Preconception Techniques

Preconception practices are a way to potentiate your feminine form while simultaneously harmonizing the soils of your womb so your future babe will be given the best opportunity to thrive. When playing with fertility you are playing with your soils. Fertility in the soil starts with three essential ingredients: air, water, and heat. The practice in preconception is to play the feminine, to nurture your fluid nature, and to connect with your womb. Preconception paves the way for pregnancy, birth and postpartum. When consciously planning a family, preconception is truly the most important practice you can engage in.

What follows is a basic practice you can utilize at home as self care for your womb. This will be discussed through movement, breath, meditation, and vaginal steaming. There is an optional practice to use a yoni egg while using the postures, which encourages a supple vagina and also charges your sacred sexual space. All the poses can be used with an egg inside of your womb and it will be introduced in pelvic tilts and pelvic floor work.

The following practices work specifically with the fluid feminine nature by lubricating the hips, softening the belly, encouraging healthy circulation in the breasts and spine, as well as establishing a deep connection with the vagina. Encouraging a supple vaginal canal and pelvic floor ensures ample circulation in your reproductive organs. You are also preparing the body and the vagina to become responsive and intelligent before pregnancy and birth, which will allow you to labor intuitively and bounce back faster postpartum. Note that vaginal steaming is not to be used in pregnancy but is a boon preconception and postpartum to bookend the whole experience.

Poses

(Exerted from A Timeless Birth)

MASTERING THE BREATH

What you do

Lie on your back, place your feet on the ground wider than hip distance, knees bent at a ninety-degree angle from shin to floor.
Knees touch and thighs wrap inwards, which widens the sacral plate, creating space in the whole pelvic bowl.
Articulate the natural waves of spine: sacrum, thoracic spine, and head will be making contact with the ground, the lower back and cervical spine will be arched off the ground.

How you participate

Soften your abdomen. Our culture subconsciously imprints a holding pattern of the belly which blocks air flow into the womb. Let that conditioning dissolve with the exhale.
As you breathe in, imagine you are expanding your pelvis 360 degrees. This natural expansion will soften your pelvic floor downwards and simultaneously lift your lumbar curve off the ground.
When you exhale, allow everything to return to neutral. Your lower back will come more earthward.
Transform your day to day routine by focusing on this breath in any position; this wave-like breath that moves the whole torso is innately natural.

What it’s for

This is the easiest way to let the breath travel down into your pelvic floor, granting an intimate awareness of how the breath connects to your womb.
It releases an abdominal holding pattern: we are actually at our most natural when our belly slightly protrudes, our organs free and spacious.
If your psoai are tight and they constrict your breath while you are upright, this will likely not show up here, as gravity won’t be working against you.
This alignment sets up a natural breathing pattern that lubricates your womb, hips, pelvis, and lower back, which will create the mobility and awareness needed for pregnancy, birth, and the postpartum period.
During the preconception phase, you want your breath and attention moving to this area frequently, as it will be a conduit for your sexual energy, enabling a stronger connection to your reproductive organs, ensuring their vitality and fertility.
Your thoughts slow and your nervous system calms; you have just circuited your parasympathetic system, which is the best way to stabilize the nervous system among life’s stresses.

PELVIC TILTS AND PELVIC FLOOR WORK

What you’ll need

• Jade egg, crystal wand, dildo, fingers, etc.
• OR your imagination

What you do

If using a yoni egg, insert it now.
On the inhale, breathe into your pelvis, softening the muscles, allowing the pelvic floor to release downward. Simultaneously, accentuate the arch of the lower back by lifting it off the ground to encourage the breath to wave up into the lungs and collarbones.
On the exhale, curl your lumbar spine back towards the ground until it is pressing against the ground. Simultaneously lift up your pelvic floor and squeeze the vaginal canal, hugging the egg in and up. (You can use your imagination, but any of the above objects works best.)
After you become fluent in this breath, the following breath cycle prepares you for labor.
Inhale as above.
Exhale, imagine you are pushing down instead of sucking up. If you have an egg or an object inside you, you should feel it move lower in the vaginal canal. This helps you isolate the sphincter of the cervix and pelvic floor. It is found between holding in your urine and holding in your feces.
Alternate between the two breath patterns.

How you participate

Imagine a grounding and building of energy on the exhale.
Imagine a current of energy rising up your spine on the inhale, energizing you.
On the second breath pattern, the exhale is a descending of energy.

What it’s for

This trains you to work with your breath and your pelvic floor rhythmically.
It lubricates the hips as well as tones the pelvic floor.
It is beneficial for increasing circulation to the reproductive organs as well as for pelvic toning in general.
This helps your pelvic floor literally bounce back after birth.

VIRASANA CIRCLES

What you’ll need

• Block or bolster
• Strap

What you do

From all fours, bring the knees together and sit back on a block or bolster (or both), high enough so your knees remain together.
If the knees veer apart, use a strap on your thighs, otherwise pressure will build in the knees.
Heels are outside the hips, and the arch of the foot matches the arch of the butt, toes are curling towards each other with the pinky toe side pressing.
Sit directly on your perineum (between your pubic bone and tail bone). This makes sitting effortless for your psoai.

How you participate

Make circles around your pelvis, pubis, right sit bone, coccyx, left sit bone, and back around.
Go clockwise through time and counterclockwise to unravel time.
These circles can be big and include the whole spinal column up to the crown of the head, which is slow and cooling.
They can also be acute, only working the lower spine and hips, which is quick, heating, and stimulating.

What it’s for

Creating circular movements in the pelvis does magic for the kidneys, bones, and reproductive organs.
It ensures that the hips remain fluid like water, moving heat out of your reproductive organs. Trapped heat dries out fertility. You will know if there is trapped heat, as it will feel sticky and uncomfortable to move in this way.

UPPER SPINE MOBILITY

What you do

Start in a Virasana that is comfortable for you.
Fists are together in front of the sternum, forearms are parallel with the ground.
On a quick inhale, you stretch the elbows back and open the chest, keeping the forearms parallel with the ground and tipping forwards onto the pubic bone.
On a quick exhale, you curl onto your tail and pull the fists together in front of your sternum, stretching the back muscles back.
Repeat as many times as you want. Give yourself a number and stick to it. Try fifty, then when you finesse it, try one hundred.

How you participate

If you are feeling lethargic, go fast, play with the masculine. You will create not just heat in the chest, but also in the lower body as your pelvis flicks forward and back. This heat comes from effort, granting exhilaration and excitement.
If you are feeling overstimulated, go slow, be the feminine. It helps cool you off and offers an opportunity to nuance the ripple and undulation through your spine.

What it’s for

Keeping the elbows lifted beyond the moment you want to give up will tone your arms and encourage circulation and flow to your breasts.
It opens your lungs, airs out your body, expels any stale air, and resets your breathing pattern.

PELVIC CIRCLES ON KNEES AND ELBOWS

What you do

Start on all fours and drop down onto your elbows.
Ensure your elbows are below your shoulders, knees below hips, all at ninety-degree angles to the ground.
Create small circles in the pelvis, as if your perineum were drawing circles on the wall behind you.

How you participate

Quick circles create heat; slow circles cool the body.

What it’s for

This acute angle in the hip crease builds heat while also opening the groin, lower back, and lower part of the uterus. This releases all the muscles that need to let go in labor.
This is a very soothing pose, whether moving or not, especially if you don’t like going upside down, as it is a mild inversion.
In preconception this pose gets you deep in your hips, playing with primal movements and circulating current through your reproductive organs.
This is a great posture to use with the jade egg, especially if you are working on keeping it in. It will massage your vaginal canal and create sentient muscles within.

VIRASANA MEDITATION

Meditation is an essential tool to train you to reorganize and reorient yourself within the demands of life. In a world that is outwardly focused, where our senses are constantly being pulled by a myriad of external stimuli, and where time spent doing nothing is considered unproductive, mediation goes against everything our current culture knows, but it is the medicine we need. In moments of silence and non-doing, the magic of life and the gift of simplicity within spaces of quietude are revealed to us. It is only when we are silent that we can hear our heart’s deeper longings. The feminine is the being, the masculine is the doing.

Find a seat that is comfortable for you, where the hip flexors can release. This typically happens when the knees are below the hips, so sit on height, such as a block or bolster, adding any blankets or cushioning necessary for you to be comfortable. This isn’t a practice to make you suffer but to empower you, so if you are not comfortable, keep adjusting. Ensure your knees remain together if you are in Virasana (as pictured above).

When you find your seat use imagery. As you inhale, imagine the tide of the ocean coming in, your breath being the magnetic pull. As you exhale, watch the shoreline recede back into the ocean. Move this breath through you and keep your mind focused. It will wander, but the ocean will always be there, ebbing and flowing for you to find your way back. There are many ways to meditate. Imagery tends to work wonders.

Vaginal Steaming

When you are done your practice top it off with a vaginal steaming session. This is a sacred tool to utilize in preconception to support fertility, harmonize your cycle, and ease menstrual symptoms. It connects you with the phases of the moon from the perspective of your personal cycle. Menstruation cleanses your organs (thus emotions) through a specific rhythm as you bleed each cycle. Menstruation is a microcosm of the dance of the five elements. The more easeful menstruation is the less symptoms in pregnancy that will arise for any imbalance is amplified during pregnancy’s porous pause. 

You can buy a steamer stool online or simply cut a hole into any stool or chair. You will place a specific blend of herbs (depending on your menstrual health) under the stool. Place blankets all around to direct the steam up through the hole and sit down so your vagina is right above the steam. Ensure it is the perfect temperature by using your wrist first to test!

As steam enters your vagina you play with the alchemy of heat rising and current circulating. The moisture imparted within ensures that there is enough water as too much heat can create barren soil. The last piece is air: you breathing, meditating, consciously connecting with the microcosmic soils of your earth, your womb.

Though these practices are for you, they are for the future generations, for within you a crystallization of the future is taking place.

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For a more in depth preconception practice, insights into menstruation from a taoist perspective, and more information regarding vaginal steaming, check out my latest book, A Timeless Birth.

All illustrations by Susan Fierro