Whole-Body Support: Integrating Energy Work into Perinatal Wellness
Perinatal care often centers on managing the body, tracking the baby’s growth, monitoring lab results, preparing for labor, and tending to physical recovery. These aspects are important, but they’re not the whole picture. Pregnancy, birth, and postpartum also involve intense emotional and energetic demands that aren’t always visible, but are deeply felt.
Energy work offers tools to support people navigating these changes on a deeper level. Whether it’s calming an overactive nervous system, releasing birth-related fears, or helping someone feel more connected to themselves during a time that can be disorienting, energy-based practices are a powerful part of holistic perinatal care.
What Is Energy Work?
Energy work refers to practices that support the body’s subtle energy systems—things like Reiki, breathwork, meditation, chakra balancing, somatic release, or healing touch. These modalities aren’t about replacing medical care but complementing it by addressing the emotional and spiritual layers of the perinatal experience.
During pregnancy, energy work can promote calm, ease tension, and help people feel grounded and present. In the postpartum phase, it can support emotional regulation, deepen rest, and gently help the body and mind settle into new rhythms.
Why It Matters?
During pregnancy, energy work can promote calm, ease tension, and help people feel grounded and present. In the postpartum phase, it can support emotional regulation, deepen rest, and gently help the body and mind settle into new rhythms.
For many birthing people, especially those navigating trauma, high-stress environments, or medicalized births, there can be a sense of disconnection from the body. This disconnection might feel like being “checked out” emotionally, feeling numb or detached, struggling to identify needs (like hunger, rest, or pain), or feeling like the body is unfamiliar or not truly one’s own.
This can happen for many reasons—past trauma, birth interventions, unrealistic societal pressures, or simply the overwhelming intensity of pregnancy and postpartum. When a person doesn’t feel safe or supported, the body can respond by going into survival mode, which often means tuning out physical and emotional sensations.
Energy work gently invites people back into a relationship with their bodies. Whether through breathwork, healing touch, or mindful awareness, it creates space for reconnection, helping someone feel what they feel, notice what they need, and reclaim a sense of agency and presence in their skin. It’s a quiet but powerful way to restore wholeness during a time that can leave people feeling fragmented.
Finding the Right Support
Energy work looks different for everyone. For some, it’s a quiet hour of Reiki or breathwork. For others, it might be journaling, ancestral connection, or sitting with a trusted practitioner who helps them feel emotionally safe. What matters is that it’s supportive, consensual, and rooted in the needs of the person receiving it.
Working with a practitioner trained in perinatal support ensures that the care is attuned to the unique challenges of this phase. They understand how sensitive the body and mind can be during this time, and they’re trained to hold space gently and respectfully.
Incorporating energy work into modern perinatal care isn’t about adding something extra; it’s about returning to what our bodies and spirits have always needed: care that sees the whole person. When we honor rest, presence, and emotional safety, we help create space for deeper healing, not just for the birthing person, but for the generations they carry forward.
Danisha Nunn
Reiki Master & Certified Perinatal Coach
