Your Fertility Obstacles Are Not Bad Karma
There is a common, quiet belief that many of my students have: that their struggles to get pregnant are the universe collecting a debt, or karma coming back to get them. That there difficult path to conception and holding a baby in their arms is somehow connected to something done wrong in their past. A decision made, a path taken, something that happened years ago.
If you have ever heard yourself say this (out loud or not), I want you to keep reading. Because understanding what karma actually is might be one of the most freeing things you can do for yourself right now.
Let’s talk about what karma actually is.
What is karma?
The word karma has become embedded into Western language. Yet the real meaning of karma has gotten a little lost along the way. Many believe that karma is simply: “What goes around comes around.” Cosmic reward and punishment. A universal scoreboard.
But in the traditional yogic teachings, karma simply means action. It is the understanding that every action carries energy, and that energy moves forward. It creates momentum.
The deeper teaching, and this is where it gets important for anyone on a fertility journey, is that karma ripens across multiple lifetimes.
This is where the concept of reincarnation becomes central to understanding karma in its true form. In yogic philosophy, the soul moves through many lifetimes, and the karma that ripens in this lifetime may have been set in motion hundreds of years ago, in a life you have no memory of. The karma you are creating right now is not something you will cash in on in this lifetime. It moves forward into the next.
It is worth noting that in its fullest and most traditional sense, yoga is actually a path toward liberation from the karmic cycle entirely. The ultimate goal, what the yogic tradition calls moksha, is the freeing of the soul from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.
This is why fertility yoga is so much more than a tool for getting pregnant. When you come to your mat, you are stepping into a practice that is thousands of years old, one that has always been about right action, liberation, and the tending of the soul. The fertility piece sits inside that.
This means that what you are experiencing right now, including the difficulty of this fertility journey, cannot be reduced to something you did or didn’t do in this lifetime. You simply cannot see the whole picture from where you are standing.
And here is what I really want you to hear: your fertility obstacles are not a punishment. They are not cosmic retribution.
A short story to explain Karma
There is a story I come back to again and again when this topic comes up.
Two men are hiking. One is a monk who has lived his whole life in right action and service. The other is a thief. During the hike, the monk breaks his ankle. The thief finds a small bag of gold.
The thief laughs. “So much for karma!” he says. “Look at you with your broken ankle. Look at me with my gold!”
But here is the rest of the story that we cannot see.
The monk was destined to fall off the cliff and lose his life. His lifetime of right action ripened into a sprained ankle instead. And the thief? He was destined for more wealth than he could ever have imagined. And he got a small bag of gold.
You cannot see the whole picture from where you are standing. Ever.
This is why reducing karma to “good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people” does such a disservice to a profound and complex teaching. And why using it as a lens to explain fertility struggles is not only inaccurate, it is genuinely harmful to people who are already carrying so much.
If it's not Karma, what is it?
Let’s name it directly, because I think it deserves to be named AND people really try to avoid talking about these two things.
Guilt & Shame.
The thing you did years ago that you have quietly wondered about ever since. The abortion. The relationship that wasn’t right. The years you spent not trying, or trying to prevent it. The drinking, the partying, the choices that made sense at the time. Whatever your version of that story is.
The guilt and shame we feel also affects us physiologically and energetically. We MUST forgive ourselves for our past actions.
Every decision you have ever made was made with the information, the resources, the circumstances, and the state of mind you had at that exact moment. You were doing the best you could with what you had.
That version of you deserves love and understanding 
Time to embrace self-forgiveness.
Self forgiveness is not just a nice idea or mental/emotional activity. It is something the body actually feels. Carrying guilt and shame is a physiological burden. It lives in the nervous system, in the tissues, in the way we hold ourselves. It is weight on a body that is already working hard. Releasing ourselves of guilt and shame is not weakness or denial. It is one of the most powerful things you can do for yourself on this journey.
This is tender territory. For some of us, this is not something we can just decide to do and it quickly happens. It takes a little time and a lot of your awareness.
If you are carrying something heavy, something that keeps coming back no matter how many times you try to release it, please consider talking to a therapist who understands the fertility journey. There is no badge of honor for doing this alone. A good therapist can help you move through this in a way that is safe and supported, and you deserve that.
Self forgiveness is not a one time event. It is a practice. And like all practices, it gets easier the more you show up for it
How do we forgive ourselves?
Here is where the real teaching karma comes into play and how empowering it can be.
While you cannot control the ripening of karma across lifetimes, you do have agency over your actions right now.
The momentum you build in this lifetime, the way you show up, the choices you make, the care you give your body and your nervous system and your spirit, that changes the rate and the way karma unfolds. You are not passive in this. You are not just waiting for the universe to decide.
This is actually a central teaching of the Bhagavad Gita: you have a right to your actions, but not to the fruits of those actions. Your job is not to control the outcome. Your job is to show up. To tend to your actions. To build momentum.
That is what I call Fertile Momentum, and it is the foundation of everything I teach in fertility yoga.
How Fertility Yoga Builds Fertile Momentum
Every time you come to your mat with the intention of supporting your fertility, you are building Fertile Momentum. Not in a magical thinking kind of way, but in a very real, physiological, and energetic way.
The mind body connection in fertility is well documented. Chronic stress elevates cortisol, which can disrupt the hormonal cascade that supports reproduction. Reproduction is always secondary to survival in the body’s hierarchy, so if your nervous system is in a constant state of high alert, your body is going to deprioritize reproductive function. This is not a moral judgment, it is biology.
Fertility yoga works directly with this. Through movement, breathwork, and mindfulness, we are actively signaling safety to the nervous system. We are improving circulation to the reproductive organs. We are creating space in the body and the mind. We are removing some of the controllable burdens so that the body can do what it is designed to do.
And when you show up for this practice week after week, you are not doing it in hopes of a guaranteed outcome. You are doing it because tending to yourself is right action. Because you are building momentum, action by action, even when you cannot see where it is going.
That is karma in its truest sense. Action, taken with intention, moving forward.
You are worthy
One more thing before I go, because I think it needs to be said clearly.
You are not broken. You are not being punished. You are not paying off a cosmic debt with your tears and your two week waits and your cancelled cycles and your loss.
You are a whole person, navigating one of the hardest things a person can navigate, in a body that is doing its best, in a lifetime that is one chapter of a much longer story.
What you can do, right now, in this lifetime, is tend to yourself. Show up. Build the momentum. Come to your mat.
Ready to join me on the mat?
