Surrender is not Quitting, it’s Releasing Resistance – Yoga with Kerry Hinds

Kerry Hinds 

The 5,000 year old yoga system is about presence and connecting to the universe, the higher self. So with yoga, I’m trying to tap into that energetic body and kind of balance it out, smooth it out, create the space, slow it down so that we can find that sense of openness. And when we’re there, surrender to this, “Ah, there is so much more to this than just my want and my push.” So we walked away and we thought, “You know what? If we don’t have a baby, we can still have a wonderful life.”

Lorne Brown 

By listening to the Coherence Code Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition, either in yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guests or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast, where we explore how the mind and body work together so you can move from stress and inner conflict to clarity, calm, and alignment. My name is Lorne Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical epitherapist. And through my work, I’ve seen that healing happens when we remove what gets in the way and allow the body and the nervous system to do what they’re designed to do to heal. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast.

My guest today is Kerry Hinds. She’s the founder of Fertile Body Yoga, and she’s a longtime yoga teacher who specializes in fertility, nervous system regulation, and the art of receptivity. Now, I wanted to have Kerry on because her work is grounded in lived experience. Unfortunately, she’s had pregnancy losses in years of IVF. The good news is that it ultimately ended in her growing and having a family, and it came through a lot of her practices like Yin and Restorative Yoga, Yoga Nidra, and Ayurvedic Medicine. And at the heart of her teaching is a simple truth that I’ve learned. When the body’s in survival mode, fertility takes a backseat and creating space, not necessarily effort is what restores flow. So Kerry, welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast.

Kerry Hinds 

Well, thank you so much for having me, Lorne. I’m happy to be here. My Vancouver friend, we are from the same place, so I’m happy to be with you today. It’s going to be great to talk about all of these things.

Lorne Brown 

Those apps where they can follow your bike ride, your travel. So, born in North Vancouver, so we’re born in the city where I live. Then where did you end up going after that?

Kerry Hinds 

Oh, so then I moved to Squim. Well, Victoria, Squim, Washington, which is the Olympic Peninsula, then to Germany, then to Boston.

Lorne Brown 

Wait, in Boston, and that’s where you know of Alice Domar’s work who we’ve had on our podcast because she does a lot about stress and emotions around fertility.

Kerry Hinds 

Yes. And I worked at her center, the Domar Center in Boston, teaching yoga.

Lorne Brown 

Okay. Oh, wow. So there’s a lot of research throughout Domar to our listeners, and I didn’t know this until right now. Kerry worked at the Domar Center. I’m doing yoga for that. That’s amazing.

Kerry Hinds 

Yeah. For their mind, body program. The mind body program, which became famous

Lorne Brown 

It became really world renowned. Yeah.

Kerry Hinds 

I mean, I wasn’t in the original study, but a few years later. Yeah.

Lorne Brown 

But you were immersed in her program. You had that experience and you did the yoga for it. So that’s good street cred. 

Kerry Hinds

It’s good street cred. Yes. Thank you very much. Yeah. And so Boston, which is where I started all the fertility yoga, which I’m sure we’ll get into, but then we came back to Washington State. So now I live in Leavenworth, Washington. So up in the mountains in a teeny, tiny town.

Lorne Brown 

And we’re close by. We’re still an easy drive, so that’s good.

Kerry Hinds 

Maybe one of these days. My family’s still there. I could see you. We could have coffee for sure. 

Lorne Brown

I’m sure we have common friends here in the Vancouver area, know people that know people, that know each other. 

Kerry Hinds 

Yep.

Lorne Brown 

So I want to start with your lived experience. And if you’re open and willing, from everything that happened, because I find when people hear the lived experience, you got some knowledge and experience of supporting people through this journey, but you also went through this journey. And so I’m sure your work is deeply informed by your own fertility journey. You said, I know I love you talking about IVF. You’ve had pregnancy loss, which I know is devastating for so many people. I want you to share about when or why you stopped some of the interventions like IVF and how you got pregnant without it, and how old were you when you went through all this and how it impacted your training. So your lived experience, this part I’m really curious about, and I think my listeners would want to know this as well.

Kerry Hinds 

Sure. Yeah, thank you. I’ll try and make it succinct because there’s a lot. But basically I didn’t really think about having kids until I was in my mid- 30s because I hadn’t really met anybody that I was like, I want to have babies with you. I was an outwardbound instructor, a backcountry park ranger. I was traveling a lot and working at ski resorts. It just wasn’t even really on my mind. And so I met my now husband and I was living in Victoria and he was over, you know what I’m talking about, but in the Olympic Peninsula. So we were doing this long distance relationship thing, living on a sailboat. So we just got married and I moved there, got on a sailboat, and then we decided to sell the sailboat and he got a job in Germany. So we moved to Germany and I thought, well, maybe this is the time for me to have kids because I didn’t have a job.

I didn’t know what I was going to do, what things would look like for me. And I knew that Germany had a really great social support system for new parents and all of that. So when we got there, we just started trying. And like many people, you think as soon as I start trying, it’s going to happen and here we go and here’s my plan and my story, and this is how it’s all going to work out. And it didn’t. So I ended up trying for a few months and went to a German IVF clinic, which for us was luckily in our teeny, tiny little university town. So that was great. And all Eastern Germany is where we live. So everything was in German and I hardly spoke any German. So I was recruiting friends that I just met like, will you come to a fertility clinic with me and translate what they’re trying to tell me?

It was like an extra level of stress. So whenever I have people who are not doing this in their mother tongue or their first language, I have a lot of empathy for them and how difficult it can be to navigate that. And so we just started with IUIs as most people do. And the testing was coming back unexplained/some male fertility things. My hormones weren’t great. So they’re like, let’s just do some IUI and see. We’ll pick the good sperm, we’ll see what happens. And we did get pregnant on our first IUI actually, and we were like, “This is it. Yay.” And of course, as you mentioned, that ended in a loss, which was being in a different country, in a different culture as well, different bedside manner around things. I’ve found this to be a particularly traumatizing moment in the whole journey as it is for many, but it was really hard to navigate not speaking the language and knowing really what was happening in my body and to my body in those moments.

So we went further along the track. We moved into IVF, and this was many years ago, so 15-ish years ago. And ICSI was sort of the new thing on the block. And they’re like, okay, well, we did a couple fresh transfers. We did some frozen embryo transfers and all of this and nothing … Oh, sorry. Curious,

Lorne Brown 

When you said you did a couple transfers, so how many retrievals, so fresh transfers did you do and how many frozens did you do? Do you remember?

Kerry Hinds 

So we did two fresh and then we did … So the first retrieval, we got, I think, 14 eggs. And this was before PG, all the testing and things. No testing. Yeah. Were they even

Lorne Brown 

Growing them out to blast a cyst then when you first started? Sometimes they were day three transfers versus day five?

Kerry Hinds 

So we did both. Okay.

So it was the new sort of like, let’s try day five, let’s do day three. And so we did fresh day three, day five, and none of those stuck. And then we had two more egg retrievals, which were frozen embryo transfers. So then they did frozen five day-ish. And again, nothing stuck. And we came to the point where we were like, this is a lot. We have three years of our lives that we’ve been living in Germany and this is what has become our lives. And we decided that let’s just take a step back. I was tired. I was emotional. I had gained a lot of weight. I cried all the time. I was just in general sort of feeling unhappy. And I was also doing a lot of yoga at that time, which I think really supported me as I was going through things and giving me perspective and a place to land and consistency.

So we walked away and we thought, you know what? If we don’t have a baby, we can still have a wonderful life, which I think-

Lorne Brown 

That’s key. To get to that place

Kerry Hinds 

To get to that place, it’s hard and you can’t get there. You can’t fake it.

Lorne Brown 

I always say this idea of being okay, there’s two ways to get there, two general ways. One is that life brings you to your knees. You just throw up your hands in the air and you’re like, “I give up. God, you deal with this. Universal energy you do this. You just brought to your knees,” which is a forced surrender, which is not, I think, how people would choose to get there because that means you’ve been beaten up pretty bad to get to that place. And then what I do in my work and what you do with yoga, notice except choose again, is my process, is to consciously, purposely get to this place of surrender where you want it, but you’re not overattached to it. There’s a form of letting go where the resistance drops. So I just wanted to bring that up to our audience that you don’t have to … There are purposeful ways to do it.

So you’ve gone through, just to kind of recap, I’m not sure how many retrievals. It sounds like you had anywhere from two to four retrievals at least.

Kerry Hinds 

Three.

Lorne Brown

So you had three retrievals and then a couple of transfers. None of those ended up in a pregnancy. The IUI, the interinsemination, got a pregnancy. Unfortunately, you lost that,

And then you had the time and expense and unsuccessful IVF cycles. Then you stopped doing this. And then can you tie in at this point, it’s neat because you got to it … I don’t know how you got there, but that part where you got to is that place of presence where you wanted the baby, but you still realize you’re going to have a wonderful life. I often explain to patients when they say, “What am I going to do if this doesn’t work?” And then I asked, “Well, tell me what your life is like now.” And most of them have the most amazing life. So I said, “Well, then you know what it will be like if you don’t have your baby, you’re living that life.”

Kerry Hinds 

Yeah, it’s so true. I feel like I often explain it that moment, it was pivotal because I think my body, and I say it like this, my body exhaled because there’s so much pressure that we put on ourselves and our bodies to make this happen, and especially as women, as we navigate all the things that we’re told we need to do to make egg quality, this and that, all the things. So that pivotal moment, my body just was like, “Oh my gosh, thank you. Thank you. I just needed a break.” And even though we give ourselves these little mini breaks between cycles or something, we’re still on that train. We’re still going in that full speed ahead direction. So yeah, my body exhaled. I think it just released the stress, I don’t want to say disappeared, but it dissipated. And then two months later, I was pregnant with my first son, which we were like, “Whoa, what the hell just happened?

We just went through three years of this. ” But I also think that was the arc of our story to get there. And that was the baby we were meant to have at that time. And then nine months postpartum, I was pregnant again. After having a very tough postpartum, I will say, and not trying to have another baby, having sex once I became pregnant again, which surprised me very much so. We were very surprised because we thought we had our miracle baby. So I do have two sons now. They are 13 and 12.

Lorne Brown 

And to unpack this, because from my lens, you came to this place of surrender, this is my view of it because you actually, you were reminding our listeners, you were practicing yoga during this challenging time.

And so you were doing things to support yourself. And this yoga, there’s many styles of yoga, but the yoga that I really relate to is what I’ve learned because I don’t practice yoga, but talking to yogis, it’s a spiritual practice. We think of yoga as like going to the gym, exercise, but yoga … So there’s many pathways to presence. There’s many pathways to drop the resistance to get into flow and receptivity. I use an approach with my acupuncture and this conscious work or form of hypnosis work, notice, accept, choose again, and many tools to help people get into this state of surrender where flown receptivity happens. You were doing yoga, and then it’s one of those things that’s hindsight. It’s not like you’re just living your life and then all of a sudden you realize something’s shifted. And for me, the way you described it is, “We’re going to be okay.

I can handle this. ” You didn’t like it. I always say, you can be at peace in an unhappy

Kerry Hinds 

Situation.

Lorne Brown 

You weren’t fighting with your reality anymore. And then it’s kind of like when people give up and then they get drunk and have sex on the beach and they get pregnant or they adopt a child because they couldn’t get pregnant and now they get pregnant naturally. All those to me are, oh look, the resistance has now dropped and now flown receptivity happens. And you were able to conceive naturally after IUI with the miscarriage, three retrievals, multiple transfers, not successful, and then you got, you called it your miracle baby, the surrender baby, and then later you got another baby not expecting it because you weren’t putting effort into it.

Kerry Hinds 

Yeah, I felt there was a spaciousness that opened up. And I think, and I say this to my students in yoga class too, the magic happens in the space. When things are tight or forced or everything in fear, it’s this action that we’re trying to have babies so hard and we’re just squeezing and holding so tight that we’re not letting anything in. We’re not being receptive. And so when we release and we say, let’s put some space into life around this. And I think really that’s what we did. We were like, we’re putting space around IVF. We were done with IVF. We’re done. And then that opened up this huge other space that just was more receptive. It was more, I don’t know, my time, my way to do it. Not to say IVF works for so many people and I love IVF and everything like that, but my story ended this way.

Lorne Brown

Yeah. And when you say space, I want to do a deep dive into that actually a bit more. And like you just said, the being that we were talking about earlier if you were no longer doing IVF, you conceive naturally, somebody can have that sense of spaciousness. I call it presence beyond space and time actually when you’re in presence, when you’re fully receptive and are doing IVF. Some people will find that baby thrive. Again, I’ve become fairly clear that it’s not so much the action. Right action must follow right thinking or right action must follow right being this. And that means your beingness is taking you through an IVF process or your case being this way, this is not my journey, this baby’s coming through this way. So like you said, it’s not like, should I do IVF or not? It’s about getting to what you call spacious.

So let’s talk about the surrender because you speak of 

Kerry Hinds 

Surrender

Lorne Brown 

And you speak of surrender not as giving up, but it’s creating space. I use it for my listeners, this is what I call the present moment when you get into that presence, beyond space and time. So I’m curious, now that you’ve lived this experience and you’ve been practicing for well over 20 years at the time of this recording, how do you help someone surrender without abandoning their desire for a baby? Because I believe you can have both at the same time. You can surrender and still want the baby. Curious, what’s your process or how do you help someone surrender without abandoning their desire or how can they hold both at the same time? How can both be true?

Kerry Hinds 

Yeah, well, both can be true. And I think first we need to realize that it’s not an if or this or that and or a zero sum game or any of that. So I think with yoga, I mean, yoga is all traditional, right? The 5,000 year old yoga system is about presence and connecting to the universe, the higher self or drama or whatever we want to call it. So yoga in itself is that practice. It’s been changed and developed differently in the Western world, but I think that there’s still this underlying pulse of what yoga is in it. So like you said, yoga doesn’t have to always be this powerful hot yoga experience that ‘s exercise-based to get our yoga bums and our whatever and our fancy pants on. But really when we go back to the traditional text, yoga was just moving our bodies in a way so that we could sit in meditation and connect to being.

And when I look at the fertility yoga that I teach, yes, we go through asana or poses and shapes with our bodies, but what I’m really trying to do as we move through is to connect the mind and the body on an energetic level. So when we talk about mind, body all the time, which is the buzzword of the last 20 years, mind, body, mind, body, mind, body, which is very important. And from the yoga perspective, what connects the mind and the body is the energy. Our energetics are connecting the two. So often we leave that piece out. So with yoga, I’m trying to tap into that energetic body and kind of balance it out, smooth it out, create the space, slow it down so that we can find that sense of openness. And when we’re there, that’s when, and like you said, surrender is not … I don’t want to have a baby anymore.

I surrender to this. It’s this surrendering to this, “Ah, there is so much more to this than just my want and my push.” And then you can fall into that. You can let that support you, that you’re being Kerry and kind of let go of the noise a little bit so that there is space. Did that make sense? I was going off on tangents.

Lorne Brown 

No, it does. And I have this process that I call notice, accept, choose again. And it’s a process that I think when I look at people that are doing this kind of conscious work, I can see NAC on top of what they’re doing. And the key is the accepting part,

Kerry Hinds 

Accepting

Lorne Brown 

Is letting go, accepting your surrender. That doesn’t mean you’re resigned to it. That doesn’t mean you’ve given up. It means you’re just no longer fighting with reality and you described it. Let’s ground this though for our listeners in this materialistic world.

And I will share that I was recently at a conference where the speaker, one of the speaker psychologists, PhD, psychologist, well-known, well-written, said that our reality actually has two dimensions. There’s the Newtonian and the quantum. He says they actually both exist. So we’re living it. There’s a living experience here, so I don’t want to deny the materialistic side of it. So let’s talk a bit about that and bring what I often find what you described as this softening and surrendering less noise is a form of nervous system regulation. Because when you get into this spiritual aspect of presence, the sense of peace sometimes will come over you. If we were to measure it, we would see changes from sympathetic to parasympathetic. So there’s so much talk about when you’re in survival mode, so when you’re in sympathetic, energy is mobilized for survival, therefore less resources are available for healing, creativity and reproduction.

And when your body feels safe, when you go into the parasympathetic nervous system, when the body can really heal, the rest and digest, also known as the breathe and feed nervous system. Now you free up resources for healing, creativity, and reproduction. So how does the nervous system regulation shift fertility in ways people don’t usually consider?

Kerry Hinds 

Yeah. So I mean, when I think about nervous system regulation, which I think is also a bit of a buzzy thing right now, we need to regulate our nervous systems. I like to think of it as a dance between the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. We can’t be in both at the same time we’re in one or the other. And when we think about the chronic stress that comes along so much with this fertility journey and being kind of stuck in this, who’s leading the dance, often the lead in the dance will be our stress response. And then our parasympathetic is following along, waiting to cut in and be like, I need some rest, I need some rest. So I like to think of it as this sort of dance between the two and that we share the lead. We need to share the lead sometimes.

And so this is where yoga can really be so beneficial for that dance is that we know in yoga all these little, I don’t necessarily call them triggers, but things that we could do to help us go parasympathetic, to get the vagus nerve engaged. So when I teach yoga, I think about the specifics. So sometimes a little bit of darkness. So I tell my students, practice in the dark. If you feel safe, turn your lights off. So darkness, we don’t want bright lights in our face, we want quietude, but ambient music is fine, but something relaxing that will help trigger that parasympathetic. And then we have support. So lying flat on the floor is hugely … It is so amazing. You know this in acupuncture, you have people lie down flat on the table. You don’t have them sitting up doing acupuncture. There’s a reason for that.

So support, because then our bodies … Well, we always have to be a little bit alert when we’re standing so we don’t fall over. So we need to be lying down. And weight can be another thing that can feel good for people who aren’t claustrophobic. So we’re just into

Lorne Brown 

You mean weighted blankets? I heard weight.

Kerry Hinds 

Yeah, weighted blankets. I mean, I just use blanket blankets and put a blanket on your pelvis and these sorts of things. So once we start to understand, oh, it’s a practice. I need to work at taking the lead, or my parasympathetic, taking the lead in the dance, because our sympathetic will always win. That’s just the way we’re hardwired to bright light, loud noises, lots of movement. That’s what we have to survive. So those triggers are fast and easy. The parasympathetics are slow. They’re slow and they’re purposeful and they’re meaningful. So when we come to the yoga mat, we can integrate all those things. And I went off track. What was your actual question?

Lorne Brown 

Is there research or from your experience, the practice of yoga, is it a way to quiet the noise? Because when I think people are stressed, I call it noise in the system as well.

Kerry Hinds

Yeah, me too.

Lorne Brown 

So how do you calm the noise? How do you regulate the nervous system? So yes, you can have challenges in life, but you’re not turning on survival mechanisms twenty four seven.

Kerry Hinds 

Yeah. So I think there’s a sense when we come to the yoga mat, when I teach fertility yoga, it is very much about that nervous system dance coming down. So using restorative yoga, using those triggers I talked about earlier, really I think slow down the system enough to create some space and perspective for people because well, we’re just running around all the time in fertility, doing this, doing that, going there, going here, going here.

Lorne Brown 

And were you this person? And yoga is one of those ways to slow down, by the way, because you have to stop and do yoga. 

Kerry Hinds 

Yeah you have to show up. 

Lorne Brown 

It’s that simple, right? But I think of some of the people that have the noise or their systems tense, they’re inhaling, not exhaling. First of all, the fertility journey does that. We know now through research, hence the Alice Domeyer program, we talked about how important the mind, body, and stress reduction is. But were you the people pleaser? Were you a perfectionist? Because so many of the fertility people have done everything they’ve had challenges for. They just pushed through. They just worked a little bit harder, pushed through, found a way and got what they needed or wanted. And this is one of the first things that they don’t have the control to change or to guarantee the change.

Kerry Hinds 

Oh, yes. 

Lorne Brown 

Were you that person? Were you the people pleaser, perfectionist and things like that, because I think Yoga softens that. That’s why I ask.

Kerry Hinds 

Yeah, so yeah. I talk about people pleasing. I call it the three Ps, the patriarchy, people pleasing and perfectionism. And how does that interact with fertility? And you’re right, coming to the yoga mat, I think puts all of that into perspective, slows us down enough, gives us that the space to surrender, let go, release, nourish ourselves, restore ourselves, which we’re just craving because we’re so busy, because we’re running around doing everything. And the way that it shows up really with the perfectionism and the people pleasing, I did this, I’m married, I have a husband, I took everything on myself. I said, “Okay, we’re going to do this diet. Here’s some supplements to take, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And then I also ran around and did all the extra things as well because I didn’t want to upset my husband’s balance of what he had going on.

So I was pleasing him by just giving him all the information saying, “Just do this. ” So I was that person, and I don’t think I saw it necessarily at the moment, and I don’t think most people do. And it stems from the patriarchy, which is what … And we live in a patriarchy, there’s no way around it. And I’m not saying it as a big, bad word, it’s just being aware … Of this, especially for women, growing up, we were told to just be seen, be quiet, smile pretty, be pretty, be kind, be the perfect hostess, do things for other people, put yourself sort of at the end of the line. So when we see that pop up in the fertility journey, we’re doing a lot of things and we’re still not taking care of ourselves. We think we are by running to the appointments and doing all the things, but really we need to slow down.

We need to embrace the feminine. We need to embrace the inside of things. So yes, I was a little bit of that, definitely a perfectionist. I think we see this a lot with the people that I work with who come to yoga because they’re like, “I want to get pregnant. Yoga might help. I’m going to show up. I’m going to do it. ” And then they do the yoga practice and they’re like, “Oh, I get it. ” This has nothing to do with the positive pregnancy test. This is what’s going to help carry me through this whole thing. And by default, that increases your fertility because you’re more parasympathetic. So it’s a little backdoor way to get into boosting fertility, but there’s no secret poses. There’s no algorithm of yoga poses that you do that will guarantee pregnancy.

Lorne Brown 

Our wake-up calls bring us to healing. And so infertility diagnosis and unsuccessful cycles,

That suffering, unfortunately, it’s the suffering that’s often required, but leads us to go within and wake up. And there’s many ways to do this, and yoga’s one of those ways. So like you said, they’re coming to you because maybe the yoga’s going to help me get pregnant. So that’s their motivation. And then through that backdoor, as you described it, they come in and then they’re like, okay, I’m going to be okay. I still want the baby as the process. Sure. Here’s the highlight. I want to share that knowing’s not enough. I think you said it earlier, but we didn’t jump on it as you can’t fake it. You can’t fake letting go.

Kerry Hinds 

No, you can’t. You can try. People say, “Kerry, what do I do? What do I do to let go? ” They stop

Lorne Brown 

Doing everything. I’m going to smoke drugs and I’m going to drink, and I got to do this. But that’s not what we mean by letting go.

Kerry Hinds 

No, no.

Lorne Brown 

Again, letting go is something that’s happening inside of you. Not so much you can judge from the actions. Often they are congruent, but it’s inside of you that lets it go. So two, 300 years ago, we probably needed a lot of energy to cultivate our world, but everything, it gets extreme and now we need the yin. You can’t always-

Kerry Hinds 

We need the yin so badly right now.

Lorne Brown 

Always being young. And by the way, you can’t always be in yin. If we’re always in yin, we’d still be living in huts, just so you know. It’s not one bad or the other, but at certain times of that circadian rhythm, that rhythm is on an hourly clock. It’s on a day clock. It’s on a weekly, monthly, central. So we got to look at it through … On a 24-hour cycle, when you get up, there’s yang time. During the day, there’s yang time with some yin, yin, within yang, yang within yin. There’s time to relax. And then at nighttime is yin time. We see those cycles. In what you’re describing today, because people in the West, we get on something and say, call it the patriarch or yang energy. Yang energy is bad. No, it’s just energy. But you can just look at our world today and go, oh, you know what’s lacking here? You know what we don’t have enough of? Yin.

Kerry Hinds 

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

Lorne Brown 

We need the yin again. It’s time for yin. And yoga, yin yoga restored. So by the way, everybody, yoga, hot yoga would still be very yang still. We’re talking about restorative yoga, yin yoga. I’ve heard you say Kerry, slowing down. And this will lower the noise. This will bring you back to your true self, which there goes the people pleasing and perfectionism when you really tap into that energy is my experience.

Kerry Hinds 

Yeah. Going inward. So even when we’re doing a faster yoga practice, you go to the gym and you sign up for your vinyasa flow class. I mean, you’re looking at your instructor. Energy is still going outwards. You might be peeking at the person next to you, what are they doing? And then there’s a sense of competition that comes in. Even though we say, keep it on your own mat. It’s just human nature. We are like, oh, what are they doing? Oh, maybe I can do that. And we’re heating the body more and we’re running around in a hot world right now. There’s so much masculine and young energy. Ugney, we would say. I do Ayurveda as well. So this is all … So we’re so similar to Chinese medicine and Ayurveda, they grew up next to each other. So there’s so many overlapping concepts.

And I mean, when I think about IVF, IVF is so masculine young. It’s like control, rational. Let’s take this out and do this and do this and then put it back in as very scientific and logical within its realm. So we need to balance that. We need to balance that with a softer feminine or inside the soma, we would say, and Ayurveda, the nectar.

Instead of burning all the time, we need the nectar so that we can continue to burn. And we have lost our soma or your chi or what, or not lost it, but depleted. So how do we bring all of that back in? And acupuncture, of course, is wonderful for this. And so the softer side of yoga is what I call it. Restorative, yin, slow flow yoga. So the way I teach, it’s very experiential, let’s say. It’s like, okay, you’re on the tabletop. You’re going to move around. You’re going to get into where your body wants to lead you, not where you think you should be going, not where you’ve been told you should be going, but where your body is naturally taking you. Of course, within IVF, we need to be a little bit careful with where we take our bodies. But for the most part, your body won’t take you there.

If it had the choice, it wouldn’t take you there to where it would hurt you anyway. So yeah.

Lorne Brown 

Talking about yoga then, I want to summarize what we’ve discussed today. Tell me if I understand your process and jump in at any time. But basically you’ve had this lived experience and what you shared is there’s a place to make … You want to have this place where you have space, room, this presence or yin aspect of yourself nurturing. And the magic happens in this space. That was your experience and what you see for the clients that you help. So receptivity, fertility according to Chinese medicine is a form of receptivity. By the way, we have a great episode with Ranine Lewis all about Chinese medicine receptivity and yin.

Kerry Hinds

Oh, cool.

Lorne Brown 

Yin yoga.

Kerry Hind

I read her book. I read her book

Lorne Brown 

Infertility Cure. Yeah. So this is what you’re talking about, this receptivity. And when you’re in this receptive mode, when you’ve created this space or presence, all of a sudden you are able to see the opportunities because you’re not so narrow focused anymore. You have greater vision. And I’m not just talking visually, you see these opportunities. And you shared that you can hold both at the same time. You can want a baby and still let go and not be over attached. I call it the resistance that can drop. So you have a desire for it and you can accept you have a desire, but you’re not overly attached to desperately needing this baby to be okay.

Kerry Hinds 

Yes, that’s key. I think that’s really key is that I remember saying to myself at one time, “I will not be happy until I have a baby.” And I remember saying that and then I remember and I said that to my husband and he’s like, “Really? Really?” I was like, “Oh.” It was a check for me. It was a reset. I was like, “You know what? Whoa, that is a crazy thing for me to say.” And I know other people are saying it too because I said it. I’m sure they have. Well,

Lorne Brown 

Almost every one of my patients says that. So they come in, so no judgment. Most of them say, “I’m not going to be okay if I don’t have this baby.” And I get that, that’s where they’re at. And then through the work that we do, and I’m saying what you’re doing with yoga, because it fits in the notice except for me. And what I do is they don’t need to change that. And I think I was going down this path, I might not have completed it. Knowing not enough is not enough. Knowing the concepts, you actually have to do the practice.

You can’t be like, “Okay, I’m going to attend letting go. I want to let go. ” And so when I work with people, and I imagine it’s with your yoga, so let’s talk about the yoga here, you actually just got to do the practice. If I was going to advise somebody and they’re looking at yoga and we’ll talk about it, because you have online yoga classes, I’m like, “You got to trust the process. Just do it. Just do it.

Kerry Hinds 

You got to show up.

Lorne Brown 

You are not going to think your way into this baby. You’re not going to think your way through the bad relationship, the work, whatever’s going on, it’s your thinking, the meaning we give it that’s causing the issues usually anyhow. So great, have a bit of understanding, learn. Here we are talking about yoga. We’re saying that there’s benefits here. We’re telling you yoga can help you find that space, that presence to allow receptivity. And it’s just one of those things that has to be experienced. So just trust the process. So the invitation to our listeners is to go check out Kerry’s website.

Kerry Hinds 

Oh, do some yoga.

Lorne Brown 

Go just do it for a while. I just say, when I see people in my practice, I go, “Let’s just do five sessions.” They’re like, “What?” I go, “Five sessions.” I have people who’ve been trying for years, months, they’ve had anxiety, depression. I go, “Can I have five weeks, five sessions?” And we do the acupuncture, the sound table with the conscious work. And I go, “You be the judge of it. See, I feel pretty confident they’re going to see a shift.” So I go, I can’t tell you how it’s going to work. I mean, I can, but you’ve got to experience it.

Kerry Hinds:

Experience it. 

Lorne Brown

Yoga’s the same thing. We can talk about yoga, I can sit and watch yoga. I am not going to benefit unless I experience the practice of yoga. Is that not a fair statement?

Kerry Hinds 

Yeah. And it’s an embodied practice. So we’re taking concepts or whatever and we’re embodying them. And it’s so true. I’m glad you said that because I have had people show up the day before their transfer like, “Oh, I heard yoga is my help. I’m going to come to yoga the day before transfer.” And I mean, I get it. I’m glad people are coming to yoga and found it. But when we’re doing this work, it’s deep. I just think it’s a deep change and deep change takes time. Transformational. Transformational. You come to class, you sign up for a six-week series, carve out that time in your schedule and come every single week. And you will see things just kind of add on to each other. And by the end you’re like, I get it. But like you said, you could watch me do a fertility yoga class.

I’m guilty of that. I’ve been like, oh, well, I like this teacher and I like skip, skip, skip, skip, skip, and look at their flow and like boring, boring, boring, boring. Nope, I’m not going to do it or whatever. But when you’re in the moment doing it, it’s such a different experience than watching or just doing five minutes or there really is, you have to show up for yourself.

Lorne Brown

Show up for yourself. That’s the key. You got to show that you’re worthy, that you value yourself. So take the time, slow down. Like you said, slow down. And by sitting down and you’re going to do 20 minutes or an hour of yoga, whatever it is, just do that. And small actions done regularly lead to big results.

Kerry Hinds 

Oh, yes.

Lorne Brown 

So that first yoga class or whatever, second yoga class, I don’t know if anything’s happening. Third yoga class. Three months later, six months later, you will look back and go, okay, something’s changed. I can see it.

Kerry Hinds 

And I think what you were talking about, cutting out the noise and things like that, I think that yoga can be physical, emotional, mental, energetic, spiritual. And that’s what I love about it. It’s like a package. So you don’t have to run to five different appointments. Still go see your acupuncturist, of course.

Lorne Brown 

See your acupuncturist. What I’m highlighting from your work, Kerry, is that yoga gets you into place of this space, this presence, this letting go, which changes the flavor or the essence behind the action because it’s that beingness that impacts the doing this.

Kerry Hinds 

Yeah. There’s this fear that I think we, and having done it, we make choices based on fear when it comes to fertility so much, especially when it comes around the noisy things, the small things. You see that ad on Instagram for tea. It’s like, “Ooh, I need that tea because if I don’t take that tea, maybe I won’t get pregnant.” So then there’s this pressure to try everything. And I’ve heard people say this to me all the time, “I’m throwing everything at it. I’m trying everything. I’m doing everything right.” And I’m like, okay, but where’s the intentionality behind it? Are you choosing to do these things for fear of never having a child? Or are you taking a step back and going, okay, I think I talk about this in my minimalist fertility thing that I like to talk about, but it’s like when you start or wherever you are in your journey right now, you can just stop, take a moment and choose a word or a phrase that is important to you to carry through this journey.

And some people, it’s like trust or balance, whatever, grace and gratitude. And a lot of the time it has to do with when I talk to people, they choose something that’s like, I don’t want to lose myself or I want to stay true to who I am. And of course this is transformational work. So you’re going to transform as you go, but you don’t want to lose yourself in the journey. And I think that happens so easily, especially right now because there’s so much noise and there’s so much information now coming at us all the time that we really are overwhelmed and we think we need to do all the things. So if we can take this one phrase with us and every time something comes up, a stressful moment, a choice to be made, like, should I go and buy this $200 tea or whatever we have to wait, I have something to come to all the time be like, “Am I losing myself here?

Or if I’m at the doctor’s office, are they telling me to go straight into another IVF treatment, but I don’t want to. I wanted to be gentle with my body through this process and give it time, then oh, I’m going to come back to that and recognize that. ” And that will really just help all the noise kind of disappear. And then there’s more space that we can make intentional choices not based in fear, which is sadly, it’s hard, but it takes time.

Lorne Brown 

And on that note, yoga, let’s talk about what you have to offer them.

Kerry Hinds 

So

Lorne Brown 

How do they find you? And I think sometimes you have little free testers classes. Can you tell us-

Kerry Hinds 

Oh, the fertilebodyyoga.com for fertility yoga. Yes.

Lorne Brown 

Okay. We’ll go to the show notes. You said fertilebodyyoga.com.

Kerry Hinds 

Fertilebodyyoga.com

Lorne Brown 

Is where you’ll find some classes. And is there anywhere you want them to go to do a class?

Kerry Hinds

Sure. So I’ve got a lot on the website. So first, I’ll just say, I don’t know when you’re airing this, but I do offer livestream. Everything is online, six-week series or longer sometimes. They’re always going on. So if you want to come and you want to create a community around this, what I love about the livestream classes, well, one, you’re at home and you’re creating sanctuary in your own space to remind you that you are capable of relaxing and renewing and doing these things. You don’t have to travel, so it’s really easy to get to. And then we do sort of a check-in when we start the yoga practice, and this really helps with the community piece. So it’s like you got 20 other people, little screen squares on Zoom, nodding and understanding and yes and giving information back and forth. And that’s one of my favorite parts of the yoga piece.

You’re so powerful. The community piece. So powerful.

Lorne Brown 

That’s great. So those are live streams. And just check out our website because regardless when this airs, people come to these and find these. This could be years later.

Kerry Hinds 

Yeah. And there’s lots of on- demand stuff. So if you can’t make it live, there’s a frozen embryo transfer program, a pregnancy loss program, an early pregnancy after IVF and loss because as you probably know and experience, it can be a highly stressful time. And you finally got the pregnancy that you’ve been wanting, but then you’ve had a loss in your past or there’s trauma that we’re carrying with us into it. So how do we soften around that and be where we are right now without being stuck in the future of the past? So yeah, there’s so much on there. There’s free videos. There’s, I don’t know, right now, I think there’s a manifestation bowl, which is not like this is what I want and whatever, but it’s a really beautiful way to tie everything in. So there’s lots of things on there, lots of yoga.

Just reach out to me. Just email me and be like, I don’t know where to start. Help me. I can help you. 

Lorne Brown 

And we’ll put your other social media links in the show as well.

Kerry Hinds 

Yeah, thank you.

Lorne Brown

Kerry, thank you so much for taking time to chat today. I really appreciate it. And thanks for offering the yoga online and the community yoga live and on demand all online so people have access to this. I invite our listeners to do the process. Go for it and see what happens. Give yourself that gift and the links are down below. And Kerry, thank you very much for today.

Kerry Hinds 

Oh, thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.

Lorne Brown 

How was that?

Kerry Hinds 

Good. So my friend, she swears you were her acupuncturist for her son. I was like, “Hey, what was that acupuncture? Where did you go with all … ” Because she had multiple miscarriages and she couldn’t hold the pregnancies. And she said that you are the only reason why her son is born.

Lorne Brown 

Oh, well, like you and I, the work that we do with respect to fertility, it’s so nice to hear those stories, right? Thank you for spending this time with us on the Coherence Co-Podcast. I’m Dr. Lorne Brown, and I will see you next week for another conversation on coherence and healing. If this conversation resonated with you, please like, subscribe or follow the show, and also share it with someone who might benefit from it as well. Remember to take a moment to breathe, reflect, and stay connected. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast.