24 Stress and Infertility There is hardly another topic that is loaded with stress on as many levels as fertility. At the onset of the intention to bring a new life into this world, numerous factors manifest as “stressors”: anxiety about the future, the fear of personal failure on many levels, insecurities about the couple’s mutual feelings, time pressure, pressure from set norms (e.g., of fertility) and inescapable biological facts, values (e.g., laboratory or societal values) and expectations (e.g., of the rest of the family). Sooner or later, all participants complain of “being stressed,” “having stress,” “stressful people,” and “making stress”—note the different formulations that such stressed-out participants choose. Stress wears out the nerves, exhausts, and ultimately drains our “substance.” In TCM, we associate this substance with the energy of the kidneys—that is, kidney jing. This fundamental energy is, as we have read in several other contributions in this book, an absolute necessity for the creation of a child. The kidneys are the root of reproduction and development—if their energy is drained due to exertion and exhaustion, no child can receive a healthy foundation for life from its parents. The question now is why every person responds differently to stress situations: one person gets heartburn, another headaches, the third one fits of raving madness, and the fourth one withdraws in frustration to a voracious feast. Why does one woman respond with a dwindling menstrual period while the other suffers from unbearable pain and emotional problems that turn her life into hell every month? Reduced sperm counts cause one man to despair in his sexual identity, disastrous sperm quality another. Nevertheless, TCM definitely presents options for assigning these different reactions to stress to specific categories or patterns. With its help, we can determine where in each patient the harmonious symphony of qi, the up and down, inward and outward movement, is disturbed. Only the smooth flow of qi guarantees that blood and qi reach the lower burner and that the fire of the heart sinks downward to unite with the ming men fire to contribute mutual love and passion to the “project new life.” The goal of all efforts and wishes, in both major and minor concerns, is wholeness and perfection—in the case of fertility treatment, the wholeness of the fulfilled wish and the attainment of the goal: man and woman and child. What causes stress are the blocks on the path to that goal—be they building blocks or stumbling blocks. Some people are able to use the stumbling blocks as building blocks; others despair over a pebble. How we face obstacles depends on a variety of factors that affect the participants, such as their strength, composure (to use a detour if necessary), mindfulness, or also creativity. Wholeness and perfection—this is the goal in minor and in major matters. Wholeness means in effect that we are content in regards to the outcome of our own expectations, satisfied and whole. It means to act the way we feel—in other words, to be authentic. A round circle—that is the feeling that we get when we are able to sit back in full contentment and satisfaction and say: “That is good, that will do.” The size of the circle corresponds to the amount of self-confidence and self-contentment within the individual. Dents and bumps, on the other hand, are deficits and excesses that move us to act or to do nothing. These are important aspects of human existence as well since they always bring us back into harmony by the desire for wholeness and roundness. Where does the feeling of wholeness originate? It is not anything inborn—perhaps a small part of it is, in regards to our natural destiny. But in reality it is guided by a multiplicity of societal, cultural, social, religious, and aesthetic notions—by the normative concepts determined by society: Our personal, individual answer to these questions, this mélange of concepts, suggested from the outside as norms and assimilated by the individual as personal ethics, stems from a great variety of sources. Until several hundred years ago, Christianity provided uncontestable answers to the questions of life, concerning the pursuit of happiness, justice, the meaning of life, and good and evil. Only Protestantism—especially Calvinism in the United States—shifted the authority of standardization piece by piece to earthly realms: the man of success shows that he is chosen, as it is said in the Bible: From this point on, definitively from the beginning of the 19th century and the provisional end of the enlightenment period on, the highest maxim of earthly actions and striving was to be successful and rich. The wealth that was accumulated here on earth signaled that the person was chosen by God. Almost four centuries after Martin Luther, people realized: God is dead! Nietzsche formulated this as follows in his book The Gay Science (Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft): “The greatest recent event—that ‘God is dead,’ that the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable—is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe. For the few … our old world must appear daily more like evening, more mistrustful, stranger, ‘older.’ … and how much must collapse now that this faith has been undermined because it was built upon this faith, propped up by it, grown into it: for example, the whole of our European morality.6 Now humans were finally forced to fend for themselves. The norms originated from within themselves. It was no longer God who ruled the world but humanity—humanity is God—and so it was said: everything is possible! The human psyche, the spirit, the will as the new “inner God” was ruled by physis (nature). And now these poor humans were forced to ask themselves the question of direction. They were now left completely to their own devices, both in the minor questions as also in the very major questions of life. The motivation, the impetus for action came to be derived from the external effect, the success in this life, the fulfillment of individual needs. The collisions that have resulted from this struggle with the external world are most of our stressors. To bring personal needs in accord with the whole, the relationship with other people, this holds the potential for conflict since the social norms—as far as they had been coined by religiously legitimized notions—are being questioned, to say the least. Nietzsche has this to say: “The mother gives the child what she takes from herself: sleep, the best food, in some instances even her health, her wealth. – Are all these really selfless states, however? […] Isn’t it clear that, in all these cases, man is loving something of himself, a thought, a longing, an offspring, more than something else of himself; that he is thus dividing up his being and sacrificing one part for the other? […] The inclination towards something (a wish, a drive, a longing) is present in all the above-mentioned cases; to yield to it, with all its consequences, is in any case not ‘selfless.’ – In morality, man treats himself not as an individuum, but as a dividuum.”7 “Autonomy of the will is that property of it by which it is a law to itself independently of any property of objects of volition. Hence the principle of autonomy is: Never choose except in such a way that the maxims of the choice are comprehended in the same volition as a universal law.”5 The developments that began in the West around the 15th century were initiated in China by Confucius already 2000 years ago: the secularization of the pursuit of happiness—away from demons and gods, towards the earthly society of interconnected humanity: “To give one’s self earnestly to the duties due to men, and, while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them, may be called wisdom”3 And people there also asked how they could achieve wholeness and happiness in the here and now, in the earthly world of their existence. Happiness can be discussed and defined on different levels: In the medical model that has nowadays been accepted in part by TCM, the concept ming men helps us to answer this question. Ming is a term that is primarily used in the Confucian context, meaning “heavenly mandate.” It is a potential that we carry within us and that shows us the path we have to take in the course of our lives. It is our duty to fulfill this mandate, this potential. It is the totality of ideas that each individual has formed about his or her very personal happiness, about wholeness on all levels (religious, social, and material) on the basis of the person’s roots and socialization. Men means “door, gate.” Ming men is hence the key, entryway, and motor in the pursuit of happiness. As acupuncture point (CV-4), which lies between the two kidneys, its direction-giving fire initiates the drive to act, no matter in which direction. Ming men thereby unites the purpose of the essence jing to preserve and reproduce itself as material existence (left kidney, yin kidney) with the life-giving fire of the yang kidney, which additionally receives strong support from the “imperial fire” of the heart—connected by the xin bao (pericardium). The ming men then gives rise to the triad of lust, love, and fertility, so indispensable for the fulfillment of the wish for a child. This urge of the ming men to fulfill one’s personal destiny means there are needs to satisfy. These needs in turn result from the emptiness of certain aspects of our existence. Only this emptiness in an area of our existence, this “dent” in our round wholeness forms a need. Which in turn drives us to go outward, out into the environment, out of our isolation into social relationships. And thereby also outward into the thorny thicket of potential stress factors. __________ The push to action, to the pursuit of happiness and contentment in one or another area thus serves exclusively—however selfless the goal may appear!—the satisfaction of personal needs. It ends with the satisfaction thereof and only arises out of new needs. The pursuit of wholeness defines itself and results from the following: On the Blessings of Idleness “In favor of the idle.— One sign that the valuation of the contemplative life has declined is that scholars now compete with men of action in a kind of precipitate pleasure, so that they seem to value this kind of pleasure more highly than that to which they are really entitled and which is in fact much more pleasurable. Scholars are ashamed of otium [leisure, idleness]. But there is something noble about leisure and idleness.—If idleness really is the beginning of all vice, then it is at any rate in the closest proximity to all virtue; the idle man is always a better man than the active.— But when I speak of leisure and idleness, you do not think I am alluding to you, do you, you sluggards?”7 Hence we are dealing with a system that is essentially comprised of two components:
Andreas A. Noll
What Causes Stress?
Authenticity—How do we Achieve it?
Ideas, Concepts, Feelings—Where Do They Come From?
What is the Benchmark for our Actions and the Pursuit of Happiness?
Benchmark: Social Accommodation
China and the Hope for Happiness
The Motor—Ming Men
The End of Pushing
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