Have you ever thought about how many times a week…a day…you think the words ‘I hope’? ‘I hope the traffic isn’t bad today’ … ‘I hope I don’t get the flu from my coworker’. And if you are traveling on the road to fertility, then I may sound like ‘I hope this is the month I finally get pregnant’ … or if you have been on that road a very long time, maybe it sounds like ‘I hope I get my period so I can keep trying…’
Do any of these thoughts actually create hope? Or create the feeling of hope? Or do these thoughts create more mind chatter – you know, the ‘monkey mind’ – as if the thoughts were just questions to keep the negative thoughts endlessly spinning? Questions answered like: ‘of course there will be a lot of traffic – I live in Houston, ug.’ … ‘I always get sick when anyone sick breathes anywhere near me’ … ‘why would this month be any different than the last one, the last five or … thirty?’
The hope that we desire to tap into is more than a feeling, more than a fleeting wishful conceptual thought. It is a knowing that anything is possible – with no conditions attached. Now that may be a new concept – unconditional thought. The conditions only make the thoughts spin more. For example, ‘I could get pregnant IF I did everything I am supposed to do (ie. if I get acupuncture, if I take herbs, if I do yoga, if I meditate daily, if I always think positive, if I avoid eating sugar and dairy etc. etc. etc.)’ or if I was ten years younger, if I had married sooner, if I hadn’t put my career first’….back to spinning thoughts, yes? And further away from hope. It is almost as if the IF is protection against hoping too much. The insurance, if you will, that we will have recourse if the miracle doesn’t happen. We can blame the sugar, or the gluten or the PCOS or age or something in our past… etc. etc. etc. … After all, it would be just too much to accept that the pregnancy doesn’t come just because.
Once during one of the darker years of my infertility, a social worker said to me that it was just ‘luck of the draw’. This was incomprehensible to me. No, it had to be my fault somehow. Maybe something that I had done that made me undeserving…not good enough…unworthy. Or it had to be something physically wrong inside me that must be fixed. There had to be a reason. It couldn’t be just because. That left me with no recourse. No power. No hope.
I ran across this quote about hope:
Hope transforms pessimism into optimism. Hope is invincible. Hope changes everything. It changes winter into summer, darkness into dawn, descent into ascent, barrenness into creativity, agony into joy. Hope is the sun. It is the light. It is the fundamental force for life’s blossoming.
~ George C. Fraser
This is the hope that transcends all rational thought, all conditions and all fears. This is the hope that I aspire to and sometimes attain and cherish. I never find it in thought. I never find it in questioning. I only find it inside, just under the thoughts and fears, in quiet moments of being. Just being with myself and my breath…just as I am in the present moment, in the now, in this moment. In the moments that I allow all of those thoughts, conditions and fears to melt away, there is room for all things possible.
And in that place, there is hope. The hope which is always available, always there waiting….just under the thoughts, conditions and fears. Hope is yours to know and to own….just because.
Need some help tapping into your hope? Schedule a coaching session with me today.
Love & Joy,
Michelle