Living a fertile life by Amanda Seyderhelm
When I went into the IVF clinic I honestly thought it was just for a standard ultrasound scan, just to be sure that everything was clear before we started IVF. What I didn’t expect to discover was that I had ovarian cancer.
Being diagnosed with unexplained infertility in 1998 was a painful blow, it felt like a life sentence without any prospect of suspension. Having explored every conventional and complementary therapy, our hopes were high for IVF giving us the answers and gift of our baby that we so longed for.
Being diagnosed with ovarian cancer just felt like my hope had been cruelly snatched away from me. My body had betrayed me and I went into panic freefall. Initially it made no sense to me. Hadn’t I done everything right? Changed my career and lifestyle, become quieter and more relaxed? Hadn’t I done enough work on myself to deserve a baby? I had a wonderful husband who supported me. Apparently it doesn’t always work like that, and I had a 10.5 cm cyst and stage 1 primary tumour in my ovary to prove it.
After 8 months, 2 major operations, 4 months of chemotherapy, and a legion of supporters, I am beginning to understand the symbolic meaning of my cancer and what it has taught me.
The ovary is the seat, the home of a woman’s creativity and fertility. It wasn’t until I lost my right ovary that I began to question what being creative actually meant to me. Up until then, I had seen my ovaries in purely physical terms, and even then not in particularly glowing terms. As far as I was concerned they were underperforming and that wasn’t good enough! Becoming aware that this was how I felt was an uncomfortable revelation in itself. But it was the beginning of putting me in touch with my own creative spirit.
Although the process of uncovering my creativity was extraordinarily painful because it forced me to look at my life without children and what that meant, it was also liberating to discover the many creative gifts that I have, and the exciting prospect of creating a fertile life as a writer, painter and an intuitive guide. My hope is that other women who feel similarly trapped, will be inspired by my experience. This is my story.
In 2002, following surgery and chemotherapy, I struggled to come to terms with the possibility that I would never have children. My diagnosis forced me to look at and complete the inner work that I had started way back in 1998, when the struggle to conceive had become apparent. This time it wasn’t just a baby I wanted it was my life. The stakes were much higher this time and I knew that I didn’t want to die. When your life is threatened it makes you ask the question: what am I here for and what am I meant to do? Almost immediately I let go of having a baby so that I could wrestle with the deeper questions about who I was. I honestly believe I would not have completed this work, made the connections I have made if I had not had cancer. My drive to conceive was so all-consuming that it seemed I was almost prepared to die for it. But my cancer was the doorway into my whole self, the place where I would finally claim my own creative power and learn to take responsibility for my self, the creative genius and sensuous goddess with a wicked sense of humour.
I started my personal development journey in earnest in 1998, 2 years after we had failed to have a baby and I started to feel imprisoned by the diagnosis of unexplained infertility. I just couldn’t believe that there was no explanation for this, so I improved my diet and took up yoga and meditation to quiet my mind. I thought that would do the trick, but it didn’t. I then moved on to working with some of the best complementary therapists in both London and New York who specialise in helping women explain their infertility by clearing negative emotional energy, releasing trapped spirits, and raising their consciousness. This deep inner work profoundly changed me and opened inner doorways to help me heal childhood hurts and my deep fear of abandonment. I now recognise that this was brave work that I did to uncover more of who I am. Back then, I was just desperate to conceive. I did all of these things in the hope of getting pregnant and having my own baby. I needed an explanation, and if that meant radically changing my work pattern, my attitudes and beliefs, I would do it all.
How could I, a career driven woman suddenly switch off all the male driven energy I had used to operate in the business world, and start tuning into the feminine energy I needed to conceive a baby? This was one of my problems. After all, babies aren’t projects that can be scheduled (maybe that’s why the IVF success rates are so low).
Connected to this problem of my masculine vs. feminine energy was the fact that I had already fulfilled my ambition which was to publish books and to help other people do so, firstly as a corporate publisher and secondly, through my own business, ReadytoWrite.com. I was good at it, my authors won awards for their work, and for a long time it was the most fantastic scam, because I was able to hide my self and my own creative needs in my work of serving (and publishing) other people. I basked in their glory and told myself that I loved nurturing their talent. This was true, but when it came to nurturing myself, I was in real trouble and found myself in the classic woman’s trap! The minute I got married and started trying for a baby in order to be more fulfilled, the wheels started to come off my wagon. I came face-to-face with the fact that I had no model for this. Inspite of my independence and professional achievements, when it came to being a mother, deep down, I didn’t want to work. I wanted to be taken care of, like my own mother. This is a phrase independent women are too afraid to utter for fear of letting the sisterhood down! Somewhere in my heart, I had crossed a line. And this was at the heart of my struggle. To learn to take personal responsibility for myself, my needs, my creativity, my money, my baby, my everything, I had to walk through the doorway of my ovarian cancer experience and accept who I was, a deeply creative woman who was looking to create her own model.
However, before I could embrace my own creativity, I had to learn to deal with my fear. Simply letting go of something, I have learned is not enough. The personal development gurus all tell us to ‘let go’. But if you don’t have anything else to hang onto, this is a recipe for disillusionment. What else was I really good at doing if not publishing? Still my focus was on doing, achieving, having, rather than on being myself and letting that form the basis of what I do. Like a hamster, chasing her feet around her wheel, I felt trapped by what I did and could not see a way out of this dilemma. At this point I thought a baby would fulfil me and give me that purpose. A baby would be a bridge between my two worlds, a complete and tangible expression of my successful transition from one to the other.
My first step towards recognising that the answer to this puzzle lay within me rather than outside me, came when I hired a life coach.
Over 18 months I worked on redefining my purpose and strengthening my personal foundation. In the process of transitioning from a full-time corporate publishing career into running my own business, I learned how to set stronger boundaries for myself and for my clients so that I wasn’t on 24 hour call. I learned to say no to projects I didn’t absolutely love and started building a community of like-minded people who supported me in my venture. I moved from being a corporate exec to an entrepreneurial soloist. I didn’t need the institutional grip around me anymore, it was stifling my creativity! I needed to do it for myself. Instead, I poured all my energy into doing it for others, and I had a fantastic and successful time with it, but it wasn’t enough. I had no energy left to nurture myself, spent no time nurturing my own creative interests. It seemed that I had swopped one career addiction for another, and still there was no baby.
Sometimes the more we hold on to something the more illusive it becomes. I really believed that having a baby would be The Answer. Subconsciously, of course, it would have just been another scam, a perfect opt out for me to avoid meeting my own needs. My needs would have been met through my baby, which is a dangerous but all too common solution for a lot of women who are deeply afraid of facing up to their own needs.
I complemented this inner work with the help of some gifted therapists who helped me locate my trapped energies and use these as doorways into understanding my deeper self. But it wasn’t until I discovered I had cancer that I finally broke through my inner demons. What a wake up call! I suddenly got that I am enough. It’s not what I do, but who I am that matters.
I thought having a baby equalled being creative and that without a baby I was not creative. What I needed to find and release was the rest of my self i.e. my fear of creativity, my fear of losing myself in that, and to understand that there are many ways to being creative. What I learned was that until you unblock your creativity you cannot fully express yourself, with or without a baby.
I realised, in hindsight, that my ovary was the doorway to the rest of my creative energy, and when I discovered that cancer had taken up residence there, I was finally willing to look at my needs and what was holding me back from being creative.
I need to write and to paint, and to give myself time and space to see what emerges within that. I still love nurturing other people’s talent, but I believe I am a better woman, wife, daughter, friend, Coach now because I spend time developing my own creativity and not just theirs. The more I move my own creative process on, the more I am able to help other women do the same.
I believe we choose what happens to us in order to work out what we need to work out, what we are here on this planet for. That’s why we are here, to learn the lessons our soul wants to teach us.
My journey has been harrowing but it has also been extraordinary. In the midst of all my cancer pain, I could feel the grace of God around me, could feel the healing energy and light surrounding me. I knew I was going to be OK, but more than that, I knew that I was showing up to do the work that my soul wanted me to do, to learn the lessons I needed to learn. It doesn’t get any bigger.
