Katie Singer - The Garden of Fertility: A Guide to Charting Your Fertility Signals to Prevent or Achieve Pregnancy--Naturally--and to Gauge Your Reproductive Health

Praise for The Garden of Fertility

Every woman interested in her own healthnot just those who want to conceive or to avoid pregnancyneeds a copy of this amazing book. Filled with solid information, thoughts of love, a fine feminist viewpoint, and great real-life stories, it is a feast of Wise Woman ways, guaranteed to empower everyone who reads it.

SUSUN WEED , author of Wise Woman Herbal for the Childbearing Year and New Menopausal Years the Wise Woman Way

The Garden of Fertility bridges the facts of biology with feminine powers of daily observation. It encourages each of us to know how our reproductive systems work, and to use them well. It is an icon for medicine in the new century.

LARRY DOSSEY, M.D. , author of Healing Beyond the Body and Healing Words, Executive Editor of Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine

Katie Singer has read widely and deeply. She offers this thoughtful, clear, informative discussion of Fertility Awareness in all of its ramifications, linking our personal health and womanly cycles to the greater world around us. Her book provides a basis for self-knowledge that enables us to understand our menstrual cycles and choose health care wisely.

THE BOSTON WOMENS HEALTH BOOK COLLECTIVE , authors of Our Bodies, Ourselves for the New Century

This books chapter on food and reproductive health succinctly presents the nutritional keys to creating regular, ovulatory cycles that are free from PMS, PCOS, progesterone deficiency, thyroid, and other gynecological problemsand that will ensure easy pregnancies and healthy children when theyre desired. The keys that Katie Singer presents are the ones Dr. Weston A. Price discovered nearly a century ago in his remarkable studies of healthy, nonindustrialized peoples. At last, this information is available for contemporary women (and men) who want to create strong reproductive health through diet.

SALLY FALLON , author of Nourishing Traditions, President of the Weston A. Price Foundation

This outstanding book teaches you how to interpret your menstrual cycles signals and how to gauge your gynecological health, how to determine when you are fertile and infertile each month, what you can do at home to avoid or heal common problems, and what different health care systems provide when you need help. Katie Singer has done a brilliant job of integrating these complex subjects into one volume that is as delightful to read as it is comprehensive. If every woman read this book, I imagine that health care would be profoundly changed.

DAGMAR EHLING, D.O.M. , author of The Chinese Herbalists Handbook

Neither the publisher nor the author is engaged in rendering professional advice or services to the individual reader. The ideas, procedures, and suggestions contained in this book are not intended as a substitute for consulting with your physician. All matters regarding health require medical supervision. Neither the author nor the publisher shall be liable or responsible for any loss, injury, or damage allegedly arising from any information or suggestion in this book. The opinions expressed in this book represent the personal views of the author and not of the publisher.

All stories presented in this book are true. Names and identifying characteristics (excepting the names of health-care providers) have been changed to protect peoples privacy.

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication.

Most Avery books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchase for sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising, and educational needs. Special books or book excerpts also can be created to fit specific needs. For details, write Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Special Markets, 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

a member of
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

375 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.penguin.com

Copyright 2004 by Katie Singer

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission. Published simultaneously in Canada

The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint the following:

A description of The Work of Byron Katie, adapted from Loving What Is by Byron Katie, Harmony Books, 2002 by Byron Kathleen Mitchell.

An excerpt from Gay Becker, PhD, The Elusive Embryo: How Men and Women Approach New Reproductive Technologies, 2000 by The Regents of the University of California.

An excerpt from Michael Borkin, ND, Womens Hormones 101, published in the September 2000 issue (37) of Alternative Medicine, www.alternativemedicine.com.

Drawings 2004 by Suzann Gage.

Prayers for David 2004 by Johana Moore.

A Meditation for Encouraging Spiritual Resolution After Miscarriage and Ninas Story, excerpted from Ended Beginnings: Healing Childbearing Losses by Claudia Panuthos and Catherine Romeo, 1984 by Bergin & Garvey; reproduced with permission of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, Conn.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Singer, Katie, date.

The garden of fertility : a guide to charting your fertility signals to prevent or achieve pregnancynaturallyand to gauge your reproductive health / Katie Singer.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-101-66259-5

1. Menstrual cycle. 2. Fertility, Human. 3. Natural family planning. I. Title.

RG161.S55 2003 2003057943

612.662dc22

To Kyce Bello,
poet, herbalist, Fertility Awareness teacher, RN, twenty-two-year-old midwife to this book

To Andrus Brooke Pyeatt, whose observations about the seasons and all things fertile daily fill my empty bowl

We know ourselves to be made from this earth.
We know this earth is made from our bodies. For we see ourselves.
And we see nature. We are nature seeing nature.

SUSAN GRIFFIN

A COMMUNITY OF PASSIONATE PEOPLE created this book. Collecting and writing up the information has been my privilege. For their contributions, I give thanks:

To Donna Taylor, who generously teaches me Fertility Awareness with love, clarity, and infectious enthusiasm;

To Justina Trott, MD, Dorian Wilkes, Anne Robinson, and Delores Roybal, who gave me the green light to teach FA at Womens Health Services, making it one of the few nonprofit clinics in the United States to provide such classes;

To Suzannah Doyle, who dazzled me with her enthusiasm for using charts to gauge gyn health, then gave me her library;

To Dagmar Ehling, DOM, who weaves Chinese and Western meridians, regularly introduces me to new modes of healing, and gave this book (and me) indispensable research and support;

To Leah Morton, MD, whose friendship and ecological vision of health care encourage me deeply;

To Judy Norsigian, Jane Pincus, Wendy Sanford, and the rest of the team of women who created