The New Year is an apt and powerful metaphor for the fertility process.  When we struggle with infertility it can be very difficult to know when to move forward with our lives and leave “infertility” behind.  This step can feel like a death more than a moving forward. From a psychological perspective, if we insist on prolonging or get stuck in a certain process, we lose the happiness, contentment and ultimately the meaning of the other subsequent stages we have to go through. Closing cycles, grieving loss, closing doors, ending chapters – however we name it, is crucial to the fertility process and ultimately, is part of what enables conception.  We see this in women who have chosen adoption after many years of infertility and suddenly become pregnant. We must let go of past moments of life that have finished and imagined outcomes that are not realized. You did not conceive this past year. You have undoubtedly spent a lot of time and energy wondering why this has happened.  You have told yourself you will do anything and everything in your power to resolve this issue before you take another step forward.  You will not move on until you find out WHY what you thought was so important to you and what feels like your birth right as a woman has turned to dust, just like that.  This attitude is profoundly stressful for everyone involved: for YOU, your partner, your parents, your friends and your siblings. Everyone and everything ends, turns over, begins again, moves on with life.  We suffer emotionally, spiritually and mentally when we can’t let go. You are not pregnant right NOW and so the best thing we can do is to let go.  It is so important (however painful it may be!) to move on. Everything in this visible world is a manifestation of a larger and more constant invisible world, of what is going on in our hearts and minds.  Letting go of infertility also and importantly means making room for other fertile processes to take place, to take root in us. Let go.  Release. Life is profoundly uncertain, so sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. How we deal with LOSS, therefore, is a reflection of how we live.  Naturally, we try and hold onto the thing that is no longer part of our lives.  However, we must understand that it is a stage in a process.  What happens next is very, very important.  Conception is not our birthright.  A fertile developmental process is! What is profoundly stressful is when we avoid loss by trying to do things to FIX what we have little control over.  When we have done all we can and we still do not have what we want, we turn away, walk away, avoid the loss. However what we must know is that ALL things evolve and change.  Which means leaving things behind, grieving and drawing on our strength to move through something. Stop turning on your anxiety news radio to listen to the same program over and over again, the one that describes how much you suffered from a certain loss: that is only poisoning you, nothing else. Nothing is more dangerous than not accepting the present as it is! Before a new chapter is begun, the old one has to be finished: tell yourself that what has passed will never come back. Remember that there was a time when you could live without the child you long for now – nothing is irreplaceable, a longing is not a need. This may sound so obvious, it may even be difficult to accept, but it is very important and it is true. Close this cycles. Not because of pride, incapacity or arrogance, but simply because life is waiting for you to move forward. Shut the door, change the record, clean the house, shake off the dust. Stop being who you imagined you were, and change into who you are. Know that Grief is a door. Emptiness is a door. Disappointment is a door. Anything that calls us to our Divinity is a door. Step through the hole of loss that is at the center of your heart. Then Abre la puerta Open the door. Happy New Year.