THE EVIDENCE WAS ALWAYS THERE: WHAT DECADES OF MIND/BODY MEDICINE CONFIRMS

One of the most damaging ideas modern fertility care has inherited is the belief that when conception doesn’t happen, something has failed. Whether that’s your ovaries, womb lining, hormones or egg health.

And yet, if you step back — not emotionally, but intelligently — that narrative doesn’t hold and my work with women for over a decade with the unconscious mind, proves this unequivocally and I'm not the only one that is seeing how the mind and body is truly linked and working intelligently for you, not against you.

The human body is not a passive machine. It doesn’t randomly malfunction. It will adapt or compensates and even protect. Which is why I resonate so deeply with the work of Dr John Sarno — a physician who spent his career treating chronic pain and created a body of work by identifying the TMS Syndrome (The Mindbody Syndrome) , but in doing so, revealed something far bigger: symptoms are often the body’s solution, not the problem. His body of work looks at pain and how it shows up in the body and while fertility isn’t necessary physical ‘pain’, it certainly is emotional and it speaks directly to my decade of findings when working with women wanting to conceive.

Quite simply, when your system doesn’t feel safe, reproduction pauses, as a solution to an underlying problem.

Reproduction is not a luxury function. It is one of the most energetically expensive processes the body can undertake. From an evolutionary standpoint, it only occurs when conditions are right.

In order to be in optimal health for pregnancy to take place, it needs safety and stability so to ensure the body is in a relaxed, open and hormonally balanced space. If this isn’t the environment, hormones will adjust in order to adapt and fertility is paused.

When a woman has lived for years — sometimes decades — in a state of emotional containment, high responsibility, unresolved stress, or unprocessed trauma, the nervous system adapts accordingly.

And when the nervous system adapts, the endocrine system follows, leading to ovulation inconsistency, irregular cycles shifts, failed implantation and the list goes on. Ultimately leading to a negative pregnancy test, again. But this is not because the body is “getting it wrong” — but because it is prioritising survival over expansion. This is not pathology, nothing is broken, wrong or failing you, instead it is your body’s divine intelligence.

Sarno worked primarily with people in pain — backs, necks, shoulders, migraines — patients who had been scanned, tested, treated, and often told ‘nothing was structurally wrong’. Much like the clients I see, who are at the end of their tether, having spent thousand's on treatments such as IVF, blood tests, genetic tests and more. And they leave without a pregnancy test, being told they have ‘unexplained fertility’ and to ‘keep trying’.

But as Sarno concludes, mirroring my very findings:

The body creates symptoms when something emotionally significant has not been acknowledged. The symptoms functions as protection or even a diversion. The Mindbody Syndrome is when real physical symptoms are created by the brain in response to unresolved emotional issues.

Once people discovered his work, those that have been in chronic pain for years, educated themselves on his work, understood the mindbody link and processed what needed to be processed the pain disappeared. Because when you change the internal relationship, the symptom no longer needs to exist; the pain subsides or in my case, fertility returns. You see, your fertility behaves in precisely the same way.

In my work, fertility challenges rarely appear in isolation.

They sit alongside:

• A lifetime of being “the strong one”

• Early emotional responsibility

• Suppressed anger or grief

• A nervous system that has learned to stay alert

• Loss that was never fully metabolised

• A deep fear of repeating family patterns

And the list goes on. And while you may be reading this thinking, I don’t have any of that, none of this is conscious. The the body remembers. Simple as that.

When the system does not feel safe enough to move forward into creation, it pauses. Not forever. Just until something changes.

In The Mindbody Prescription, Sarno didn’t offer exercises or treatments in the conventional sense. He offered a shift in orientation. Away from fighting the body or seeing it as ‘failing’. Away from fixing or overriding it (with medical intervention), away from outsourcing authority (to the medical system) and instead took the patient inward. Bring awareness, exposing emotional truth and to the removal of fear, grief, loneliness.

This is the same pivot I see transform fertility journeys again and again, this isn’t about trying harder and pushing and as a consequence overriding body’s communication but dropping the fear (emotional baggage) because when fear drops, physiology follows.

This is not an alternative method, this is a foundational process what ever route you are on. We now have decades of evidence showing that stress, trauma, and emotional suppression affect hormonal signalling, immune function, inflammation, and reproductive outcomes. Neuroscience has caught up to what clinicians like Sarno observed in real time. And yet fertility care still too often treats the body as something to be controlled, rather than something to be understood.

What I have witnessed over the last ten years is consistent, undeniable, and deeply human: When women feel safe in their bodies again, their biology responds. Not because they were broken but because they were finally heard and processed what needed to be seen, heard and felt.

This is an invitation to you, not an explanation. If you are navigating fertility challenges, this is not about blame or introspection for its own sake. It is an invitation to consider a different framing:

What if your body isn’t failing you — but communicating with you?

And what if listening, rather than overriding, is the thing that allows reproduction to resume?

Sarno trusted the body’s intelligenc and so do I. And I have seen, time and time again, what becomes possible when women do too.

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If you’re not familiar with this work but are curious to explore how I can support you with your fertility; please read/listen to Dr John Sarno’s The Mind Body Prescription (also available on you tube as a lecture - watch HERE)

If you would like to book a call with me to discuss your fertility then book here.

Watch my masterclass here.