Consciousness is Contagious

Being Human Is a Birthing Practice

This is a story about the power of longing. The wish to show up as fully and genuinely as we once intended to show up. It’s about the way that wish can keep nudging each of us toward the possible. A personal and a collective “possible.”

Is there a yet-unborn part of you that keeps tugging at your heart? Longs to be born? I’d love to hear about it.

In a world of wrongs, you must do what’s right. That injunction was carved into my DNA through stories of my family—my two grandmothers, my aunt, my older brother—none of whom I ever met. Though we did not set a place for them at the dinner table, the lost were a palpable presence in our home. Relentless reminders: Your life is a gift. Earn it!

Alicia Genevieve Mikles, OVUM III, fabric & poly fill on vintage doily, 14" x 17", 2021 - instagram: @aliciamikles

As a schoolgirl in my native Czechoslovakia, I marched in May Day parades, starched and tidy in a white shirt and navy-blue skirt. The bright red scarf of a Young Pioneer blazed around my neck as I belted out songs of allegiance to the one-party state: “If they’re not with us—they’re against us—but they must not sway us from our path!” Every corner of my childhood’s black-and-white reality echoed the call: do your part—rid the world of evil.

After immigrating to America at nineteen, I strove to obey that command, joining countless consciousness-raising movements. Yet most often, I found myself utterly clueless—not just about how to change the world, but how to navigate my own paltry life.

Diagnosis

Then, one sunny Tuesday afternoon, a lab report offered an escape route from powerlessness.

I can easily recall the sting of panic as I stood in the narrow kitchen of our Upper West Side apartment, listening to my OB-GYN deliver the news: Premature Ovarian Failure, she explained, meant that my childbearing years had come to a close.

The diagnosis struck like a penalty for my innumerable shortcomings. I was quite fluent in the language of self-blame, and now I had compelling reasons to use it. What was my problem, getting in line for seconds before everyone had a turn? After years of floundering, didn’t I finally have it all? A healthy, blue-eyed little girl who lit up my days, a man at my side, who was well worth the wait, a job I loved, teaching English as a second language at Hunter College.

So why did this hurt so much? If you’d asked me then, I’d have said I failed—failed my daughter by being unable to give her a sibling, failed my husband who wanted a larger family, failed myself for ignoring the ticking clock of my biology.

Or, had I paused long enough, I might’ve said: I don’t know why this feels like such a colossal defeat. I don’t know why adoption feels untenable. I don’t know why I can’t even glance at the unopened package of syringes attached to a pamphlet on egg donation.

Today, I have a little more insight into the woman I was on that Tuesday afternoon, standing in the kitchen with the phone pressed to my ear. What I didn’t understand then, was that as much as I wished to bring one more life into the world, it was my own life that needed saving.

No, I didn’t have a life-threatening disease. But the crippling self-doubt that had shadowed me since I arrived in America was pulling me under once again. Back then, leaving behind my parents, my friends, my “promising young actress” status, and a language I loved, I had scrambled to figure out who I was.

Now, unable to fulfill what was presumably one of my most elemental tasks, the scaffolding I rigged up to construct a new identity was suddenly collapsing under me.

With every “No, there is nothing you can do,” I sank deeper into a familiar swamp of despair.

Epiphany

Except this time, I had an antidote: desire. Right or wrong, I wanted that second baby more than I allowed myself to want anything else before. Fierce, uncensored, nonnegotiable desire became the golden rope I clung to, inching from dejection to hope.

At first, hope meant seeking a third, fourth, and fifth opinion in the Park Avenue offices of the best and brightest in the baby-making market. From there, I ventured to Chinatown and its environs. Five acupuncturists later, I found a homeopath, then a Native American medicine man, an herbalist, a naturopath, and a midwife.

I replaced one set of experts with another.

It was only after all the specialists had given up on me that an entirely unexpected idea emerged: an epiphany. I realized I had an opinion about the diagnosis.

Elated by that glimmer of a thought, I became the principal investigator of a most compelling research project: my own healing.

First, I translated those clinical lab reports into words that spoke directly to my body—words that evoked a visceral response: My ovaries are depleted, they don’t have enough energy to create new life. How, then, do I generate more energy—for my body, my mind, my spirit?

This was a far more workable assignment.

Guidance

A voice of knowing—one I didn’t even realize had been silenced—began to speak again, dispatching guiding dreams, clearing the path.

In one dream, I discovered a malignant growth in my uterus. The doctors in the nightmare assured me it would vanish the moment I stopped clamoring for more than I already had.

I didn’t need to call my ex-therapists to decode that dream. I was trudging through the familiar, treacherous terrain of Child-of-Survivors-Guilt, where self-sacrifice was traded for the privilege of being alive.

I had traversed this land before. I knew enough to switch on the high beams when the path grew eerie, to anticipate the twists and hairpin turns, to hang on to the wheel and keep my eyes on the road.

Gradually, I surrendered to the notion that I was not meant to control how and when birth happened. My task was simpler and, in its way, more profound: to persist in creating a conception-friendly space—both within and around me. To humbly and diligently attune myself to the ever-present promptings of a quiet voice within me pointing me toward the next guidepost.

Not that it was easy. It required patience, humility, and a fierce loyalty to my own experience, no matter how invalidated it was by the medical dogma of the day. But what a relief, to shift from the clenched stance of a dictator—forcing my body to obey—to the role of a trusting collaborator.

Eight months into a gradually unfolding self-healing protocol of radical lifestyle changes and massive soul-searching, I conceived a baby girl without medical intervention. Forty elated weeks later we became a family of four.

The presence of both my children is, for me, a source of unending wonder. And the pilgrimage sparked by my soaring hormones delivered far more than their arrival—it offered an entirely new way of approaching my life.

After decades of deferring to outside authorities, I’ve come to understand what it takes to stay the course and uncover a truth I could finally trust as my own. For someone who grew up under a tyrannical regime, in a family perpetually threatened by the powers that be, this was a taste of unprecedented freedom.

New assignment

Fertility advocacy was not part of my career plan, but after my second daughter’s birth, everywhere I went, I began meeting women battling the same supremacy of statistics and diagnoses that once haunted me. One day, galvanized by yet another harrowing testimony, I resolved to host a Sunday afternoon gathering in our Upper West Side Manhattan apartment for women and couples who’d reached out to me for guidance.

Most of them had been labeled “untreatable,” endured years of invasive procedures, or were juggling an array of perplexing natural remedies. And yet, in this gathering of supposed “rejects,” something extraordinary began to unfold: we celebrated the births of babies who defied the studies, the odds, the labels.

Gradually, fertility advocacy and education became my life’s work.

As I continued testing the ideas that had helped me defy medical dogma, an entirely unexpected gift emerged: a clear, systematic healing process with its own language, philosophy, and toolkit. The most wondrous part of this gift wasn’t just the arrival of “inconceivable” babies, but its capacity to reduce suffering and guide people toward navigating life’s challenges with a sense of grace.

An unexpected gift

Numerous branches of social science have offered explanations for why we humans behave as we do and how we can move toward a more conscious and compassionate way of living our lives. My contribution is in the particular way these universal truths have unfolded for me, and how I have applied them in my work with clients over the years.

In the Fertile Heart OVUM philosophy we speak about three invisible forces that shape all aspects of our personal and collective lives. Forces that surface in the currents of our circumstances, the threads of our relationships, and even signals of disease.

O.V.U.M.—Latin for “egg”—stands for Orphan, Visionary, and Ultimate Mother.

In the early days of leading circles, the grief in the room was palpable. One afternoon, a woman broke into uncontrollable sobs. “It sounds as though a long-forgotten orphan has been resurrected inside you,” I said gently when she calmed down. From that day forward, the Orphan became a central metaphor in our work.

The Orphan, in the three-way mirror of OVUM, reveals the abandoned child within us—parentless, voiceless, and burdened by the grief and denial passed down through generations. With no adult present to guide or protect them, the Orphans are frozen in a silent scream of outrage, desperate to be heard. When we build our lives on Orphan-rooted half-truths, the structures we erect are bound to crumble.

But there is good news. Within each of us lies the seed of another force: a wisdom far greater than our daily mind. This innate intelligence has been named and revered across time and cultures. It needs no religious or political affiliation and speaks to us in dreams, symbols, and moments of profound insight. It offers a roadmap to our creations, whether they take the form of children, books, or peace projects. It’s a force that sends shivers down the spine when our bodies recognize it as the sound of truth.

In the Fertile Heart OVUM practice, we engage with this voice of knowing through carefully crafted imagery and movement. After years of teaching, I have settled on calling it the Ultimate Mother—a mother that offers the Orphan a protected sanctuary where all grievances are heard without a threat of repercussions.

Finally, according to the OVUM model, by uniting the Orphan with the Ultimate Mother, we nurture the seed of our next not- yet-born self: the emerging fully human parent who can hear the wailing of the abandoned child and the guidance of the Ultimate Mother and responds with equanimity.

For several years I spoke about the liaison between those two forces as the Student. One night as I was drifting off to sleep, a far more fitting term came: Visionary. The Visionary, conceived in the liminal space between the Ultimate Mom and the Orphan, is the grounded, mature adult able to choose the next useful step in the direction of her desire.

To my amazement, when I combined the first letters of these archetypal forces—Orphan, Visionary, and Ultimate Mother—they formed OVUM. I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect acronym.

Through the years of teaching, this process began to take shape as a tool not just for biological conception, but for living.

The perils of positive thinking on the road to peace

Infertility—or, as I prefer to call it, “the scenic road to parenthood”—is often the most emotionally significant challenge people face. Over the years, I’ve worked with brilliant, introspective clients—mental health professionals, meditators, yogis—who nonetheless fell into the hollow trap of “positive thinking” in response to their pain.

Instead of engaging with the raw, messy emotions of grief, jealousy, or rage, these unwelcome responses were placated with suggestions to reduce stress or improve lifestyle choices. Many feared that their “negative” reactions would jeopardize their chances of conceiving. The wounded, bereft child within was left crouching in the shadows, its cries silenced by shame or self-judgment.

But when we label feelings as “negative” or “positive,” we’re telling ourselves that something is wrong with what we’re experiencing. Without a safe space to tend to the injured voices within us, those wounds often find expression in ways beyond our control. What if, instead of dismissing jealousy or rage as “negative,” we saw them as signals of pain? What if we said: He is jealous—oh, he must be hurting. She is raging—how awful that must feel.

Far too often, the world feels like a giant playground filled with billions of us, orphaned—running in circles, vandalizing swings and slides, kicking sand into each other’s eyes, screaming for Mommy. I can’t say I have much faith in our ability to strategize our way into a kinder humanity.

But birth is possibility. It’s about conceiving the inconceivable. Birth operates under entirely different laws.

In the world of baby-making, a fragmented embryo is unlikely to lead to a full-term pregnancy. Likewise, a fragmented human being—someone who disowns any aspect of their nature—cannot give birth to a healthy life, a thriving community, or a peaceful world. And yet, unlike embryos, fragmented humans can be repaired. We can be born and reborn into greater wholeness over and over again.

Lasting peace cannot simply be legislated or enforced—it must be conceived and nurtured by shepherding the motley crew of our inner Orphans to safety.

In Styles of Radical Will, Susan Sontag writes: “An event that makes new feelings conscious is always the most important experience a person can have. These days, it’s a moral imperative as well.” Consciousness is contagious. Unseen and airborne, it seeps into sealed-up caves and walled-off terrains, places unreachable by even the most advanced drones. The story of our species is co-authored by all of us. The feelings we attend to, the thoughts we expand upon, and the action we choose to take, will tip the balance—toward a more frightening or a more life-friendly earth community.