Do you struggle with your child when it comes to proper oral care? Is making them brush and floss similar to pulling teeth? Even if they are diligent about cleaning, some kids are more prone to cavities and tooth decay than others.
Xylitol may be the answer you’ve been searching for. Here’s how using it for teeth and gum can protect your child’s cute little grin.
Surprisingly, the answer was provided over 400 years ago, by the cofounder of the Jesuit order, St. Francis Xavier. The truth was expressed in his famous quote: “Give me a child for the first seven years, and I’ll give you the man.” Xavier was aware of the fact that life-controlling behavioral programs, downloaded into a child’s subconscious mind during its first seven years, will shape the character of the rest of that person’s life experiences. While our personal wishes, desires and aspirations are a product of the conscious mind, 95% of life experiences are controlled by behavioral activity programmed into the subconscious mind.
Remember, Nature spends a lot of effort and energy in creating a child, and it doesn’t do so randomly or just on a whim. Nature wants to ensure that a child is going to be successful in its life before embarking on the process of birthing that child. Although a child receives genes from both its mother and father, the genes are not fully set into the position of activation until the process of development. The first eight weeks of a child’s development is called the embryo phase, and that’s just a mechanical unfolding of genes to make sure the baby has a body with two arms, two legs, two eyes, etc. The next period of life is called the fetal stage, when the embryo has the human configuration. Since it’s already shaped, the question is, what will nature do to modify or adjust this human in the next number of months before it’s born? What it does is this: Nature reads the environment and then adjusts the final tuning of the genetics of the child based on what’s immediately going on in the world. How can nature read the environment and do this? The answer is that the mother and the father become nature’s Head Start program. They’re the ones who are living in and experiencing the environment. Their perceptions of the world are then transmitted to the child.
We used to think that only nutrition was provided by the mother to a developing child. The story was, genes control the development, and the mother just provides nutrition. We now know, of course, that there’s more than just nutrition in blood. Blood contains information about emotions and regulatory hormones and the growth factors that control the mother’s life in the world in which she’s living. All this information passes into the placenta along with nutrition. If the mother is happy, the fetus is happy because the same chemistry of emotions that affect the mother’s system are crossing into the fetus. If the mother is scared or stressed, the same stress hormones cross and adjust the fetus. What we’re recognizing is that, through a concept called epigenetics, the environmental information is used to select and modify the genetic program of the fetus so it will conform to the environment in which it’s going to grow, thus enhancing the survival of the child. If parents are totally unaware, this creates a great problem—they don’t know that their attitudes and responses to their experiences are being passed on to their child.
The good news is once you become aware of where you are struggling in your life, you have an opportunity to define the limiting dysfunctional subconscious programs that are inhibiting your efforts! The profoundly important fact is disempowering subconscious programs can be rewritten using techniques such as self-hypnosis, habituation practices, and a number of new modalities collectively referred to as “energy psychology.”
I’m the first to admit that I wasn’t ready to be a parent and that I was ignorant about the importance of parents (versus genes) in child development. With 20/20 hindsight, there are many things as a father I’d like to go back and change. Now when I see my daughters and sons-in-law raising their children consciously, in a way that means that these children, unlike their grandfather, won’t have to rewrite a lot of negative programming, I wonder how I could have been so ignorant. I’m reminded of Bharat Mitra’s description of organic farming, which could also serve as a description of conscious parenting: “How beautiful. How natural. How simple.”
Once the subconscious mind is reprogrammed, replacing limiting beliefs with your personal wishes and desires, the subconscious mind working 95% of the day will get you to your destination unconsciously, without the necessity of applying any conscious effort. Does this really work? For over 40 years, I was truly working “hard,” yet failing, to achieve happiness and a true loving relationship. Twenty-seven years ago, I employed these scientific insights to rewrite my dysfunctional developmental programs. How did that work out? For the last 25 years, I have been blessed to truly manifest a joyous Heaven-on-Earth life experience with my wonderful partner Margaret.
For details on how to create the life you desire, I invite you to check-out the www.brucelipton.com website which offers a large number of freely available written articles, podcasts, and videos, revealing how you can reprogram and empower your life. The Honeymoon Effect book is a source that illuminates the molecular pathways connecting the mind and the body and offers an understanding of how to create and sustain a “Heaven-on-Earth” experience in every aspect of our lives. If you are interested in learning more about conscious parenting and birth psychology, please see the resources we have listed HERE, including the Nature, Nurture, and the Power of Love DVD.
With these insights, I wish for you a life of Health, Happiness, Harmony, and of course, LOVE.
With Love and Light,
Bruce
What comes to mind when you think about the holidays?
Do you groan, feeling burdened by all you have to do? Do you dread going shopping for gifts or cleaning up after Christmas or Chanukah or Kwanzaa or other holiday celebrations?
Or, do you feel a sense of fun, delight, and joy in the celebrating and in the giving and receiving?
Which part of you is in charge of the holidays - your judgmental, ego wounded self or your spiritually connected loving adult?
Think for a moment about the little child in you - the child who may have loved the holidays. What delighted you about Christmas or Chanukah or Kwanzaa or other holiday celebrations? Most kids are really excited about receiving gifts, but many children also feel equally excited about giving gifts. Did you enjoy decorating your house?
Or, were the holidays a sad time, a time of heartbreak due to not having enough money? Or a time of loneliness due to the loss of a loved one? Were they a time of stress in your family? Was there abuse around holiday times?
If your child has been participating in school through online learning for some or all of the past school year, the change back to in-person learning this year may be a big shift. Emotions ranging from excitement to nervousness and stress can all arise, and may even be amplified in this unusual time we are living through.
Despite the worries kids and their parents have about staying healthy in the pandemic, there is still excitement about students being back in the classroom, interacting with their teachers and peers. For many kids, this will be a welcome change from solitary learning. For others, the bustle of the classroom poses a big adjustment after logging in to school from the quiet of home for much of the past year. All this is on top of the anxiousness kids normally may feel when starting a new school year with new classmates, classes, teachers, and in some cases, new schools.
When your painful emotions seem to be caused by something outside of you, you are in an illusion. For example, your child falls from a tree, and you feel fear, anxiety, and panic. The fall seems to have caused these emotions, but if you look inside yourself, you will see that they are not new. You have experienced these emotions before, even before you had a child! The fall activated dynamics inside you and they cause the painful emotions that you experience. Other events will continue to activate them until you become familiar with these internal dynamics and move beyond their control.
Are you acquainted with your inner child? This psychological concept evolved to explain the complex way our minds and physiology remember the events of our youth. They can drive our attitudes and behaviors, even if we aren’t conscious of them.
However, it benefits your psyche to get in touch with this miniature you. Better yet, you should bring them out to play now and then. Here are seven reasons keeping your inner child alive is good for your mental health.
Do you find yourself attracted to the same type of person over and over again? Worse, do you find yourself repeating old toxic patterns that you seem unable to break? Doing inner child work could help you understand and reverse the cycle.
One of the things I loved doing as a child was making creative things for my parents. I would spend hours designing and building wonderful cards with little poems in them, and make special pieces of jewelry for my mother. The only problem was that, while my mother would receive her gift graciously, she never received it with her heart. She would smile and tell me how lovely it was, but I never felt her love coming back to me. My mother did not know how to open her heart, how to smile at me with love and cherishing in her eyes. My father would never even notice his gift.
I wanted to connect with my parents, to share love with them, to know their hearts, but their hearts were hidden. Sadly, my mother died at the age of 86 without ever being able to share her heart with me. My father died at 92 and his heart was always closed.
Your children need to feel your heart and soul. They need you to take the time to stop what you are doing and just be with them. They need you to really see them – to see who they are beneath their outward ways of being.
One of the greatest gifts we can give to our children is to see their essence, their true Self, the individual expression of Spirit within them. When children are deeply seen and valued by their parents, they learn to see and value themselves. All children need this profound mirroring from their parents to feel intrinsically lovable and worthy.
Did you know that if you spell stressed backwards the word is dessert? Do you remember when you were a child all that mattered was the fun parts and all the chores and grown up stuff could be saved to last? As a matter of fact we had such a look of dread written all over our faces when we were asked to come in from playing with our friends or we had to wait before we could play. So how did we get to be so important that we do not create the time to still play in our lives. Is the issue that we are more important? What if I told you I believe the issue is we have become non-important. We are so unimportant to ourselves that we have made everything and everyone more significant than we are and we have forgotten the value and necessity of desserts. Often in our society today, too many people are doing things and staying busy without fulfillment and joy. Too many people are on automatic pilot without consciously choosing to participate with decisions which are necessary in order to have a life in which in college we would have written home about. We have forgotten that we are here to enjoy our journey and savor each and every day.
We all know the mantra there is good stress and bad stress and what a brilliant way of making another reason as to why we have forgotten to enjoy our lives. Regardless of whether it is good stress or bad stress…it’s still stress and it accelerates the head chatter, the bad eating habits, the lack of sleep and all the other elements which go with stress. We can intellectualize stress and explain what type it is yet our body still feels it and doesn’t understand why we are so out of balance with it.
Were you deprived of comforting holding as a child? I was. I was held by my mother, but the energy of her touch was so needy and engulfing that I hated being held or touched by her.
Babies and toddlers especially need warm, tender, caring, comforting holding and touch to know they are loved and to help them learn to regulate their feelings. Without this loving physical nurturing, they feel deeply rejected and abandoned.
How can we heal this yearning for the nurturing loving touch that we might have missed out on?
Brandon asks:
“When I try to get in touch with my anger, the thought comes up “my mother.” I think I didn’t get touched, cuddled, and caressed as a child. Here I get stuck! I draw a blank. I don’t know what the next step of the Inner Bonding process is.”
There are two ways to heal the lack of touch – with another person, and within yourself.
"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up." -Pablo Picasso
The news is exhausting, isn't it? We are inundated with information that's often confusing and conflicting. We are inundated with "breaking" news, stories of surges and spikes, overcrowded hospitals and looming threats of another potential lockdown. It's a lot.
That's why I've taken to removing myself from the chaos, as best I can. I’m doing it for my own mental health. These days, I read some news in the morning, and then again at the end of the day. But never before bed. I’ve reserved that time for Kevin Costner and his hit TV show "Yellowstone!"
