What epigenetics, ancestral wisdom, and the first seven years of life reveal about the roots of your health
There is a question that has shaped medicine for decades, and a quiet revolution slowly dismantling its assumptions.
The question: are we products of our genes, or products of our environment? Nature, or nurture? The answer — and the revolution — is that this was never the right question. It was always both. And the relationship between the two is far more dynamic, far more personal, and far more hopeful than the genetic determinism most of us absorbed somewhere along the way.
I want to take you into that territory. Not just because the science is fascinating (it is), but because understanding it changes how you relate to your body, your history, your family, and your choices. It changes what healing even means.
This is Post 1 of the Born of the Earth series — an exploration of what is truly upstream of health. We start here, at the very beginning: with the code you were born with, and everything that shapes how it speaks
Your genome is the collection of DNA sequences you inherited from both parents, tracing back through every ancestor before them. It is often spoken about as if it were a fixed script — a predetermined story playing out whether you like it or not. If your mother had heart disease, the reasoning goes, watch your cholesterol. If your grandfather had diabetes, assume the trajectory.
But this framing leaves out the most important character in the story: the environment.
Epigenetics is the science of how gene expression is regulated by factors outside the DNA sequence itself. The prefix “epi” means above — and that is exactly right. Epigenetic mechanisms sit above the genome and govern which genes get switched on, which stay silent, and how strongly they speak. The DNA itself does not change. What changes is the chemical landscape surrounding it — through processes like DNA methylation, histone modification, and the activity of non-coding RNA molecules.
Think of the genome as a library. Every book is present, representing every potential the genetics of your lineage has to offer. Epigenetics determines which books are open and being read at any given time, in any given tissue, under any given condition. And what determines that? Your environment. Your nutrition, your stress levels, your relationships, your exposure to toxins, your sleep, your sense of safety — all of it reaches down to the level of gene expression and shapes which version of your biology gets expressed.
Your genes are not your destiny. They are your potential. The terrain you live in determines how that potential unfolds.
This is not a small distinction. It means that the story is never written in advance. It means that two people with identical genetic risk factors can have radically different health outcomes based on how they live, what they are exposed to, and what they inherit from their ancestors in ways that go beyond DNA.
One of the most profound (and initially controversial) discoveries in epigenetics is that trauma can alter gene expression across generations.
To be clear about what this means and what it does not: trauma does not mutate DNA. A traumatic experience does not damage the genetic sequence itself. What it can do is alter the chemical marks on the DNA — the methylation patterns and histone modifications — that determine how stress-response genes are expressed. And these alterations can be passed down.
Dr. Rachel Yehuda, a neuroscientist at Mount Sinai, has spent decades documenting this in survivors of the Holocaust and their adult children. Her research showed that epigenetic changes in a gene called FKBP5, which is involved in regulating the stress hormone cortisol, were measurable in both Holocaust survivors and in their children who were born after the war — children who had no direct exposure to the trauma themselves. The offspring showed altered cortisol and glucocorticoid receptor patterns consistent with a heightened stress response setting inherited from their parents.
It is not the trauma itself that is inherited. It is the biological sensitivity the trauma created — a survival mode passed forward through the generations.
This is not hopeless information. It is actually orienting. If you have ever felt like your nervous system responds to the world with a hair-trigger that does not quite match your own life circumstances, this science may offer context. The heightened state may not be yours alone. You may be carrying something forward for your family — and with awareness, you can begin to work with it.
The work of researchers Michael Meaney and Moshe Szyf at McGill University illuminated another dimension of this. Their foundational research on rat mothers and pups showed that the quality of maternal care in the first days of life directly altered the epigenetic programming of glucocorticoid receptor genes in the hippocampus — affecting stress reactivity for the lifetime of the offspring. High licking and grooming from mothers produced offspring with more resilient, regulated stress responses. Low maternal care produced the opposite. And critically, these epigenetic marks were reversible: cross-fostering pups to high-care mothers early in life could undo the programming. The environment, even in early infancy, is rewriting the code.
In humans, parallel evidence links early childhood adversity, abuse, and neglect with measurable epigenetic changes in stress-response genes — changes associated with long-term vulnerability to depression, anxiety, and stress-related illness. The body remembers, at a molecular level, what the child experienced.
Ayurvedic medicine has understood the intergenerational nature of health for thousands of years, though its language is different.
In Ayurveda, ojas is the vital essence — the most refined product of healthy digestion, metabolism, and spiritual practice. It is what remains when all seven body tissues (dhatus) have been properly nourished and transformed. Ojas governs immunity, vitality, mental clarity, emotional stability, and reproductive capacity. It is, in essence, the biological expression of overall wellbeing — and according to classical Ayurvedic texts including the Charaka Samhita and the Sushruta Samhita, the quality of ojas in each parent at the time of conception directly determines the strength, resilience, and vitality of the child.
When ojas is depleted through chronic stress, poor nutrition, overwork, unresolved emotional pain, or excessive consumption — the gametes themselves are affected. The eggs and sperm carry forward not just DNA, but the energetic and biological quality of the parents who produced them. This is not a metaphor. We now understand this in molecular terms: sperm epigenetics, maternal nutrition’s influence on oocyte quality, and the role of mitochondrial function in fertilization and early embryonic development all speak to exactly what Ayurvedic medicine named thousands of years ago in its own vocabulary.
There is also something remarkable and distinctly maternal here: mitochondrial DNA is passed exclusively through the mother’s line. Every cell in your body carries mitochondria: energy-producing organelles fundamental to metabolism, immune function, and cellular resilience. And every one of those mitochondria traces its lineage back through your mother, her mother, her mother, and so on in an unbroken maternal thread. The mother’s metabolic health, her nutritional status, her mitochondrial vitality — these are a direct inheritance, generation to generation, in a way that is entirely distinct from nuclear DNA.
The mother is not just a vessel. She is the first environment — the original terrain from which new life learns what the world is like.
Ayurveda also emphasizes garbhini paricharya (the care of the pregnant woman) as fundamental to the health of the child. The mother’s emotional state, her diet, her relationships, her exposure to stress and beauty and sound, all become part of the developing child’s experience. This is not a new age sentiment. We now have neurobiological evidence that maternal cortisol crosses the placenta, that chronic maternal stress alters fetal HPA axis development, and that prenatal emotional experiences shape the child’s baseline stress reactivity before birth.
The moment of birth does not mark the beginning of environmental influence — it marks a transition within an influence that has already been shaping the developing organism for nine months.
The womb is the original terrain. The fetus floats in amniotic fluid that carries chemical signals from the mother’s body: hormones, nutrients, immune factors, and the molecular signatures of her emotional and physiological state. When a mother experiences sustained stress, her cortisol and adrenaline levels rise — and fetal cortisol receptors respond. When she is nourished, safe, connected, and at ease, that too is communicated biochemically to the developing child.
Research published in journals including Biological Psychiatry and Development and Psychopathology has linked prenatal stress to altered fetal brain development, including changes in the structure and reactivity of the amygdala and prefrontal cortex — the brain regions most involved in emotional regulation, stress response, and social connection. The baby is not passive. It is learning what kind of world it is coming into, and calibrating its biology accordingly.
This makes the care of pregnant women not just a matter of maternal health but one of the most significant public health interventions available. How we support, honor, and resource pregnant and recently postpartum women — ie their mental health, their nutrition, their stress load, their sense of community — reaches directly into the next generation’s nervous system.
If the womb is the first world, the first seven years of life are when the child builds their model of it.
Developmental psychologists John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth established the framework we now call attachment theory: the idea that the quality of the bond between infant and primary caregiver creates an internal working model of relationships. This becomes a template that shapes how the child (and later the adult) experiences intimacy, trust, safety, and self-worth. Secure attachment — built through consistent, attuned caregiving — produces a nervous system that can regulate itself, reach out for connection, and return to equilibrium after stress. Insecure or disrupted attachment produces a nervous system braced for unpredictability, often for decades.
Neuroscientist Allan Schore has documented the neurobiological underpinnings of this process in extraordinary detail. The right brain — the hemisphere most involved in emotional processing, somatic experience, and implicit memory — develops most rapidly in the first three years of life, and its architecture is shaped almost entirely through the quality of right-brain-to-right-brain communication between the infant and caregiver. The mother’s face, voice, touch, and attunement are literally building the child’s capacity for emotional regulation at a structural level.
Bessel van der Kolk’s clinical work, detailed in The Body Keeps the Score, showed what happens when this early architecture is disrupted by trauma, neglect, or chronic stress: the effects are not simply psychological; they are somatic, neurological, and immunological. The body holds what the early environment inscribed.
And yet even here, the story is not fixed. Neuroplasticity, therapeutic relationships, somatic practices, plant medicine, and conscious community all offer pathways back toward regulation and repair. The epigenetic marks laid down in early life are not immutable. They respond to new experiences, new relationships, new environments — which is what makes this work worth doing.
There is one more piece of this story that stops me every time I think about it.
During pregnancy, fetal cells cross the placenta and enter the mother’s body — beginning as early as the first trimester. These cells are not simply passing through. They take up residence in the mother’s tissues: her bone marrow, her liver, her lungs, her thyroid, her brain. And they stay. Geneticist Diana Bianchi at Tufts University documented fetal cells persisting in maternal blood for up to 27 years after delivery. This phenomenon is called microchimerism — from the Greek chimera, the mythological creature made of parts from different creatures.
A mother does not simply carry a child. She is, for the rest of her life, partly made of them.
Research suggests these persisting fetal cells are not inert. They appear to migrate to sites of tissue injury in the mother and participate in repair, behaving like stem cells. They have been found in maternal heart tissue after cardiac damage, in healing wounds, in thyroid tissue. There is also early evidence that these fetal microchimeric cells in maternal brain tissue may play a role in strengthening the emotional bond between mother and child.
The bidirectional nature of this exchange also means that some maternal cells cross the placenta in the other direction, persisting in the child’s tissues. The separation of birth is, biologically, never complete. The connection established in the womb continues at a cellular level, for life.
This is science confirming something that many traditions have always held: the bond between mother and child is not metaphorical. It is structural. It is biological. It is, quite literally, written into the body.
It means your body is not a fixed machine running a predetermined program. It is a living system in constant conversation with its environment — from the level of your cells to the quality of your relationships to the stories your family has carried across generations.
It means that root-cause medicine has to look upstream of the symptom, upstream of the diagnosis, and sometimes upstream of this lifetime. The terrain of your health was being shaped before you were born. The question is not whether that terrain can change. It can, and does, in response to everything you experience. The question is whether you are making choices that support the healthiest expression of who you are.
Understanding your epigenetic terrain is, I believe, the beginning of real health literacy. Not because it gives you something to fix, but because it gives you something to tend.
Plants, food, rest, relationship, purpose, safety, belonging — these are not soft variables or lifestyle accessories. They are the primary inputs into the system that regulates your gene expression. They always have been.
The terrain can always be tended. That is the most important thing I know.
Want to start tending your own epigenetic terrain?
Download the free Natural Medicine Cabinet Remake Guide — a first step toward understanding your body as a living system, and supporting it as such with nature’s bounty.
Roots and reverence,
Marina
Marina Buksov, PharmD | Holistic Health Coach | Clinical Herbalist | marinabuksov.com
Works Cited
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