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The biological clock
My professional life was a success: marketing manager then journalist, I progressed as I saw fit. For my friends, “Réjane” has always rhymed with rebellion and freedom. I have always decided on everything. One day, at 30, back from a year around the world with my husband, I declared that I had a “window”: I was available, I was of age, so it was the moment to have a child. After seven years of waiting, my husband and I went to see a specialist. The verdict is in: I was sterile. And given my age and my ovarian reserve level, the doctor advised us not to try anything, believing little in an oocyte donation. This announcement did not devastate me, I was disappointed, but rather relieved since science had spoken. She gave me the reason for this prolonged wait. I will not become a mother. In seven years, I had already given up on the case a bit and this time I could definitely close the case. True, except that eight months later, I got pregnant. This is where I wanted to understand what had happened. A miracle ? Maybe not.
Ayurvedic medicine helped me release my stress
I had already changed things between the announcement of my infertility and the discovery of my pregnancy.It was unconscious, but Ayurvedic medicine had started the process. Just before going to see the specialist, I went on a report to Kerala and we took the opportunity, my husband and I, to spend a few days in an Ayurvedic clinic. We had met Sambhu, the doctor. We, the typical Westerners (headache for Madame, back pain for Monsieur), were the incarnation of two very stressed people… My husband, no doubt more confident, told the doctor that it had been seven years since was protecting herself more, but that I did not get pregnant. I was furious that he was talking about it. The doctor did not change anything in the planned Ayurvedic process, but we had conversations about life and he thus distilled things in the tone of dialogue: “If you want a child, he said to me, make room for it. “
At the time, I thought: “What is it all about? Yet he was right! He also assured me that if I continued like this, on the hats of wheels in my professional life, my body would no longer follow: “Take time for yourself”. Sambhu then sent us to Amma, the charismatic “hug mom” who has already hugged more than twenty-six million people. I went backwards, not with the desire to be hugged but with the curiosity of the journalist. His hug, by the way, did not upset me, but I saw the devotion of people in the face of this capacity for permanent presence. I understood there what maternal power was. These discoveries have awakened enough things in me that on my return I make the decision to go see a specialist.
The proximity of death, and the urgency to give life
I also switched to 4 / 5ths in order to exercise a profession closer to my aspirations, I continued to have a massage, I worked with a friend on documentaries. These things fed me. I put bricks in place to take a step: basically, I started moving. The following summer, my husband and I went back to the Himalayas and I met a Tibetan doctor who told me about my imbalance on the energy side. “In your body, it’s cold, it’s not welcoming to a child. ” This image spoke to me much more clearly than a hormone level. His advice was: “You lack fire: eat hot, spicy, eat meat, play sports”. I understood why Sambhu, too, had given me clarified butter to eat a few months earlier: it made my interior softer, rounder.
The day I met the Tibetan doctor, a huge storm destroyed half of the village where we were. There were hundreds of deaths. And that night, in the proximity of death, I understood the urgency of life. On the second stormy night, when we were huddled together in a single bed, a kitten came and snuggled up between my husband and I as if asking for protection. There, I understood that I was ready to take care and that there was a place between the two of us for someone else.
Being a mother, a daily struggle
Back in France, the new management of my magazine wanted me to fire someone in the editorial staff and I dismissed myself: I needed to move on. And a few weeks later, my son announced himself. The initiatory path started before being pregnant has continued. I felt great distress at the birth of my son because my father was dying and the pattern of my professional life was complicated. I was frustrated, angry. I wondered what I had to change to endure this life. And then I found myself alone in my father’s apartment emptying his things and I collapsed: I cried and I became a ghost. I looked around and nothing made sense anymore. I was no longer there. A coach friend told me: “A shaman would say that you have lost part of your soul”. I heard what she was implying and I gave myself a weekend of initiation into shamanism, my first weekend of freedom since the birth of my son. When we started hitting the drum, I found myself mentally at home. And it gave me the resource to reconnect with my joy. I was there, in my strength.
Anchored in my body now, I take care of it, I put happiness, roundness and softness into it. Everything fell into the boxes … Being more of a woman does not make me someone less, on the contrary. “Consider that the woman you were is dead and be reborn!” It is this sentence that allowed me to move forward. For a long time I believed that power was mastery. But gentleness is also a power: choosing to be there for your loved ones is also a choice.