Robin Saraswati's Story

Born into the Eisen Family of six I grew up with two older brothers and a little sister, and was accustomed to self-made football teams, and board games complete with players picked right at home. Pack life suited me, and I always thought that’s how it would be for me: that I’d grow up and have a huge, lively family of my own that traveled, ate and played together.

Two ectopic pregnancies in my 20s drastically cut my chances of delivering even one biological child, but the company of my precious dogs eased my yearnings: two white, Chihuahua sisters; Max my guy-dog; Digger an adorable found-mutt; Ginger, the lovable doggie with allergies and special needs of all kinds; and me, made a comfortable family of six.

My husband Alex didn’t quite count in the lounging herd. He was often off circumnavigating the globe to master Mongolian horseback archery or Chinese calligraphy or study the magical shamanism of the Nepalese Bön. A renowned pioneer of Oriental Medicine to the West, Alex had opened a lot of doors for me in the acupuncture world. We lectured in the Middle East, became faculty in the Netherlands at the Qing Bai Academy of Chinese Medicine and, true to our purist natures, together made annual trips to China, the source of our 5,000-year old art forms. There we steeped in the classic, unadulterated medical texts and methods preserved from the cleansing of the Cultural Revolution, and tutored in advanced treatment protocols from contemporary Chinese Medical masters.

While in China I received from my Classics professor a stone etched with words from a Tang Dynasty physician and saint that, to this day, keeps me enthusiastic and engaged in my studies. It reads, “A real Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) scholar should broadly and deeply study and understand the classical theory of Chinese Medicine in order to touch the origin of medicine. To reach this aim, one must study and work hard their whole life, and never give it up.” A greater treasure from the East, I learned Yang Sheng, a method which re-establishes a healthy life by teaching practices to root out the unconscious physical and mental habits that lead to disease, rather than superficially treating presenting symptoms.

While Alex traveled, I could have sprawled on the couch cuddling my wonderful dogs. But, more driven than that, I completed my doctoral studies, learned Chinese and French, and contemplated starting an all-woman folk band. Drawing on my art degree, I refined the beauty in our home and our TCM clinic. I completed a teacher training in the ancient and powerful discipline of Ashtanga Yoga, a consistent practice I adopted that cultivates physical, mental and spiritual health. I served as clinical director of the Pacific Center of Health (PCOH), the professional clinical arm of the Pacific College of Oriental Medicine (PCOM), where I served on the faculty for 10 years. As part of my doctoral thesis, I designed and conducted a placebo-controlled clinical study at my clinic and, together with my research in the area of menopausal syndrome, found new ways to manage menopausal transition, which furthered my specialization in hormonal balance.

My professional interest in fertility was no accident. Before I’d become a “fertility expert,” before I was even a practiced clinician, I’d successfully treated infertility with Traditional Chinese Medicine. Fresh out of school, armed with evangelical faith in the method and book knowledge, but totally green, my very first real-world patient presented with a fertility problem. She was a 27-year old woman with severe endometriosis, and her gynecologist told her she’d never have children. Just as determined to heal as I was to help, she came to me for treatment. 

Studying up on endometriosis as I went, but drawing on what I knew, I found her to have a profoundly deep kidney vacuity that halted movement and created cold accumulation in her uterus. This caused blood stagnation and pain with each monthly menstrual cycle. I warmed her womb and supplemented her kidney energies with TCM treatments for a dedicated eight months—and she became pregnant! Though she could have initially followed doctor’s orders and had a hysterectomy, eliminating her ability to create a family, instead she delivered a healthy boy nine months later. TCM is so effective, two years after that she became pregnant again, entirely on her own. 

As if a heart- and womb-warming case study wasn’t enough to steer me directly into fertility as a specialty, other influences got me there. Feminism oriented me to women’s issues and made me particularly aware of the modern woman’s conundrum of having the recent freedoms to live without proscription to society and gender, and pursue a career, but suffer the cost of manipulating our menses for years, and waking up at middle age stressed, exhausted, malnourished, and unable to make babies. (Actually, some of us never got to sleep and others of us never woke up.) 

The cornerstone of Taoism decrees that humans excel when they align themselves with nature, a teaching echoed in my studies and eventually evidenced in my life. Oriental and Herbal Medicine oriented and grounded me in natural cycles and rhythms: I ate with the seasons, rose with the sun, slept with nightfall, and became intensely curious about the monthly and lifespan ebb and flow of female hormones. Living according to the Tao and sharing it with my patients, I became accustomed to balance and delight in my life and success in my clinical practice. Bringing babies to term under my care, I posted a wall of smiling, chubby baby faces at PCOH.

My own complicated pregnancies made fertility personal but not poignant until my own longing for a child began around age 40. In my then eight years of marriage, Alex was ambivalent about beginning another family with me. We’d already raised his two beautiful children, Jasmine and Max, to college age, and our lives were more than full. But in a display of his love for me Alex capitulated to my master baby plan. As I look back, my desire for a child then was more about wanting intimate connection with Alex and a manifestation of my union with him. Regardless, as an older woman with scarred fallopian tubes, chances were slim my attempts with Alex would create anything but disappointment. But I wanted to believe otherwise.

I would have tried or paid anything to ensure a successful conception to term, but I allowed his staunch philosophical leanings to steer us away from Western procedural intervention. With two ectopic pregnancies behind me there was an 80% chance I’d have another one. If I were to create a child with Alex it would have to be now, and it would have to come miraculously.

Alex and I attempted to conceive for several months. I kept calendars; I took my temperature regularly; we had sex in every position reputed to help; I treated myself with herbs. And then something happened I couldn’t have charted: my favorite dog and soulmate, Diggie, died of a cancerous tumor, and within days of her passing I became pregnant.

By way of ultrasounds monitoring the growth of my fetus my obstetrician assured me it had secured its place in my womb. In the midst of my grief about my loss of Diggie, I was all the more elated about this new life inside me. This was IT for me. While pregnant, I had done a White Tara meditation while seated in front of my altar: I became White Tara, a seed-filled bowl, and I saw this circling of two centers, me and my baby. I’d felt a deep connection with this little being.

But less than a week later my doctor rushed me into emergency surgery, after she’d re-confirmed the embryo had lodged inside my fallopian tube. Her plan conflicted squarely with mine: she would remove my last natural, viable conduit to my uterus and my last hope of a biological conception with my partner, Alex.

Although I’m sure my life continued to appear fine, the years after my pregnancy loss and before the end of my dissipating marriage were painful and tense. I felt part of me had lost its center and lost connection with life (like a lot of the women who come to me for help with fertility). Healing became a very spiritual process for me. I unraveled my entanglements, found a single, guiding lifeline of something deep inside me, and allowed the people, places, things, activities that kept me closed and constricted, to drop away.

Alex and I later took all steps to adopt a baby, but I felt I was still pushing my agenda on him during a time I was finally learning to stop pushing. We divested ourselves of everything we’d created in San Diego—our home, our clinic, our faculty positions at PCOM, most of our belongings. We packed what remained and relocated to a 26-acre swath of gorgeous land in Asheville, NC. But my intimate connection with Alex had eroded so much the pieces didn’t line up anymore, and we eventually, lovingly divorced. Our union hadn’t produced a child, but we created an important professional and personal partnership that continues to this day, and for that I’m grateful.

It took me a long while to recover from the magnitude of my losses, but through it all, by way of my teacher Ram Dass and the Tao Te Ching, I got the deep lesson that fertility is much more than a narrow reproductive marker: Fertility is the ability to fully inhabit a moment, to be completely present. That is where life happens—and that is the creative force of the mother. When we can learn how to connect consciously with what is happening in each moment, however painful, allowing and trusting the unfolding of life on life’s terms—rather than controlling and forcing outcomes—we more simply open, to life.

The path of fertility travels the distance of Disconnected from who I am, what I do, and what I think, to Finding, knowing and connecting to who I am at my core, to birth that into the world. Motherhood is about first developing Selfhood, stepping up to become a mother, so life comes through to touch life; the unseen meets what is seen.

Baby or no baby—on this path, women get their lives back!

I’ve long been a student of Ram Dass and a regular at Krishna Das’ kirtans and yoga retreats. But I began making trips to India, the lap of the fertile valley mother, in October 2007. There I met my guru, who after 5 minutes named me Saraswati, after the goddess of fertility, creativity, the arts, music, and learning. The name literally means, One who flows, like a river. That meeting was the truing rod that brought me back to center with myself. All I had to do was walk through a doorway, become Saraswati, and step into my new life.

 

As I radically changed literally, everything, I wanted to hold inviolate this new space to allow experiences to bubble up, rather than dive in and force my way through them. Out of this came the connections that led me to a deeper offering of healing, and to the synchronistic and powerful shifting of my work with women in the retreat environment with The Fertile Soul. Through all of these changes, the grace of my devotion to my beloved teachers in India and China, and the strength and authenticity that gives me, became the centerpiece of my life.

My separation from Alex furthered my journey to alignment by freeing me to find my true desires—one of which was to have a biological baby. This time I’ll enlist the help of modern medicine. I’m preparing for my IVF in the fall.

The complications of my pregnancies have become a life-giving gift. They have brought me to authenticity, to facing ambivalence, to courageously stepping forward onto a path that is blind, and to this work of birthing healthy, nourished, capable, receptive and creative Mothers. It is my honor to share my personal experience with fertility and my passion to serve women in this.