Maya Shankar on her heartbreaking fertility challenges and the importance of kindness

This beautiful, moving and revelatory conversation is about loss and also of course, about love. Dr Maya Shankar is a cognitive scientist as well as the host of the extraordinary podcast A Slight Change of Plans which was Apple’s Best Show of 2022.

In this episode we discuss:

• How to navigate a life full of unexpected challenges, particularly around fertility.
• We discuss surrogacy, a subject that is new and still relatively unknown to most and particularly the physical challenges of gestational surrogacy.
• How surrogacy involves creating a personal and intimate relationship with a stranger and trusting them with the responsibility of carrying their most precious being - their baby.
• How we can make our family from the people we choose to love.
• How Maya is thrown into the rollercoaster of hope and despair when it comes to fertility – as she says ‘everything in fertility humbles you.’
• Maya discusses the meaning of the loss of an early miscarriage, how utterly devastating it is, and how the small acts of kindness from others gave her forbearance to somehow weather the pain of it.
• How important it is to recognise in a world of fixing and toxic positivity that you can’t escape the pain of loss.

This episode is an incredible example of how listening to live, real connected conversations between two people who barely know each other and yet feel a deep connection is how we learn about ourselves and others. This is an inspirational episode — not to be missed.

Find Maya:

Instagram: @drmayashankar

Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-slight-change-of-plans/id1561860622

Support links:

Miscarriage association: https://www.miscarriageassociation.org.uk/

Child Bereavement UK: https://www.childbereavementuk.org/

Sands (stillbirth and neonatal death): https://www.sands.org.uk/

Julia’s Website: https://juliasamuel.co.uk/

Julia’s Instagram: @juliasamuelmbe

Grief Works app: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/grief-works-self-care-love/id1558867513

A big thank you to Drowsy for sponsoring this episode. If you're in need of the best night's sleep ever, then head to www.drowsysleepco.com and use the code JULIA for a very generous 25% off.

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Produced by Georgie Rutherford

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