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What if achieving fantastic health to support your fertility doesn’t require dogma, perfection, or overwhelm? In this eye opening interview with Chris Axelrad of the Axelrad Clinic in Houston, Texas, learn powerful lessons about how the “best” medicine doesn’t have to be complicated and how what you DON’T do is just as important as what you do! Your approach to medicine on this journey is about to get an awesome upgrade.
Transcript:
Hey gorgeous, if you want success on your fertility journey, you’ve got to have the mindset for it. It’s time to kick fear, negativity, doubt, shame, jealousy, and the whole clown car of low vibe fertility journey BS to the curb. I’m your host, Roseanne Austin, Fertility Mindset Master. Former prosecutor and recovering type A control freak perfectionist.
I use the power of mindset to get pregnant naturally and have my baby boy at 43, despite years of fertility treatment failure. I help women across the globe beat the odds on their fertility journey, just like I did. Get ready for a quick hit of confidence, joy, feminine badassery, and loads of hell yes for your fertility journey.
It’s time to get fearless baby, fearlessly fertile. Let’s do this. Welcome to the Fearlessly Fertile podcast, episode 80, a punk rock approach to natural medicine. Hey, my loves. I am so excited to be presenting you this week with a super awesome interview I did with Chris Axelrod of the Axelrod Clinic in Houston, Texas.
And what I love is bringing you, well, kind of a punk rock approach to this whole fertility thing because, you know, when we are inundated with scary statistics and long face lab coats telling us what we can and can’t do, it can feel really overwhelming. It can feel like conventional medicine is telling us that our dream of being a mom can’t come true.
And it can be hard to reconcile that with the fact that women beat the odds every single day. Like you’ve got to know right now, there’s a woman on a planet of almost 8 billion people who is facing or has faced exactly what you face today. And is holding a baby in spite of that. So I love presenting you with killer information and loads of experts that are really standing for the proposition that we can take responsibility for our health and well being.
And that we don’t have to be at odds with conventional medicine. Conventional medicine can work with natural medicine and many other disciplines to come together. to present you with the best possible circumstances for making your dream of being a mom come true. Sometimes we get really trapped in this idea that we have to pick a side, that, you know, we’re either doing it the natural way or, you know, we’re doing conventional medicine, and it presupposes that any of these things on their own is bad.
And I really want to empower all of you listening to think outside the box and really ask yourself, How can these things work together for me? Because your story is unique. You deserve to be looking at things. Through the context of what is right for you, which is what I love so much about Chris’s approach.
Not only is Chris Axelrod the founder of the Axelrod Clinic in Houston, he’s also the author of the book, Awakening the Seed. Chris is a specialist that uses modalities such as acupuncture, herbal medicine, and therapeutic nutrition to support his client’s goals when it comes to fertility and a wide range of other health concerns.
And while you’re going to get to know Chris during my interview with him, I really wanted to share his philosophy. And it’s this, there is nothing greater than the healing intelligence embodied in every cell of your body. Our mission is to help you fully express it on every level of your being to overcome dis ease and hence manifest the full expression of your true self.
Can you see why I love this guy? Here’s my interview with Chris Axelrod. It’s really interesting. I’ve been having so many conversations with people lately about other people finally figuring out that this mind thing freaking matters. It’s crazy. It’s crazy because you know, when I was going through your book, I was like, I really loved how.
It’s like you were saying the things that people don’t want to talk about how you actually have to take responsibility for yourself. Like there was, there was one of the quotes that like, I mean, I literally was taking pages and pages of like furious notes. Just, it’s just the lawyer in me that like, where you said, most people are unwilling to let go of their story about how all of this is going to end up.
And most people are looking for a magic bullet to avoid doing the simple but real work that will make the difference. I get it. It’s scary. It means that you have to be responsible for yourself, but that’s also the brilliance of it. Well, it’s empowering, but there’s two ways to look at it, right? Some people look at, look at that, like it’s blaming, but what, uh, but what it really is, is trying to help people realize how much power they have.
It’s not easy sometimes to people to admit to themselves, Hey, maybe, maybe I’ve been going about this the wrong way, or maybe there’s something I’m doing. here that that can that I can do differently. It brings, it can, it can bring up a lot of really painful emotions, regret, shame, guilt, anger. Uh, and frustration and all those things.
And so I think that’s why in the book I really focused first and foremost on you need to love yourself and you learn how to be kind to yourself, love yourself, merciful with yourself. That is a number one thing that has to be addressed because when we’re, when we have this tendency, this habit of being really judgmental and hard on ourselves.
It makes it really difficult to look in the mirror and start to say, you know, okay, so how do I change this situation? Where are my, where am I failing? I mean, at the end of the day, it’s like, you know, any great athlete, any great business person, leader, whatever, will all, they all say the same thing, which is, you know, success is not just about doing everything right.
It’s also. about accepting and even in ways seeking failure in order to know what not to do, you know, and, and accepting the failure and not taking it personally, but just looking at it and going, Hmm, okay, that didn’t work. So how did I screw that up? How can I make sure I don’t screw that up again? And, you know, as a business owner, just as a simple example that we hire people.
And sometimes those people. You know, because we don’t control other people. We don’t control what people say, what they do, how they behave, how they react to things. So sometimes they do things we don’t expect. Sometimes those things are, eh, you know, we can just make a correction and, you know, move forward.
Sometimes those things are a little more impactful in a negative way than we would hope. And sometimes we do have to end that relationship. Sometimes we just have to let people go. I’ve had to do that, but I always take a step back and go, now where Where did I mess that up? You know, I set up in the hiring process where there are red flags that I didn’t see That I should have like been like or that I did see but I ignored right the answer that question is yes Okay, then I found one thing but also there’s ways especially in being a boss where you It really is our job to to set up set people up to be successful Right for sure fail in many different ways and it’s the same thing with ourselves.
You know, what we want to do is We want to set ourselves up for success and when, and when, when we’re talking about fertility, we’re talking about successfully becoming a parent. I don’t equate fertility directly with getting pregnant. I just want to make sure that’s clear. But the bottom line is that being successful at becoming a mother, which to me is, is, is what the ultimate goal really is.
I think what a lot of people confuse in my opinion. That being pregnant anoints you as a mother when Yeah, that is not the case. There are plenty of people that get pregnant who really don’t show up as mothers, and there are a lot of people who never get pregnant who show up. in a way that is just unbelievable in the way of mothering.
And so, you know, I think it’s important to remember the goal is to have a child to love. The goal is to have a child to care for. The goal is to have a child to pour your heart into. And to receive that love of a child. Talk, talk about that in the book too. Yeah. You know, the, the thing we’re really seeking through this fertility journey is love.
That’s what we’re really seeking, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And it’s, it’s an interesting thing because I, everyone, you know, people love to get attached to the thing, the op, the, the object. Mm-Hmm. . And, and I think that it ends up closing people off from the journey. And what’s actually happening, the becoming, the unfolding of what’s happening.
It’s part of the medicine. It’s actually the most powerful part of the medicine. Yeah. Yeah. And like, Oh, go ahead. It’s different. There’s, there’s probably, you know, there’s IVF protocol A, IVF protocol B, probably equal, equal equivalent, uh, effectiveness. What’s the difference? I don’t, you know, why, why, you know, what’s, what’s going to be the biggest difference maker.
Yeah. To me, it’s how people show up. You know, how are you showing up to that process and, and, and what are you putting into it? And what are you also ensuring that you’re not putting into it? Right. Being a musician. That’s another thing that I learned over the years is, is I had a few of my mentors kind of hammer into my head that, you know, what you don’t play is just as important as what you do play.
song. It’s what’s not there. That also makes the song really good, right? Well, it’s also like that same thing as listening for what’s not said. Yeah. It’s, it’s in the silence. It’s in that, that missing piece that, you know, there’s so much. Um, I do want to, yeah, you know, I think as part of that, you know, what’s not there, I think that’s key.
That’s big. That’s kind of how I am when I work with people and do treatment plans for people, especially for, you know, the supplements, because I can’t really do the acupuncture stuff for remote people, but people who are listening to the podcast, if they want to reach out to me for me to help them with their supplements, kind of help them with their diet plans and stuff.
I’m really big on helping them to just like, cause you know, they’ll always be like, what else can I do? What else can I do? Okay. And I’m like, just only what I mentioned, that’s all you need to do. So the only, the other thing you can do is nothing like do less. Well, that’s what you said in your book was like, you were like, it isn’t about taking this endless amount of, of supplements is about taking the right ones and how.
Because I think you would also see like, I actually pay attention to this, like the time and space of the six principles of seed intelligence, where you were talking about slow down and open up space. So just slow down and become more open. Part of that slowing down, it seemed to me was like, you’re not inundating yourself.
Yeah, yeah. And there are supplements that can counteract other supplements and things like that. So, you know, it’s, uh. It’s, uh, it’s important I think to, to really be as best as you can, you know, leave space. If you’re taking supplement A, we got to have space for supplement A to like work. If it’s too crowded, you know, it’s like anything else.
It’s like, you know, if you’re in a, if you’re in a room with a bunch of people, if the room gets too crowded, you don’t have space to operate, you don’t have space to really do the thing that you’re trying to do. Right. So. Right. It’s that old principle of, you know, instead of trying to do a thousand things once, we’re trying to do, you know, the one or two most powerful things a thousand times.
Yes. So you build up that power, you build up that momentum. And so that’s really the principle of how I practice and, you know, I was raised in a family of doctors. My dad is an M, was an MD, may he rest in peace. My brother is still. EMD, my cousin, my, all my uncles, my sister’s married to an MD. So I was steeped in medicine, but I never really wanted to do the conventional medicine thing.
So, well, and it’s really interesting to me about, because you wrote the book, awakening the seed. And I thought what was really cool about your story is that. You’re able to take the information that you learned as a software engineer, because when I was reading your book, you talked about how you guys would make small tweaks, like looking to optimize, you know, how can we make a small tweak to make something run a thousand times better?
And that also seems to be your approach when it comes to fertility through, you know, the, the, the version of Chinese medicine and kind of more evolved way you have of looking at the body holistically. Yeah, I mean, you know, it’s funny. I didn’t realize I was doing that until I started to think, you know, for the book, like, how am I going to explain some of the things that we do in clinic and some of the ways that we work with people that have allowed us to have so much success?
Um, how am I going to reverse engineer that in a way so that it’s all written out and explained in a way that, that, you know, somebody can really understand it and grasp. The, the concepts and put it into practice and I kind of stumbled upon that. It just sort of hit me like, you know, I, now I realize how much influence that, like you said, that, that software development experience had on the way that I approach medicine because I’m always looking to optimize, optimize, optimize when you’re, when you’re a software programmer, your cost, if you’re a good software program, let’s just say this, if you’re really conscientious.
Uh, quality minded software programmer, you’re, you’re always looking at every step what you’re doing to make sure that the code you wrote is efficient and it’s not going to use a lot of resources and it’s going to get the job done and it’s going to do exactly what you expect it to do. And I never realized that, you know, that was such a big influence on how, how my practice evolved once I got into medicine.
But it really is because that’s always what I’m doing with my patients. It’s like if I. If I tell my patients to do something, I’m making sure that it’s, it’s, you know, what needs to be done, that it has a high degree of giving us the result we’re looking for with the least amount of wasted effort, you know, and it’s like, I think that’s, and I was just talking about this yesterday actually on, cause I did a two, a two day live training.
I’m training other practitioners in my methods and one of the things I mentioned was, you If someone kind of, you know, put the gun to my head or whatever and said, tell me the one secret, the one secret to your success as a practitioner, I would say, I would have to say, I made it easy for my patients, you know, I made it easy.
I didn’t overload them with things that were not only difficult, but probably useless and unnecessary. So, um, you know, when you, when you do that, it’s funny when you, you, you set people up for success. They have a much higher chance of being successful. Imagine that. Right. Well, and it’s interesting because I even see that in my own work.
You know, as a former prosecutor, you know, my job was to be like, Okay, what am I not seeing? What are the holes in my case? You know, where, you know, testing the theory, testing, you know, you know, how far can I take this? Is this correct? You know, is there another way of explaining this, which is how I got to where I am today as well is like, we have this missing piece of mindset on this journey.
You know, everyone’s looking for some solution outside of themselves when, when in doing so they’re ignoring the foundation of their success, which lies within them. What do you think? Yeah. Yeah. And it’s about learning how to take a step back and, and really just do the fundamental things that make that thing AKA, this amazing body that you already have, this amazing mind that you already have, and all of the unbelievable billions and billions of reactions and decisions that are being made inside that body right now to make that thing as strong.
and clear and powerful as possible. And it’s not something that you need that it doesn’t have anything to do with. I mean, of course, you can take a supplement and there are supplements that will help and that will accelerate the process. But the supplements don’t substitute. And I will tell you right now, the people that I work with that have the best results, they’re not always Paragons of health.
They’re not always the healthiest people, you know, not always the thinnest. They’re not always the best in shape. They’re not always the ones that are doing everything perfect, but they’re doing the things that matter and they’re doing those things consistently. Right. Right. I mean, that goes for the, that stands for the proposition that, you know, I’m telling my ladies all the time.
I’m like, you are the silver bullet. It’s you. It’s you in, in like the most, in the best possible way. Like, and some people freak out. And like we were talking about before we, we started this conversation, we, where we were talking about how some people see that as blame. I mean, the title of my book is, am I the reason I’m not getting pregnant.
And, and it was hilarious because when Bernie Siegel wrote the foreword to this book, he was answering the question. He says, yes, you are the reason why you’re not getting pregnant. Yeah. And so many people like freaked out about that, but it’s not about blame. No, no, it’s not. One of the things that I teach a lot is there’s a difference between judgments and discernment.
You know, judgment is you’re wrong. and it’s your fault. Judgement is a very, uh, it’s a, it’s a frame of, uh, punishment and a frame of, you know, uh, reward and punishment. Discernment is where we’re able to sit back and like we were talking about earlier before we came on. We’re, we’re able to reflect on ourselves and not take our failures personally and realize that we’re human and all humans have blind spots and all humans have tendencies to be a little bit lazy, to be a little bit greedy, to be a little bit, you know, whatever.
And so, you know, that’s why my book starts off. Very first thing is we have to go back to learning how to be kind and merciful and loving with ourselves, because. The journey of self improvement, the journey of, like you said, looking for the blind spots and going, what am I not seeing? Well, when you find that blind spot and you start to see what you weren’t seeing, it can be a really harsh bucket of cold water in your face.
Oh, totally. Yeah, it can just be like, oh, wow, man, I cannot believe that I, Acted like that. I can’t believe the way I talked to that person or I can’t believe that I had this sitting under my nose this whole time and I wasn’t seeing it. And the person who lives in that judgment frame uses that as ammunition to tear themselves down more, right?
Right. The person who lives in a discernment frame, in a frame of loving kindness and mercy, Is going to be able to look at that, and I’m not saying it’s not going to hurt at all, it definitely is something that is kind of a moment of reckoning, but they’re going to be able to mine that for the goal that they can get out of it, and then move on, and start, and, and change, and, and, and evolve, and progress, and, and grow, and what represents change and growth, in my opinion, more than conceiving a child?
You know, you talk about the ultimate transformation and growth that someone can experience. And that doesn’t even necessarily mean having the child yourself. I mean, that child, whether it’s your own biological child, whether it’s a donor egg, whether, whether that child’s adopted, you know, I don’t have, I don’t have biological children.
I have two beautiful daughters that I adopted, and I’ll tell you that I can’t imagine loving them. a human being more than I love those two girls. I don’t, I can’t imagine how just knowing that they had a few more strands of my DNA in them because we’re all 99 percent identical genetically. So, just knowing they had a few more strands of me and my grandparents and my great grandparents DNA in them was, I can’t imagine how that would change how I feel about them.
The miracle that they, that I was just able to be a part. of their growth and their evolution into who they are today is what’s the real juice. It’s that’s the real like That’s the real fulfillment and joy of, of being a parent, you know? I bet you have people that, you know, before they actually meet you and get to be in your sphere that expect to come into a clinic and, you know, be given a very dogmatic, ritualistic prescription for how you’re going to help them fix their fertility.
Yeah. Like, people must be shocked sometimes when they come in. I think, you know, I think shock might be one way to describe it or relieved, relieved. I think it’s probably what I, what I sense most is they, you know, people who come through our program, uh, I think the initial aspect of what they feel is kind of like, okay, this is different.
Right. I mean, this is not, it’s definitely something that people have never. I don’t think most people ever experienced before in any type of medical setting. Okay, just the way we talk to people, the way that we, we respect and really I’m, I’m vehemently, I’m all about autonomy, patience, autonomy. You know, you make decisions, it’s your body, it’s your life, it’s your destiny.
I’m not here to try to influence your decision. I’m not, I’m not here to try to tell you one way is right, one way is wrong. This is like, you know, evil. This is like what I’m here to do is number one. I will always give you feedback on any decision that you would like my input on. And I’m gonna be honest with you about what I see is the pros and cons.
But once you make your decision, whatever that decision is, I’m just gonna help you make Make sure that has the best chance to work. Right. You know, and I think that is a, sadly, that’s a frame that a lot of people never experience when they go to, especially alternative medicine practitioners, who I think in many ways do tend to be a little dogmatic and a little bit.
have an agenda that they’re trying to, um, uh, live out. Um, that, that happens a lot. And even in conventional medicine, there’s the same thing. So I think they feel that sense of freedom and relief and they, they feel that space that they can just be themselves. And, and, and when they come here, they’re not going to get, um, you know, like, and if they don’t drink the water that I, you know, the amount of water that I recommend, or if they don’t take the supplements that I’m recommending or whatever, they’re not going to hear from me.
But why not? Like, what, what’s wrong? Like, don’t you want to get pregnant? Don’t you want? It’s like, look, it’s your journey. I’m here, like, one of the jokes I used to make with my practitioners that I mentor is, you know, I’m from Houston, so I grew up in a, in a, in the South, and Houston’s kind of a metropolitan city.
Believe it or not, we were the, supposedly the most diverse city in the United States, which is, Pretty cool. And so, and, uh, so it’s a very, uh, cosmopolitan metropolitan city, but we’re down in Texas, right? And we have the biggest rodeo on earth every year in Houston, biggest rodeo. Okay. So I grew up going to the rodeo and the thing that used to always crack me up on the rodeo was watching the rodeo clowns, you know, like the ones like with the bull riders, you know, the guys are on the bulls and these bulls are no joke.
I mean, you see, have you ever seen bull riding in person? Not in person, not in person, taking a human being and turning them into a, a human rag doll. I didn’t realize that you can do that, you know? And so they’ll fly off of these bulls and the rodeo clowns come running in to distract the bull. So the bull doesn’t go trample the guy or like gore in the death or whatever.
And so what I always used to tell my, uh, I would actually tell my patients this, I’m like, look. You’re on the bull. Okay. You’re the bull rider. I’m the rodeo clown. I’m just here to make sure you don’t hurt yourself. And then, you know, whatever. I’m just like here to keep you safe. Okay. But you got to ride the bull.
And so people aren’t willing to ride the bull. That’s okay. I’m still the rodeo clown. Well, and I, you know, this whole analogy here speaks to the underlying foundation of what I see as your philosophy is that you’ve got to take personal responsibility, got to get back to basics. You’ve got to see your own power.
And I can see how that’s so discombobulating. For, you know, somebody who walks into your clinic who, you know, who, who says, what? This person’s not just going to give me this ironclad list of 5, 482 things that I need to be doing on a daily basis in order. To get pregnant because everybody wants, well, maybe not everybody, but most people like me and the women that I serve lovably type a control, freaky professionals who just want a fricking recipe, they’ll do everything that you tell them to do on that list to a T, but they’ll forget that they have license and that they have agency and all of this because that is scary.
It is scary. And again, it goes back to that self love. It goes back to, you know, if, if we hear that and we see that and it scares us, it, that’s, that fear reflects self doubts that, that fear reflects a level of, it’s almost like a projected judgment into the future. Like if we fail, how are we going to feel about ourselves?
Right. Like I’ve got this recipe now and I’ve got to do it right. Right. And if I do it right, it’s going to work, but if it doesn’t work, what does that say about me? Do I, you know, in that judgment frame, you’re already like, you know, in the future, like, beating yourself up if you fail. And the bottom line is like, you know, one of the principles of my book is nature only needs good enough.
Nature. I read that. That’s so good. That’s so good. Nature doesn’t need perfect, man. You know, nature doesn’t need perfect. Go outside, go, go out in nature, go walk around. Look, it’s a mess out there. Okay. Where there’s not people, everything is real messy, but look what it got us to. Right. And so nature doesn’t need this perfect situation to create life.
Nature just needs a little bit of help and a little bit of space. And so doing all the things perfect doesn’t nature doesn’t care about that nature’s like good for you patching on the head. Here’s a gold star. I don’t care whether you do it perfect or not, you know, but what nature needs you to do is enough of the things that really matter.
And again, in my book, at the end of the day, the four principles, make sure you’re drinking plenty of water. And I know that sounds almost and again, like there’s almost this like laughter. At sometimes that you know the things I I say but make sure you’re drinking enough water You know people think they’re drinking enough water But or they’ll say they are whenever I have someone come in and say something like well, I sleep eight hours a night I’m always like, okay, they’re probably sleeping six maybe seven hours a night because we all tend to pad our own Accomplishments we all tend to want to believe that we’re doing all those things but sufficient sleep is absolutely critical and at night It’s very important to sufficient hydration is very key.
And that means at least for most people, three liters of water a day, that’s six half liter bottles of water. And it doesn’t matter if you drink it out of a plastic bottle or a glass bottle or whatever, just drink it, you know, I read that in your book. You’re like, everyone’s freaked out about plastic bottles.
Like I went, I must have spent no less than 600 when I was on my journey, like looking for the bottle that was constructed of angel’s wings to hold the water that I was going to be drinking because I was so terrified of metal, plastic, anything. Yeah. And, and, you know, I’m not saying that those things aren’t necessarily a problem.
What I’m saying is it’s a bigger problem. If you’re not drinking the water. And also, you know, something I say in my book too, which, which, which is, I’m sure for a lot of people, a little cold bucket of water as well, is that we look for these things, we look for these things to blame, like the BPAs and the this, that, the others, because we don’t want to look at the real problem, and, and the real reason that most people are having trouble getting pregnant is not because of all those things.
Again, It’s because they’re not doing the really fundamental basic things of self care. And I would say the number one fundamental things of self care is being kind to yourself. But that’s too easy, Chris. But that’s too, I mean, like, like, are you kidding me? Like that’s literally what people would say. You think it’s, well, you think it’s easy.
So do it for a week. Yeah. Tell me how easy it is. Totally. I totally get it. It’s, it’s as easy as spending an entire day without saying a single word. You know, everybody thinks, Oh, I could do that. Okay. Let’s see you do it. It’s not as easy as you think. You know? I did 30 hours of that at a meditation retreat that I went to, and it was hard as fuck.
Yeah. It was so hard to be, I know the first silent retreat I went to, I started talking during lunch. I totally forgot that we were supposed to not talk. Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah. That’s crazy. But you know, and here’s the thing though, is that I get why there are people who, there’s people who would take that as an insults like.
You’re telling me that I have to be kind to myself when I’m getting pregnant. I’m like, no, I’m not telling you that. I don’t know what’s going to help. You know, every case is different. I don’t know where you are on the spectrum of, like, if pregnant is here, I don’t know if you’re here or if you’re way the hell over here.
All I know is you’re not here yet. And so if we’re going to go on this journey together, what I’m going to do is I’m going to tell you some of the fundamentals. Like, if we’re going to go up a mountain, before we start going up the mountain, I’m going to start. I’m gonna start off by telling you. Okay, here’s a few things you need to know.
Number one, if you see a bear, don’t run, just stand still. You know, number two, if you start to feel tired, we need to rest. Just let me know. We’ll rest. You know, number three, when we get up to the higher altitudes, you’re not gonna be able to, I’m just gonna give you like the thing, right? And so being kind to yourself, I’m not telling you that that’s gonna get you from the bottom to the top of the mountain.
What I am gonna tell you is that’s a really important principle that’s going to help you get to the top of the mountain. Absolutely. You know, absolutely. I mean, there’s still a journey on, there’s still a journey there, right? Yeah. And, and that’s, you know, that’s why like, I’m always telling women, it’s like, you’ve got to cover your bases.
All of them do the best that you can like mind and body because it doesn’t make any sense to be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on these treatments when what you’ve got going on upstairs is saying it’s never going to work. I’m not worth it. I’m not, you know, worth all of this investment that I’m making.
My mom was right. You know, all of this stuff, like it, it makes no sense. But the other side of that coin is you also don’t have to be the Buddha for it to work. Exactly. I mean, you know, yeah. You know, and that’s why, that’s why to me the loving kindness towards the self is such a powerful practice because it softens up a lot of that and it allows us to kind of be our imperfect, weird, messy selves and still like be okay.
You know, it’s like, oh well. I, uh, I forgot to do X, Y, Z, or I didn’t take this for that or the other supplement or dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. Oh, well, let’s, you know, get started back on it tomorrow. Yeah. I mean, that, that’s such a massive switch for a lot of women on this journey, because if we’re even a nanosecond off.
From taking a dose. It’s like from zero to cray cray. Like I remember putting like I had estrogen patches during my, you know, one of my treatments and I didn’t realize it needed to be on my abdomen versus on my hip. I just put the patch on my hip because it was more comfortable. I went into meltdown because it was not perfect.
And the idea that we don’t have to be perfect is strangely hard to take. Yeah. Yeah. And, um, but it’s a very, but it’s very liberating thought, you know, uh, nature just needs good enough. There’s one thing I want you to, any, anyone who’s listening to this, remember, uh, from, from this podcast, it’s nature can do a hell of a lot with good enough.
The bottom line is there’s no rules to this thing. Okay. There are no rules. We’re taught that there’s like this rules. These rules that how things are supposed to look and supposed to go. And if we’re doing everything by the rules, then everything should work. And I think one of the most important things for everyone to realize is again, nature just needs good enough.
Nature doesn’t care. Nature is not looking for the perfect cycle or anything to be done according to any kind of rule book. We need a healthy egg in the presence of a healthy, reasonably healthy egg in the presence of reasonably healthy sperm. And. It’s on, you know, and I love that we’re talking about this because so many women I come into contact with are tracking their cycles with the precision of a lunar landing.
And they’re freaking out. That’s a good metaphor. Yeah. I mean, cause that’s what I did. I was like, NASA has nothing on me, man. Like I can land this bitch like right here. Like, I mean, I was just so psycho about that and you know, but it actually goes back to You know, something we were talking about earlier is think about the energy that goes into tracking with such precision.
There’s an expectation of failure behind it. Like I can’t trust this. I can’t, you know, cause trust is something that you talk about in your book as well is I believe it was one of the six principles that you were talking about was this, this trust. Trust is something that is, is if the untrained mind is not willing to trust much because we’re so focused on the present circumstances and what we can perceive with our senses.
What do you think about that? What role does trust play? Well, it’s a huge, the role that trust plays is trust allows us to relax and rest. When we’re living in this frame of constant suspicion, constant mistrust. Then it forces us to be more, you know, to continually question, continually, like, you know, you said, like tracking and noting every little thing.
And to me, the tracking isn’t the problem. It’s the mindset, like, you know, again, the mindset we bring to the tracking. So, you know, no one would say it’s insane to track your, your retirement portfolio. I mean, you need to look at the numbers from time to time, you know, and, but tracking is designed to. To show us trends and to show us, you know, it’s, it’s designed to be retrospective, not in the moment, you know, like if, if a plane, if, if someone’s flying a plane and they look at their altimeter and their altimeter says a thousand feet, and then they start going, oh my God, we’re about to crash, we’re about to crash because they’re only a thousand feet off the ground.
That’s how most people track their cycle. So you can’t. The point is that the altimeter says a thousand feet, but you’re go, but you’re, you’re, you’re taking off. So, so like in, in 20 minutes, it’s going to say 30, 000 feet, right? You’re fine. But, but you don’t just look at that one reading and then make all of these extrapolations of disaster.
And that’s what most people. do when they’re tracking their cycle when they’re doing their temps. I have patients that want to temp. I’ll just let them temp. I don’t tell them to stop. Now, sometimes they’ll ask me, do you think that I should stop? And I’ll say, yes, you should stop now. I mean, I totally get that.
This is why, like, I wish I knew you when I was in the darkest moments of my Cray, because I would be devastated if my temperature was like 0. 10 off. Like, I mean, I literally, my sense of self esteem, and this is not an exaggeration. My sense of self esteem was, would hinge on whether or not I ovulated on day 14.
So extremely educated, doing good things in life, married to the love of my life, trying to do good in my community, but one temperature would destroy what I thought of myself. I mean, that’s no exaggeration. That’s what we do to ourselves. We were talking about trust and I did want to mention one thing, which is, you know, that’s part of, that’s one of the downsides of our scientific era that I think we, you know, science is great.
The science is all about, I don’t believe anything that I can’t prove. There are things that you, there are things that we have proof for, but you don’t see it as proof. The fact that you’re still alive today proves how powerful and resilient and wise your body is. People will say, I don’t trust my body.
My body’s working against me. And I’ll say, no, it’s not. You’re still here, aren’t you? Your body’s actually done a lot. Your body’s actually done everything you’ve asked it to do, which is why you’re still here. And your body will continue to ask, asking you to do exactly what you are doing, exactly what you ask it to do, even if it’s not in your body’s best interest.
You know? And I love how you, you actually, there was a story that I read that within the book where you talk about if you’re eating processed food all the time, your body is going to do what it thinks it wants you to do. So if you eat processed food, it’s just going to keep you alive because it thinks that you just are trying to.
You, you just need to be alive at that point because what you’re putting in your body’s full of toxins. And it’s not even that. It’s, it’s just so much that like, you know, you’re not, if you’re eating a ton of sugar, your body is going to just go along with that and do what it does in the presence of a lot of sugar.
If you are, if you are not, if you’re drinking very little fluids during the day, your body’s not going to complain. It’s not going to abandon you. It’s going to still keep you alive. It’s going to do whatever it can to, to serve you, to keep serving you, even though you might be doing things. And a lot, and a lot of times doing those things, not, not out of spite or not, not because you hate yourself, not because you’re trying to punish your body, but just because you don’t know that that’s what your body needs.
And you don’t, you just don’t know what you don’t know. But your body isn’t gonna hold that against you and it’s not going to say, well, now that you’re drinking all this water, you know, if you had only drank that water for 10 years, you know, so what I’m going to do is I’m just going to like not give you even better health because I’m mad at you.
It’s like, no, the second you start drinking the water, the second you start eating those nutrients to your body that are going to. Help it regenerate and restore and become stronger. The second you do that, your body goes right along with it and your body’s like, thank you. All right, I love you and we’re gonna do this.
Now , your body’s not gonna be like, you know, you screwed me all those years, drinking all that coffee and didn’t, and smoking cigarettes and staying out late partying. So you want to like eat all this good food now? Well screw you. I’m not gonna help you out. No, your body doesn’t do that. Yeah, I was like, I loved you then.
I love you now. Oh, I mean, isn’t that just a very different perspective on seeing our bodies as a cooperative? Element of all of this as opposed to the enemy. Yeah. Like it’s, it, it’s a really, and I think this is why mindset is so important across the board, because, you know, we lose connection to ourselves on this journey.
We think we’re just this pile of parts that are not connected that we just like, you know, blast my ovaries, you know, my uterus is a jerk. You know, all these, you know, we just get so caught up in that. You know, and so when we look at, you know, one of, one of the ways that it really came through loud and clear in your, you know, in your work is that bringing all of these elements of personal ownership together was really critical.
Like, you know, drink the water, you know, take a look at the supplements, you know, you don’t have to be taking 78 of them to be doing well for yourself. You know, what you’re saying is that the body doesn’t need, you know, it can work with good enough. You know, something I wanted to touch on real quick, too, is, you know, that you mentioned people who, you know, and, and I get why this happens, people who feel like their, their body is working against them, that their ovaries, my ovaries hate me, my uterus hates me, whatever.
And what I want to suggest to you is, The, the, the thoughts that you think the language that you are repeating inside of your mind, your body takes that literally your body, our subconscious minds do not have a filter. Our subconscious mind believes everything we tell it, which is how people end up going crazy, which is how people end up believing in some ways, believing things that completely defy like rational reason.
Because our subconscious mind will basically just accept everything we tell it as a fact. So, it’s important to edit those thoughts. It’s important to learn to stop feeding those kinds of thoughts. And instead feed thoughts of kindness and love, compassion, mercy, and, and learn to make those kinds of thoughts.
And focus on things that inspire you and help you feel better and help you feel more powerful. And stop feeding. These self defeating negative thoughts into your mind at first, it’s a mechanical process. A lot of times at first, it feels very rote to do that. There’s not a lot of meaning behind it, but what will happen is over time, as you start to develop, you move away from this habit of all these negative seeds that you just keep dropping into your subconscious mind, and those seeds are no longer there.
And you’re starting to cultivate the habit of planting more fruitful seeds into the subconscious mind. It’s kind of like if, if I give you a vitamin to take, you’re going to swallow, you have to take it every day. And after the first week, you might not feel much difference. It’s just a vitamin. But then 30 days later, you look back and you go, you know, usually I get a headache at least three times a week and I didn’t have any headaches this last month.
Or usually I’m exhausted at the end of the day and I’m starting to come home and I’m not exhausted anymore. It’s always these little things, but they start to pop up after you’ve been practicing for a little while. And it’s going to be the same with your mind. If you learn how to edit and really take charge of thought stream going on and refuse to say things to yourself, like my ovaries hate me, my, my body hates me.
God hates me. I’m being punished this that these thoughts have no, there’s no productive value to these thoughts whatsoever. There’s no, there’s not even, in my opinion, there’s not even usefulness in analyzing them. We just, we just drop and we choose to focus on thoughts of my body loves me, my body cares about me.
I may not be pregnant yet, but I’m still alive, man. And I lived through a lot of stuff and that’s a reflection of just how. Much love and power my body has, and I’m going to respect that. I want to be grateful for that, and I’m going to give back to my body by being kind to myself and all those things.
It’s just a different way of looking at it, but it has a profound effect on our biology and our physiology when we guard our minds and we guard our spirits against those kinds of, against generating, and remember, you’re the one thinking that thought. That thought is not, has not been planted in your head.
There’s not someone else, you know, with a microphone saying that in your head, that’s you. So now, it’s up to you to clean up that mental stream and clean up that mental river so that it’s clear, like a clear, beautiful, pure stream of water flowing. And that’s water that will feed your spirit and not cause you, and not bring you down and not, you know, just make the journey harder.
Yes, I mean, and I think that, you know, this is such a beautiful combination of things where, you know, I think that the expectation in, from, Both of us and both of our respective work is to empower women on this journey. You know, my piece is the mind, yours is, you know, really helping women, you know, reclaim their power when it comes to their health.
And when you unite these things, you really do become unstoppable. This is why we have so many anecdotal, you know, bits of information that stand for the proposition that statistics in the end don’t matter much. doesn’t, you know, it’s, it’s not the end of the world that you’re trying to have a baby in your forties or whatever.
You know, you don’t have to wear the badge of a diagnosis. You can get beyond that. And I think this is, it’s such a lovely representation. And through our conversation here, I think we’ve really illustrated that this is about bottom line, empowering women to take control of their destiny. Absolutely. And you know, the one thing that I would say kind of in closing, I get, I get the sense that Is it, you know, there’s a lot of people.
There’s a lot of reasons people think that they, you know, that they want a baby. I want a baby because I want to give my parents a grandchild. I want a baby because I want to make my partner happy or that, you know, all my friends are having babies and I want to be part of what they’re doing and all that.
But the real reason behind all that, that you want a baby is because you want love. You want unconditional love. You don’t only want it. You don’t only want to receive it. Because there’s no more unconditional, there’s no, there’s no love that is more unconditional than the love of a child, especially a small baby.
And that’s what you crave. And you also crave to give that unconditional love to something. And guess what? You can start doing that right now. You can start doing that right now. You don’t have to wait for that. Because that’s really what you want. And what I would argue is, and this is really the whole premise of the book, Is that it is by doing that now that you awaken the seed, that you awaken that seed within yourself, that creativity, that openness, that heart, and you awaken to the realization that you can be happy right now, like you can live a life of purpose and fulfillment and happiness unconditionally, whether you have a baby or not, whether you have three babies or one baby, because that opportunity exists in this very moment for you, you.
Very, you know, every single moment for you to, to love yourself unconditionally, to love others unconditionally, to receive that unconditional love. Then you let go of the need to have the baby. And then interestingly enough, for a lot of people, that’s when the baby appears, right? And, and that’s engineer.
Yeah, you can’t engineer it, but think about though, like even if someone was not ready to accept what you just said, which I know is truth because I see it every single day in my own practice is that, you know, it’s think about how much, even if you couldn’t buy that, you could be happy now. Okay. Like even if that was too big of a leap for somebody listening to this to think that they could be, if they could have that amount of unconditional love now, if for no other reason.
Think about how much more powerful you could be and how you could show up to your treatments, how you would perceive yourself and look at your period or look at your ovulation or all of these other things. Think about how much more powerful you could be if you loved yourself that much. Like if you want to turbo charge your treatments or you want to turbo charge, you know how you may show up to whatever cycle, think about how much differently you would feel, how you would respond if you just had some love for yourself.
Think about, I mean, I say this all the time to my ladies, I’m like mindset elevates medicine. Like, think about these two things working together. It’s not a choice of one or the other, but think about what you could say to yourself at the end of the day if you knew that you brought both to the table.
That’s right. That’s a good, and, and the thing is, if we’re walking around beating ourselves up, hating on ourselves, hating on life, looking at the glass half empty side. We’re just dumping tons of stress hormones, and we’re really, physiologically speaking, we’re just walking around in our own little horror movie.
When you reconnect with that part of yourself, like you said, Roseanne, you’re unstoppable. You’re unstoppable. And it amplifies the effect of whatever medicine, of whatever medical things you might be doing, because It just gets you out of your own way. It gets all of the things that counteract the medicine out of the way and gives the medicine room to work, whether it’s supplements or injections or pills or, you know, procedures, whatever it is, it has that much more room to actually work.
When that when our when we have that kind of openness to the light within ourselves. Yeah, no, I mean seriously drop the mic. I mean that I think people if people really get on board with that they have an opportunity to day as they’re listening to this to really make a dramatic. impact on the trajectory of their journey.
And so I’m excited, Chris, for women to get in touch with you and for women to really get the opportunity to learn how you approach this kind of medicine. So, and I know you do telemedicine, which is great, especially now when people aren’t. Aren’t really going anywhere that, you know, a woman who’s inspired by what we’ve talked about here.
She can reach out to you. It doesn’t matter where in the world she is. We have an international audience. And so why don’t you tell women how they can get in contact with your team? Sure. It really just starts to go to my website and what I’ll do is I’m going to set up a page specifically for people on this podcast.
So the website address is Axelrodclinic. com and that’s spelled A X E L R A D clinic. com Axelrod clinic. And that’s again, that’s R A D not R O D Axelrodclinic. com forward slash Rosanne, R O S A. Okay. Right. Is that right? Did I spell your name? Yeah. Yeah. No, totally. And what happens there is you’ll see a video of me and I’ll be telling you, you know, what the next steps are, which are basically fill out a form on the page and you will, that will request a free initial consultation.
The initial consultation is free. We, what we’re going to do is get together and just talk about your case. You’ll fill out some forms ahead of time. So I know a few things about you. And then we can discuss, you know, what it would look like to work with me. And also, I’m going to be really up front with you, too, about my, my thoughts on you know, the prognosis and things like that.
Axelrodclinic. com. That’s A X E L R A B clinic. com forward slash Roseanne. R O S A N N E. Well, thank you for being with us, Chris. It was such a great opportunity to get to know you and get to know your philosophy. And it falls in alignment with with the way that I move through the world as well, because it’s.
You know, I like women to be empowered. I like women to treat themselves like adults and make great decisions for themselves, um, because at the end of the day, we’re the ones that are responsible for our lives. So thank you for being with us, Chris. Thanks, Roseanne. It’s been a pleasure. Hey, loves. I hope that you found my conversation with Chris Axelrod absolutely eye opening.
And if that work resonates with you, I hope you do reach out to him. He’s a hell of a guy. My loves. I hope you can really see again. I’ve said it a thousand times and I will continue to say it. Mind and body work together. What if you could harness the power of your thoughts and beliefs to support your body on this journey?
You become unstoppable when you do just think about it If you could think believe and take action like a woman who succeeds on this journey Where could you be 12 months from now? My fearlessly fertile method program is for women who intend to get pregnant in the next 12 months and say hell yes to covering Their bases mind and body so you don’t have to look back on this time with regret I work with women who are committed to success To apply for your interview to be part of this revolutionary program, go to my website, www.FromMaybeToBaby.com and apply for an interview with me there. My methodology has helped women around the world make their mom dreams come true. Their results speak for themselves. If you don’t have a mindset for success on this journey, love, you’ve got a gaping hole in your strategy. Let’s fix that shit and set you up for success till next time.
Change your mindset. Change your results. Love this episode of the Fearlessly Fertile Podcast? Subscribe now and leave an awesome review. Remember, the desire in your heart to be a mom is there because it was meant for you. When it comes to your dreams, keep saying hell yes.