Trauma from your Mother’s Womb
The womb is a powerful sacred space where life, abundance and possibilities are transmitted into the world. It is also a space where physical, emotional, spiritual and energetic trauma is held. It can be a vessel for downloading unprocessed, unspoken, ancestral, cultural and collective trauma.
From the time of conception up until our birth, all that happens to us within the quality of our womb atmosphere, has instructed us about life, relationships and our family of origin.
Memories or experiences are stored as vibrational imprints. Because of this imprinting we develop our own unique view of the world. These imprints shape how we interact, positive or negative. Our early imprints, whether preverbal, ancestral or collective, get in the way of welcoming in our embodied self.
Imprints
Energetic imprints are created when there is a strong release of mental or emotional energy. Or something is left unfinished. This event is stored together with an energetic charge. The original experience may have occurred in childhood, inherited from your ancestral lineage or the collective, but a certain word, look, touch or smell may trigger a reaction.
Imprints have the power to affect the way we feel, see and our relationships. They are reminders from the past and while it remains hidden and not integrated, this has an influential impact in the present and may become a controlling dynamic in our life. Epigenetics has taught us that we can modify our genetic coding by way of adjusting our beliefs
Welcome to the World?
The prenate is vulnerable in many ways. Are you aware that more than half of babies are unplanned? Some are aborted and some welcomed. Unplanned conceptions may grow into unwanted children with ambivalent parents. We now know that utero stress and trauma can be remembered in the embryonic cells. When a prenate is exposed to trauma like loss and violence, and encounters it again after birth, it can create present and future difficulties.
If we felt unsafe in the womb and needed to hide as part of a survival strategy that may make birth feel scary because we have emerged and now are seen. Fear can escalate as we grow from child to adult.
Adoption also has complex and entangled imprints. Parents may reluctantly give babies up for adoptions, or did not want their baby and contemplated abortion…
When a prenate is conceived and held in utero in a warm, welcoming, and loving space, the imprint creates a sense of ease, trust and safety in the journey of coming into the world. This increases capacity for ease, freedom, and resiliency. Imagine a conscious, joyous welcome at conception. As a prenate and at birth, this would shape our sense of identity, belonging, and becoming.
Ancestral and Historical Roots
As we come into life, we inherit the ancestral lines of our parents. We acquire our first imprint of sexuality as well as our sense of relationship from the quality of our parent’s communication, love and relationship at conception. We each have our own story that influences us.
This unresolved, ancestral trauma transmits from one generation to the next continuing all the way down our ancestral line, until it resolves. The deeper we journey, we walk through layers of history where there have been very violent times. There has been oppression, grief, war, slavery, genocide, colonization, rape…
Healing Womb Trauma
We need to consider a different approach. Instead of waiting around for someone to rescue us or take away our suffering, we need to act for ourselves. A piece of this trauma is the disconnection, distortion and pain that has continued to passed through generations. The real legacy gift is how we respond to it and who we decide to become.
We choose to hold and include what was too overwhelming for our ancestors, to bring light back into the world. This dictates whether an inherited trauma continues on to the next generation as heartbreak and suffering, or we change the story.
Change our trajectory and those who follow will bring deep healing and peace to the ancestors who have been waiting for us to include them. We have now access to so many resources and tools which our ancestors never did.
Endings and Beginnings
Difficult early somatic memories remain with us our entire lives, unless integrated. They prevent and inhibit our innate ability to know what we want, our agency to move toward it, and our ability to connect and create healthy, intimate relationships. Whatever your past it doesn’t decide your present and future.
Karen Johnson
Supporting clients to integrate early somatic imprints, and that no matter which phase of their life they are in, from conception to the dying process - can benefit from this integration.
Ancestral, cultural and collective healing is a spiritually-grounded process empowering you to connect, repair and nurture relationships with your wise and loving ancestors.
Many of us are feeling lost and longing for belonging after generations of displacement, oppression, colonialism and the consequences of cultural wounding. These burdens are held within our bodies and families… we also hold the blessings. The ancestral reparation process opens a path to your roots to mobilize the transformation of inherited burdens and the integration of your gifts.
I work with an embodied approach. My work is based on the perspective that you have many dimensions to your being, and many parts, all of them interacting within a living, dynamic, mysterious and intelligent system. Instead of being one solid fixed thing, you are more like a body of water, music, an emergent event in the universe.
My approach is rooted in the co-creation of a transformative container for deep inquiry, healing, and emergence, in and through the body. I am dedicated to fanning the flame of our wholeness and aliveness, our unique and diverse ways of becoming fully human and mature at this time, on a troubled planet. I weave together threads from different approaches and traditions, depending on what the focus of our work together is. Some of what I offer are foundational practices that evolve and develop over time, such as meditation, grounding and embodiment, emotional integration and relational healing, and soul work.
