Parenting Begins Before Conception:

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction – Parenting Began Before Conception: My Personal Journey
Chapter 1 – Why Prepare For Parenthood? [click here to read excerpt]
Chapter 2 – Your Child: A Multidimensional Being [click here to read excerpt]
Chapter 3 – Preparing Your Body for Conception [click here to read excerpt]
Chapter 4 – Preparing Your Mind for Conception
Chapter 5 – Preparing Your Spirit for Conception
Chapter 6 – The Time of Physical Conception
Chapter 7 – The Prenatal Journey
Chapter 8 – Birth and The Beginning of Your Baby’s Human Life
Chapter 9 – Holistic Parenting: Practical Next Steps
Appendix A – The PreSeeding Birth Program
Appendix B – Birth Wish List
Appendix C – Financial Investments before and after the Birth
Appendix D – From Soul to Cell: A Perspective on Reincarnation
Appendix E – The Implications of Abortion in a Prebirth Health Care Model
Appendix F – Resources

© 1999 by Carista Luminare, Ph.D.

Excerpt Two:

Why Prepare for Parenthood?
Endless Phases: New Opportunities to Learn and Grow

The first weeks after my daughter, Kylea, was born, I was overwhelmed with the many changes and challenges of parenthood, as well as the many adjustments that my baby was experiencing. Then I received a note from my older brother, who had become a father three weeks earlier. “Try not to take parenting so seriously,” he wrote. “Everything is just a phase.” This simple yet enlightening remark is a good reminder to all new parents. You and your child will continue to go through changes, and there will always be something new to learn.

Indeed, life as a parent is filled with many different phases, from the moment a child is conceived through each adjustment during pregnancy, birth, infancy, and beyond. Some of these conditions are brief, others more long lasting. Just when you master one, a growth spurt in your child will require you to explore and expand your parenting wisdom once again.

Let’s look at some of the major phases that you can be aware of and prepare for as new parents.

• Conception: Your conscious exploration of the optimal conditions and time to conceive your child can include a complete
  review of your past relationship with your own parents, the strengths and weaknesses of your partnership, and the physical and psychological health of you and your partner. You may want to include the spiritual needs of your child as well.
• Pregnancy: Physical changes in the mother, such as nausea, sporadic body aches, astonishing food cravings, and broken sleep cycles, will have a profound impact on you and your partner as you readjust sleep and workloads (both professionally and at home) and give all due consideration to mood swings from intense hormonal fluctuations.
• Giving Birth: While this generally lasts no more than a day,
  the conscious preparation will take many weeks or even months. Discussing options—midwife, hospital, or a combination of both; breast-feeding; immunization; and circumcision—will present many learning opportunities. As you educate yourselves, you may find previously held philosophies challenged.
• Coping with Fatigue: One of the least-considered changes, which has an impact on both partners, fatigue can begin during pregnancy and frequently lasts throughout your child’s infancy. Being aware of the likelihood of fatigue allows you to plan the sharing of necessary tasks accordingly.
• Re-balancing Your Relationship: Commonly, once your baby is born, sexuality and relationship changes as well as possible career and financial challenges will comprise a new phase that may shift and require continual conscious adjustment for years. Just as you have learned what your child needs to support one phase of his development, this knowledge will become obsolete as he changes his eating, sleeping, and playing requirements constantly.

It’s important to remain flexible—that is, don’t become attached to what you learned in one phase, which may not carry well into the next. And as my brother pointed out, remember that everything is a phase, so try not to take your parenting too seriously. There will be creative solutions and life lessons for all family members each step of the way. Even the most challenging phase, whether it lasts a moment, a day, a month, or years, will present you with new opportunities to improve the physical and psychological well-being of both yourselves and your child. One phase that will never end—that only grows each day—is experiencing the wonders of giving and receiving love.

Excerpt 3:

Why Prepare for Parenthood?
Anticipate Lifestyle Changes Now

Once a child is born, changes are swift and may be overwhelming. Parenthood, partnership, career, and self-care become a balancing act. You’ll find yourself trying to be your true self while being a reliable source of love for your family, a beloved to your partner, a friend to your community, and an effective professional in your career.

Making Things Work

Some employers are very supportive in offering flextime, while others are resistant to considering their employees’ family responsibilities. Self-employed people have their own concerns; they commonly struggle to budget enough work time separate from their endless domestic responsibilities. Personal and professional routines often seem to blend into one large list of tasks whose priorities need to be continually assessed.

Keys to balancing your work with your new family will include:

• Considering your willingness to sacrifice some of the activities and behaviors of your previous lifestyle.
• Prioritizing goals and commitments: family, personal, and business.
• Anticipating the ways in which you will have to reorganize your personal and professional time and space.
• Rebudgeting your finances.
• Revising your work-related and most cherished personal interests.
• Knowing that you will be continually considering the essential needs of your child, partner, self, and work, over and over again, as new requirements unfold.

Often a baby demands immediate and urgent attention at the most inconvenient moments of your already overcommitted day. Frustration is predictable on days that hold both deadlines and a needy child; on the other hand, you’ll feel fulfilled and strengthened on the days you gracefully complete your goals. The more flexible and objective you can be, the more likely it is that you will not only endure but also enjoy the radical changes in your daily routine that will begin the moment your child is born.

Excerpt 4:

Your Child: A Multidimensional Being
Consider a Holistic Health Approach

Have you ever considered how a holistic approach to parenting can benefit you and your future child? Holistic health care takes into account the whole person. Most of us think of preconception and prenatal care as optimizing the physical health of the child and mother. We rarely consider the father’s health, the psychological health of the parents and their relationship, and the whole health—body, mind, and soul—of the unborn child. Your own prebirth holistic health care plan, however, can include all of these aspects in preparing to conceive your child.

Although the term holistic health has been defined in many ways, common among them is the concept that each of us is a multifaceted being with complex physical, psychological, and spiritual needs for achieving a state of whole health. Every individual has a physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual body, and the well-being of each of these bodies is equally important. If one or more of these bodies is in dis-ease, the health of all of them is affected. When all of these aspects are in balance and integrated, we are in optimal holistic health. A holistic perspective also includes environmental influences that contribute to our health—social, economic, political, and educational.

Whereas traditional allopathic health programs tend to focus on the symptoms of a condition, holistic health care addresses the reasons why a symptom is appearing. Instead of medicating a condition to get rid of it, a holistic practitioner will assess what needs to be physically or psychologically altered within your lifestyle to naturally improve your life. When you practice holistic living, you may discover that many of your health challenges are resolved intuitively, as Sandra’s experience illustrates:

David and I had been trying to conceive a baby for almost three years. Our doctor recommended strong fertility drugs, and so we tried that for another year with no results. I was becoming more and more depressed and our relationship was suffering. I finally began to address the emotional fear about not being able to have a baby. I discovered I had a lot of sadness about my abortion six years earlier, and a tremendous amount of pain regarding my mother’s death following my birth. It suddenly dawned on me that I was stewing in a belief that I or my child would die if I became pregnant. I realized I was subconsciously giving my body the message that it was safer for me to stay infertile. Once I acknowledged and worked through the unresolved grief from my past, I realized that I could create a different outcome for my life. Two months later I became pregnant without the assistance of any drugs. The fertility drugs never worked because it was not a physical problem; it was a psychological one. Our doctor had never even asked me about my past, or my beliefs about becoming a mother. All of the answers to my fertility challenge were in my mind.