From the Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama...

Recently, I wrote a letter I'd been meaning to send for quite some time. Although Calm Birth is based on ancient and modern practices, I've been achingly curious about what His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who thinks more about meditation than anyone on the planet, might have to say about the application of meditation to the prenatal period.

I drafted a letter, expressing my gratitude for the Dalai Lama's tireless work and influence on the planet, and I told him about the Calm Birth program. I concluded by asking what types of practices he might recommend for pregnancy and childbirth.

Much to my delight, I received a response from his religious interpreter within the week! Without any further ado, here is the letter:

Dear Anna

Thank you for your letter addressed to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, with an introduction to your Calm Birth and asking for some prenatal meditations. We appreciate your compassionate work in helping pregnant women within whom begins the human life on Earth! As His Holiness the Dalai Lama is very busy and is not able to attend to all the letters and requests received at this Office, I beg you to bear with me. I have been asked to respond to your questions.

Please do keep up with your good work for humanity, particularly involving nurturing our babies, the future seeds of humanity.

Your work definitely aligns His Holiness' vision for a better world, better tomorrow for our younger generations and the future generations, as he often says, "The first teacher of love and affection in our life is our beloved mothers before we ever heard anything about these values from our spiritual teachers!" Over the last numerous years, in accordance with some credible scientific findings, His Holiness has been urging the need for women taking more active role in building a compassionate world owing to your more acute sensitivity to others' pain and suffering compared to the male species of human beings. His Holiness also states his view that if we have more women leaders of the nations around the world probably there would be less warfare, fighting and conflict amongst the different countries, regions, or communities because of the propensityto empathy and affection, though some women may be exception!

As you are aware, His Holiness the Dalai Lama's message to the world, to everyone of us, is that we must take to heart, with the sense of oneness of all humans on Earth, how to nurture compassionate human beings right from the beginning, which is what you are doing, for a peaceful and happy future of the world and humans in it. Such an upbringing of our children, the seeds of our future, could produce generations who would shoulder the responsibility for our human society as a whole, not only one's tribes and race, etc., by working constructively and for the whole world holistically, including our ecology in which humanity survives and thrives.

In a nutshell, the key message of His Holiness for all of us is the cultivation and development of compassion which he believes is the fundamental teeming ground for care-giving and kindness to others--including our external environment with which we in inextricably bound--with the sense of brotherhood and sisterhood. This message echoes in almost all of His Holiness' public talks, spiritual discourses and religious teachings these days everywhere he travels.

Therefore, though you already have a number of meditations for your clients and their babies, the driving intention for all of them should be genuine universal love and compassion embracing entire living being who are same as us in cherishing joy and happiness and wanting to avoid any problem, pain and suffering. Within this motive the mothers-to-be should care for their precious little babies inside them and focus on in and out breathe to relax their mind; once their emotionally calm and settled they could use tong-len meditation using their breath as the vehicle for sending their untainted love and compassion to the baby and taking any ill-health or harm of their babies onto the mothers themselves.

So, I would suggest you to design simple and practical meditation exercises for your project. I hope you could include those meditations which help promote the overall well-being of the mothers-to-be and their unborn children, which are practical, and suit them. If you could train them to maintain their clarity and luminosity nature of their mind without having to exert much physical pressure, I would think it would also help the baby's physical and mental well-being. So, any meditation that can boost the overall well-being, physical and mental (emotional/psychological/spiritual) of both the pregnant woman and her child would be advisable.

Thank you for your kind attention and I hope this makes sense to you as a professional. The details of what/how to use the meditation techniques on the ground, you would know better.

Please feel assured of His Holiness' prayers and blessings for your good health and success and all-round prosperity.
With warm regards,
Tsepag
Religious Interpreter to H. H. the Dalai Lama

I was so happy to read this: not only does H. H. the Dalai Lama support prenatal meditation, he also expresses the possibility of cultivating compassion from within the womb. By using the third practice on our audioguide, Giving and Receiving, perhaps this benefit will be received. The words of this letter resonate profoundly with our own teachings in the Calm Birth method, and it is refreshing and wonderful to know that we are all on the same team of bringing babies to this planet in more empowered ways.

Thanks to H. H. the Dalai Lama and his religious interpreter for this thoughtful letter, and may we all birth in a better way.