We are individually and collectively influenced by the traumatic events of our lifetimes. Major catastrophes such as war, displacement from home, childhood abuse, and random acts of violence create reverberations and ripple effects in our lives that impact how we view ourselves and others. These impressions are also handed down from generation to generation, manifesting as information that gets lodged in our nervous systems and compels our behavior in mysterious ways. However, investigating trauma can offer us powerful touch points for healing, and for simply joining with the collective fear of our fellow human beings with the utmost empathy.
Perhaps you have not been personally affected by a traumatic event in this lifetime, but chances are someone in your family line has. Trauma is an ancient concept, originating from the Greek word for wound. Wounds can injure our physical, psychological, and emotional bodies—and while we can heal from many wounds, some remain open and raw for a long time. Such is the case in the unhealed wounds we inherit from our ancestors, as well as the trauma from our own perinatal and birth experiences that can be passed from one generation to the next—in some cases, even influencing our fertility.
There is significant research on how those who survived extreme physical and mental trauma, starvation, and abuse passed on a heightened nervous system, endocrine sensitivity, hyper-inflammatory conditions, and reproductive imbalance to their children. Hypervigilance, naturally developed in times of strife, particularly impacts fertility. Currently, the Middle East has one of the highest male factor infertility rates on the planet, most of which can be attributed to the stress and impact of war over the last several decades. The legacy of transgenerational trauma is such that even if universal peace were declared tomorrow, generations to come could still be adversely affected by the wars of the past.
Trauma need not be as extreme as war or genocide to be harmful and inheritable—small and overlooked daily traumas such as poverty and domestic abuse are just as injurious. The microtraumas in an individual’s life span can also accumulate into more established currents that direct the flow of a person’s life. Happily, there is a way to heal these wounds and change the future.
Each time we choose to have a child, we are presented with the opportunity to reframe our individual histories, and by extension, our familial line. Herein lies one of the earliest and most significant gifts that our children offer us: the ability to reflect on what has not worked and to move forward to a new model of the family. Infertility can feel isolating, unfair, and painful, doubly so when much of the contributing trauma was handed to us by our ancestors, who might not have put in the healing work necessary. There is a concept in holistic medicine suggesting that a symptom that is not resolved will linger under the surface for years until it again finds an opportunity to express itself in hopes of being fixed. Applying this to transgenerational trauma suggests that even if you do achieve pregnancy with ease, you and your children will at some time have to resolve the unfinished business of your lineage. In consciously conceiving you get to set the time for this healing and get to do it on your watch. This resolution is profound and not only helps you get pregnant, but also enables you to be fully present for the joy of being a mother.
While studying obstetrics in Shanghai, one of the most impressive and apparent differences from the United States that I observed in the labor and delivery room was the temperature: It was hot. Really hot. In general, China is exceedingly sparing with its use of energy. I recall graciously being invited over to one of the doctor’s homes for dinner one evening and being quite surprised to see my host answer the door in a full-length winter jacket. We all sat around the table in cold-weather garb while feasting on her family’s favorite recipes. So this was unusual.
“Why is it kept so warm in the delivery room?” I asked the doctor.
“Cold is the first trauma,” she replied, “so we try to make it warm to ensure that babies and their mamas have less trauma.”
The doctor understood one of the essential aspects of our humanity: our mastery of fire and our ability to rise above the elements. When exposed to cold, our muscles and bodies tense and we withdraw from the environment. Our respiration quickens, we begin to shiver, and we might reserve energy by lowering and saving our voice. We also conserve energy by slowing our digestion. Depending on the length and location of exposure to cold, the impact can remain with the body for a lifetime.
In my childhood, I recall always being puzzled as to why my father, a seemingly tall and robust ex–Army Ranger, still needed extra blankets on his legs and feet at night.
“Service to the nation,” he would explain to me when I asked why. It was not until sometime later that I learned the effects of frostbite; cold exposure even at the young age of 21 could linger in his body forever. You see, some traumas are so intense that even briefly witnessing them can leave behind a residue. It is difficult to erase such experiences from memory, even when we are not fully conscious of them. However, the faster the injury is addressed, named, contained, and processed, the less likely it is to have long-lasting—and fertility-impacting—results.
Thus, it is that postpartum care in China that greatly supports the essential energetic environment of the mother by paying close attention to avoiding cold, maintaining warmth, eating warm foods, and obtaining plenty of rest. There is a cultural understanding that the degree of care for the mother and baby at the time of the delivery and during the postpartum period impacts future fertility.
In contrast, Western medical intervention and its extreme methodology can interfere with several natural processes that occur at birth. For instance, without dilation of the cervical canal, women cannot produce oxytocin, considered the “love and bonding” hormone. Without its presence, mothers find it hard to connect and relate to their babies. Breastfeeding also produces oxytocin—so when mothers do not breastfeed their children, oxytocin is not sufficiently produced in their body.
Along the same lines, an orthopedic surgeon friend of mine now uses a heated blanket to warm the body and muscles of his patients before surgery. This positively influences the outcome by encouraging tight muscles to relax instead of constrict. Adding heat might seem like an obvious and straightforward way to combat trauma and positively impact health, but sometimes the most obvious solution is the hardest to see. The outcome of surgery can change when we merely add a warm blanket. And with this, the plausibility of trauma—often considered a default experience, given the ubiquitous nature of human suffering—is substantially reduced.
Factors such as severe cold or surgical trauma might be more obvious than the more subtle wounds of inherited beliefs and patterns. My work includes identifying potential ways unresolved injuries are passed down from one generation to the next (transgenerational trauma), and how these might interfere with fertility. I do this by listening for specific key phrases and descriptions from my patients. Frequently, people know they are carrying a psychic or emotional burden for their family. They often talk about feeling very different from their siblings and other family members, and how they either walk away from conflict within their family or avoid direct contact with them altogether.
If you intuitively feel like transgenerational trauma might be playing a role in your ability to get pregnant, there are several ways to begin to reflect and create an inventory of what might be happening behind the scenes. The following are some—but not all—of the most common factors that I look for in my one-on-one work with clients:
We will explore several of these concepts throughout the book, as they often relate to the ecosystem of fertility. To begin, let’s look at some of the more common themes of inherited trauma.
Many people grow up believing that the stories of chronic miscarriage, traumatic births, and infertility they hear from mothers, aunts, and friends will undoubtedly be what they experience. This is doubly true about transgenerational myths of fertility. The stories that people hear from childhood into adulthood influence how they understand and connect to their sexuality and to their reproductive capacity. Take, for instance, the second child of Diana, the client we spoke about in Chapter 1. Her narrative could have been influenced by a mother who had not healed and a lingering psychological darkness over her own birth, which had already been traumatic due to the emergency C-section.
Sometimes, within a family, individuals are stigmatized or scapegoated for being too sensitive or demanding too much attention. While this may seem specific to the personalities involved, it might actually point to a pattern perpetuated through the family line, or a belief cemented and repeated from generation to generation. If this is the case, someone may be making visible the symptoms of a deeper and older trauma in the family. It’s painful to listen to the whistleblowers of a family, especially when there is little or no time to process their revelations or when they have been labeled mentally ill, but they can air many uncomfortable and necessary truths about our family trauma.
Even the way we are taught to listen is often directly inherited from the structures we observe in our formative years. Did someone hold space for you to speak as a child? Or were your words and ideas immediately shut down?
Half of the battle with understanding both transgenerational trauma and trauma from our own births is in identifying and naming it. The act of holding space for individuals to express their intuitive hits without judgment or quick dismissal typically exposes many of the most common reasons they are labeled as disruptive to the family. This may include the individual’s reluctance to speak; an overreliance on rationalism; a penchant for cynicism; and overly exaggerated responses of anger, sadness, and the like. These all need to be addressed for someone to heal from trauma.
Ironically, sometimes the most secretive traumas can be the most apparent because people seem to go out of their way to avoid them and never speak of them. Family secrets can encompass a wide variety of topics—from mental illness and institutionalization to disease, imprisonment, adultery, adoption, illegitimacy, financial ruin, and abandonment. In modern times, extensive reproductive medical treatments, and making the choice to never disclose their use to the resulting children, can also contribute to another type of family secret. This is one that ultimately can injure everyone, especially the child who might later face his or her own reproductive difficulties, seemingly without cause.
Interestingly, people who try the hardest to keep the secrets close and hidden are typically the ones who have the most amounts of shame and guilt around the trauma. It only takes one curious whistleblower to awkwardly out the information that has been so well kept for generations—but that person is often met with the most voluble ridicule, and sometimes with exile. In particular, hidden information about children born in secretive ways—such as out of wedlock, as the result of extensive fertility struggles and treatments, from an affair, or during times of extreme fear or abuse—can energetically encode that child with a sense of not belonging, or of difference. Sometimes, this realization comes to an absolute head when a person who voices (or represents) the family’s private world decides to have her own children and comes face-to-face with the undercover records she is holding.
I frequently observe patterns of trauma that can correspond to dates and seasons within a family’s history. For instance, one of my patients, whom I will call Shayla, initially came to see me because she was concerned about a pattern she perceived around miscarriages she’d had over the years, all of which had occurred in October. While she had successfully carried two pregnancies, she subsequently experienced two separate miscarriages that both occurred at different stages of her pregnancy. The first miscarriage took place at 7 weeks, and the second at 13. Shayla explained that she felt cursed and was now terrified to be pregnant during the month of October.
Sometimes it is difficult to determine if an event like this, which has an element of cyclical timing, is caused by transgenerational trauma or if it is a type of “new” trauma that might be passed down if it is not healed. In Shayla’s case, I suggested that we do a timeline exercise that I often use to determine events that have majorly impacted health. Starting with the present moment and working backward, I encouraged her to record significant life events, both positive and negative. These can include such things as loss of a job, death of a family member, marriage, birth, illness, car accidents, etc.
It is surprising how many of our major events can quickly pass by without our acknowledging the significant impact they have on our life’s course. Such was the case with Shayla. She had not realized the correlation between the birth of her second daughter in the month of October and the two miscarriages. She listed intense delivery as an important life occurrence, six years before her first miscarriage.
As I asked extensive questions about what she experienced, Shayla went on to describe an extremely dangerous birth for both herself and her daughter. The pregnancy had been healthy up until the last two weeks, when she began to experience severe and painful cramps. Her doctors chose to induce early, a decision that Shayla did not agree with but felt pressured into. The labor did not progress, and an emergency C-section was performed, during which my patient’s heart rate, as well as the baby’s, dipped dramatically. Shayla was stabilized, but her child spent three weeks in the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit), during which time Shayla’s father, who had been in good health, suddenly passed away. My patient had to decide between leaving her newborn at the hospital alone, caring for a small child, and traveling to attend her dad’s funeral. She chose not to attend the funeral, which would require her to fly across the country—a decision that she later came to regret.
“Do you intuitively feel there is a connection between the life events that occurred around the birth of your daughter in October and the miscarriages?” I asked.
“I do,” she responded, “but I am afraid to admit it because I don’t feel there is anything I can do to fix it. And if I can’t fix it, it means that I will continue to have miscarriages. I really loved my father dearly, and not being able to say goodbye has haunted me.”
Herein lies a window into a deep unconscious and unseen inheritance that can perpetuate trauma from one generation to the next. For Shayla, so many associations with sadness, loss, and grief in the month of October—her daughter’s birth month—could impact her daughter’s own psychic and energetic realms, imprinting her with a type of secondary trauma that contributes to her own personal narrative about fertility.
It’s important to acknowledge here that people can also rush into pregnancy to try to quickly fix an emptiness typically felt in the wake of loss or death. Processing loss can take time, and even when you feel like your mind has integrated the shock and you can move forward, your heart and body might be working on a different timeline of healing. When maternal age and pregnancy are added to the process of healing from grief and loss, the added pressure to quickly conceive can add to both the recovery process and the time it can take to become pregnant. Such was the case with Shayla, whose heartbreak exponentially increased with each loss.
The practical magic that ultimately helped this client conceive and carry to term was not found in supplements, hormonal panels, complex procedures, or IVF, but in allowing her original injuries to heal with time, space, and self-reflection. Shayla traveled to her father’s grave in October and with the help of her husband and children, restaged the funeral she had missed. The process uncovered a well of grief that she had not known she was carrying. Her healing allowed her to reframe her trauma into gratitude, not only for her deceased father but also for the spirits of the two children she had lost. In looking back, she believed that these miscarriages had been her greatest teachers—and while she would always hold them close to her heart, she understood their more significant meaning in the chain of her life and that of her family’s.
Her third child, who was due October 21, was born via VBAC, or vaginal birth after cesarean, on November 1. Shayla had successfully moved beyond the pattern.
If you are aware that the energy and environment leading up to a child’s birth is particularly stressful and intense, special care and consciousness should be taken to acknowledge the presence of that child’s spirit. I like to direct my clients to imagine that their unborn child is just like a cartoon angel sitting on their shoulder, listening and observing the events that are unfolding. We are human, after all, and because being human is difficult, you don’t have to be perfect. Simple awareness and recognition are enough to make all the difference. It is especially important to ensure that a child’s spirit is met with a unique and inviting welcome, not an imposed expectation that the child will fix heartbreak, relational disconnect, loss, or depression.
Stretch a long piece of paper across a table, counter, wall, or desk. Draw a long straight line across the middle from left to right. In the middle of this line, mark the day and time of your birth. Everything before this point of your birth is the timeline of the energetic matrix that you came from, and the events after this point reflect the major events in your life. Add positive events, such as falling in love or graduating from college, above the line. Add negative events, such as childhood illness or a disruptive family move, below the line.
Starting with the present moment, represented at the end of the line, and working backward, begin to record significant life events, both positive and negative, from your own lifetime. Work backward toward your birth and record what you know about your birth, including your gestation and conception. Once you have reached your birth date, begin to record what you know of your family line, paying special attention to topics that were covered in this chapter. This is also an intuitive exercise, meaning that you can write down any thoughts, feelings, or intuitive “hits” that you believe are relative, even if they do not make sense to your rational mind. Gaining awareness of these events will shed light on your current fertility journey. It is surprising how many of our major events can quickly pass by without our acknowledging the significant impact they have on our life’s course.
Many traditions of medicine and bodywork take into account the type of birth you had as a causal factor that impacts your health. Specific physical postures can be the effect of how you lay in the womb, and holding patterns of tension in the body might be the result of being born breech or via forceps or suction.
If your birth process was interrupted at a stage of labor, such as during transition as you were moving through the cervical canal, some traditions hold you will always have difficulty with transitions in life. Essentially, birth can be a refractive mirror of transgenerational trauma and a precursor or predictor of how your earliest experience in the world might impact the rest of your life. Here are some major themes to look for that indicate trauma around your own birth (note, many of these are experienced at a higher rate among children born via the use of reproductive medicine):
Many of the repetitive traumas around inherited reproductive difficulties are seen in the story of a person’s conception and birth. I ask each of my patients what they know of their own conceptions and births—and if they don’t know anything, I encourage them to learn more from their family. Inquiring for potentially traumatic stories can be dangerous. It is important to hold space and boundaries, so as to be able to listen and learn without allowing the discovery to impact you too much. I suggest going into such conversations with an extremely open mind, recording them if possible and making the questions concise and succinct. I’ve included an exercise on page 15 that will help you take an intuitive inventory. The answers that you will find in this inventory will typically give you the first clue to potential trauma influencing fertility.
Some of the less-navigated topics around conception and birth, even among those within the world of fertility medicine, include the energetics of embryo extraction and storage. (I differentiate this from egg freezing, where the egg has not been fertilized.) I once had a conversation with a young woman in her 20s that struck me as revelatory. When she asked me what I did and I shared with her that I was a fertility specialist, she responded as no one ever had. “Do you think that being born from IVF has lifelong complications?” A little puzzled, I inquired if she was working on a research paper for school. “I was born via IVF,” she stated, “and I’ve always felt that the cognitive difficulties I have are related to the way I was conceived, but no one believes me.”
One of the most injurious traumas that can impact a person’s ability to trust her intuition—and to a larger extent, her life path—is using science or medical facts to mitigate her instinct and experience. It is important to listen and not overinterpret someone’s views, no matter how factual you find them to be. “It could be,” I responded, and we went on to speak for a while about her story and how it might impact her fertility. I shared with her how some children can recall past lives and can give specific details about who, where, and when they lived—and how some children who shared a womb with a twin that did not make it to birth can exhibit a noticeable absence of that twin.
I’ve observed that some children express loss or sadness over what they describe as leaving their brothers and sisters behind: Their parents can become confused by their grief because they often did not have siblings. More in-depth inquiry typically uncovers that these children were born from IVF, and that there were other stored embryos from the same fertilization and extraction. While this might sound impossible, when it comes to the energetics of conception we can only hypothesize about how an individual becomes an individual, and when consciousness becomes embodied.
The process of IVF is challenging to navigate, and I’ve found that my patients who voice concern over these other frozen potential children soon become too overwhelmed with the process and the end goal of becoming pregnant. And because the stress of living in the modern world is enormous and demands so much from each of us, it can be hard to find the time to be reflective about a topic such as the secret life of frozen embryos and what consciousness they may or may not have.
Many people have initial resistance and fear around returning to the memory of the IVF process and even more opposition to the acknowledgment that they—who often wanted children so badly that they were willing to endure intense fertility treatments—could somehow potentially be leaving other children behind in cold storage. Some women I have worked with state that they never want to do IVF again because, to them, it felt as difficult as a miscarriage or an abortion.
None of this is spoken about in public, and typically remains in an individual’s internal dialogue. However, a guiding principle of spiritual fertility is to shed light onto the places that elicit the emotions of blame, shame, and guilt. To destigmatize the shame of IVF, we must allow it to be spoken about and acknowledged as what it is: an intense life event. To mitigate the guilt of leaving embryos behind, we must celebrate their sacrifice for the life of the child who did make it. Lastly, to move on and heal energetically at a societal level, we must resolve the blame that we show ourselves and our fellow human beings for needing assisted reproductive medicine in the first place.
It is my intention that approaching the conception and birth of your children through the practices that this book teaches can help you overwrite transgenerational narratives and promote conscious conception, which takes into account the mind, body, and spiritual connections.
There is an unseen intelligence at work when it comes to conception, pregnancy, and birth. Trusting in this intelligence and in your body’s own intuition is essential to deterring the factors that might be interfering with its natural progression. As you remove the filters of trauma and stress, new unwanted energetics that enter into your environment will become clearer, and you will know how to block them from impacting your fertility.
Such was the case for my patient, Rachel, who learned how to deflect jealousy and envy from her sister, who was harming her connection to the fertility process. Rachel’s family had a rough history; her great-grandmother had escaped a concentration camp that took the lives of her entire family. This woman married the man who helped her survive and moved to America, where the severe starvation that she had suffered significantly influenced her reproductive health.
Rachel’s grandmother was a miracle child, born after many miscarriages and years of failed pregnancy attempts. Rachel’s own mother had not experienced fertility issues and was able to conceive and carry three healthy children to term. Unfortunately, because the transgenerational trauma was never addressed, that pattern of infertility persisted. Rachel’s older sister went through several failed rounds of IVF and intrauterine insemination (IUI), and was devastated by the failures. So, when Rachel and her husband decided to start their family, Rachel was understandably concerned and expressed anxiety and fear about her own ability to conceive.
What Rachel did have working for her was a keen curiosity and an openness to healing; these two powerful tools, combined with trusting her gut, led her to me and the methods of this book. We set out to work immediately on helping her to establish clear boundaries when communicating with her family, especially her sister.
I’d like to take a moment to address how, when women start to set boundaries, they often can experience guilt and shame for what they feel is a type of selfishness. It is not easy to prioritize your own emotional and physical needs, but this is essential for healing. Sometimes expressing transgenerational trauma for a family is the result of a soul contract we have made to take on the pain and ultimately heal it for those who came before us. The significant point, which I made to Rachel, was that when it comes to transgenerational healing, everything she did to mend the inherited wounds was working reflexively to also heal the wounds of the past. This meant that the clearer her boundaries and the more loyalty she had to herself, the deeper and more accessible the healing would be for her sister, as well. Rachel understood, but she needed some major energetic backup when coming face-to-face with her family, and she got just that in the exercise that I call the Golden Passport.
Later in this book we will discuss the importance of language and belief systems around fertility. While you will find this exercise relevant within the context of that section, I encourage you to use any of these practical magic exercises whenever they may be helpful. Remember, one of the guiding principles of spiritual fertility is trusting yourself and your intuition above all others. That said, the Golden Passport is an extremely useful therapeutic tool for almost any situation. It has its roots in the ancient energy medicine of qigong, which cultivates an internal warmth and energy that, when called upon, acts as a psychic immune system.
Years ago, to empower one of my patients to enforce boundaries, I printed up a mock passport made of gold paper and handed it to her, explaining that it was the ultimate pass that would take her out of any place, conversation, situation, or bad vibe that she came across. The Golden Passport meant she did not have to explain or justify her departure; she could merely exit the situation without a word. It worked like a charm!
I began to give these “passports” to my most energetically empathetic and susceptible clients, always with the instruction that it symbolized they could just walk away from any trigger that they knew might impact their fertility. Society teaches that it is rude to leave a conversation without a reason, but from the vantage point of spiritual fertility, your spiritual and energetic health trumps good manners.
Our family members, who have the opportunity to love and support us more than anyone, in particular tend to keep a running ledger of what they might call our selfish acts and disrespects. For those of you whose softer voices tend to be deafened by the louder ones, it is especially empowering to realize there is absolutely nothing wrong with simply leaving a toxic situation. As the Golden Passport never expires, you will be able to use it again and again, well past conception, pregnancy, and childbirth.
Consciousness is one of the most critical techniques you can bring into the fertility process when you are aware that family trauma negatively affects you. Merely cultivating a daily practice—such as a walk or meditation in which you allow yourself to acknowledge and hear your internal dialogue without blame, shame, and guilt—can provide a more transparent perspective into who and what in your environment enforces these impulses instead of helping you mitigate the stress.
Make a golden passport for yourself. Create a document, preferably on golden or yellow paper, that will fit inside your wallet. Write your name and date of birth on the passport, as well as the statement: “Never Expires.” As you start to work with how the energetics of your environment impact you and your fertility, begin to freely use this golden passport as the ultimate pass out of any place, conversation, situation, or bad vibe that you come across. When you use the Golden Passport, you do not have to explain or justify your departure; you can merely exit the situation without a word.
When we consider the energy surrounding the issue of fertility, we are able to look at the larger picture of how we fit within our lineage. Imagine everyone on Earth has chosen to be here. Assume that the family line you were born into was resonant with an aspect of your eternal soul, regardless of the pain, arguments, and disconnects you may have encountered. Just like a bee to a flower, you too were attracted to land when and where you did.
I like to compare preparing for conception to planting bushes and plants that attract butterflies. How could a beautiful creature hatched from a cocoon thousands of miles away find its way over mountains, rivers, and streams into your yard—and even more amazingly, into your gaze? So many things are orchestrated behind the scenes for that moment to occur, which all began with your intent to call in a butterfly. Even if you just planted the shrub nonchalantly, knowing that butterflies would find it, you still participated in impacting the energetics. The magical moment of this viewing, as your intent comes into creation, can bring deep peace and connection to the larger forces that unify us all as humans. When we become conscious of what we are doing, our impact becomes more meaningful and perhaps less destructive. Indeed, while the moment of awe when you first hold your newborn child is indescribable in so many ways, those emotions are often compared to a sense of peace in a higher plan that is at work in the universe.
However, it is not enough to treat conception and fertility with the deepest reverence. To create a comfortable landing place for our future children, we must understand our trauma responses on a deeper and subtler level. The ways in which we allow trauma to be embedded in our systems can have far-reaching effects. The impact one life can have is significant in ways that cannot be understood. Choices that we make in our communities represent the culture and history of all the people who live there, and who ever lived there in the past. Small traumas impact how people behave.
I recently noticed that I avoided a particular street in my neighborhood of Brooklyn.
Why don’t I ever walk down that road? I asked myself, only to instantly remember witnessing a violent act there over a decade earlier. Just as we all avoid specific paths that have been imprinted with negative and painful memories, these individual avoidances can exponentially influence the direction our family, community, and ultimately, the world will take.
This is also my experience with how fertility is currently practiced. Many people, supported by the medical system, take action to avoid pathways that are embedded with the memory of trauma. There is a collective default to rely on science and rationalism, especially when faced with fear of the unknown. But one thing is for sure: We are a product not only of the generations that came before us, but also of the lives that our ancestors lived, the environments in which they existed, and the people with whom they chose to merge. While science will someday support this statement with universally agreed-on facts, we already have concrete proof of the impact and effects of our environment on our individual bodies.
At a dinner party, I once sat next to a very interesting mother of two. She described herself as the child of two extremely rational New York City doctors and as a feminist and an author.
“What do you do?” she asked, curious. Usually, I answer that I’m a holistic fertility doctor and medical intuitive, but that night, I was feeling especially open and relaxed.
“I have the gift of sensing the spirits of unborn babies, and I help people connect and conceive.”
“Wow,” she responded, “like a psychic?”
“Yes, like a psychic, but more like an advocate of the intuitive,” I replied.
We continued to speak of the mystery of pregnancy and birth and the magic of the unknown. I often experience when talking with people who claim to be extraordinarily analytical and “anti-woo-woo” that they open up and share radically nonrational stories of dreams, visions, and energetic awareness of their child’s spirit prior to birth. I’m always so pleased to hear the staunchest skeptics admit that when it comes to their children and their love for them, something that is impossible to understand via the rational mind kicks in. As I began to explain how I first experienced my gifts, with the story of my daughter’s appearance in my energetic field that I shared in Chapter 1, her brow furrowed with what I thought was a skeptical intent. Much to my surprise, however, she exclaimed, “I can make sense of the presence of babies’ spirits and the way that the transgenerational trauma that you are describing can impact fertility because I know that we, as women, carry all of the eggs that might turn into children in our ovaries even before we are born. So, my daughter’s potential children, my future grandchildren, were actually living inside me for a small period of time.”
“Exactly! You were in your grandmother’s womb just as I was in my grandmother’s womb.”
She was referring to the fact that women, unlike men (who continuously generate new sperm), develop our ovarian reserve around week 20 of our gestation, shoring up the direct lineage and connection to the past and giving reason to an otherwise hidden knowledge. My new friend had powerfully connected the tools of the spirit with those of modern scientific knowledge. Her curiosity and openness beautifully linked together what so many women I work with intuitively understand: the female body is an archive, and its halls of wisdom extend deeply into the history of the planet.
Intuitive knowledge can be very difficult to defend in the analytical world. But in the end, as the filters of trauma are cleared, your unique and individual wisdom will be undeniable. As the world becomes more and more diverse, the homogeneous religious, moral, and cultural standards that at one point provided a more consistently agreed-upon narrative (at least for people with privilege and power) are becoming less and less relevant. I’ve mentioned the great window of opportunity for healing that occurs when choosing to become a parent. At that point, many of the ruts and patterns that we repeat from previous histories have a chance to be addressed and cleared so they will not be passed on to future generations. Infertility is a symptom of a deeper wound that must be treated to heal completely.
Often, people think that if they just have a successful pregnancy and healthy child, all the pain and hurt of the past will lift. For some this is true, but the patterns that we allow to permeate the future, the traumas that we might be too afraid or busy to address, will continue in our children’s lives. The current state of the planet is the most obvious example of what can happen when previous generations blindly pass on unfinished psychic or energetic baggage. A tremendous opportunity has arisen for you to become an influencer of the future: your unique voice and history must be heard.
Trauma can be passed down from the generations that came before us. While our ancestral line often works to support us, sometimes the trauma we inherit impacts our fertility. This chapter taught you how to identify inherited trauma by investigating the history of your family, as well as the timeline of your own conception, birth, and life. Paying special attention to cyclical events and anniversaries, as well as similarities in major life events such as miscarriage and death, provides a clear window into patterns that have yet to be healed within your family line.
As we identify and work through the energetic wounds from our family, we begin to heal the impact this trauma has had on our energy body and our endocrine system. This healing works inversely, as well, reaching back in time to the many generations that came before us. Identifying and clearing transgenerational trauma and trauma from our own birth also prepares the path for a healthier pregnancy by creating clearer boundaries between ourselves and our family lines. At this point, you should be able to begin identifying whether the energetic trauma you are carrying is your own or your ancestors’.