About Us

Mission, Values, and Vision Statement

Lotus Fertility's mission is to help women help themselves by nurturing an awareness
of the stages of fertility - Preconception, Prenatal, Birth, Postpartum - as realms of
consciousness, realms that also carry significant patterns of impact upon family
well-being, world ecology, and future generations. Though most blatantly expressed
via the physical experience of the body, these realms are also the process of all
feminine creative energy.

Lotus Fertility integrates the optimal health values of Aware Birth with the unity
values of ancient Yoga and the New Physics, and empowers women and couples to
re-align with the inherent interconnection between fertility, sexuality, and spirituality
- a quantum leap in family development and planetary healing in a modern society
where they are often dissociated.

The vision of Lotus Fertility to provide resources and facilitation to support women's
development of attunement to their own intutive capacity.

Though especially suitable for women who love Yoga, and who attend classes or teach
Yoga, the Lotus Fertility resources can support ANY woman who has a heartfelt desire
to experience the creative source within herself, and within her intimate partnership
and family life.

Philosophy

The central focus of Lotus Fertility is to facilitate the "inner midwife," the intuition
within woman, an innate wisdom through the milestones of women's development and
all the integrity possible therein. This connection is something we also have an
original longing for, yet it also requires cultivation, day by day. The choices we make
towards personal awareness and maturation (regardless of chronological age) can
create very unique scenarios of self-expression.

Lotus Fertility honors the role of awareness within human health and development.
Most blatantly expressed in how a culture deals with birth and death, it is also most
intimately experienced in how each person experiences their relationship to breath,
and its creative wisdom in the body. Labor & Birth is a dramatically diverse realm
where many olympic-level athletes and "sex symbols" may fail to properly dilate/open
for birth and proceed to narcotic delivery or surgical extraction, and where many a
stellar yoga/meditation teacher may stall in a prolonged labor through trying to
"meditate out" of a desexualized or overly observed labor and its needless
suffering/drama. It is also a realm where many a matured woman can excel, regardless
of the degree of her fame, expertise, fat-to-muscle ratio, 'perfect chronological age',
or positive maternal lineage.

Four principles taken from ancient Yoga philosophy are themes in the work of Lotus
Fertility:

Ahimsa: Non-violence, Harmlessness (in thoughts as well as actions)

Ananda: Joyfulness, Original Goodness, Blissfulness

Moksha: Emotional Liberation (self-security)

Rasayana: Juiciness, Vitality

A blooming bud of a flower is a traditional labor & birth focal point, placed in water
and situated where the laboring woman will frequently see it and remember her
sacredness while opening herself to the birth energy. In ancient India and throughout
Asia, the flower used was often the Lotus, as they are easily found, and considered
sacred. In lieu of fresh blooms, photographs or paintings would be used. Like a Lotus
flower, the truly healthy human being's physiology is self-healing, free of confusion,
and radiantly alive to respond to Life in its every breath. Lotus Fertility contributes to
the larger work of healing the earth through self-healing & conscious co-creation.

The Lotus has been associated with fertility, spiritual renewal, and divine inner beauty
from time immemorial, for good reason. Lotuses, like the potential human being,
bloom amidst the muddy waters of the world. How wonderful it can be to offer our
children the blessings of a conscious pregnancy and an aware birth, one where the
mother-baby-papa connection is facilitated, empowered, and revered - wherever
the birth occurs. One where newborn is fully welcomed as sacred, into the warm
arms of a radiant mother, free from the distractions of unnecessary medical rituals for
at least the first hour of life. One where committed partners are transformed into
parents.

Putting it into Practice

For those to whom this work appeals, there is the potential for a re-framing of just
what fertility is, and sometimes surprising changes of heart. The Lotus Fertility
approach involves working with the heart center's innate intelligence. Dialogue
mentorship, self-study, self-care education, creative projects, and community
workshops, are core components along with the encouragement for some kind of daily
self-attunement routine (meditation, prayer, being in nature, yoga, chi gong, etc.).

Life Cycle Themes

As Lotus Fertility work relates to women's self-healing as well as preconception
health, it fosters the heart-womb connection in body, mind, and spirit. Because of
cultural ignorance, conditioning, or trauma, the vast majority of women carry on with
at least partial and even full disabling of this key pathway of the soul in the body.
Restoring heart-womb empowerment is thankfully within reach of any woman. How?
Because our essence and our birthright, is joyful aliveness. If we take full
responsibility to do the work for this and are loving & patient with ourselves, our core
energy and cellular intuition are happy to blossom, because we are born to bloom!

As Lotus Fertility relates to pregnancy, the heart-womb connection enhances
conscious prenatal bonding with the baby, partnership between the woman and her
own radiant light, and a potential deepening of the sacred-erotic aspect between the
woman and her partner-lover. The gestating baby is carried under the mother's heart,
and the womb environment is in rhythm with the maternal heartbeat, circulation, and
the pulse of the umbilical cord.

Lotus Fertility explores home labor, waterbirth, lotus birth, and freebirth options as
well as the importance of making informed decisions about care providers and birthing
environments for various institutional scenarios. The Lotus Fertility work focuses on
facilitating the connection to sustainable, creative source and in the process,
full-blossom personal development and family enrichment are made real.

In new client postpartum scenarios, the Lotus Fertility approach supports healing,
bonding, and blooming of the mother-baby and the family as a whole, assisting the
new mother's recovery in both body & soul. Viewing the first 9 postpartum months as
"extrauterine gestation" (Ashley Montagu Ph.D) where the nursing mother and her
baby are as in-sync and unified as during pregnancy (nursing mothers & their babies
share the same REM sleep patterns even), the Lotus Fertility approach can bring
healing, happiness, and pleasure to the Postpartum journey.

Mary Ceallaigh

Mary's work is the fruit of her own path of experiences, including countless lessons
transmitted through the mentorship of Jeannine Parvati, the founder of the modern
yogini-midwife lineage. This reclaimed tradition cultivates an inherent sacredness of
the feminine and its intuitive powers, with each consultation, group class, and birth
journey, through facilitative dialogue that encourage self-awareness and self-care.

Mary attended her first birth in 1989 and has apprenticed in midwifery & women's
self-healing since that time, both in the U.S.and Scotland, with a variety of teachers
and birthworkers. She integrates her knowledge of mothering, prenatal & early
childhood development sciences, birthworker arts, yogini philosophy, and intuitive
healing traditions into Lotus Fertility.

Her great-grandmother Minnie Mae was a traditional midwife in rural Arizona,
attending low-risk women often referred to her by the travelling country physician;
and her grandmother, who later became a pediatric nurse, spoke passionately of the
dignity and grace of those days, a touchstone for Mary's own vocational path.

As a Doula and Apprentice Midwife at various junctures throughout her adult life, Mary
has worked with a diversity of client scenarios, births (home, birth center, and
hospital) and prenatal & postnatal scenarios. She has also served as a board member of
AIMS Scotland and the California Assn. of Midwives, attended many midwifery-related
conferences and pursued significant additional studies and research related to
midwifery history and the social linguistics of the Life Cycle. Pacific Oaks College,
where Mary received her BA in Human Development, is an institution reknown for its
contributions to child development scholarship and the originator of anti-bias
concepts for emergent curriculum in private and public schools.

Mary has studied various forms of Yoga since 1988, both on her own and with Jeannine
Parvati, Hari Deva Kaur, Tom Watanabe, and Gurukaram & Mehtab Benton, completing
Kundalini Yoga teacher training in 2003. She studied Tai Chi & Chi Gong from 1997-1999
with Chou Li at the Pacific-Asian Museum Garden in Pasadena, California, and has practi
Mary is a daily Yoga practitioner and incorporates her knowledge of Life Cycle
development and transitions with the self-healing repertoire of Yoga and Midwifery.

She also credits the innumerable stories women and men have told her, upon learning
of her work, about their life cycle & birth experiences, covering a spectrum of possible
outcomes. These stories shared, many in unlikely, spontaneous scenarios, have
offered profound lessons that have confirmed the impact of personal intention,
values, and vision in the realm of fertility consciousness, and the range of possible
outcomes created in prenatal, perinatal, and postpartum passages that shape the
destiny of the world family.

...SOME PROFESSIONAL HIGHLIGHTS:

Professional Member: International Kundalini Yoga Teacher's Association, IKYTA

Kundalini Yoga Teacher Training, Yoga Yoga Studios,
Austin, Texas completed May 2003

Hollywood Birth Center (California), Mary served as center Office Manager & Public
Relations representative as well as on-call Midwifery Assistant and occasional Doula
from 2001-2002.

Tech Consultant (Midwifery & Homebirth) for the homebirth "Home & Away" (ABC TV)
episode. Culver City, California. November 5th-12th 2001.

Co-Director of the Cal. Assn. of Midwives "Midwifery & Childbirth Awareness Project"
providing community education for California, working with CAM Board of Directors.
1998-2000

Co-Author of NOW's 1999 Resolution "To Expand the Definition of Reproductive
Freedom to Include Homebirth and the Midwifery Model of Care."

Steering Committee Secretary of AIMS Scotland (Assn. for Improvement of Maternity
Services) 1996-1997.

Hygieia College member from 1995 - Present

B.A. Human Development, Pacific Oaks College 1991