Murshida Vera Justin Corda, Ph.D.
Life’s greatest challenge—parenting
In Cradle of Heaven, Murshida Vera Corda, Ph.D., helps parents and caretakers develop the ability to attune to their children through observing what is happening in their five developmental bodies: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and ethical/moral, regardless of their chronological age. She shows how motherhood and fatherhood consist of a series of skills we relearn in life’s greatest challenge — parenting.
“Murshida Vera helps parents surround conception, pregnancy, and birthing with loving radiance. Her material is interwo¬ven with detailed guidance for the spiritual conduct of the beginnings of human life.”
- Edith Patten, International Childbirth Education Assn.
“With Cradle of Heaven, Murshida Vera Corda addresses the fear of the unknown future for prospective parents so that they can prepare joyously and consciously for the birth of their child.”
- Kathleen Grandison, MD., New Life Birthing Center
“Murshida Vera, seeing the unfolding of the human spirit in a child as the growth of seed, has created tools for the best environment to guide the innate entelechy of the child to physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual growth. The book is a must for teachers and parents.”
- Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Jewish Renewal Movement
“In Cradle of Heaven, the practical understanding of a skilled nurse and counselor combines with the intuitive vision of a gifted mystic to produce an approach to sex, pregnancy, delivery and postpartum care that is genuinely conducive to health and wholeness.”
-Pir Zia Inayat-Khan, Sufi Order International
Murshida Vera J. Corda [1913-2002] had successful careers in ballet, graphic arts design, nursing, and teaching before beginning her pioneering work in early childhood education and family development.
As an artist, she illustrated children’s books with watercolors, designed and silk-screened the original Vera scarf designs, and studied dance with Ruth St. Denis.
She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in education and completed a Master of Arts degree in the Education of Exceptional Children at the University of California at San Francisco. While receiving additional training at Columbia University in New York, she studied with the leading pediatric specialist, Arnold Gesell.
Vera Corda taught in the public schools for fifteen years and held a lifetime teaching credential in California. Early in her career she worked at the San Francisco Youth Guidance Center and at Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute, where she employed art therapy techniques with at-risk young people. She was also a registered nurse and practiced psychiatric nursing at DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn, California.
Murshida Vera Corda was a Sufi disciple for over fifty years and was given the title of Murshida, or spiritual teacher. During the early seventies she founded the New Age Seed Schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, based on the teachings of the Sufi master, Hazrat Inayat Khan. She developed a complete curriculum from infancy through elementary school and trained teachers and parents in the spiritual, intellectual, social, physical, and moral development of children.
After retiring from full-time teaching, Murshida Vera Corda tutored children with special learning needs at her home in the Salinas Valley. She continued to travel and teach until she left the body on April 7, 2002. Her work lives on in those whose lives she touched.
From the Author's Introduction:
Mothering seems to have gone awry in our fast-moving civilization, which appears to have bypassed intuition of the heart. We have forgotten what our pioneer forefathers and foremothers took for granted in infant care before the pediatric profession came into being. In the West, we have lost the art of nurturing the birthing mother, ourselves, and our men. Somehow we must return to natural, intuitive ways, for when a civilization becomes too mental, as is the trend today, it will destroy itself.
One purpose of this book is to help caretakers develop the ability to attune to their children through observing what is happening in their five developmental bodies: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and ethical/moral, regardless of their chronological age. There are some skills and knowledge that our culture does not pass on, perhaps due to the waning focus on family nurturance, directly reflected in the increasing number of single-parent families in our fast-changing society. Motherhood and fatherhood consist of a series of skills we relearn in life’s greatest challenge — parenting.
Postbirth energy is usually centered on the infant’s care, but in older societies, postbirth care included brushing the mother’s hair, sponge-bathing her, massaging her arms, and giving her loving embraces. Today birthing coaches, midwives, and close friends of the couple who attend the birth take over this function. Caring gestures are as important as good nutrition and should be encouraged by this support group, for it will be modeling the caregiving skills the mother will soon use in her own nurturing.
Most of our fathers had little or no role in our delivery, other than getting our mothers to the hospital. Planting of the seed seemed to conclude his part of conception until a bundle was placed in his arms hours or even days after its birth. Excluded from the birthing scene, he missed those crucial first moments when the soul enters this life on the breath. Hospital rules allowed no immediate eye contact with his own infant. The euphoria passed and all too soon the father returned to his lonely home, feeling separation, strangeness, and sometimes even estrangement from his wife and his child.
Another purpose of this book is to fill in empty spots in understanding the complex role of parenting today. Bonding with the new soul enables us to unlearn and relearn at every level. Only through reliving our childhood by growing up again with our children — adopted, foster, or those we guide — can we be made whole and complete in our own development. Living experience, backed by peer-group sharing, builds parenting skills and self-confidence. Parents can also learn from mother nature and the way she shares her bounty with us, regardless of whether we are deserving or not. The most important role that parents and caretakers can play in children’s development is to provide an environment of unconditional love in which children can learn about our world. Love, not “things,” builds that kind of atmosphere.
For more information on the work of Murshida Vera J. Corda, see the website of Holistic Human Development, Inc.: www.veracorda.com
