Pulling Down the Moon now holds its $210 six-week Yoga for Fertility programs at Fertility Centers of Illinois in Chicago (since 2002), and Shady Grove Fertility in the Washington area (since 2008).
Support groups have long existed for infertile couples, but in recent years, "yoga for fertility" classes have become increasingly popular.
Let's talk about what it's like to show up at a yoga for fertility class thinking it will be stress relieving and then have a surge of anxiety as women describe the YEARS they've been trying to conceive.
Why burden yourself with the uncertainty, lying in bed on a stormy night, that your business may not survive?" Donna Childs, author of a book about disaster preparedness: "The answer to the question of should they move to a new location is to be found in the mission of the business, providing stress-reducing yoga to aid fertility.
Even as more and more fertility clinics adopt stress-management programs like yoga, cognitive therapy and biofeedback, the role of stress in infertility remains a matter of debate.
Because the entrepreneurs, Beth Heller and Tamara Quinn, linked their yoga business to referrals from Fertility Centers of Illinois, from which they subleased quarters in a rented building on the Chicago River, they temporarily relocated their business while the similarly displaced fertility clinic reconfigured and rebuilt the first floor offices after the July 2010 flood.
This changed after she started going to yoga-for-fertility classes taught by Ms. Spencer at World Yoga Center in Manhattan in 2005.
But students of yoga-for-fertility classes say that the coping skills they learn help reduce stress on and off the mat.
Ms. Heller was surprised; she had been thinking of starting the same kind of business: one offering yoga classes specifically for women going through fertility treatments.
I signed up for classes at a local yoga studio days later, and then I Googled "fertility meditation" and listened to a soft voice telling me to chill and think about becoming pregnant for 15 minutes.
