Ten golden rules for future parents

  1. Conception is the beginning!

« In every art, the beginning is extremely important for the whole, when constructing buildings, foundations are most important, in the naval field, the importance is in the hull… Thus, in society, the way couples unite and the beginning of life are very important for their prosperity ». Ocelle of Lefkada, disciple of Pythagoras

– What’s the secret of a couple’s happiness?
– Love for each other and a common objective

It is a simple secret: strive to make each other happy, think of each other generously, without expecting anything in return, offer your love aiming at the well-being of your companion. You can express your love by preparing a good meal, an outing she or he appreciates, a kind message, a good word, a sweet caress, keeping silent when the other is tired, now and then a look filled with admiration; encouragement, backing up one step in case of conflict, communicating effectively and affectionately…

It is also good to preserve a little time and space to reflect and deepen the contact with yourself, replenish your energies, rest and take care of what ignites your passions. This is how you will succeed in fully enjoying the bond that unites you both, while remaining inwardly free.

Long before conceiving a child, choose to quit smoking, not to drink alcohol, to eat healthy, to take walks in nature while breathing deeply, and above all to nurture for each other a profound and spiritual love. May communication between you be infused with kindness, admiration and joy. Prepare your child’s arrival in a state of plenitude; be aware that your organism and your mind need time in order to prepare for a new arrival. Then, give your child the time to come to you.

  • Do not lose patience, your child will come.
  • Sunbathing the lower abdomen in the morning benefits the fallopian tubes and enhances a woman’s fertility. Abstinence, refraining from lovemaking for a while, reinforces a man’s sperm.
  • Healthy foods like fresh fruits, dried fruits (almonds, raisins, nuts), salads with sprouted wheat… A two or three day fast on fruit and vegetable juices helps eliminate toxins, purifies the blood and makes both of you more fertile.
  • Live your union admiring your partner’s most beautiful aspects, qualities, talents and soul grandeur, while leaving imperfections aside. Love fully the life that springs from both your hearts, and share with each other your highest aspirations.

During lovemaking a couple’s feelings get inscribed in the DNA of the child being conceived and become its cornerstone. In your sexual embrace, wish for a child embodying peace and love, gifted with talents and virtues coming to rejoice you…

Conception is the beginning of life, let love preside over it!

“Children of couples in love are beautiful and intelligent,” says tradition.

Want your child with all your might, feeling already father and mother in your heart and spirit.

This attitude of admiration, fondness and love in the couple creates a filter that favors a genetic encoding contributing to vigor and health, regardless of possible hereditary deficiencies of the last generations both in the maternal and paternal lineages. Epigenetics demonstrates the supremacy of the lived experience over heredity: it acts as a structuring force, especially at conception and during pregnancy. Yes, the good quality of a couple’s life and the depth of their exchanges, influence their child’s biology by promoting a genetic makeup that corresponds to how they experience life.

  1. Rejoice in your new work: Nine months… to engender a new world!

“Respect towards nature and human beings cannot exist without respect towards the child in the womb. Womb ecology reveals itself in world ecology.” Dr. Thomas Verny

You have just learned that you are expecting a child? You are already Parents!

Rejoice, feel enthusiastic, grateful and proud: it is a great honor to bring a new life on earth. Live this expectancy as a feast in which your child is the guest of honor!

Your other occupations, the problems you have to face, your difficulties, all this comes second to this formative and pedagogical work nature has entrusted you with!

Mother, as much as possible, spend your pregnancy in joy, elevation, gratitude and wonder. Sing, read, walk, engage in all that inspires you, so that happiness hormones circulate in your blood and your child’s body develops harmoniously. The brain will build itself well and later your child will be intelligent, attentive, healthy, dynamic, balanced, sociable, patient, psychologically resilient, caring and joyous! As a mother, your soul’s higher states are excellent material for a robust foundation of this future adult’s health, intelligence and talents!

Parents, even amid all sorts of problems – including times of unforeseen mourning – talk to your child. Explain that life is also made of difficulties, but that your love is permanent and that life is first and foremost a grand gift filled with joys.

Dr. Thomas Verny, one of the founders of prenatal psychology, explains that your love is your child’s shield against life’s difficulties.

This is how you prepare your child to succeed in life, to face difficulties with dynamism, optimism and hope!

You are the Mother, you are the Father of tomorrow’s Humanity!

Remember: during pregnancy, the harmonious life you live as a couple neutralizes even negative aspects of your genetic heritage, while favoring and reinforcing the expression of its positive aspects. Such is the might of the pregnant woman, of the expecting couple.

At the moment of conception, the man and the woman bring forth the plan of a new human being:

The woman is the earth-mother: during nine months she provides basic materials for the accomplishment of this plan! In the night of her womb, she forms a new human being in flesh and bone, fostering his or her potential character, talents and even genius traits. Like a builder who during the construction of a house can rectify the dimensions of a room, decide to make larger windows, choose more solid materials and improve the plans, the pregnant woman receives from nature the power to collaborate with life. During pregnancy, her formative power is spectacular. She can build what is best, while correcting possible defects of the genetic material organized at the time of conception.

The man is the oxygen of this earth-mother. He must become pregnant of his wife, and like a tireless worker embrace her with his thoughts, his love, his attentions, and create the most inspiring ambiances for her formative power. His vocation is to offer his companion the values he wishes her to birth in their family.

  1. Rest, live and eat well

“It is not enough that families have lots of descendants… the most important is to give birth to beautiful human beings. Thanks to that, cities will live in peace and homes will be wisely governed.” Ocelle of Lefkade, disciple of Pythagoras

You need rest. At night, strive to go bed early so as to help your body regenerate well. Make sure the electronic devices near your bed are turned off (even cell phones) in order to stay away from their positive ions, as they are unfavorable to your organism.

Just before falling asleep, place your hands on your body’s tense zones in order to reassure them. Calm your body, talk to your cells, listen to them and thank them for their work. Ask them to ensure harmony among all your organs. Your baby will enjoy this profound time of relaxation.

At the beginning of the day the forces of nature are most beneficial and invigorating for your health and your mind. When you get up early, you receive these vivifying energies. So, whenever possible, take an early morning walk in town or in the countryside, or swim in the sea, a river or a lake, when the sunrays offer you their most precious elements. Enjoy the winter snow and the springtime rains, walk barefoot on the morning dew, and your body will thrive.

Your baby has the sense of taste, and later on will like what you ate during pregnancy! Eat fresh food that has gathered beneficial sunrays: plenty of fruits and vegetables, beans, cereals (whole wheat, barley, quinoa, millet, oat, brown rice), cold pressed olive oil, nuts and dried fruits, 50% whole-wheat sourdough bread, honey and unprocessed sugars. As much as possible, choose food from sustainable and respectful farming.

Try eating fish twice or three times a week instead of meat. Fish is rich in fatty acids that benefit the development of your child’s brain. Seaweeds bring antioxidants to your bloodstream, they are rich in good amino acids, trace elements and mineral salts, essential to digestion and to your overall health.

A small glass or two of green sprouts juice every day, with added celery, carrot or beet, is to your organism an elixir of vitality. Withdraw as much as possible from alcohol, tobacco and caffeine or energy drinks. Try avoiding food containing margarine, white sugar, white flour and artificial sweeteners, as they are toxic and overwhelm the work of your cells and of your baby’s cells.

Each meal is a rendezvous of love with life. Sit at the table calm, joyful and thankful. Think of the path the seed undertook until the food you are eating, how nature nurtured it, the virtues it is now transmitting to you. And surrender to a feeling of gratitude towards this generous offering. Chew each mouthful thoroughly while breathing mindfully, your digestion will be helped and the food will nourish you even more. To savor what you eat harmonizes your emotional brain, it is a sure way to obtain more wisdom and health for you and your baby. When you eat well, you give your child a healthy body while transmitting good eating habits for life!

  1. Breathing deeply

“For breath is life, and if you breathe well you will live long on earth.” Sanskrit proverb

Wherever you are, breathe deeply. Deep breaths oxygenate your blood, your brain, and foster a harmonious formation of your child’s organs. A few times per day, breathe deeply and slowly for three minutes, your heart and your brain will be in synch, and your health optimized.

Each and every day, think of taking a bowl of negative ions. They abound in parks and forests, near pine and eucalyptus trees, by the sea, near a water spring or even by the running tap water! And they are countless at dawn.

Breathe the fragrance of flowers and the natural scents you like. Your baby receives them! The sense of smell also balances the emotional brain, it welcomes the fragrance of a plant as a transfusion of energy. “Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts.” Thich Nhat Hanh

Singing, walking, dancing, swimming and all harmonious activities that increase your lungs’ capacity are a treasure for your pregnancy. Reading out loud beautiful texts and reciting poems are also excellent activities for your body and your soul. You will feel inspired.

  1. Beauty at the heart of your life

“The object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful.” Plato

Your baby feels everything! Your thoughts, your feelings, your impressions, all that you live! Each of your thoughts, poetic or harsh, each sound, each image beautiful or ugly, each gesture kind or violent, are valued information recorded in your baby’s subconscious and later will influence his or her choices. It is up to you to choose what your baby is exposed to. Strive to close your inner doors to what is disharmonious around you, like gossip, cynicism, indifference, bad faith and all forms of social violence. With tranquility, push aside negative thoughts and feelings born of daily life. Tell yourself, while patiently dealing with them, that they will pass like morning fog or clouds that the sun dissipates.

In order to form a child beautiful in mind and spirit, cultivate happy emotions. Learn to transform anguish, fear, sadness, anger and sorrow. During pregnancy, fearing the unknown is often a source of anxiety. Take refuge in the present moment; offer your womb to your growing baby as a nest tender and warm.

As Plato reminds us, the only true birth is the birth of what is beautiful. Keep your look on life, your imagination, your intelligence and your soul busy with grandeur, beauty and truth! Admire works of art, stories about the great qualities and ideals of good and wise persons. Make an appointment with your partner to share inspiring poems and prose celebrating life, joy, beauty and lofty human values! Draw from nature’s beauty, praise its life, its strength, light, vitality and power: a sunrise, a starry sky, the splendor of flowers, trees and mountains. What you admire together helps forming a healthy, beautiful child endowed with artistic and moral sensitivity. Serenity will embrace you both.

  1. The colors of light and their power

“Let me, O let me bathe my soul in colors; let me drink the rainbow.” Kahlil Gibran

Nature is resplendent, teeming with colors that have the power to strengthen our immune system. The science of colors is applied in phototherapy and chromo therapy, they both use intense white light as well as lights of the colors of the rainbow. Each of the seven colors acts upon our physical body and our mind, they can be seen when a ray of sunshine passes through a crystal. When your eye intercepts one of these colors and, moved by its beauty, you invite it inside you, great beneficial properties flow into your baby.

Red instills force and dynamism in your muscles
Orange harmonizes your circulatory system and your feelings
Yellow nourishes your nervous system and your intelligence
Green boosts your digestive system
Blue pacifies and amplifies the power of your lungs
Indigo supports and feeds the structure of your bones, inspiring you justice and stability
Purple gladdens your hormonal system and motivates your spirituality

Envision your child basking in the light of these solar colors, with all their qualities and expressing their virtues. Fetal cells absorb this beneficial light and use it to form healthy and luminous organs.

Link your child to the powers of life. Admire the colors of the prism and their nuances in the flowers, fruits and vegetables, in the skies, prairies, oceans and mountains. Day in and day out, wear light colors, luminous ones! Decorate your home with pillows, bedcovers and curtains of radiant colors.

Contemplate dawn with serenity, wishing with all your heart the best qualities for this dawning life you carry inside you!

While admiring the first light rays at sunrise, ask for your child a luminous intelligence and a heart filled with kindness, goodness and love. Wish for your child a strong and creative will along with a healthy and vigorous body. Remember, your imagination is endowed with a formative power!

Take walks in the morning sun, and open your home to its light; it possesses anti-depressive and vitalizing powers, endorsed by science. In the evening, lift your gaze to the sky and immerse yourself in its distant suns, in its infinity. Your worries will weigh much less… Choose a star, ask for its friendship and benevolence, tell it your dreams, and try to hear its dreams.

  1. Listen to music and sing, play an instrument!

“Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.” Plato

“From conception onward, the baby hears with every cell” explains Pr. Alfred Tomatis. Offer radiant music to your child! The Mozart effect is already well known, but do you know how much Vivaldi, Haydn, Rossini, Bellini and many other compositors can rejoice both your baby and you? Their music nurtures the harmonious development of your child’s organs, activates the brain and connects you to your soul. In every nation, traditional songs celebrate a wealth of humanity’s riches; draw from that vast treasure and choose what you want to offer your child who will forever be inhabited by the love of music.

Amazing studies have demonstrated the unstructuring effects of music with chopped and syncopated rhythms on living organisms. However, nowadays such music is ubiquitous, and we are accustomed to it since childhood. It might seem unnatural for most couples to wean from this dissonant music. However, babies react to it, and it is common for pregnant women to leave a concert that is too intense, due to the strong kicks they get from their baby. Thus it is important to protect your child’s formation by carefully selecting the sounds that reach him or her. Music acts upon matter.

“Musical education begins before birth,” explained renowned violinist Yehudi Menuhin; sing to your child, the father and you. Hum your joy. Cradle your baby in your heart’s music, and all three of you will incredibly benefit from it on a cellular level. After being born, your baby will remember your voices and their musicality. You will have contributed to your child’s clear thinking and aptitude to express it well.

  1. Imagine your child as a seeder of peace

“There is no way to peace; peace is the way” Gandhi

Envision your child as a healthy adult, serene, beautiful, creative, entrepreneur, fair, honest, wise, happy to help others…

Inspire yourself on the qualities you strongly admire in the heroes and great beings in the stories and legends you love. Look for great traits of character in the books, movies, plays and shows that move you, wish them to be embodied by your child.

On the Greek island of Karpathos, pregnant women are advised to contemplate sunrise wishing for its light to penetrate their child’s intelligence, for its warmth to impregnate their heart so that love and goodness may reign in it, and for such vigor to vivify their physical body. A mighty example! Such a gift will certainly delight your child who will never forget. Indeed, in the words of Dr. Robert Debré, “All is memory. The living entity feels, records; an organism never forgets anything, even from its experience in utero.”

When you happen to admire high mountains or walk among grand trees in a forest, link your child to their majesty. This magnificent and humbling experience will incline your child to always be moved by what is unfathomable and inspires us. Comforting will be inscribed in your child and you will thus shield him or her from pride.

Facing a calm and tranquil sea, wish serenity to your child! When the waves are strong, let their power fill you, and wish your child to be dynamic!

Looking at flowers, smelling their fragrance, offer your child their beauty, their magnetism and their purity.

Roses and jasmine, flower sovereigns, will inspire you to ask their greatest and noble qualities for your child.

Under a starry sky, ask this breathtaking greatness, this amazing wisdom to bless your child! And offer your little one inspiration and dreams.

By uniting thought and love, you multiply the power of what you imagine and will remain recorded in the memory of your baby’s cells. These gorgeous wishes will act like guides throughout your child’s life. The formative power of your imagination is astonishing!

Several nascent branches of science are beginning to demonstrate how a pregnant woman’s formative power influences the physical and psychological development of the fetus.

Invite the father to imagine what he wishes for your child. Doing so will increase the synergy between the three of you. The wealth of his inner life generates an ambiance in which your family thrives.

Be ambitious, ask for the highest virtues for your child. You are preparing him or her not only for your family but also for the entire world.

Remember, you are the mother of tomorrow’s humanity!

  1. Love her, love him! And your child will be capable of self-love, love for others and for Life!

“The world we will leave to our children depends on the children we bring to this world.” F.M Zaragoza

Engage all your resources to welcome this pregnancy, to accept and love this baby. Your child suffers if you don’t accept your pregnancy. He or she wants and needs your happiness. In the case where it is difficult for you to accept being pregnant, talk to your baby and explain the reasons why you feel that way. An important part of this “conversation” is to explain that this difficult situation has nothing to do with who the baby is.

If it’s a boy and you want a girl, he is aware of it and his hormonal circuits are disturbed by it… and the same happens if it’s a girl and you want boy.

It is preferable to wish for a human being that is beautiful, healthy and strong.

Honor your child, he or she is a unique human being.

Communicate with your baby, talk to your baby who is cradled in your womb and hears you, understands you… listen to his or her messages! Offer your baby the joy of a sweet welcome to earth. The more you value your baby, the more he or she will, feel empowered to rejoice in life. Both of you can caress the baby through your belly. He or she will feel the thrill of being acknowledged! French neonatologist Jean-Pierre Relier explains that “Love for the prenate is the most appropriate stimulant for the creation of brain synapses.”

When something wrong happens, console your baby, explaining lovingly that even if the situation is tough, you love, respect and consider him or her a wonderful being gifted with wondrous latent potentials!

Unconditional love towards this baby you’re expecting fashions his neurophysiology in such a manner that this future adult will one day walk the earth with serenity, promoting reconciliation and building peace, finding innovative solutions and excelling at communication.

When crossing difficulties, take refuge in the love you feel for your child. One of the founders of prenatal psychology, Dr. Thomas Verny, states that “Your love is your child’s shield against life’s ordeals!”

Your baby feeds on what you eat, the air you breathe, the images, the light and the colors you admire, the music you listen to and the scents you appreciate. The words you use, your caresses, your love, the images and visions you create, what you wish and dream for him or her and your lofty ideals are food for your baby, essential nutrients! Your inner life, how you see yourself, others and the universe get translated in biochemical information, faithfully assimilated by the developing organs and characterizing them.

And you, dear father, you are your pregnant companion’s pillar. Lend her your support, elevate your love towards her, appease certain of your desires in order to render your relationship even nobler. Talk to your child, offering your protection and your love. You are father, corner stone of your family’s happiness!

“May the father have the mother and the child in his thoughts and in his heart!” Chinese proverb.

Together, you are working for your child’s future, as well as for your nation’s future. You are the builders of tomorrow’s citizens, so work with all your heart for a society of peace, creativity and higher values. Your task is grandiose… you will soon realize this.

  1. Birth: a meeting of souls – Breastfeeding: a great mystery

Mother, when the blessed moment of birth arrives, offer your child his or her first gaze. Eye to eye, you possess the amazing power to activate your newborn’s brain with hormones of happiness. Father, in case you happen to be the one to delight in your child’s first gaze, set your anxieties aside, be present like never and experience the wonder.

Place the baby over you, dear mom, give off your warmth and offer your breast.

“The baby should start breastfeeding within the half hour following birth. It’s when he instinctively knows what to do. If he starts later, he’ll have to learn.” Dr. Michel Odent

The first gaze you exchange, your body warmth, your touch, your scent, your voice, the first breastfeeding, compose the very best welcome for your child. A welcome that conveys to both of you a deep seeded feeling of safety, cradle of emotional and social intelligences! Moreover, this skin-to-skin contact ensures an optimal microbial colonization, so vital for the nascent immune system.

Breastfeed your baby in the same attitude you had during pregnancy. Like your blood, your milk is impregnated with your feelings, your love and your thoughts.

When you breastfeed your child attentively, the power of your bond is reinforced.

The world greatly needs this simple and potent message of prenatal education. Transmit it to your family, friends and colleagues. It is a matter of public interest of the highest importance.

By disseminating this information, you work for a better world and become benefactors of humanity!