The Menstruality Podcast - 82. How to Change the Way we Approach the Initiation of Infertility (with Shereen Öberg)

Episode Date: April 6, 2023

Our guest today, Shereen Oberg draws from a unique and rich mix of influences in her women’s empowerment work. She is the author of The Law of Positivism, she’s a yoga teacher and acupuncturist, and alongside this she holds a business and economics degree, and has recently completed a Master's degree in Global Sexual and Reproductive health and rights. She comes from a long lineage of strong, Kurdish matriarchs and political, social rights activists who shared their natural birth stories with her, this inspired her to train both as a nurse and a doula. Today we chat about how all of these influences wove together in her recent thesis about how we need to change the way we approach infertility across the globe. We explore:How 186 million people are affected by infertility in the world today, and most are feeling a degree of loneliness and isolation.The three big themes that occur across the globe; the grief felt with each loss, a deep questioning of purpose and existence, and the feeling of being let down by the healthcare system. What ancient goddess myths can teach us about the initatory process of infertility. ---The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [e-mail]---Social media:Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.schoolShereen: @lawofpositivism

Welcome to the Menstruality Podcast, where we share inspiring conversations about the power of menstrual cycle awareness and conscious menopause. This podcast is brought to you by Red School, where we're training the menstruality leaders of the future. I'm your host, Sophie Jane Hardy, and I'll be joined often by Red School's founders, Alexandra and Sharni, as well as an inspiring group of pioneers, activists, changemakers and creatives to explore how you can unashamedly claim the power of the menstrual cycle to activate your unique form of leadership for yourself, your community and the world. Hey, welcome back to the podcast. Our guest today, Shireen Oberg, draws from a unique and rich mix of influences in her women's empowerment work. She's the author of The Law of Positivism. She's a yoga teacher and acupuncturist. And alongside this, she also holds a business and economics degree

and has recently completed a master's in global sexual and reproductive health and rights. She tells a story of how she comes from a long lineage of strong Kurdish matriarchs who were also political and social rights activists and these women shared their natural birth stories and wisdoms with her which inspired her to train both as a nurse and a doula and today we explore how all of these different influences wove together in her recent thesis about how we need to change the way we approach infertility across the globe. I found this conversation very healing as someone who has undergone four years of fertility challenges and I encourage anyone interested in supporting themselves, their clients, their friends, their

family through challenges like this to tune in today as well as anyone who's passionate about supporting women and people who bleed or who are going through menopause through all of the initiations of the menstruality arc. It is such a goodie. So let's get started with the amazing Shireen. Shireen, it's such a joy to have you on the menstruality podcast how are you doing today I'm really looking forward to this conversation how are you feeling thank you so much for having me today and I'm feeling very excited to be here I've I love the podcast and I love the work that you all do so I'm really excited to talk today and share also. Where are you at in your cycle at the moment? How's your journey with your cycle going?

So I'm definitely in my mid cycle and I'm feeling the energy of that and I feel that it's been I've had lighter days like I feel lighter in a way um my my last cycle I felt like in the end it was actually a lot of tension and and anxiety and that I know that that was a result from not resting the cycle before and just going going going so I feel like in peace right now I feel like it's a um I'm also like more prepared for the the like the fall and and that that part much more this cycle so yeah I'm feeling light I'm really with you on the not resting unfortunately this I mean I've got to whisper this because if Alexander and Shani hear me say it then I might lose my job but I just didn't get to rest this menstrual cycle I we have a house renovation going on lots of things happening in our world and I ended up

doing two long motor well two long fast motorway drives on my period which is so not what I needed and I can really feel the impact of it because I my inner critic is totally alive and it's I'm only on day five and I keep having to watch it and just just be with it just hold the tension as we talk about so much at bed school of okay this is the fallout of not resting this is what psychologically I feel stretched I have no patience I keep feeling angry and like I have a fast temper and no resilience it's like okay there it is this is why we rest so I'm just being kind to myself while my critic stomps all over my inner winter right now it's hard yeah definitely it does like bleed over I feel like I that what that happened to me too like I was feeling things that I usually don't

feel in the beginning of the cycle so it's definitely a time for rest and sometimes the body knows that because I got a cold last week and that really slowed me down which might be why I feel a little bit lighter less tense than I was so I think that's a good point yeah we just gotta keep going perfectly and perfectly in this world that isn't really designed for cycling people people that live cyclically yeah we just have to keep going but you Shireen are doing this amazing work have been studying and I mean your career from what I know of it has been so fascinating so far but the piece that we're really going to focus on today is that you have graduated from your master's in sexual and reproductive health and with a focus on women's health and you've published

your thesis which has a special focus on infertility and the healthcare system and IVF. And I'd love to hear what inspired this path of study for you. So it's been a long journey, I think, definitely from how I grew up in my teenage years being in growing up in Sweden having a Kurdish background living in different cultures and what that means and also like how I see it as a lifelong journey everything leads into the other things that manifest it's like this weaving right and I feel like for me personally everything happened when I was living so not in tuned with my cycles and with myself it was just going going going and um it started very early for me in my career I think I

moved to Ireland to for my first like real job after graduation and everything and that was when I was 24 and I just which was with Google right after a big course of business study yeah exactly and and for that was just going and going going that was definitely like being in your young masculine energy no breaks nothing just going and then that really affected my cycles I actually throughout those two years when I was there I stopped having my bleed because I was so stressed that I had lost so much weight so that really took me into like okay what should I do that it was like a good experience in that way because I really needed to like stop and focus and the womb was talking to me I had never paid attention so much to it

I would also say like I didn't mention this but from I was a teenager I had really really bad cramps and heavy bleeding which I know now also like that that has an energetic healing aspect to it that needed to be tended to. So that really started my journey. So that was about 10 years ago. And the research into what I should do to come into balance again, that led me forward into the interest and then like my alongside with this the parallel like lineage that I was working with was the the spiritual one and that path and that also came to

me in in this crisis so that was like a really tough descent, I would say, those years. And the descent and the ascent, it comes and goes. It's like we flow through it throughout life. It's not the first and the last. So what happened was that when I was starting to work much more on a spiritual level, I felt the first connection with the goddess and all that she had to guide me through and everything that I could to to really um question like my choice in in of education of career path of all of those things um and and something was always pulling me to healing because I was doing healing and I was really feeling like

called to serve others in their healing as well so it came into the path of Reiki to all types of like just unlocking different pathways for healing for myself and others and when I did that I started also working more and more with women because that was what the goddess guided me into as well it felt natural and also coming from a lineage of very strong matriarchs and and activists female activists that triggered something in me I think as well so leading up to studying acupuncture wanting to become a midwife but also like shifting from that because I saw how tough it would be for me to to work in the system that is not helpful for women and then it led me into this program which I did for the past year I started last last year and finished now this summer so that's how the journey went and it's more clear

what I'm what my purpose is in this moment. Wow it's so fascinating to hear all of the different threads that have brought you to where you are. And I think this is the same for so many people who experience menstrual symptoms, that there's a calling happening from inside us that propels us onto our own calling in life. Not that I would ever want to gloss over the fact that the symptoms are really hard and it's a painful and challenging journey to work with them and heal them but it's like there are nudges coming from within so it's fascinating to hear how that unfolded for you. I'd love to hear about your matriarchs in your family too.

Yeah, definitely. So my roots are Kurdish. I grew up in Sweden, but I'm Kurdish by ethnicity and culture and language. And so the Kurdish people are a native to some of the areas in the middle east so um my family are from the northern iraq part and uh and there's a long lineage of being very like earth earth connected people because living like close to the mountains or within the mountains and working with the um I grew up with a very natural holistic way of living I think because they hadn't been colored so much uh from it's it I mean I'm the I'm a first uh how do you say first generation immigrant in Sweden still I came to Sweden when I was one so we had that like really I grew up with really being as natural as possible my my mom really was against pills and and things like that so it's because it's not in the culture it was more common to use maybe herbs plants food as medicine and so unfortunately the Kurdish people have been and still are very oppressed in in the country those countries it's become more autonomous in northern Iraq, but in the rest of the areas, it's still very much colonialized.

And what happened was that from both of my lineages, both grandmothers had to work very actively because they came from families who were very politically active against the regime and they had to also step up. So if you've heard about the Kurdish women who really defended the people from very strong and being like in in that sense very equal to their male partners being out there on the field and um women's like secret movements uh to to be able to share information so really the the foundation of the, it's so important that merging. So with that, I feel like and also like hearing stories. And my grandmother had 12 children on my mom's side, hearing those birth stories and how like how natural, like the natural way of living and birthing. So I feel like my grandmother maternal grandmother still lives so she's taught me a lot I never met my paternal grandmother because she was actually imprisoned

for her work that she did for the Kurdish people and she passed away when I was like eight years old but I feel like she's standing with me very strongly in everything that I do thank you for bringing them into the conversation it's beautiful to feel them with you and with us incredible women but let's talk about your thesis first let's talk about what's happening in our world right now for the hundreds of thousands millions of people experiencing infertility so yeah could you tell us about your your thesis and and your how it came about yeah so when my journey started with this focus on women and even acupuncture, I studied to be able to help women that it's always been like a leading star. And what happened was that two years into the nursing program, which here in Sweden, we have a three year nursing program. And then you do one and a half year of midwifery and I had done

the doula work as well and been in birth and I loved it but then when I was at a maternity center or like a birth center I didn't feel connected to the career path of of becoming a midwife so I felt like I'm not going to just continue just to do it again because I've done things like like just done things because I think it's good and it looks good and no I felt like no I stop now and I can kind of let me know if this lands for you but I can feel your grandmothers in that because the system that midwives are working in now is you know it's beautiful in many ways you know many healthy babies are born there's many healthy mothers and there are massive constraints and huge pressures on the people on the birth workers

yeah and I think you had a sense of perhaps coming from this you know background that you've come from from your grandmothers you just had a sense that that wasn't right for you no exactly like not being part of that is still patriarchal system because it still is unfortunately and it's I would say here in Sweden at least it's all of birth is midwifery led so it's not doctors leading birth and everyone births with midwives so that's that's at least a good good because I know it's different in in in the world so we have like that empowerment at least but I just felt like there was something else and this program that I found which was also international so I had like classmates from all over the world like western africa bangladesh people like mexico like different so we got this also not just eurocentric view of of how the world looks because it was a global program. It was really insightful because it's in the field of sexual

and reproductive health and rights. And it's an umbrella term for many different things. If we look at it, it does focus a lot. If you think about an organization like UNFPA, who works very much for this. And also the focus tends to be on the contraceptives and like how to prevent. But the infertility part is under this umbrella. It's just not that heard, I would say.

And in society, it's not talked about. And in education, it's not talked about. And in education, it's not really talked about. It's really like a hidden thing, because maybe it looks like a luxury problem compared to like a teenager getting pregnant and not being able to support it, or like maternal death, which is horrible as well. Like there's so many things within this term um but i i chose to and my classmates did amazing jobs with like how to prevent uh maternal death or stillbirths or like these are so important so so important and uh they have midwifery backgrounds some of them that I worked with or nursing backgrounds so that that whole aspect is super interesting and I wanted to focus on the other side so it's like the two sides

like the two sides of the goddess how it manifests because everything is the goddess right everything is all of these experiences so that side at which yeah I think both me you feel like it's very connected to Ishtar and you know because she is not the mother archetype but she's the queen of heaven and earth and she does what does kind of walk this path of being hers in herself alone um so my focus I wanted to really so there's different ways of doing research and I felt like if I would have only focused on women in Sweden that go through infertility and IVF we have only one aspect because we are very privileged here to have like free IVF attempts three of them we have it more readily available but what about countries we who don't have it and it's a big financial burden so we we have that discrepancy as well and then I wanted to really focus on

what is the support that is there what is the So it comes more from a nursing and support aspect. Like what is this in healthcare system? What does it mean? And what is societies doing to support women? So the thesis was a metasynthesis, which means that I took qualitative studies, which are interview studies of different kinds from different parts of the world. So I didn't have one specific continent or country.

I tried to look for different ones from all over the world. And the countries, I'm trying to pull it up here, there was 19 countries represented. So in my study, I had 506 women in total. And that's qualitative study. It means it's not like a form that they fill in or a survey. It's a qualitative. And the countries that were included in the end, because I had to find the link between not just going through infertility, but also going through IVF or other types of like more invasive treatments. And the countries that it came down to that I really found was aligned with the aim was the UK, China, Turkey, Sweden, Netherlands, Pakistan, South Korea, Iran, US, Israel, and South Africa. So it's not all countries, but it's kind of diverse and we can't forget that we have about so women who are listening to this can probably relate to feeling like you're alone

in your experience because it's not talked about so it feels like you are going through it alone and no one else is going through this but we have 48 million couples around the world who go through this 186 million individuals are affected worldwide according to to vh vho and yeah and it can have so many different factors and diagnosis and it can be unexplained, which means there is no diagnosis because the Western medical system either don't have the diagnostic tools, are not looking into different factors that would be more holistic. What did you see, you know, in this global study, what did you see is the same for people across the world experiencing infertility? I would say that infertility, no matter where you are, is really, it can have some nuances, but most of it is the same. know in one I did a beautiful um past life regression many years ago maybe also nine years ago or something like that and one of the things that I got from that that life was that we all feel the same even if we look the same or if we appear to be different, if we don't look the same and we have different country settings and cultures, the feelings are the same.

I cannot know exactly what pain and grief feels for you, but it's still explained in the same way. So it feels like there's a link between all humans and we had a discussion actually when when we're doing the opponentship and someone asked how is it for women who are in a more low income setting not accessing and also the stigma that is even higher. But the personal experience is still the same. Because if you're a mother in Sweden or in Bangladesh, if you lose a child, you cannot say that the grief is more or less in anyone, right? We just experience differently and the support is different. But the experience of grief

is the same. And that's one of the big things that I saw. So from the analysis I did from these, and I'm talking about hundreds of articles gone through and boiled down into 19 studies that I focused on, you can say that the findings showed three big themes that came up, which was the same for, I really like, also, you know, you have to show in a scientific way that this is, these are themes throughout the countries. And one is the personal reproductive trauma and personal reproductive trauma in that is the loss and grief which is felt by these people the thing is that the the grief it is a human a human like we can all feel grief hopefully like not hopefully but I if you have that ability you you know what grief means and it can show itself in different way but all of the women

experienced grief it's a loss it's a loss of I love this quote it says the woman says it doesn't really go away this is like some someone died but nobody else knows it only you know it so nobody else is mourning and i feel like that was the most powerful thing like the life grief that this i mean everyone can can feel what what does it mean to most of us will lose someone we love so that that feeling that's interpreted into this experience that the loss of something invisible and you're it's hard for others to grieve with you because it's intangible because it's not it's a dream that have been with you probably by norms and socialization from you were a child maybe when you were playing with dolls and having this vision doesn't mean that all women have a vision to become mothers but if you have that vision for yourself and then

it doesn't come true in some way, then it is a loss. So the loss and grief was really important under the reproductive trauma. And also the questioning of your purpose and existence. Like, what is my purpose if this is not the next stage of my life? Like, what does it mean for my life and my future? And that is also like a grief component within it right I'm just nodding like a like one of like those nodding cats because I'm just everything you're saying is exactly what I felt through it I was lucky I had a circle of women at the time I was going through it and the howls of grief that

came out of my body looking back and even then I could feel I know that women and people who have wanted children across time have howled like this exactly but in other areas of my life there was a lot of oh well I'm sure it'll happen one day or you can always adopt or well if you just if you just relax just for like on holiday my friend went on holiday she got pregnant straight away you know all of this superficial people are trying to help they're trying to bring something loving but because we're not we don't know how as a culture to be with the unexplainable and to be with the irreconcilable and if we could it would be so much better for people who are experiencing infertility if if you could say oh I'm on my period and I'm in deep grief because

I really you know I really want to have a child and someone could say wow that must be so hard I really hear you instead of all the other things they say and how beautiful would that be so true and there is these microaggressions happening because it's it's like an unconscious microaggression but people asking questions not from a bad place just of like not knowing and I feel like society is getting better with that because it it is starting to become more like out there but maybe 10 years ago 15 years ago 20 years ago it was not at all so thanks to like social media and more like awareness around it just like the menstruality and the cycle like all of this work that we're doing as well like that's becoming more talked about and we

see the counter forces of that as well of course yeah and also under the reproductive trauma comes the uncertainty and lack of control that that came through very uh hard and just regarding the microaggression you know sometimes it can also be in the field of um like you said like finding solutions and like, have you tried this? Have you tried that? Have you tried this? Yes, of course I have. Yeah. You know, these women are trying everything. It's not that they have come to IVF after not tried anything. It's like, I was literally like standing on my head, eating pineapple, massagingaging my womb getting acupuncture impossible thing yeah exactly so it's like it's not always trying to find a solution and I also really wanna one important thing that I didn't look at was women that go through secondary infertility and

maybe IVF because that's a different dimension and in those cases it can also be a microaggression can be but you have one child like and you cannot say that to a woman because it's like saying like one of your friend died and you say but you have that friend but you still lost this one right it's still a loss so I feel like the yeah the sensitivity it's really it needs to be learned because it's very hard for people to to understand how it because they haven't walked in those shoes but the lack of control and of course one of the big uh personal and their reproductive trauma is also the physical pain that treatments lead to so it takes you from that emotional and mental pain into also the physical because it can be physical pain of course like

you said like you're in pain in your menses and that's like a tangible pain right and it's it makes it even more tangible the fertility because you have that pain but then also the treatments that that affect your hormones you can become overstimulated and the surgery when they like take out the eggs, all of that, that's also a dimension that maybe people can relate to more like, okay, you've gone through IVF, you're taking needles every day, you've shots, you've had the needle in, in your vaginal wall, like go through, like people maybe can relate to that a little bit more, but. But it's interesting, even with that for me I've never been able it's very healing having this conversation with you

because I've never really been able to talk about the physical pain I endured going through IVF because there's very quickly oh but you've got arty now and everything's fine and I feel even a bit breathless just even saying that out loud because yes I do have my son I am so blessed I'm so lucky and he's amazing and it was a lot for my body to go through and because of the joy of it being successful which of course I wouldn't ever take back it's that's that's still there inside me you know as I'm talking to you I'm feeling for myself okay I need to tend to this somehow but it's true that there's emotional pain there's physical pain and a lot of it goes unprocessed did you see that in your study yeah of course one study that I came by of many studies that I saw in my research when I was finding was also the impact it does have even if you have a child

after the IVF like what is the what is the impact on the on the pregnancy what is the impact after birth like all of this and definitely I would say that because of the insensitivity that you encounter in the healthcare system don't forget that before getting the treatment women are also under investigation and that means also some physical pain because you're also in getting these checkups and be these invasive um like instruments and flushing the the the tubes like all of these these add on so that it creates a trauma of course you have to it doesn't mean that because you had a child that pain and that like invasiveness of any invasive um procedure that we go through is a trauma to the body right because we have these different layers of the body in my book the law of positivism live a life

of high vibrations love and gratitude i really talk about the physical body as one layer of us that is important to work with healing and then that feeds into the other layers and the other layers feed into to that so it's like you the physical body is important to tend to and see what emotional trauma also do we hold there? The medication, like what happens after? Like what type of information are you getting about the side effects of the medication? I come to that in the third theme, actually. Because the medication and how it affects you afterwards as well, it's not just like you have the medication and it's like the pill it's something that changes your hormones and and the last point of the reproductive trauma is the loneliness and isolation and that that is the the sense that people are feeling like

not understood that they cannot share different cultures have different perspectives on this of course like how open is your your surroundings for you to share this and what is this support so there's these five layers of the reproductive trauma that I saw and that is like a thread a red thread throughout the different studies wow a red thread I love that another aspect of this is that you are probably in a setting with other people where you're not like most women are not going through it all alone. The importance of, since I did focus on women who are partnered, because there are women who do it without partners as well. But this focus was on those with partners, how partnership support, how important that was. And it has an impact on your relationships.

It definitely impacts your sex life and your intimacy with your partner. But what's positive is that when you have a supportive partner, the relationship can grow stronger. So that's a really like beautiful things to see how couples really in these different cultures felt like they came. It was strenuous. it did cause a lot of like fights and things like that or just irritation and it can be from having two different perspectives of the journey but i also saw that there was it was beautiful to see how couples could become stronger when they went through it together and then the last aspect of of this the third theme was the sense of being failed by the health care system and society and that is due to lack of psychological support

it was so focused on the physical being and that's throughout all of those countries and some are high income countries and they're still not support or any like holistic thinking um not being fully informed what it is that's happening what it what the like the diagnosis the root the cause uh not what i could see like people women were really afraid of the side effects and how it impacts them long term but it was the sense of women not being fully informed because they are going in and out of the doctor's office in a very short time and this is like life-changing things and the most important i want to say this very clearly it's it is besides the lack of psychological support it's actually the dehumanization and lack of compassion from health care professionals that these women expressed and that is very sad it's something that like the humanity and I mean the work that we do for example the support on all

levels it's not there it's not even there for women barely who give birth who have got given birth who are in so there's so many layers of a woman's cycle that that is happening and we can see it in like across like the different countries and the different settings so yeah that's that's what I saw and it was a really insightful like investigation that I did it really really it's surprising but not surprising menstrual cycle awareness was a massive resource for me going through infertility. It helped me to cultivate trust both in my body and also in life's greater seasons and cycles. And if you'd like a supportive framework for your infertility process or for any of life's initiatory experiences, I recommend getting a copy of Alexandra and Sharni's book Wild Power which you can find at

wildpowerbook.com. So I edited this conversation with Shireen because I literally could have spoken to her for hours and I had to take out an earlier section about how Middle Eastern goddess mythology has influenced her understanding of the initiation of infertility, including her work and study with the goddess Ishtar or Inanna, as she's often known, and the story of her descent into the underworld. But we're going to pick it up again now. So I wanted to set the scene with you before we begin. Let's get back into the conversation with Shireen. What fascinates me about you, Shireen, there was one thing you said in an interview with you that I was listening to this morning, you can see the connections between the challenges that women are facing now and the marginalization and I think it's also important

to name that there are non-binary people and people who don't identify as women and trans this glorification of the goddess and the feminine and of woman had continued would we be seeing the impact that we're seeing today on so many levels of the lives of women and menstruators but particularly when it comes to infertility Yeah, I mean, I feel like when the mythological story starts changing, also society starts changing because you go from having this goddess that like worships herself and her vulva to going into like belittling her because she has different consorts,

for example, in the stories. And then that comes into the Genesis story and Lilith, for example, who's also part of Ishtar's story as the serpent and her like sovereignty that she wanted to claim and demonifying her. So it's like a lineage that that just something shifted and we have no idea how it was 10 000 years ago like we can just see like from

these are very like old scriptures that's found in mesopotamia um but the role of women and menstruators like you say and and how that is reflected in how the earth is being treated and then it it like evolves into everything in society and where there's imbalance this is the result look how the world has has evolved and it's not about one being more than the other it's about coming back into balance so like you said we as women if you are in deep grief or pain physical pain like a menstruation pain maybe all of us can relate to that feeling of feeling all the women's pain in one moment in our body and that is the lineage because we're all connected so when we have this imbalance and still the imbalance in the the women doing unpaid work because I did do an internship in UN women as well and that was really insightful to see like women's empowerment from that

perspective as well like from leadership perspective from yeah just like acknowledging that for example nurses and midwives it's like it is a it is a profession that is so important. I mean, Florence Nightingale did show that with statistics. But how long ago was so long ago? But still, in many countries, it's not in place. So seeing that women are underpaidpaid women's jobs are underpaid like we see this the cause of this the effects of this route that happened so many thousand years ago it's it's blossomed out like this so the importance for me to show with with the work that i've done in the intellectual field is that we need to shift

like the system needs to shift and I'm not the first one to say it but I'm at least highlighting it again and we have many women's causes but this one is in particular for me important and then for me personally how I work with, I do have a devotional practice. I've gone through a priestess year with the goddess and not in service only to myself, to all of humankind and womankind. And to support women in the ways that I can through channeling, through through lifting her up then I feel like at least in this lifetime I'm contributing to something and hopefully we see a shift in these upcoming decades that that we're in but it takes. Because if we had thousands of years of imbalance and we still see the imbalance,

we see the imbalance of political leaders from like the women are underrepresented in very important roles in society. That's why this has not been prioritized. We need to prioritize humans and we need to prioritize especially if you go into also how is the um like the midwifery care for women who are going to give birth who are giving birth post birth like that whole part this is a the beginning of a human life is there anything more important like this earth would just be an earth if there

wasn't humans on it and mother earth will stay alive but it's not sure that we will stay alive so how can we take care of each other in on this planet wow you've just named so many incredibly important themes and done such a great job of weaving together the the history and all of the impacts of the way our focus changed several thousand years ago from honoring and looking down to our bodies and the earth as sacred to looking up to a concept in the sky as sacred and not that there isn't much beauty in um christianity and islam and hinduism and all the religions that exist today but there is uh there was a cost and that cost is being seen in in women's bodies just to as we close the conversation i'd love to hear how you understand infertility and the procedures that many of us go through through an initiatory lens like through the lens of the initiatory stories like the underworld journey of Ishtar

it's a good question because now I focused on what's like wrong with the system and the like negative experiences as I said everything is the goddess so there's we all have everyone carries their own weight of something right and some things are just, feels like very unfair or like what, you know, this is also an old thought, like, is this a punishment or is this like karma? What is this? But like, I see that all of these things that we go through as women in different ways, because we have so many stories of grief and loss. And there's so many ways that reproductive trauma can come up.

It is like what I've seen, an invitation from the goddess. Even if you don't have a spiritual path or you don't identify that you have a connection with a divine thing, it still is something initiating you forward on your path. nothing is a waste of time or experience because everything you can always like my my like rule my like motto in life is that I really trust in in my path and what is ahead of me even when I can't see it clearly and that is a practice because sometimes you dip in and you forget okay what like I'm this little being and I'm like these things are happening to me and it's not fair of course we're human we feel like that but it's you know it's like in Vedanta when like the soul that has forgotten it's part of that light of something greater so that's like the constant movement back into that oneness and for me personally I am holding her hand as if she is

my mother and she is walking me for she's walking ahead of me and I can trust her that's how I go through things in life I am in full I trust her as a child trusts its mother I know that she will not take me somewhere where I'm not supposed to be and when I am in that darkness I'm back into her womb and she is enveloping me in her womb and that's why embracing all of the emotions that come into life everything that goes on in our cycles and being conscious of it and doesn't mean that we fix it have to fix everything or change things everything just is so I feel like when you come into that and you come into a greater communion and devotion to something to yourself to your own womb you connect with something deeper that can help you see the clear initiations that you've had in life how important they are

and how they are moving you forward and you can always do something with it or just be in it so you can um nothing is is uh like um everything has a clear purpose it's just that we cannot see everything right now if we had more time I would love to debate that with you because I feel like my journey of infertility I had that belief and it shifted through the journey um and it's possibly just where I'm at in my level of evolution but I I guess it opened me up to see in my my truth is that I'm inside a tapestry that I can never I can never understand because it's so nuanced and full and complex and and rich so I'm not sure I personally I'm not sure if there's a reason for everything that happens to me, but I do know that I'm woven into just the arms of life and that there is life is always flowing and always changing. But, you know, that we could go into that for a long time.

Yeah, it's such an interesting topic and comes into so much in different parts of life. So it's yeah, it can definitely be talked about for many hours that's part two part two part two and now um in closing shireen i'd love to hear if you had one message for people who are going through infertility right now or approaching ivf or have had several rounds and what would you say to someone who's in the middle of this initiation of infertility? I think one thing is that you're not alone and you have everything that you need within you to go through it because you are much stronger than you think and everything will every all the pain and grief will one day transform into something new

a fuel or more love more compassion so just know that even when you are in that darkness, is that there's always, you will always have an ascension from that. Just like Inanna Ishtar went down into the underworld, died. And that was an initiation for her to come back even stronger and more insightful and more wise, wiser than she's ever been seeing things more clearly so that's what I want to and also a lot of love and support for everyone who's going through this and if anyone want to connect with me please do that I would love to hear your

story and yeah just share how can people connect with you shereen if they've if they've loved what you're saying and would like to learn more and be with you more yeah so i have mostly active on my instagram love positivism and the same name for facebook and my youtube channel, where I also have very many beautiful women coming and sharing and supporting and sharing their story. And also my website, lovepositivism.com. I do offer healings and other types of work that I've been doing for many, years so if you are going through something like this you can definitely connect with me and and I will see if I can support in any way. Thank you this has been so fascinating and I deeply appreciate your capacity to be talking at multiple levels at the same time and your passion for this for unearthing

um the the pain and the challenge of infertility in such a fruitful and beautiful way and I feel I feel healed after this conversation you know I feel like you see me you understand me you get this whole crazy picture of infertility. And I hope everyone listening has a taste of that as well. Thank you so much for your generosity. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, everyone.

Thanks for joining us today. Thank you for being part of the community listening to this podcast the best way you can support us is by hopping on to leave a quick review on apple podcasts that's what helps to bring more people to the podcast so we would really really appreciate that okay i will see you next week and until then keep living life according to your own brilliant rhythm