Hello, I’m Sarah

The Infertility Honesty Blog

You may know me from my original platform, the Infertility Honesty blog which I started in 2014 on the verge of ending fertility treatments.

Or maybe it’s from my advocacy contributions on various media outlets.

Behind the scenes of blogging and advocacy, I was practicing and studying yoga. Inconsistently in the tougher years, but something kept pulling me back to the mat, again and again, through it all.

Through the trauma of trying to conceive.

Through my conscious, grief riddled transition into unexpected non-parenthood.

And then through the complex, not anything like I thought it would be, Afterward. 

Tried and tested practices which supported me in grief

Infertility and involuntary childlessness left a mark on my health and wellbeing and I needed to proactively address it.

Over time, this has resulted in a huge toolbox of resources, collected during, and supporting me through, these experiences.

So, I offer you the road tested – and I mean road tested! – practices that have served me through all points on my childless path.

In the hopes they can serve, bolster and nourish you, too.

I understand – I’ve been there.

And I’m still here with you, in this uncharted territory we call involuntary childlessness.

The problem with traditional yoga settings

In the years after I started practicing yoga, I could feel the benefits of everything I was doing, including the top-notch teaching from my instructors. 

But there was another side of things. Not long into my infertility journey, it became an unexpected struggle to be in the ‘yoga world’.

I found many studios overtly catering to the reproductively privileged, piling unnecessary triggers onto the rest of us.  Requests to make the environment appropriate (or heck, even bearable!) for others were often responded to with disdain. Or not responded to at all.

I also encountered yoga studios and teachers – mercifully! – that weren’t so parent/baby centric, and who were willing to do the good work of acknowledging and tending to our needs, too.

But still, there were roadblocks.

Cultivating a space where our truth is embraced

Coming face to face with the person infertility and childlessness forced me to become ploughed me into a most inconvenient truth:  The common yogic world view isn’t broad enough to acknowledge, never mind accommodate, my lived experiences and those of others like me. The typical yogic world view can be representative of much of the stuff life altering loss and trauma demand you unlearn. Many yoga spaces don’t understand grief, and are even actively averse to it.

And so, from all this came a long-simmering desire to create a space without such interferences.  A space which, at the very least, is set up not to dismiss, retraumatize and spit in the face of the gumption it takes to do something good for yourself in the presence of loss.

Simply, I dreamed of a space where we wouldn’t be unnecessarily jostled while doing the sensitive work of engaging with our bodies and other layers of self.

While I believe there is no such thing as a totally safe and trigger free zone, it’s my intention and hope that Afterward Honesty Yoga can make strides on this front for the involuntarily childless.