Your Body Is Running Your Grandmother's Survival Code

Jun 26
5 min read

The Science Your Abuela Couldn’t Name

But Already Knew

The Science Your Abuela Couldn’t Name

But Already Knew

There is a question I return to again and again when I sit with women in this community who are doing everything “right” and still hitting a ceiling they can’t see. They’ve done the vision board. They’ve said the affirmations. They’ve built the altar, lit the candles, AND sent the prayers. They’re working hard. They’re working spiritually. They are, by every metric, trying.

And still, the money doesn’t stick. The opportunity almost lands. The relationship almost heals. The confidence almost holds.

Almost. Almost. Almost.

I want to tell you something that took me years to understand and that no one in the mainstream manifestation space is saying clearly enough:

The block is not in your beliefs. It’s in the biology. Meaning: How you feel deeply connected OR disconnected to your body, and how you're rejecting the signals that the body is using as a vehicle to communicate your intuitive intelligence towards you.

That is how begin to change how we do this work.

What Your Abuela Knew in Her Bones

Your grandmother didn’t have the language of epigenetics. She didn’t know about DNA methylation or cortisol regulation or the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. But! She KNEW things. She knew which plants healed which ailments before any doctor came. She knew when danger was coming before it arrived. She knew in her body what her mind hadn’t processed yet.

That deep biological ancestral wisdom within her, referred to as pre-linguistic body intelligence is not mysticism or "woo woo." It is biology. Science is finally catching up to what our ancestors have always understood: what happens to a body gets written into that body’s instruction manual. The manual gets passed down. AKA: Trauma and habits.

This is the field of what science calls epigenetics. It's one of the most important things you will ever learn about why spiritual work alone, mindset work alone, or strategy alone is often not enough to create the shift we’re reaching for. We need a full mind-body-soul strategy.

The Science: The Spiritual Merger

Epigenetics literally means “above the gene.” It is the study of how our behaviors and environment influence the way our genes express themselves, not by changing the DNA itself, but by turning genes on or off, up or down, like a dimmer switch.

Here is the part that should make the hair on your arms stand up:

Those switches can be inherited.

Trigger Warning: When your great-grandmother survived colonization, migration, poverty, domestic violence, or any form of chronic stress, her body responded by upregulating certain stress-response systems and downregulating others. Those adaptations helped her survive. Research shows that those epigenetic modifications and biological settings can be passed to her children, and her children’s children, through mechanisms that scientists are still working to fully understand. I had to pause and cry when I processed this information. It made me feel closer, deeper and better understand the grandmothers I never knew and never met, and even the elders I have known. That hit hard.

It is widely known that the impacts of ancestral trauma may be transmitted through epigenetic mechanisms and carried into future generations who never directly experienced the original event.

No wonder we REPEAT ANCESTRAL CYCLES! It is subconscious and genetically imprinted in our DNA.

In short: The body can carry a wound it never personally received.

Now think about your lineage. Think about the women who came before you. Think about what they survived, and what survival cost them in their bodies. Think about what they never got to heal.

You are not starting from zero. You are starting from their unfinished business.

That is not a tragedy. It's information because what has been written can be rewritten.

What This Looks Like In Real Life

I want to be specific, because I’ve watched this play out in my own life and in the lives of countless women in this community. Epigenetically inherited survival codes don’t announce themselves. They feel like personality. They feel like “just how I am.”

They show up as:

• Hypervigilance around money even when you have more than enough ex: checking your account balance compulsively, never feeling financially safe regardless of the number.

• A physical tightening in the body before any act of visibility ex: posting on social media, asking for what you’re worth.

• An automatic shrinking in the presence of authority, even when you are the authority [oooof! disciplinary authority rooted in Latinidad].

• Difficulty receiving ex: compliments, help, love, money without immediately deflecting or giving it away.

• A nervous system that reads rest as danger and stillness as threat.

• The voice that says “who do you think you are?” in the exact tone of someone you love. :(

These are not character flaws. These are not weaknesses. These are intelligent biological adaptations to conditions of threat that your lineage survived by running these programs.

The problem is: the threat is no longer present, but the program is still running. So much so, it is running loudly enough to override the affirmations, the vision boards, the spiritual practices, and the strategy.

Until you address it at the level where it lives, the body — you will keep bumping into the same ceiling.

In my 1-1 sessions for spiritual coaching, we identify where these reside as emotions, stories/narratives, and the connection to your chakra system to recognize them and RELEASE!

Here is where I need to go deeper... because this conversation has a cultural dimension that generic epigenetics content will never touch.

For Latinas specifically, the inherited survival codes are not just personal. They are political. They are the biological residue of colonization: of land theft, of forced labor, of the suppression of Indigenous spiritual knowledge, of the systematic dismantling of communities’ ability to be self-sustaining and abundant.

When your ancestors were told their knowledge was primitive, their language inferior, their spiritual practices demonic. They were punished for taking up space, for having pride, for expressing ambition, and their bodies encoded those experiences as survival information. FUCK THAT!

Decolonizing your mind is not a metaphor. It is a literal rewiring of survival programs that were installed without your consent, in a lineage that survived conditions you were never meant to transcend.

Now let’s do the work.

You can work with me 1-1 in a private spiritual coaching setting as we work through my tailored formula.