Returning to the Roots: Early Imprints and the Path of Healing by mary Justus
Why Early Imprints Matter in Birth and Healing
Birth is more than a physical passage. It is the threshold where life imprints itself most deeply into our being. The way we enter the world—whether through ease, challenge, intervention, or separation—leaves a mark. These imprints live not in our conscious mind, but in the tissues of the body, in the nervous system, and in the felt sense of whether life is safe, welcoming, and trustworthy.
For doulas and birth workers, this terrain is especially meaningful. The clients you serve are at this very threshold, carrying their own histories as they birth new life. To meet them with awareness of these layers is to hold a field of possibility not only for a new child, but also for the deep healing of generational patterns.
It is equally important for doulas and birth workers themselves to engage in their own early imprint healing. When you explore and integrate your own earliest patterns, you deepen your capacity to hold space in a grounded, embodied way. Doing this inner work reduces the chance of unconsciously bringing your own history into the birth space, and allows you to meet families with greater clarity, neutrality, and compassion. In this way, healing becomes reciprocal: as you hold space for others, you are also supported by the wholeness within yourself.
What Are Early Imprints?
Early imprints are the patterns that form in our system before we have words or conscious memory. They may arise from:
The journey through conception, pregnancy, and womb life.
The birth process itself, whether vaginal or cesarean, medicalized or natural.
Early separations, such as adoption, NICU stays, or maternal health complications.
Pre-verbal experiences that shape identity and belonging.
These experiences lodge deep in the brainstem and nervous system. They influence how we respond to stress, how we bond in relationships, and how we carry ourselves through life.
How Early Imprints Shape the Nervous System and Identity
Looking at birth and pre-verbal experiences matters because they live in the most primitive layers of the body’s operating system:
They shape fight, flight, and freeze responses.
They answer primal questions: Am I safe in the world? Am I safe in relationships? Will I
survive and belong?
They ripple into the existential realm of identity, often without our conscious awareness.
Birth itself sets up a primal sequence of timing that becomes etched into the system. When we revisit these layers with awareness, we can update the deepest programs running within us— transforming the way we think, feel, and relate.
Why This Matters for Birth Workers and Families
For doulas, midwives, and parents, understanding early imprints changes how we approach birth and postpartum:
For birthing parents: Unresolved imprints may surface during labor or postpartum, when the nervous system is most open. Recognizing this can normalize and soften what arises.
For babies: The imprint begins in the womb. The way a baby is received and held in their earliest moments plants seeds for lifelong regulation and trust.
For families: Awareness of imprints allows generational patterns to be acknowledged, digested, and re-written with compassion.
For doulas and birth workers, tending to your own imprint work strengthens the container you hold. Birth is already a charged and vulnerable space. When you’ve met your own early layers, you bring a steadiness that clients can feel—an unspoken safety that reassures the nervous system of both parent and child.
Doorways of Healing: Modalities That Support Early Imprint Work
Polarity Therapy: Energy as the Blueprint of Form
Polarity Therapy is a whole-person approach that works with the flow of energy in and around the body. Using gentle touch, dialogue, and energy exercises, it supports balance and integration of undigested experiences. Polarity Therapy helps clients explore attitudes, beliefs, and lifestyle patterns that influence health, while also offering tools like Polarity Yoga for self-regulation.
At its heart, Polarity Therapy is about presence—coming home to the body so natural vitality and coherence can emerge.
Reiki: Receiving the Energy of Life
Reiki is a gentle, non-invasive energy healing practice that attunes us to the body’s innate wisdom. It can be received by anyone—at any stage, in any condition. Because my sessions are grounded in somatic awareness, Reiki is not only luminous and energetic but also deeply embodied, reminding us that life is sacred and healing is always possible.
Perinatal Somatic Therapy: Unwinding at the Root
Perinatal Somatic Therapy works directly with birth, womb life, and early imprints. Because these experiences live in the brainstem and body tissues, this work unfolds in sensation and implicit memory rather than words.
It is tender, specialized, and paced by the client’s readiness. With trust and safety, these imprints can be met and re-patterned—transforming survival strategies into new pathways of belonging and love.
This modality has been some of the most transformational work I’ve witnessed, because it touches the very origins of our sense of safety and self. Uncovering the core wound that lives here with care and love results in deep transformation.
Somatic Movement Therapy and BMC® : Listening to the Body
My work with somatic movement is deeply informed by Body-Mind Centering® (BMC®), an integrated approach to transformative experience through movement re-education and hands-on repatterning developed by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen. Rather than a theoretical study, BMC® is an experiential exploration of embodiment, grounded in the body’s anatomical, physiological, developmental, and psychophysical systems. Through movement, touch, voice, and awareness, we begin to sense how the mind expresses through the body and the body through the mind — opening pathways for integration, healing, and embodied presence.
An Integrative Approach to Healing Early Imprints
While each of these modalities—Polarity Therapy, Reiki, Perinatal Somatic Therapy, and Somatic Movement—can stand alone, the deepest healing often comes through their integration. In my work, I don’t see these practices as separate compartments, but as different doorways into the same field of wholeness.
Sometimes we begin with the body through movement or breath, then shift into the energetic blueprint with Polarity or Reiki. Other times, the session naturally leads us into the tender terrain of perinatal imprint work. Each modality informs the others, creating a tapestry of support that meets the person exactly where they are.
What unites them all is the orientation to presence—the recognition that the true healer is not outside of us but within. When awareness touches what was once unconscious, integration unfolds. The modalities simply give us different languages to enter that conversation with the body, the nervous system, and the soul.
For doulas and birth workers, this integrative approach mirrors the birth space itself: dynamic, layered, and deeply intuitive. Just as no two births are the same, no two healing sessions unfold in the same way. Holding this kind of spacious, multifaceted support allows both parent and child to be met with reverence for their unique journey.
The Healing Process: From Imprint to Integration
Healing early imprints is not about erasing the past. It’s about digesting what was too overwhelming at the time and reorganizing around a deeper truth. This process:
Restores nervous system regulation.
Expands relational capacity.
Opens new choices beyond survival strategies.
Reconnects us to a freer, truer self.
Healing unfolds at the pace of the body, like breath—expanding and resting, opening and pausing.
Reclaiming Wholeness for Ourselves and Future Generations
When we explore and heal our earliest imprints, we are not just tending to personal wellbeing. We are reclaiming the possibility of parenting, partnering, and living from a place of coherence.
For doulas and birth workers, this awareness enriches the care you provide. For parents, it means meeting your child with more presence and fewer unconscious patterns. For all of us, it is a chance to live from the wholeness that has always been here.
Closing Invitation
The path of healing is not about fixing what is broken. It is about remembering the sacredness already alive in you. Early imprint exploration invites us to return to the roots of our being, not only to heal the past but to open to a more spacious and loving future.
Whether you are preparing for birth, supporting families as a doula, or seeking to understand your own journey, may this work serve as a reminder: the body is the temple, and life itself is holy ground.
Mary Justus | The Embodiment Temple
Somatics | Quantum Energy Healing
RSMT- Registered Somatic Movement Therapist RSME- Registered Somatic Movement Educator RPP- Registered Polarity Practitioner
LMBT, Reiki Master Teacher
https://msha.ke/maryjustus (New website coming soon!)
Guest blogger Mary Justus is a mother, artist, dancer, yogini, and teacher with over 25 years of immersion in yoga, meditation, energy medicine, astrology, and somatic practices. Her work is informed by deep study in Polarity Therapy, Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy, Reiki, BMC®, trauma resolution, the Realization Process, and her lifelong devotion to non-duality. A near-death experience in early adulthood awakened her passion for embodiment and the mystery of consciousness. It is her joy and devotion to meet you right where you are — with curiosity, presence, and practical tools for navigating the path of healing and awakening.