Foreword by Beatrijs Smulders, Suggestions for use, Introduction, Quotes from different disciplines, A lot of experiences of parents(-to-be), Appendix with exercises, Music-tips, Cited and Recommended Literature, CD- information, Info about the author Riet van Rooij and her Freyja Practice.
And the Chapters:

• Inviting and welcoming your child: the conception
  
• Building the nest: a sanctuary
  
• Hi little one! Making contact, seeking contact, getting contact
  
• Self-image and stirrings of the soul: your experience in words and pictures
  
• Dancing with your belly, rocking with your baby
  
• As long as it works out all right, as long as it is all right: coping with fear and tension
  
• The delivery: an initiation
  
• The star in the middle: the child and its birth
  
• Respect for your baby: continuing soulful contact after the birth
  
• An empty belly, empty arms: if your pregnancy goes wrong
  

With this book I hope to support parents-to-be in their physical well-being, in the communication with their partner, in their connection with the spiritual dimension of life and in the contact with their unborn child. With the ideas and methods I am passing on, I hope to provide impetus to go through the pregnancy ‘soulfully’, in a contemporary sense, and thus to hold life in reverence. Besides this, my book is intended as a plea to take our unborn children and newborn babies seriously by communicating with them at the level of the soul.

WELCOMING
Did it feel good when you finally succeeded, or do you not know exactly when it happened?
Was it an accident, after the initial shock of which you were happy nonetheless, or was it finally a success after months of disappointment and the umpteenth sly bout of love-making?
Did you wake in the night making love and (...)

If the pregnancy is already a reality at the time of reading, you will be able to look back at the conception. And... are you satisfied? If you like dealing with things consciously it could be that you’re walking round with ideal images of how it actually ought to have happened. It is nice, and human, to strive towards ideals, but somewhere along the way life itself goes its own way.

MOTHER EARTH
‘I feel just like during puberty,’ a woman once confided to me: ‘a mixture of pride and vulnerability. Everyone can see it, yet its so intimate as well...’ Coming to terms with a belly that previously you would have hated, enjoying large, firm breasts, feeling an unprecedented sensuality – it all happens. Maybe you feel like a kind of Mother Earth, powerful, fertile and full, but the opposite can also happen to you: feeling estranged from your own body, insecurity as regards your partner, discomfort, bother.

It can be stimulating to create a place at home that draws you into it. A sanctuary that inspires you, that helps you remember what is really important to you, in short: a pocket-sized place of contemplation.

TUNING IN
There are different ways in which you can establish contact with your child. By talking to him you are already concentrating on him: ‘Hey Philip, don’t kick so hard. You’re hurting me!’, or ‘Come on now, little elf, will you do some more moving? We’ve hardly felt you today.’ (...)
You can have a playful chat with your child, express your concern to him or really get down to it and write him a letter. You are then tuning yourself in internally to your child and this can give you a feeling of connection, irrespective of directly perceptible reactions from the baby’s side.

Now that he’s expecting his first child, Josh encounters some old pain; his relationship with his father is playing up an awful lot. Josh is in fact terribly unsure as to whether he himself will be capable of being a loving father – the father-son relationship he knows from his own experience is not exactly a splendid example. During a guided visualization he makes contact with his child’s energy. He feels that his daughter is nearby him and has things just the way she wants them. She is exuding something very serene. Josh then knows intuitively that his child accepts him as a father. He lets his tears flow freely, it touches him deeply.

Communicating with your unborn child is a matter of ‘slowing down’. In due course, journeying inward and looking briefly, or more extensively, for your child is heart-warming and promotes calm and trust in the natural wonder that is taking place in your life. Furthermore it constitutes excellent preparation for the birth.

MIRRORS
Many people still have the idea: now I’m having children I ought actually to be grown-up by now, ready, no longer bothered by... (fill something in). Probably a certain image of the good mother or the ideal father is underlying this, and to your dismay you’ve only got a couple of months left to become that... To be honest, you’re still feeling and doing all kind of things that you’re more likely to expect from a big kid than from an adult parent. As long as it works out all right...

YOUR BODY AS A ROCKING CRADLE
Dancing is moving with feeling. By dancing you are able to make the energy in your body flow and pay homage to the changes in your body. Dancing is a way of celebrating the physical side of your pregnancy.
Experiment a little, caress your baby with your movements... flow with your body along her... and enjoy. Fluid as a stream you twist around your baby: dreamy, voluptuous, nurturing...

Attentive hands
Touch with full, attentive hands. You adjust the shape of your hands to the belly, softly curved. Try to encircle your baby with your hands, inviting him or her to come and lie in the palm of your hands. Not prodding and forcing, but encircling in a nurturing way. Thus the message of your hands is something like: here I am, my baby, will you come to me?

EXAMINING AND SHARING FEELINGS
If you are expecting a child it is perfectly normal to feel uncertain or anxious now and then. (...) Fear deserves a place alongside all other feelings and the trick is to deal with these natural feelings in a healthy and deliberate manner.

Naturally you’ll be longing for a pleasant experience and would not begrudge your baby a smooth birth, but if you are fixated, for example, on a water birth – with candlelight and soothing music – then it is good to realize that, essentially, spirituality has nothing to do with these outward forms. Delivering the baby in a manner that is soulful and aware means that you put your all into giving birth to your child, in which you are also regarding the baby itself as an entity with a valuable contribution to make. One of the greatest qualities on which you will be challenged is letting go of your ego with its impressions and conditions and idealized images..

THE ART OF LETTING GO
I have been able to survey many reactions from men while watching deliveries together on DVD. ‘What a plonker’ he could then comment from the sideline at a rather silent man who was ostensibly doing nothing. Still others were able to identify well with the role, a beacon of calm in the storm of labour. .

Affirmations that are able to promote ‘birthing qualities’ in you like submission, letting go and confidence are, for example, for the woman:
It is a challenge for me to follow my body
I’m ready to release my child
I feel connected with all women before me; I have faith in my strength

It was Saturday evening. Catrin had been due for thirteen days already. They were expected in the hospital on Monday, though a home birth was a top priority for them. What was keeping this baby? They decided to go to bed early. The desire to seek contact with the baby arose in both of them. Will placed his hands around the baby and they took turns speaking to him. This went something like: ‘Here, little person, listen. (...)

When preparations and intentions degenerate into spasmodic control, they get in the way of the natural process of delivery.

I am convinced that every delivery has its own wisdom (...) By being born, your son or daughter is introducing himself or herself and giving voice to his/ her being. Not surprisingly, on the level of the soul there is no distinction between nice, easy or natural births and tough, difficult or medical ones. Delivery and birth are forms of the soul expressing itself.

THE BIG RECEPTION
Midwives for whom the wisdom of the soul of unborn babies is a genuine fact put themselves in conscious contact with them during the birthing process. They tune in to the essence of the child and work together with it. They address the child as an intelligent being, let the baby know by means of touch or directed thoughts what is being expected of him. As parents, too, you can tune in to your child during the birthing process. (...)

I believe that only a few births can be labelled ‘gentle’; being born is after all a violent job in which considerable forces play a role. It is precisely this intensity that is an invitation to the child’s soul to enter his little body.

A period of introduction and maternity in which there is room for the soul will benefit from some delay and restraint. I have met a good few couples who told me that days after the birth they looked at each other completely exhaustedly and realized that they still had not heard from each other how they had actually experienced the delivery and the birth of their child. (...)

YOUR GREATEST TEACHER
A wise soul in a cot... how do you handle it? Once your baby has been born, this conscious being – with which you communicated intuitively during your pregnancy by talking to him, to whom you perhaps wrote and whom you encountered in visualizations – suddenly has a name, a voice, a body and needs intensive care. (...) In the way in which you touch, lift and carry his little body, you can give expression to the realization that he is an adult soul in a dependent baby-body.

Crying is communicating and is a part of life. You are supporting your child in his being if you encourage him to cry if he has reason to do so. Say ‘go on darling, cry; I see you’re having a hard time of it’, instead of ‘hush, shush, there’s nothing wrong’.

‘Walk your talk’ is no simple recipe for parenting; it is a process of becoming aware, in which your child is perhaps your greatest teacher. (...) I still remember clearly how shocking I found it when I first heard that the tone in which I sometimes have a go at my children sounds exactly the same as that of my mother before me, although I had made such a firm resolution to do it differently nevertheless (....) The best thing you can give your children is, as far as I’m concerned, your sincere willingness to consider everything that crosses your path of parenthood to be invitations to learn.

NOT A SINGLE HUMAN BEING, DEAD OR ALIVE, COMES WITHOUT REASON
It is shocking if this string of expectations is cut and your baby returns to where it came from or to whatever invisible dimension. How is this possible? Why first come and then so quickly go again?! (...)
The soul is asking to live through an experience in all its facets, not for a conclusive explanation. On the level of the soul there is no unequivocal reason that can be put forward for life or death.

There is usually little to see of a developing baby during a miscarriage. Precisely because generally so little that is tangible and visible remains of such a short pregnancy, many people feel the need to perform a parting ritual they have devised themselves; they want to give the event a place in their lives symbolically. They bury a doll in the woods, plant a rosebush in their garden or make a picture in memory of the baby that came and left again.

A cold emptiness filled my belly. (...) The more I bled, the more I begged and prayed to all gods and goddesses I could think of. I felt real connection with my inner guide, Freyja, who as a mother goddess gave me encouragement in what I felt to be a deep womanly affliction: how the life of your child flows out of you without you being able to do anything about it. Yet the intensity of what I experienced then, including being together in powerless despair with my husband and my first child, has been preserved in my heart as a valuable present from ‘’Frisky’’. We look back on it and cherish it. Since then, I experience her now and again as a kind of inner guide; if I look for her or if she appears to me spontaneously, she puts me in touch with a deep truth in my life: that everything has the meaning I attribute to it...