Meditations for Pregnancy: 36 Weekly Practices for Bonding with Your Unborn Baby

The relationship between mother and child begins the moment a woman learns she is pregnant. Meditations for Pregnancy is a beautiful tool for mothers-to-be to enhance that relationship, nurture their bodies through a healthy pregnancy, and focus their thoughts on a joyful birth experience.


Available now! Includes Meditations for Pregnancy CD!

To order, print and complete the PDF Order Form and mail along with a check to:
Michelle Leclaire O'Neill, Ph.D., R.N.
869 Via de la Paz, Suite F,
Pacific Palisades, CA 90272.

To order by credit card, call 310.454.0920 and leave your order request, mailing address, and credit card information (this is a secure line, monitored only by Dr. O'Neill) and your order will be shipped the following day via US Priority Mail.

Meditations for Pregnancy

On a continuing basis, our society is ambivalent about motherhood, which carries over to the mother, feeling for herself and her unborn infant. We need to celebrate motherhood. One of the ways of doing that is to include the spiritual and emotional care of the mother along with the physical during her prenatal and postpartum period. We need to allow each mother to give free reign to all of her feelings both positive, negative and ambivalent surrounding motherhood, pregnancy, labor, birthing, marriage, play and career. A mother communicates with her unborn baby (whether she wants to or not) in four different ways:

  • Biologically – This happens through the nutrients the mother takes in. Therefore she can make a choice to provide healthy or unhealthy nutrients.
  • Behaviorally – If a mother puts her body in an uncomfortable position for the baby, she may feel an elbow or a knee suggesting a new position. If she attends a rock concert, the baby kicks vehemently to protest. When she listens to the largo movements of baroque music, the baby becomes very peaceful with a steady healthy heartbeat.
  • Emotionally – When a mother is scared or anxious, she communicates this with her biochemistry. She has a direct connection to the placenta, the organ of the baby. Since the placenta produces many of the hormones responsible for maintaining the pregnancy, perhaps the baby participates in his own miscarriage if this intrauterine environment is unhealthy on a continuous basis.
  • Intuitively – Intuition has always been a valid women's way of knowing. Mothers listen silently to their own inner messages and the baby in turn responds. This has not been honored by the medical community at large. However, now there is a new movement in medicine that addresses what women have known for ages. Now the male dominated medical community is giving women permission to do what we have always done naturally; trust our own inner selves; our other way of knowing. It takes science a while to catch up with innate intelligence.

There is a story about a baby girl, Kristina, who refused her mother's breast at each offering. She accepted a bottle easily. The obstetrician was perplexed and tried an experiment. He asked another mother if she would try to nurse Kristina for one feeding. The mother agreed and Kristina latched on right away and suckled to her heart's content. The doctor asked Kristina's mother about her pregnancy. She said it was healthy but that she didn't really want Kristina in the first place. She wanted to abort her, but her husband wouldn't let her. Intuitively, Kristina knew this. Had Kristina's mother received the proper prenatal care, helping her to deal with these feelings, this lack of bonding could have been prevented.

Pregnancy can inspire an overwhelming host of emotions. A woman may feel excitement about the new life growing inside her, yet apprehension about the changes it will bring. Her body is expanding; her hormones are out of control. Everyone offers unsolicited advice. What she really needs is a way to calm her fears, center her thoughts, and focus her mind on her prenatal child.

Meditations for Pregnancy is written by an expert in pregnancy and birthing to provide guidance and comfort to a mother-to-be throughout the weeks of her pregnancy. For each week, beginning with the fifth, the book provides a thoughtful meditation that speaks to the specific needs and joys of that phase of pregnancy. Inspirational quotations and a short affirmation accompany each meditation, along with a brief description of the development of the growing fetus that week.

Best of all, an audio CD features a 20-minute guided meditation to calm the expecting mom's emotions. It is read by the author and accompanied by soothing music. Meditations for Pregnancy is a wonderful way for women to explore their feelings and calm their nerves and bond with their babies-all in preparation for the transformative experience of birth.

If a mother attends to her baby's needs in utero and to her own need for emotional support and care, the comfort, peacefulness and health of both mother and baby will follow.

About the Author

Michelle Leclaire O'Neill, Ph.D., R.N., has worked in the field of psychoneuroimmunology for the past sixteen years. She was on the staff of the Simonton Cancer Center in Southern California for ten years. While there, she taught meditation; imagery; their two-year health plan, dealing with death and dying as part of life; and getting well again. As a balance to her work with cancer patients, Dr. O'Neill began working with reproductive health and preventive medicine. She developed the Leclaire Hypnobirthing Method, the first hypnobirthing and natural childbirth method developed by a woman, and the Mind Body Fertility program, which she teaches at various locales. She lectures and speaks extensively on her program. She counsels and is the director of the Mind Body Center in Pacific Palisades, California. She is the mother of three children.

What people are saying about Meditations for Pregnancy

"This is the best bonding book ever. A must for EVERY pregnant woman. I read the marvelous daily words, educational, poetic, life enhancing every day and wrote my thoughts and feelings daily. One day I'll give this to my grown baby so he knows how I thought of him every day. BRAVO.
– A reader from NYC		   "After 20 weeks of 'doing' so much for the perfect pregnancy, eating the right foods, creating the right atmosphere, doing the right exercises, I opened the book by 'coincidence' right to page 53 week 20 and realized immediately that all this time I had forgotten to just BE with this light inside me. Her 17-minute meditation is so relaxing, so inspiring, and so effective in creating the loving connection every mother wants to have with her child. Thank you Michelle for this brilliant gift for women."
– Nicole Parker, Actress, Second Time Around