Embracing the people behind motherhood

Whyte Ridge

For those struggling with infertility, Mother’s Day can be an isolating experience, and being unable to conceive can trigger an onslaught of negative, self-hating emotions in women in regards to what is already a very emotionally taxing job.

Juliana Avella, a holistic fertility specialist, is hoping to help change that in the form of Lyly Wellness Community, a budding online coaching system that connects her with those trying to have kids in a mission to help them feel less alone.

Avella started her career backwards, she said, working with kids first. When her second child was born with a mish-mash of food sensitivities, she backtracked her education and became a registered holistic nutritionist and health coach, which eventually connected her with women trying to conceive. Unable to properly help them at the time, Avella went back to school again — a bit of a nerd that way, she said — attending Health Science Academy to receive the proper education for what she’s doing now.

Avella said that, around Mother’s Day, many people unable to conceive feel very lonely.

“When you are pregnant, you want to share that with the world,” she said. “When you are struggling, you don’t share with anybody. Because you feel ashamed, you feel guilty, you feel broken, and you feel that everything is your fault, but it’s not.”

She compares the process women face, and the psychology behind it, to gardening.

“There’s two (tomato) seeds that you planted,” she said, as an example. “One — the crop came out beautiful, or green, and it gave you a tomato. The other one came in kind of weak, and then maybe brown, and then the tomato never grew. Or maybe the tomato grew but it was little and then fell from the crop … you never blame the seed. You blame everything else, right?

“Maybe it was too much water, maybe there wasn’t enough water … Or maybe you say, oh, there was a very hard summer because the sun was so hot, and then maybe that made it die … you blame everything but the seed, but with the fertility, it’s different. You’re always blaming the seed.”

Anything can affect fertility, the Whyte Ridge resident said, and every patient she sees is different. Sometimes it’s based on stress, or feeling pressure or estrangement from a partner, or diet — and a diet changes drastically based on how someone is feeling, as well. For example, if Avella is feeling a strong draw to a certain fast food, she takes a step back to wonder why that might be. (Although, she encourages people to indulge if they absolutely have to, emotionally, as that’s part of the process, too.)

“There is no miracle pill that you that can drink and then get pregnant, but if you change (external factors), the chances will increase a lot,” Avella added.

Lyly Wellness operates on Avella’s ‘B.E.L.I.E.V.E. Method,’ a holistic roadmap she uses to coach women through the process, which is done through online meetings. She offers online courses, as well.

She said that Lyly aims to cover both of the sides of motherhood, even the parts that aren’t pretty, pre-and-post-partum.

“(It’s) kind of like embracing the antagonistic feelings of motherhood that comes from conceiving through until menopause,” she said, and embracing the person going through it all.

“To awake this person behind the motherhood, the conceiving: ‘Hey, you are not a pregnancy test.’”

Alongside regular meetings, Avella is also running a blog and hopes to begin a YouTube channel in the near future, to share tips in a more affordable way.

For more information, visit lylywellnesscommunity.ca