What Your Body Already Knows About Giving Birth with Marie Berwald
There is a particular kind of calling that does not announce itself in advance. For Marie Berwald, founder of Birth Bliss and Empowering Wellness, it arrived through nausea on a yoga mat, a desperate phone call from her sister, and two decades of quietly falling in love with one of the most overlooked chapters of a woman's life. In this episode, she joins Mariah and Monique to talk about holistic pregnancy support, the surprising tools that help women move through morning sickness, and why the most powerful thing she can give any client is the ability to trust their own body again.
Episode Highlights
How a Prenatal Yoga Class Became a 22-Year Career
The Phone Call That Led Marie to Energy Work
What Energy Work Actually Is and How It Applies to Pregnancy
The Sway Test: A Simple Way to Start Listening to Your Body
Why Collaborative Care Beats the Expert-Knows-Best Model
The One Thing Marie Recommends for Every Pregnant Woman
How a Prenatal Yoga Class Became a 22-Year Career
Marie did not set out to specialize in pregnancy. She was a yoga teacher, specifically the kind that taught power yoga, until her first trimester arrived and left her teaching from the floor. She switched into a prenatal class at her studio and, as she describes it, felt immediately like she had come home. When the instructor moved away and no one else was available to teach, the studio owner pointed out that Marie had a whole summer off as a teacher and suggested she get trained. She did, thinking it would be a temporary detour. That was 22 years ago, and she has never stopped teaching prenatal since. What kept her there was not just the yoga but the whole terrain of pregnancy itself: the intensity, the magic, the challenge, and the near-total absence of truly holistic support for women moving through it.
The Phone Call That Led Marie to Energy Work
Three years ago, Marie received a call from her youngest sister, who was eight weeks pregnant and vomiting six to seven times a day. The nausea was severe enough that her sister told Marie she did not want to abort the pregnancy but also did not want to be alive. Those words, Marie says, pressed something deep in her. She told her sister she did not know how they were going to fix it, but that they would. That search led her to the Emotion Code and Body Code, frameworks for identifying and releasing stored emotional energy from the body using muscle testing. She had previously assumed energy work was for people born with special gifts. What she found instead was that it gave a structure to intuition she already had. Her sister improved. Then a woman in her prenatal class improved. Then another. And the work expanded from there.
What Energy Work Actually Is and How It Applies to Pregnancy
For anyone unfamiliar, Marie situates this work within a broader family of modalities that includes Body Talk and the Alignment Code. The underlying idea is that unprocessed emotional experiences leave residual energy stored in the body, which is part of why a small stimulus can trigger a disproportionately large reaction. That overreaction is not irrational: it is the body responding to every unresolved instance of that emotion, not just the one in front of you. The framework uses muscle testing to identify what the body needs, whether that is releasing stored emotional energy, supporting specific organ systems, adjusting energy meridians, or something as practical as adding apple cider vinegar to water for blood sugar balance. The point is that the answer is different for every person, and the body already holds it.
The Sway Test: A Simple Way to Start Listening to Your Body
One of the most immediately usable tools Marie shares is the sway test, a basic form of muscle testing that anyone can try at home. You hold an item against your chest, ask whether it would be helpful for you right now, and then wait. Within a few seconds, your body will sway forward toward a yes or backward toward a no. Marie shares an example of a client in her morning sickness program who was not sure whether watermelon would stay down. She held it against her chest, her body swayed forward immediately, she ate it, and it worked. Marie also uses muscle testing with her own supplements, particularly vitamin D during the long Saskatchewan winters when sunlight is essentially unavailable for months at a time. The idea is not to replace medical guidance but to add a layer of bodily intelligence to decisions that are often made by guesswork anyway.
Why Collaborative Care Beats the Expert-Knows-Best Model
A thread running through Marie's whole approach is her conviction that no one external authority has the full picture of what a woman needs during pregnancy. She references a medical researcher she once heard speak on what she called family-centered care, whose core point was that neither the patient nor the physician holds all the answers alone: the physician knows the treatment options, but the patient knows herself. The best outcomes, that researcher argued, come from genuine collaboration between those two kinds of knowing. Marie has carried that framing with her ever since, especially when coaching clients who need to advocate for themselves in medical settings where a one-size-fits-all approach is still very much the norm.
The One Thing Marie Recommends for Every Pregnant Woman
When asked what single practice would make the most difference for a pregnant woman, Marie does not hesitate: give yourself permission to lie down every day and listen to a guided meditation. She grounds this in the science of the ultradian rhythm, a cycle that repeats roughly every two hours and signals the body's need for rest. During pregnancy, when internal demands are dramatically higher, pushing through that cycle rather than honoring it costs women more than they realize. A ten to twenty minute rest with a guided meditation is not laziness. It triggers the same recovery processes that happen during sleep, supports the nervous system, helps process emotional residue, and changes your state of being in a way that shifts everything that flows from it. Marie's YouTube channel, where she is easiest to find, is full of free guided meditations and holistic support resources for every stage of pregnancy, including early anxiety, morning sickness, and healing after miscarriage.
All Heart & Soul's Details:
Website: www.heartandsoulmastermind.com
Join the mastermind program: www.heartandsoulmastermind.com/heartsoul
Say hi to Mariah on Instagram: @mariahmckechnie
Say hi to Monique on Instagram: @moniqueforcier
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