COVID Conclusion

“Breastfeeding mothers should wear a mask while breastfeeding their babies,” Kenya Health CAS Rashid Aman has advised.”

He made the statement during the daily briefing on the COVID-19 as the country celebrates World Breastfeeding Week.

Others have told me that the CDC has recommended the same. This is mindboggling and all I can think of is a quote from Forest Gump, “Stupid is as stupid does!”

Nothing so far in the COVID debacle has left me so speechless and at the same time laughing as the idea of a mother covering her face while breastfeeding her child!

In my 2009 book The Natural Soul: Unity with the Spiritual Energy That Connects us to Our Self, Others and God (Muse House Press, Atlanta GA.) I have a chapter called “Soul Parenting Remembered.” Here are excerpts from this chapter and then you decide if it is a mentally, emotionally, and spiritually healthy idea for a mother to be masked while nursing. (Here’s a hint—if the setting is peaceful, the intimacy is off the charts. God made sure of that with hormones.)

Soul Awareness

We are observing that more and more babies today that are being born wide awake with full contact to our God source and contact with us, if we are open to it. After two or three years though, they may lose that sensitivity or ability to remember who they are: Souls that have come into physical bodies.

These babies, and all of us, can remember that we are Souls, first and foremost, and will continue to remain so after we “die.” We are eternal Souls occupying a finite body. Our body is born and dies. However, our Soul — that organized conscious energy that sometimes appears as light and other times as an electrical impulse — is eternal. Anyone who has had a Near-Death Experience or another kind of Spiritual experience can tell you that. Everyone who has had a meaningful out-of-body experience says the same thing: We existed consciously outside our physical body. This is a kind of experiential proof that we exist before and beyond our physical selves.

The problem is that by the time we turned three, most of us have lost that experiential knowledge, or Soul memory. It could have been different, though. Just imagine how it might have been if a beloved aunt, uncle, or grandparent, or even one or both of our parents, had remained cognizant of the true nature and needs of our Spiritual self. What if we had grown up in the presence of someone who could have looked us in the eye and reminded us of our Soul with a hug, or a song or something that would have perked up our memories as an infant and toddler? If they had rocked us while singing a special song as they cuddled us, or told us we were safe and loved, these people could have been our Soul Parents. They could have kept those Soul memories alive. That was our loss and theirs. Now that we are aware of this, however, we have the opportunity to do it for the little Souls that are entering this dimension now. We can help these beautiful children retain full knowledge of who they are and where they come from, and in so doing we can prevent Soul amnesia from setting in.

Soul Amnesia

Most of us forget who we really are because our parents were taught to believe that babies are devoid of the ability to think or be conscious. The belief was that infants cannot even see (except for shadows) when they are born. If you were treated as though that were the case, you would not have received any encouragement or stimulation to keep your Soul memories alive. Like the vast majority of us, you would have been brought up to believe this party line, as well as many other untruths, because no one gave us any other choice or assistance to help us remember who we are.

Could it be that all babies — all infants throughout time — have been sensitive and gifted, and we are only now beginning to realize this fact?

Staying connected to who we really are fades into the recesses of our mind, as though it’s been tucked behind a stairway in a dimly lit cellar, until later on in life when something — a Near-Death Experience perhaps, or meditation, prayer, or other altered states of consciousness or triggers — turns the light on in that recess and we remember. But we don’t have to let our children’s memories of Unity and our God source fade.

We can help them “rehearse” our memory of Home. The term “rehearsal” refers to a way psychologists explain taking material from short-term memory (which lasts seconds to minutes) and placing it into long-term memory, where it will last years or longer. Rehearsal is the deliberate act of repeating the material in various ways, from speaking to writing. For preverbal children (infants and toddlers) this doesn’t work well. What works best for them is cuddling (not tickling), singing, and an attitude of Unconditional Love that is continuously reflected in the way we look at a child and treat them.

(Whitfield, C.L. Memory and Abuse 1995 page 16)

The phenomenon of Gazing

My daughter, Beth, delivered Ethan by C-section. We weren’t allowed to be present in the delivery room, but within a few minutes of his delivery, he was wheeled out with Eddie, Ethan’s new dad, walking next to the crib and holding his little hand. Within moments they settled into a new baby nursery where we and Eddie’s parents could watch through a window. Eddie, seated on a stool, stared into Ethan’s face continuously while stroking his arm and face. The only thing that could stop him was the nurse’s invitation to ask each one of us to come in, one at a time, to look at Ethan. And what did each one of us do? We gazed into his face and stroked his skin. The most remarkable thing happened. He gazed back into our faces. We were transfixed by his gaze.

When Beth came back into her room, we all moved in with her and took turns gazing into Ethan’s face. This just happened naturally. Sometimes he slept and sometimes he stared back. When Ethan was in bed with Beth, if she wasn’t holding him, they were both on their sides, facing each other, with their faces about six inches apart. Their gaze was obvious and profound. Beth then naturally stroked his skin.

Here’s what science has now learned about newborn babies and gazing: From birth, human infants prefer to look at faces that engage them in mutual gaze, and from an early age, healthy babies show enhanced neural processing of direct gaze. The exceptionally early sensitivity to mutual gaze demonstrated in these studies is a major foundation for the later development of social skills.

Soul Bonding with our Babies

When I looked into Ethan’s face and cuddled him in my arms, even when he was just hours old, I would repeat to him over and over, “Welcome to Earth! You are safe. You have wonderful parents! We’re so happy you are here!”

Every night, before bed, Beth sang to him:
“I see the moon, and the moon sees me. The moon sees somebody I’d like to see. God Bless the moon and God bless me and God bless the somebody I’d like to see. It seems to me that God above created Ethan for me to love. He picked you out from all the rest because he knew I’d love Ethan best.”

And I sang that to Ethan, too, as it is the same one I sang to my three children and to all my other grandchildren now. The first time Kate heard me sing it to Nick she got very excited because her mom used to read her a similar poem. There is something very bonding about singing; it helps to keep our Soul memories intact.

Besides song, getting down on the floor to “just be” with a baby or a child at any age creates a bond that lasts a lifetime. Eye contact is important, even if we are already playing with them. We build a tower with blocks and look into their little faces. Twenty minutes of eye contact while playing is comparable to hours of play without eye contact. Once the children are mobile, whatever they want to do we can do with them. It’s their preference. Bonding doesn’t happen if they have to follow what we want. Bonding happens when we “play” according to their preferences.

The bonus for us is that through their eyes we get to see the world afresh.

How much of this tender loving relationship is lost if a baby or a child can only see half our face?

Unconditional Love

In my Near-Death Experience, my grandmother held me in the tunnel. That holding brought back all the memories of how much we loved each other. All my memories of her, all the memories of wonderful loving times we spent together, came flooding back. All the toxic pain of this lifetime fell away. I felt whole again and I remembered my Soul, and now I can draw on that memory whenever I want or need to. I remember my grandmother, and I feel her love igniting my Soul. This was a type of experiential rehearsal. She gave me that gift.

In my childhood, my parents couldn’t give me what I needed. Besides my grandmother, I also had an aunt and uncle that were my Soul advocates. I went over to their house every weekend to escape and have fun. My aunt and uncle were not only attentive to me, their very look felt warm and welcoming. These three people — my grandmother, my aunt, and my uncle — were my Soul parents. I could do no wrong in their eyes. They loved me unconditionally. They saved my Soul.

My aunt and my grandmother have made their transition to the other side. But I find this same relationship in the here and now with my grandchildren and with other children that come my way, even the ones I don’t know and may not formally meet. A child being carried past me or wheeled by in a stroller looks into my face and I purposely have total eye contact with them. If there is a pause, I smile a wide smile, and I think “Welcome to Planet Earth!” If there is an opportunity, I start a conversation with them and they respond.

Our community pool is a wonderful place to have contact with little kids. Their mothers often say that the children’s grandparents live in other cities so they welcome the attention of “we elders” for their children.

It’s so easy to give children unconditional love and it makes a huge difference to them even decades from now. The little ones coming into this dimension now are open and sensitive. Tokens of our love, from the slightest glance to the biggest hug, are their birthright and our privilege to deliver.

Looking back at the beginning of this article, this idea of wearing masks with infants and small children recommended by these false authorities is more than “Stupid is as stupid does.” It is one of a number of attempted restrictions to our freedoms and mental health.

And it is far more. It is a crime against humanity. When will the tribunals start?