarriages as their wake up call. Some people have a death in the family, a terminal illness, a divorce, or a financial disaster. And then you distill it down. It comes down to I’m not safe, I’m not lovable, I’m not good enough. So we’re all running those programs. So I may have a different trigger, but I can connect and relate to my patients that I see because I’ve worked my shit for many years.

My shadow and stuff, theirs is gut triggered by fertility that puts them into their programs that I think most of us have inherited and developed since childhood, right? They’re just showing up in our adulthood. But the part I wanted, so that’s just my understanding of holding the space. You don’t have to have infertility to be able to support somebody with infertility is what you shared. And thank you. I agree. The part about not having anything positive, and so it’s about being authentic. So when I do my conscious work with my patients, it’s not about trying to feel good. And there’s a book that I love, this line from Michael Brown, no relation to me, Lorne Brown. Michael Brown, the book called Presence Process. And his quote is, rather than trying to feel better,

Get better at feeling rather than trying to feel better, get better at feeling. And so I have this process that I’m starting to call the practice, but call it notice except choose again. And I don’t know exactly why, but I’ll give you my theory: when you accept what is, you notice you have this thought or you have this feeling, and I came through this. This is what you call, some people say they have a download. I read a lot, I do workshops, I’m trained in clinical therapy. I do the work on myself. And one day it became obvious to me that everybody who has these, Byron, Katie, Joe Dispen, everybody, the psych K, the EFT, just one day became clear by dating me that everybody’s doing, they have 10 steps, 20 steps, two steps. It was three steps. Notice everything that happens is neutral.

And then we give it meaning. And the meaning we give it is through the lenses of our subconscious, the wiring. And we get that we came into the world with it and it gets imprinted on us through our sex, our religion, our family, whatever, intentionally or unintentionally. So that’s our lens. And so notice, because when you believe in this story, you make it real. So the first part is just noticing it, then accepting what is. You said that what is, this is from the car, the power of now to accept what is surrender to what is. Because when you fight with reality, you put resistance in the field. We call it cheese stagnation, Chinese medicine, you talked about this, you and I off camera before about the expansion and contraction. So it’s resistance. Resistance doesn’t feel good. But when you can accept what is, that’s being authentic, not trying to feel positive or think positive, but just notice and witness your feelings come.

And I have tools to help us because they’re really uncomfortable. I believe these thoughts and feelings are just like they’re energy and energy, emotion, energy in motion, emotion, energy, motion. They’re very, nature is supposed to move up and through us. So you’re meant to feel the sadness, you’re meant to feel the frustration, but when you suppress it or repress it or project it out or believe in it, it gets stuck. So Tara boxes, our issues are in our tissues. They get stuck in our tissues. So when you notice it, the uncomfortable feelings come up, but now you’re witnessing it, you’re observing it, you’re noticing it. And this takes the charge out of these energy motions, emotions, and they just move up through you. And then peace comes. You’re not trying to think positive by just noticing them. So no longer believing them and observing them.

They get to move through you. And about Jibal Taylor, about 90, these are podcasts. I’ve learned this for all my 90 seconds. It’ll just move through you. If you get really practiced at witnessing and not identifying, there’s a fine line between being in the emotion, so believing in it, so you’re at the effect of it, you’re suffering and then witnessing it. So it’s still uncomfortable, the fear, but there’s a witness there now and that’s a different, that little change changes everything. And that uncomfortable feeling now acts as a portal to presence. And now you tap into your higher self that you talked about at the beginning, the part, the all knowing. And now you have flow and receptivity. And this is when miracles happen and inspire thought comes through you. So it’s about getting to a state of being. We all want to do, do, do. But we’re taking action out of fear and lack. So we get more fearful and lack. But if we can get to that place of presence, which feels peaceful, there’s a sense of relief. Why? Because there’s no resistance

And flow and receptivity happens, chief flow happens. Then inspired thought will come through you, and then you’re doing what comes out of that being out of being whole and complete. And then the last step is choose again. How do you want to be? Because now that you’re present and conscious, you can start to be the creator of who you’re being in this world. So that is my process and that’s what I’m passionate about. So when you say you don’t have to think positive. Yeah, I don’t tell my patients ever to try and think positive, be authentic, be pissed off, be angry. Observe it though. Notice it. And I don’t know why, but through all the episodes I’ve had, there’s over 70 backyard people who listen to a lot of the quantum physicists and the experts and conscious I have, they say, they call it consciousness.

They say there’s something beyond the physical that you can tap into. And when you really can be present with these uncomfortable emotions, they act as portals to presence. You tap into something and the resistance drops and there’s a sense of peace. And I’m not telling you just from my theories and workshops, I mean I’ve experienced this. I’ve had these glimpses of peace of relief, and I’ve had these glimpses of profound peace, which I can’t describe well and wondered and was like, what the hell was that? And bliss. So I don’t only use it in my practice, but I do it for myself daily. And so that’s been my understanding of it. And that’s what I thought you were saying. When you say don’t try to think positive, when you try to think positive, then you’re not accepting what is. And now you’re creating actually more resistance.

Natalie Masson 

And I love it when I talk to practitioners who have come along different pathways and we discover that we’ve come to the same conclusions, but we’re using slightly different words and metaphors and frameworks for thinking about it. And the way that I describe what you’re talking about is everything in our body needs to be paid attention to. And emotions are in our body. Our emotions need attention. And if we start with that assumption, what our emotions most need is attention. Then what happens when they don’t get attention is they keep striving for attention and they intensify. They keep calling back. And so if you’re feeling sad, for example, and you’re like, Nope, nope. Happy thoughts, only happy thoughts only. Well, you’re sad because you’ve been on this journey for a while. Maybe you’ve been through a loss, maybe you don’t know if this is going to work out and you think you may be losing your dream.

You feel sad. That’s legitimate. That legitimate emotion is saying, please pay attention to me. And when we override, we stay too busy, so we can’t notice it, it just keeps coming up and it comes out. It’s going to be heard in some way. It’s going to win. It’s going to come out physically in your heart, in your gut, in your tension, in your shoulders. It’s going to come out somewhere because it needs attention. And so when you talk about softening the resistance, what I’m framing that as is when we do turn toward that emotion and simply say, I see you, I hear you, I feel you. Now it’s been heard and the resistance goes down. It’s no longer fighting to be heard. And that’s what then gives us space to, what did you call it? Choose.

Lorne Brown 

Choose again.

Natalie Masson 

Choose again. We can’t choose again when that emotion is still raging to be heard, we’re just intention biting against it, trying to push it down. And so when we compassionately listen and acknowledge, that’s when you can get more to that. You’re describing like a bliss state where it’s like, oh, all that resistance went away, oh, look, there are other choices. We can see that much more easily when we have taken inventory and sometimes to be quiet and give our emotions compassionate, authentic attention. And if this is still sounding like a little boom to people, I really encourage the movie Inside Out. It’s Disney, I think it’s Disney, Pixar, extremely well done. The first one came out over 10 years ago and the sequel just came out. Main characters went from childhood to adolescence. It’s a whole new set of emotions like shame and belonging, all these things. And so it does a beautiful job of representing emotions go haywire when they’re not getting the right kind of attention given to them.

Lorne Brown

Yeah, what we resist, persist. I love how you put that. And so as we shared, we give you some tools. I think we both have. There’s so many tools to help you lower the resistance. So you have that free flow and receptivity, which is what fertility is required, free flow and receptivity. I think that’s episode one or two with Rand Lewis talks about the Chinese medicine approach and how flow and receptivity is key. And your work encourages me, enhances the flow and receptivity by expansiveness. And your patients probably have used these words with you. I know they are on my table when we do the work and then they’re uncomfortable feelings and they observe it and the resistance drops just, I say it’s peace or profound peace, but the most common word is I feel lighter, I feel expansive. My chest feels like it’s lighter and it can open more. So if you want to know what that feels like, you’ve all felt it. That’s what that feels like. A sense of relief. Can you share a simple practice tool here if this is okay or if it’s not okay to do it here. We’re going to direct them anyhow, that we’ll just direct them now where they can go to get more of you. But if you have something like an easeful breathing exercise or something because the breath is so powerful, can we share that now or do you prefer

Natalie Masson 

I would love to. If we have time, I would love to guide. I’ve pulled up a few statements from different affirmation sets that I have. And I think what I’d like to do is just blend a few of them together and invite everyone who’s listening to come along for the ride and just experience. We can talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. But it’s much more meaningful when you experience something in your own body.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah, you can’t think your way through this stuff. It makes sense. Experiences process work. So Natalie, before you do the experience for us, let us facilitate, can we tell our listeners where they can go to find you? Because we’ll do this now and also where they can find your meditations and then we’ll have our own experience on our podcast with you leading us through one.

Natalie Masson 

Yes, absolutely. My website, fertility from soul.com is where you’ll see all the information about my fertility offerings. And many of my meditations are on my fertility from the Soul YouTube channel. And also I am taking the best things that I’ve created for fertility because they apply to general wellbeing as well. And I’m beginning to offer those for general wellness. And that is through Harmony within.io. And you can also go to my harmony within YouTube channel. So that is a newer branch that I’m growing because I feel like these tools are too good to keep contained inside the fertility realm. I want them to be available to everyone.

Lorne Brown 

We’re so similar because 50% of my practice is reproductive health because of what I’ve been doing for over two decades like yourself. And then people want to have that spiritual awakening. People want to feel peace, they want to feel happy. And so people now have just come in through word of mouth. And half my practice is people not trying to get pregnant, but just want to heal old wounds and old programs. So it’s fertility from the soul.com and we’ll put these in the show notes and the other one because it had a different, it wasn’t

Natalie Masson 

Dot com. Yeah, harmony within io

Lorne Brown 

 

And Harmony within.io. Perfect. So there’s where you can go to learn more about Natalie and to download any of her programs that she offers and hear about her coaching. Now I’m going to mute myself and I would love for you to facilitate a meditation for us to elicit that relaxation response. Well, you do the intro and tell us what this is about and why we’re doing it.

 

Natalie Masson 

Okay. Well this is going to be a spontaneous hybrid of many of my different meditations of springing forward from the conversation that Lorne and I have just had. So this is very much a co-creation here with some affirmations and guidance from different meditations sprinkled throughout my library. So allow yourself to let go of all the thinking and doing and planning that might be going on in your life at this moment, and allow yourself to just come into a comfortable position and notice breath flowing into your body and out without any agendas or expectations for how you should experience this. Just being open to what emerges for you, noticing breath flowing into your body and out without trying to breathe in any particular way. Aware of this moment and this breath, I’ll share with you some affirmations or inviting acceptance. With each breath, I invite awareness of this moment.

I am aware that each moment is a new moment. I can choose to wake up to this moment noticing it with fresh eyes, aware that the past is behind me. I breathe into the present moment, aware that the future is yet to unfold. I breathe into the present moment. I understand that it’s natural for my mind to wander, and I can practice patience when I witness my mind wandering. Next, I’ll share some affirmations for egg quality. My body is a nurturing home for my precious eggs. When I breathe in slowly and calmly, I’m sending soothing and enriching energy to my eggs.

The more I can let go, the more energy my body has to replenish its resources and nurture my eggs. I am committed to taking care of my body from a place of love, kindness, and appreciation toward my body. I believe in my body’s capacity to heal, strengthen, and regenerate. Now, continuing to invite awareness of breath blowing into your body and out aware that there’s no rush to get to a next breath. Just following the wave of the in breath and the out breath, you might envision a peaceful scene of waves in the ocean rising and bawling water rushing forward and receding. You follow breath into your body out and then wait patiently for the next breath to come in. Just like waves of the ocean. They come when they’re ready, patiently waiting and watching this beautiful process in your own body, breath flowing in breath flowing out and waiting quietly to witness some next breath blowing in and trusting this wise process of your body, your mind of your whole beautiful human system to take care of you, to move in a healthy direction. When you give space when breathing for openness, when you nourish yourself, your mind, your body, your emotions, very deeply noticing how it feels to have taken this time to breathe, to be present, and to allow in this energy of openness. Thank you for allowing me to guide you

Lorne Brown 

And thank you, Dr. Natalie Masson for sharing this with us. So again, one more time. It’s the fertility from the soul.com. It’s in the show notes. And Natalie, can you say the other website, because I don’t have it in my notes, I only

Natalie Masson

Harmony within harmonywithin.io.

Lorne Brown 

Harmonywithin.io. Perfect. Thank you very much for joining us on the Conscious Fertility Podcast.

Natalie Masson 

Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

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 a-c-u-balance.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.