Welcome
Our Biology Becomes Our Biography: 
How Our Earliest Experiences Shape Lifelong Health

The womb is our first home—and the experiences we have there leave lasting imprints on our bodies, our nervous systems, and our sense of belonging in the world.

This year, we explore how biology and biography are inseparably linked. From conception through birth, our earliest environments shape lifelong patterns of health, resilience, relationship, and identity. What happens before and during birth is not just a beginning—it becomes a living story carried forward in the body.

Experts and practitioners from around the world will share research, clinical insight, and lived experience illuminating how prenatal and birth experiences influence infant physiological, cognitive, emotional, and psychological development. We’ll look closely at how safety, stress, connection, and perception are biologically embedded—and how these early imprints continue to shape individuals, families, and communities across the lifespan.

Birth is more than a medical event. It is a formative experience that sets the tone for how we meet the world. The ways a baby is conceived, carried, and welcomed influence their sense of safety and connection. Likewise, a mother’s subjective experience of birth has profound implications for her own mental and emotional health, and for her baby’s developing nervous system.

Together, we’ll explore the innate wisdom of birth, the deep relationship between womb ecology and world ecology, and how conscious, compassionate care can support thriving mothers, babies, and future generations.

Join a global gathering of educators, researchers, clinicians, and birth workers as we reflect on how nurturing early environments don’t just shape outcomes—they write the first chapters of our lives.