The Power of Healing Trauma Preconception and During Pregnancy
As a BodyTalk practitioner who specializes in fertility, pregnancy, and birth, I can’t stress enough how powerful healing intergenerational, karmic, and past-life trauma before conception or while pregnant can be—not just for you, but for your unborn child and future generations. The womb is often considered a sacred space where new life is created, but it also carries the energetic imprints of unresolved emotional, physical, and karmic patterns. By addressing and healing these traumas during preconception or pregnancy, you can break cycles of pain, enhance emotional well-being, and create a nurturing, harmonious environment for your baby’s growth.
The Law of Rhythm, one of the foundational Hermetic principles, teaches us that life flows in cycles—rising and falling, moving forward and then retreating. Trauma, whether karmic, intergenerational, or epigenetic, follows this same rhythm. It is important to recognize that until trauma is healed, it continues to repeat, manifesting across generations and lifetimes. However, this cycle can be broken. Healing happens when you become conscious enough to step in and disrupt these patterns—which is the beauty of BodyTalk’s ability to pull up and bring the long-lost hidden factors back into awareness, so they can be healed through the simple yet powerful act of nurturing.
The Mouse Study: How Nurture Disrupts Epigenetic Trauma
A groundbreaking study in the field of epigenetics demonstrates just how powerful nurturing can be in breaking the transmission of trauma. In this study, male mice were conditioned to fear the smell of cherry blossoms (acetophenone) by associating it with mild electric shocks. Even when the shocks stopped, the male mice developed an instinctive fear of the scent, which they passed down to their offspring. Remarkably, the next FIVE generations of mice also showed an innate fear of the cherry blossom scent, even though they had never been shocked themselves. This study provided direct evidence of trauma being passed down through epigenetic changes.
Epigenetic changes are like how a caterpillar and a butterfly have the same DNA, but look and behave completely differently. Their genes are the same, but certain genes are turned on or off at different stages of life, which leads to their transformation. The shock/smell trauma in the original mice created an altered nervous system response in their offspring. They developed hereditary gene expressions of the fear response in order to protect their pups from the harm they endured.
However, the best part of the study was the discovery that when the baby mice were allowed to stay with their mothers, who provided nurturing care such as licking and grooming, the epigenetic transmission of fear and trauma stopped. The nurturing behaviour of the mother was able to rewire the trauma response, breaking the cycle that would have otherwise been passed down for generations.
This profound discovery demonstrates how powerful nurturing is, not just emotionally but biologically. It underscores the importance of environments filled with care, safety, and love—where trauma can be healed instead of inherited. This is why I am such a huge supporter of the #NurtureRevolution and conscious parenting movements that support healthy brain and nervous system development and create a foundation for lifelong health. As an (expecting) parent, you have the power to break cycles of inherited pain and rewrite the future for your children!
Prevention is much easier than treatment, but you can heal the old trauma. Love is always the answer.
The Holocaust Study: Phobias Inherited Through Trauma
The transmission of trauma across generations has also been observed in humans, most notably in descendants of Holocaust survivors. Research shows that children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors exhibit higher levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, making them more prone to anxiety, depression, and PTSD-like symptoms. Even though they did not experience the Holocaust directly, the trauma of that horrific event was encoded in their genes through epigenetic changes.
One striking example of this inherited trauma is the recurring phobia of showers in some descendants of Holocaust survivors. Many survivors were led to gas chambers disguised as shower rooms, and the terror of that experience left a lasting imprint on their genetic code. This encoded fear, passed down to future generations, manifests as an irrational but deeply rooted phobia of showers.
Living in Saskatchewan and working with Indigenous peoples, I see the horrific residential school trauma being replayed in the bodies and minds of the survivors’ children and grandchildren I work with firsthand. As an expecting parent, you can help break this chain of pain. The trauma from the past can find expression in those who come after, but nurturing and conscious care can help to rewrite these patterns. By creating a safe, loving environment, you can reverse the effects of inherited trauma, just as in the mice.
Why the #NurtureRevolution and Conscious Parenting Matter
As you bring your baby into the world, you have the power to shape their emotional foundation. The #NurtureRevolution and conscious parenting movements are all about breaking cycles of trauma through nurturing, presence, and awareness. These movements are built on the idea that when you provide your child with an environment full of love, empathy, and emotional safety, you stop the transmission of inherited trauma. You pave the way for your child to be resilient, emotionally balanced, and free from the weight of past wounds.
Conscious parenting is about more than just providing for your baby’s needs in a loving way—it’s about being fully present and aware of the deeper emotional patterns playing out within you. It’s recognizing that the fears, anxieties, or emotional wounds you carry might have roots that go far beyond your own experiences. They may stretch back through generations. Conscious parenting acknowledges that when you’re triggered by your child, it’s not your child causing the reaction—it’s how they activate old wounds within you. Your responsibility is to become aware of these patterns and break the cycle of reactivity. Your child doesn’t “make you mad”; the anger already exists within you. You may desire to be a calm loving parent but end up being impatient and stressed because of your own wiring.
When you consciously re-parent yourself and heal your own wounds, you stop passing those wounds onto your children. We can work to help you become regulated, calm and attuned in ways your parents weren’t. This is some of the most important work you can do—not just for your baby, but for humanity as a whole.
And who wants to spend all their time reactive and triggered? I sure don’t, especially when the reactivity was directed at my children who were just being kids. I found BodyTalk when my oldest was a toddler, and I could NOT cope with his neediness, acting out for attention and often horrific behaviour. Through BodyTalk, I reconnected with my emotional intelligence and learned how to hold space for and accept his big emotions. I became more patient, loving, and connected. And guess what? By changing the way I related to him, his behaviour changed so drastically that people even asked if I had medicated him!
If you want to help your baby, start by healing yourself.
So how does this all work?
As much as we inherit traits from our ancestors, we also inherit from the collective consciousness. You may not realize it, but influences from past lives and generations are part of your current experience, shaping how you respond to your child and your world. In The Holographic Universe, Michael Talbot talks about how there’s as much evidence to prove the existence of reincarnation as there is for the Big Bang (which is now universally considered as fact), yet past lives are often dismissed as “woo-woo.” But in my work, I’ve seen time and time again how we all carry unresolved trauma from the past, whether it’s from our ancestors or past lives.
It is often described that we exist like an ocean of consciousness, with everything interconnected. You are like a unique wave, existing for your specific time before returning to the whole. ‘You’ as this person won’t exist again but you exist as part of the whole. In this ocean analogy of consciousness, the father of Integral Theory, Ken Wilber states ‘We are no more wet or less wet than anyone else’. We are no better, no worse than anyone else. I love that mindset of equality.
In BodyTalk, we recognize the basic physics that energy cannot be created or destroyed; it only changes form. We know that unresolved trauma or emotional pain is simply energy. In BodyTalk, we refer to this as active memories—the emotions and experiences that remain energetically active and trigger reactions within our tissues. When someone dies, any unresolved energy (emotions/experiences) doesn’t simply vanish—it returns to the ocean of consciousness. The next child entering consciousness inherits that unresolved energy, just a “scoop of karmic soup” they carry to process and unravel. This means that the pain or experiences from past lives or inherited memories aren’t dormant—they are living, breathing forces that actively shape your current life experience.
Our past-life and generational pain sit in our subconscious like a book on a shelf. Just as we can inherit genes for breast cancer but need specific environmental triggers (epigenetic activation) to activate them, our past lives function in the same way. Every time we have an experience, our subconscious asks, “Have I been here before? How do I react to this situation?” It then explores our library of experiences to determine how to respond. If it finds a past-life trauma from a similar scenario, it can feel very real, and your body becomes reactive. But when we help the body recognize that this isn’t your experience and it isn’t relevant in this life, it can be let go. The body can drop the reaction, and it will no longer trigger a response.
My work in this area really took flight when I read Dolores Cannon’s book The Convoluted Universe Vol IV. Over her decades of past-life regression hypnosis and research, she discovered that unresolved traumas from past lives often manifest in the present as chronic pain, emotional wounds, or irrational fears. During regression sessions, clients would recall specific past-life experiences that held the key to their current struggles. By acknowledging and processing these memories, her clients were able to release the grip of past-life trauma, leading to profound healing in their present lives.
I see the same in my practice every single day.
Here are just a few of my client stories:
One baby I worked with years ago was fine in his car seat, but as soon as you put him in the car, he would have a meltdown. They could not travel anywhere with him. I found he had a past-life event of having been orphaned by a car accident. This caused him to overreact if he was in or aware of his parents being in a vehicle. By recognizing actively clearing the past-life experience, it no longer held a charge, and he could instantly travel without hysteria. The mom tells me that years later, he still reminds her to drive safely whenever she leaves.
I worked with a baby who had a phobia of water. From the moment she was born, she would panic if you put water on her. I found a past life where water was toxic and dangerous. I was able to resolve the issue, and they were instantly able to bathe her. That little girl, now seven years old, absolutely loves swimming.
I have found numerous cases of older children with bed-wetting issues linked to past lives of nighttime molestation, where their bodies would sleep too deeply and disconnect from somatic awareness because they believed nighttime wasn’t safe to experience. Upon helping their systems know they are safe to feel and know their bodies day and night, the bedwetting issues were resolved.
In one session, 18 years of back pain was resolved instantly! We found a past life of falling from a ladder and breaking her back and how it related to an active memory event when she was 18 years old. She remembered the experience right away. She recounted how she was forced to climb a very tall ladder to change a light bulb at a retail job. She realized that it was around the same time when the pain emerged within her. Pain instantly vanished. I wish it was always that easy to heal chronic pain!
A 24-year-old woman came to me with arthritis in her knees, a condition unusual for someone her age. I found a past-life experience where she had been kneeling down for execution. I found a subconscious belief that she still deserved punishment for how horrible she was in that life. Upon recognizing that experience wasn’t hers to carry the arthritis was permanently resolved.
I addressed sciatica at the level of grandparents for one woman to be told her sister stopped having sciatic issues as well.
I addressed genetic epilepsy in 7 year old at an ancestral level and what was most miraculous was her younger brother also stopped having seizures despite not receiving any treatment at all himself.
One mom I worked with had migraines at the base of her skull; I found that her skull was clamped on too tightly due to a past life of being hung to death. I asked if she liked scarves. “NO! I hate anything around my neck; I don’t even wear necklaces!” she exclaimed. It made perfect sense, and the migraines dramatically reduced. In her case other factors needed to be addressed to resolve them thoroughly.
Another client had a past life of being stoned to death in the Victorian age, and while I don’t remember how that was manifesting physically or emotionally for her, I found it fascinating that she utterly despised that time period. There are always clues in our triggers. This same client went from being barely able to touch her knees to completely touching her toes for the first time in 50 years when we addressed a past life of slavery, specifically cotton picking. Her body refused to bend forward because of that lifetime. Instant change in her flexibility that remained permanent. The restrictions in mobility were not physical but energetic/emotional. As they always are.
I find a lot of past lives are tragic deaths because those who experienced them are no longer around to resolve the energy and pain of the experience, so it is just passed on to the next being to clean up. The biggest issue is that the root cause of our problems is almost always subconscious, and we need help with experiences like BodyTalk, hypnosis, plant medicines, etc. to access and heal them. I find we are always given clues to bring it up from the dark. Like the woman who hated scarves or the other hating the Victorian ages, the things that trigger us are communicating to us that there is a deeper story to explore.
The 8th Chakra
The 8th Chakra is an energy center located just above the head, outside of the physical body. In BodyTalk, we access it as a gateway to past-life and karmic healing, connecting you to your soul’s journey across lifetimes. While the seven main chakras focus on physical health and emotions, the 8th Chakra links you to something bigger—your higher consciousness, unresolved memories, and patterns passed down through generations.
By working with this chakra, we can access deeper spiritual layers, helping to uncover and heal old karmic cycles or emotional blocks that affect your present life. This process releases the weight of the past and clears the way for growth and healing.
How BodyTalk can help:
1. Breaking Repetitive Cycles
When we don’t acknowledge or heal past traumas, we often repeat the same emotional, behavioural, or relational patterns. These cycles can manifest as recurring life challenges, chronic health issues, or relationship struggles. By addressing the root causes—whether from this lifetime, past lives, or inherited ancestral trauma—we break these cycles, freeing ourselves from the subconscious programming that keeps us stuck. This is the key to moving forward with more clarity and personal freedom. As an expecting parent, you have a unique opportunity to address these patterns now, breaking the cycle before your child is born.
2. Releasing Emotional Blockages
Unresolved trauma, whether ancestral or karmic, often shows up as emotional blockages in the body. These can cause feelings of fear, anxiety, anger, or even physical pain, such as headaches, reduced mobility, or chronic illnesses. Addressing the past helps us release these emotional blockages, allowing energy to flow freely again. As energy begins to move, emotions that were once suppressed are integrated, leading to emotional healing and balance. This is how BodyTalk is known first and foremost as a method of stress reduction. We clear the old stuff that create the tension and triggers within you. Allowing you to be in more control of your moods and in calm steady states that directly benefit your baby.
3. Healing Physical Symptoms
Many physical ailments have deeper roots in unresolved past experiences. For example, physical pain like back pain, headaches, or digestive issues may be tied to past-life trauma or inherited ancestral stress. By addressing and resolving these deeper causes, the physical symptoms often dissipate. By healing these deep-rooted traumas, you can have a pain-free and complication-free pregnancy, an easier, blissful birth and a faster recovery postpartum.
4. Reclaiming Personal Power
Trauma, especially inherited or past-life, often leads to feelings of disempowerment or victimization in the present. These subconscious imprints can make us feel like we’re controlled by forces outside of ourselves. When we address the past and clear these traumas, we reclaim our personal power. We shift from feeling like victims of our circumstances to understanding that we have the power to change our reality. Reclaiming your power before or during pregnancy allows you to step into parenting with confidence and deeper levels of trust and intuition that deeply support you throughout birth and into parenthood.
5. Healing Generational Trauma
Intergenerational trauma affects not only individuals but entire family systems. By healing past traumas, we don’t just heal ourselves—we also help release the energetic burden for our family line. This healing can ripple forward to future generations, preventing the transmission of trauma to our children and grandchildren. Addressing the past enables us to end cycles of pain, guilt, and dysfunction, offering healing to both our ancestors and descendants. As an expecting parent, you are in a unique position to prevent inherited trauma from being passed to your baby. I have even addressed and disconnected babies from genetic ailments.
6. Spiritual Growth and Karmic Resolution
Addressing karmic imprints from past lives allows for spiritual growth. When we clear past-life trauma, we are also resolving unfinished karmic lessons, which can help us move forward on our soul’s journey with less baggage. In many traditions, karma represents the lessons we carry forward from past experiences, and resolving these helps us to evolve spiritually. When we confront these karmic imprints, we can break free from past-life patterns of guilt, punishment, or unworthiness, moving toward higher states of consciousness and fulfillment. Healing past-life trauma as an expecting parent allows you to approach parenthood with greater spiritual clarity, paving the way for your child to enter the world with a clean energetic slate. When working with adults I have decades of current life experiences and programs to sift through, but with a fetus or newborn, we can clear a lot of old baggage before it can create a problematic pattern in them. I have several older children I continue to work with monthly since they were in the womb and it never ceases to amaze me how through each new stage of development or life experience new ones are brought to the surface and how quickly we can resolve how it is impacting them physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.
7. Creating New Energetic Patterns
Once past trauma is addressed and cleared, we have the opportunity to consciously create new energetic patterns. This is the process of reprogramming the mind and body to align with healthier, more balanced ways of being. After clearing the old imprints, we can focus on nurturing new patterns that support emotional well-being, physical health, and spiritual fulfillment. By healing yourself, you can consciously create new, healthier patterns that will positively shape your baby’s experience and development. We can wire in a brain and nervous system from a place of safety and love that is strong and resilient to stress.
8. Integration and Wholeness
The ultimate goal of addressing the past is to achieve integration and wholeness. Unresolved traumas create fragmentation—parts of ourselves become stuck in the past, leaving us feeling disconnected or incomplete. By healing these fragments, we reintegrate them into our present selves, leading to a greater sense of wholeness and alignment. This integration process helps us align with our true nature, free from the influence of past pains and imprints, allowing us to live more fully in the present. Being present and attuned is the best gift you can give your baby.
9. Enhancing Emotional Intelligence and Empathy
When we address and heal past trauma, we develop greater emotional intelligence and empathy. Understanding where our reactions and triggers come from—whether from past lives or inherited trauma—allows us to approach ourselves and others with more compassion. This awareness creates space for more authentic relationships, deeper emotional connections, and healthier interpersonal dynamics. As an expecting parent, this emotional intelligence allows you to approach your child with a deeper sense of empathy and attunement, fostering a strong parent-child bond essential to their wellbeing.
Conclusion
Healing past-life, karmic, and intergenerational trauma is a transformative process that not only liberates you from cycles of pain, fear, and inherited wounds but also creates a foundation for future generations to thrive. The Law of Rhythm teaches us that trauma repeats across lifetimes and family lines until we become conscious enough to break the cycle. By addressing unresolved past experiences you heal the fragmented parts of yourself, reclaim your power, and open the door to freedom and spiritual growth.
Nurture plays a key role in this healing. Just as studies have shown that trauma can be disrupted through loving care, conscious parenting and intentional nurturing can stop the transmission of inherited pain. By providing environments filled with love, compassion, and emotional safety, you reshape the future, breaking cycles of trauma and fostering emotional resilience.
This work begins even before birth. By healing trauma in the preconception phase or during pregnancy, you create a nurturing energetic environment, free from the burdens of past traumas. This conscious preparation allows future generations to enter the world with a clean slate, ready to thrive in health, freedom, and emotional balance. Through the power of healing the past, you transform both yourself and the legacy you leave for future generations.
The womb becomes a space of healing, not just for you, but for your lineage and the future generations to come. When you engage in this deep work, you offer your child the most precious gift—the freedom to create their own path, unburdened by the unresolved traumas of the past. Prenatal BodyTalk holds the key to breaking cycles of pain, allowing you to connect deeply with your baby so together, you can nurture a future filled with love, growth, and emotional resilience.
You and your baby deserve a Conscious Birth!