Try something for me right now.
Place a hand on your heart and hold it there for a moment. Don’t do anything with it. Just let it rest there.
What happens?
For me, it is immediate. A hand on my heart is a reminder to look inside. I start to feel my heartbeat. I feel the warmth of my own palm against my chest. Something settles. It takes about three seconds and costs nothing, and yet it is one of the most direct routes inward that I know.
This simple gesture is the foundation of the heart-womb meditation that I include in my fertility yoga course. The course is about the connection between heart and womb, and this practice embodies that connection more directly than anything else I have found.
When you are trying to conceive
When you are trying to conceive, the womb can start to feel like a place of disappointment rather than possibility. Something that is being watched and waited on and found wanting, month after month. The heart carries its own weight too — the hope, the grief, the love that has nowhere to go yet.
This meditation is a way of tending to both. Not fixing either, but simply acknowledging them. Bringing warmth and attention to the places that are carrying the most.
Oxytocin — the hormone most associated with connection, safety and calm — responds to exactly this kind of gentle, intentional touch. In a journey that can feel so dominated by stress hormones, a practice that reliably generates the opposite is worth knowing about.
My students have called it beautiful. I think what they mean is that it feels like discovering a powerful connection that has always been there but you haven’t been aware of it’s potency.
If you’d like to experience it for yourself, it is waiting for you in the course.
Photo by Ketut Subiyanto