YOUR UNBORN: A MULTIDIMENSIONAL BEING
‘Babies are not just “blobs of tissue” developing in our wombs—they are living, thinking, reacting human beings who have feelings.’
— Thomas Verny
Personality Forms in the Womb
Modern research facilitated by highly sophisticated monitoring and tracking equipment suggests that the foundation of behaviour is already laid in the weeks after conception. Even before a pregnancy is confirmed, the brain of the foetus begins to form and function.
‘Behavior doesn’t begin at birth. It begins before and develops in predictable ways,’ declares Janet DiPietro, a well-known prenatal psychologist at Johns Hopkins University. Her research suggests that there is very little difference in behaviour between a newborn baby and a 32-week-old foetus.
Prenatal psychologists believe that during gestation and early childhood, the subconscious brain of the child is most receptive. This is the part of the brain that governs most of our habits, beliefs, thoughts, communication and behavioural patterns. Psychologists have observed that babies are born with clear differences in patterns of activity, sleep, moods and attention.
A large body of research with premature babies as well as foetuses shows specific preferences for tastes and sounds. Soft music is preferred to hard music. The mother’s voice is clearly differentiated and preferred to others. Foetuses increase their rate of swallowing of amniotic fluid after sweet food is consumed. They also exhibit a range of expressions on their face. They suck, touch and feel themselves as well as their enclosing environment. Motor and musculo-skeletal coordination allows for a range of movement. A response to a sharp light is seen towards the third trimester.
Harvard Medical School psychologist Heidelise Als writes, ‘The fetus gets an enormous amount of “hormonal bathing” through the mother, so its chronobiological rhythms are influenced by the mother’s sleep/wake cycles, her eating patterns, her movements.’
Considering the variety of stimuli and influences the foetus is subjected to, it is not far-fetched to assume that behaviour and responses start to develop early and get rooted as habits or patterns.
Nurture Your Whole Baby: Body, Mind and Soul
From time immemorial, human energy field or aura is commonplace in art, religion and philosophy.
Physical matter is simply energy in a condensed form. Our energy body extends outside the physical body space and has many layers to it, which correspond to the many aspects of our being. Below is a brief explanation of the layers of our energy body:
The Dynamics of Energy in Shaping Our Personality
Our energy field is dynamic. It keeps changing due to a host of internal and external influences. These energy changes then cause the corresponding changes in the physical body.
The sun, earth and other higher entities in the cosmos are our sources of energy. This energy is conducted into the energy body. It is also radiated outward and grounded back to the earth. Management of the life force into and out of the energy body is done at seven major points called chakras (‘chakra’ is a Sanskrit word that means ‘rotating wheel’).
Health and happiness as well as emotional distress and disease shows in the energy body much before it affects the physical body. In fact, it is widely believed that what has manifested as disease in the physical body has been in the energy body for fairly long.
Depending upon your inclination, you can choose from colour therapy, aromatherapy or essential oils, aura meditation, chakra cleansing, channelling, accupuncture, accupressure, reiki, yoga, or physical disciplines like martial arts and dance therapies, mantras or music or a host of other methods, and in one way or another they all work on the energy system. Taking charge of thought processes alone is a great way to start, as thoughts are also energy in action.
Foetal Brain Development
The brain being the primary centre of intelligence, an extra emphasis on brain health is certainly warranted. The prenatal period is a critical time when the basic architecture of the brain is established and foundations for its future potential are laid.
The number of brain cells remains relatively stable from birth throughout our life. Brain development with age involves the growth and networking of these cells by establishing circuits or connections between them called synapses.
Research in neuroscience reveals that:
A Mother’s Moods and the Baby’s Brain
The brainstem, the part of the brain that regulates our central nervous system and manages sensory input, sleep, cardiac, respiratory and many other processes, develops fully before birth. The constant rhythm of the maternal heartbeat trains, influences and organizes foetal brain structures like the brainstem. If the mother is experiencing anxiety or distress, her heartbeat, breathing, speech and biochemistry will be erratic and the baby’s nervous system will build around it.
In the book Brain Child by Dr Mark R. Pitzer, a postdoctoral neuroscientist of St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago writes, ‘A child’s intellectual development is influenced equally by their inherited genetic blueprint and the early immediate environment. A child’s early environment literally sculpts and molds the brain, influencing how a child perceives his or her world each and every day, for the rest of his life. It ultimately influences the adult’s capabilities, likes, dislikes, how he responds to stress, his abilities to face life challenges and problems.’
Research Suggests:
Modern research in epigenetics suggests the highly deterministic role of the environment. It implies that even genes are not deterministic, it is the environment that controls the expression of genes. This means that the diseases that we think are hereditary or unavoidable are not so and by changing the internal environment, the very expression of genes can be altered.
We cannot alter the genes we give a baby but by altering the biochemistry of its body, even diseases that run in the family can be prevented from expressing.
Enhance Your Baby’s Brain Development
According to Dr Thomas R. Verny (one of the world’s leading authorities on prenatal psychology), maternal feelings and moods are linked to hormones and neurotransmitters that travel through the bloodstream and across the placenta to the developing brain of the unborn child. In his book Tomorrow’s Baby: The Art and Science of Parenting from Conception through Infancy, Dr Verny suggests that experiences during the critical periods of prenatal life and early postnatal life organize the brain and have more influence over intelligence, emotions and the structure of the brain than we thought before. He advocates parents to consciously provide windows of opportunities to nurture a child’s brain during the early years and actualize their child’s full potential.
Some of the other factors that are found to be beneficial to the baby’s brain development in the womb are love and care for the baby, bonding with the baby through talking, gaining enough weight, moderate exercise and a wholesome diet with good proteins, seafood, fish or fish oil and macro and micronutrients like Omega-3, folic acid, iron, vitamin D, choline, iodine, etc.
Did You Know?
The Omega fatty acids are a group of essential fats that play an important role in brain and nerve health, memory, vision and cardiovascular health and are also believed to protect against age-related decline of the brain and heart. It is believed that they are not synthesized by the body and have to be obtained from food. Some good sources are fatty fish, nuts and seeds and dark leafy greens. Vegan and vegetarian diets, if not managed well, are sometimes found deficient in Omega fatty acids. Supplementation is an option that can be checked with the doctor.
Harmful to Baby’s Brain Development
Some factors that have been found to have harmful effects on prenatal brain development are medication without the doctor’s clearance, lack of sunshine, mother’s stress and anxieties, tobacco, smoking and alcohol. Gaining appropriate weight is also important. Gaining too much weight is not natural and conducive for healthy brain development. Gaining too little weight causes babies to have smaller heads and brains which has been linked to lower IQs.
Moreover, inadequate nutrition may lead to learning disabilities, delay in language development, behavioural issues, delayed motor skill development and lowered intelligence.
Your Five Senses
Although it may be obvious that the food you eat becomes the matter of your baby’s body, it is equally true that the sounds you hear, the sensations you feel, the sights you see, and the aromas you smell impact your baby immensely. Since an unborn is in such an impressionable phase of its life, the effects on it will be even more profound.
Timeless Treasures:
Many beliefs and traditions in ancient cultures have expressed the mystical correspondence between the external environment of the mother and the internal environment of the womb in amazing ways. If a knot came by a pregnant mother while sewing in tribal Hawaii, she had to immediately smoothen it, lest the baby knot herself/himself up in the umbilical cord. In Bolivia, the very act of knitting when pregnant was believed to encourage the baby to wrap the cord around herself/himself. Ancient Greeks believed it was important to remove every single knot in the birthing room, and that included hair braids to wall decorations.
Your sensory experiences have either nourishing or damaging effects on your baby’s mind and body. Even an imagined experience has a physiological effect. When sensory stimulus is soothing, your body produces health-promoting chemicals (hormones and neurotransmitters) transferring the same to your baby. So, it’s important to use the opportunity to leverage the effect the environment has on yourself and your baby rather than running on automatic pilot.
Laura Huxley offers this practical suggestion in her book The Child of Your Dreams:
‘If you can take even five minutes a day, to think good thoughts, listen to your favourite music, or nourish yourself in any way you want, your kindness will be multiplied a thousand-fold and become an organic part of a person’s being for years to come. Five minutes of care is worth years of well-being. What’s more, you can talk to the embryo, sending it warm, reassuring messages, even verbal ones.’
Sensory Development in the Foetus
Babies operate in the womb with a rich spectrum of sensory inputs and responses. It is important to understand the development of your baby’s senses so that you can appreciate her/him as a sensitive and active being. Dr Thomas Verny’s research suggests that the foetus can see, hear, experience, taste and, on a primitive level, even learn in utero.
In the book The Mind of a Newborn Baby, David Chamberlain writes, ‘Long before the completion of the cortex, complex systems for breathing, sleeping, waking, crying, spatial orientation, and movement are already functioning. The senses of taste, touch, smell, and hearing are fully operative and coordinated. Even vision is advanced at birth, although the visual portion of the cortex is not yet fully developed.’
Your baby’s sense of TOUCH:
As early as the 8th week, the embryo shows a sense of touch. The environment of the womb offers a lot of surface to explore including the baby’s own body. Foetuses are known to stroke body parts, umbilical cord and placenta and suck their fingers or thumb. In the advanced stages of a pregnancy, the baby may respond to a simple touch or pat on the belly, if alert.
Your baby’s sense of TASTE:
Taste buds start to develop in the second month of gestation and fully develop early in the second trimester. A mother’s diet influences the taste and flavour of the amniotic fluid, and the foetus swallows and sucks at it from an early age. Research suggests that swallowing actually increases with sweet flavours and tastes and reduces with pungent or bitter tastes. It is also believed that swallowing amniotic fluid gets the digestive system ready for breast milk.
Your baby’s sense of SMELL:
The sense of smell develops by the 13th to 15th week. Even though the foetus does not breathe air in the womb, it smells through inhalation of the amniotic fluid. Studies have shown that newborns are drawn to the odour of breast milk, although they have no previous experience with it. Newborns also experience affinity for their mothers through her smell. Our sense of smell is the strongest at the time of birth.
Your baby’s sense of HEARING:
By week 20, the nervous and brain structure for processing sound is in place and the external ear structures form between weeks 18-20. Towards the end of the second trimester, the baby starts picking up sounds internally, at first, and from the outside environment later. The gestation environment is a rich source of sound with heartbeat, circulatory system and digestive track. The mother’s voice is well recognized and is preferred even before birth.
Your baby’s sense of SIGHT:
The last sensory system to develop in the unborn is the vision, until about 25-28 weeks of gestation. This allows their eye and brain structure to develop well. In the womb, babies are seen to sense light at about 6 months gestation, and respond to it by week 32-34.
Providing Meaningful Early Education
Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov calls the technique of educating the child in the womb ‘Spiritual Galvanoplasty’ or gold-plating. It is the greatest gift parents can give to their offspring and to the human race.
The foundation for intelligence, creativity, emotional life, spirituality and personality are laid in the womb.
What is Foetal Education?
The essence of prenatal education is not to ‘educate’ in the traditional sense, but rather to connect and interact with the unborn by providing an appropriate environment through choosing the right stimuli. Some of the ways are touching the belly, reading/talking, playing music to the foetus, relaxation exercises and many such things.
In his book PreParenting: Nurturing Your Baby from Conception, Dr Verny writes, ‘Womb-time is best given to lessons of love, pleasure, intimacy and trust. It is these that lay the foundations for optimal intellectual development when the time is right.’
According to Ian Robertson’s book Mind Sculpture: Unlocking Your Brain’s Untapped Potential, how much a child’s brain develops depends on how early his education begins and how good that education is.
Mark R. Pitzer, a post-doctoral neuroscientist of St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago, also agrees that early enriching experiences are indispensable in helping a child reach his or her full mental potential, because it challenges the brain, causing its connections to strengthen and its neurons to survive and grow.
Dr Yoshiharu Morimoto, a pioneer in the field of prenatal education and founder of the Pre-Birth Education Center in Osaka, Japan, believes that the mother and baby are like two synchronized computers and they communicate with each other in the deep layers of their unconscious minds.
We should remember that true education is character building that begins with conception and continues through the entire life. Foetal education has nothing to do with competition and achievement in the world outside; its aim is only to foster the highest possible nurturing and bonding.
Prenatal Stimulation
The purpose of stimulation is to establish ways to communicate and foster bond with the child which could also make the transition after birth smoother. Stimulation can be done by instinct, or you may keep in mind the sensory development, for instance, starting with auditory stimulation in the 5th month.
Timeless Treasures:
The ancient Chinese culture has its own version of foetal educaton called Taijiao. While modern versions of Taijiao in practice could be too ambitious, the classics essentially outline that the thoughts, speech, action and experience of the mother have an undeniable influence in shaping the well-being and intelligence of the unborn child.
Stimulating through Sound
Whether you influence it or not, your unborn is already responding and interacting with the sounds in its environment. You can choose to participate by filtering the external auditory stimuli for maximum nourishment.
Sound can uplift and pacify us, like the sounds in nature, or it can wrack our brains with cacophony. Choose the balancing and nourishing power of nature’s sounds to restore your calm and peace, as much as possible. Avoid noisy places.
In some parts of India, pregnant mothers have a tradition of wearing glass bangles during their last trimester. The light and rhythmic click of these bangles is believed to reach the foetus and comfort it as the mother goes about her day.
Converse with Your Baby
Both partners can make time to talk to the baby. Your baby may or may not understand the meaning of the words but can sense your emotions and love behind the words. Talking to your baby will help her/him feel welcome and assist in her/his bonding with you. You can talk about the things that resonate deeply with you like work, hobbies, music, nature or animals or even ordinary day-to-day experiences.
A child hears her/his father’s voice in utero, and there is evidence of recognition, happiness and bonding to the voice after birth. In his book The Secret life of the Unborn Child, Dr Thomas Verny states that even though a man is at somewhat of a disadvantage in the bonding process, the physical impediments are not insurmountable.
When siblings communicate with the baby in the womb, they also begin to develop their own relationship with the new baby. Harmony grows in the family as everyone makes space in their life and their time for the new arrival.
Reading Stories and Poems
Some parents may find the idea of conversation with an unborn baby difficult; for them, reading stories and poems may be a good way to start and get comfortable. To be able to talk in a free and unstructured way, you may explain the meaning after you have read the text. As time passes, you may find it more natural to converse as part of your routine day.
Again, the purpose of reading poems or stories to the baby is not to make her/him remember those poems or stories, nor to influence her/him to become a literature lover, but to let the baby get used to your voices, show your care and love, and build a compassionate parent-baby relationship.
Soothe with Music
Music is said to be the food for the soul. At the same time, it has a strong energetic influence on the body and mind. Thus, soothing music can have an impact on the whole personality of the baby.
Our cells, tissues and organs are directly influenced by the energy of the musical chords we are exposed to. All great art and music is a spiritual gift from higher dimensions. It helps the soul separate from the mundane and connect with a higher consciousness.
Music is a channel beyond any other in the womb that allows you to energize the physical body, mind, emotions and soul of the unborn. Not only energy and stimulation, music can aid in soothing and relaxation too. Select calming notes that allow your breathing and heartbeat to mellow.
In the book Secret Power of Music, David Tame states that there is scarcely a single function of the body that is not affected by musical tones. When waves of different frequencies of music are absorbed and reflected, bodily processes activate as well as slow down. Research has shown a clear influence on pulse, respiration, blood pressure, digestion, secretions, etc. Some studies have observed that a newborn will smile or stop crying upon hearing a piece of music that was played to her/him in the womb.
Ancient cultures and philosophies recognized the power of chanting, sound and music on mental processes, intelligence, IQ, memory and recall. It’s important that pregnant women be careful about the music they listen to and choose only life enhancing music. Unborn babies prefer slow and soothing music and not hard rock.
Stimulation through Touch
When you caress, pat, touch or massage your belly, use your hands as an instrument to give energy and love to your child. Every night before bed time or anytime during the day, the pregnant woman or her partner can relax and keep their hands on her abdomen along with some form of conversation to elicit a foetal response.
Make a point to touch your baby frequently, you simply need to feel your tummy. Mundane chores like shower, moisturizing, dressing and toilet breaks can often be used to exercise mindfulness and to express love.
Stimulation through Sight
Visual processing has a biochemical response on the body. All that we see influences and changes us, be it a breathtaking piece of art or natural landscape or a horror movie. Notice the first thing you see when you wake up, make sure it is pleasing and comforting. As you go about your day, focus on all the views or images that appeal to you. Become aware of how they affect you and the ones that uplift you. Observe the colours, textures and shapes of things around you. When the mother delights in the wonder, beauty, joy or mirth of what she sees, the resulting influences nourish the baby.
An ultrasound can show a foetus blinking at light shone from a flashlight at about 26 weeks. Light permeates through the mother’s skin and some amount of sun exposure to the belly could be beneficial to the optical development of the foetus. Women living in latitudes with less sunlight should make some effort to allow their womb to be exposed to light.
Stimulation through Smell
Aromas subtly influence our moods, behaviour and energy levels. Pleasant odours soothe our being and the unpleasant ones may annoy or deplete us. Eat a wide variety of healthy foods to get the baby used to a wide spectrum of flavours and aromas. By diffusing a calming aroma such as lavender in the room while meditating, doing yoga, listening to music or receiving a massage, your brain will associate the smell with relaxation.
Stimulation through Thoughts
Although your baby is not physically present with you at this moment, you can still think about her/him now and about the time when you would meet. Your baby will be able to sense your loving thoughts and this will provide her/him with a sense of comfort, love and stability.
Stimulation through Visualization
Many religions have a holy mother-child archetype. Its purpose is to give us an image of a beautiful maternal bond for reference. You can use these or any other personal images to visualize your affinity and bonding with the baby. If you already have children, imagining love for your baby will not be difficult for you.
You can imagine your baby in a specific image or just feel connected to her/his formless soul.
Summing Up: