I feel incredibly blessed to be arriving at this place in my life and work: The Farm in Summertown, Tennessee, where I have the honor of joining the Community Birth & Wellness collective and continuing a journey that began more than 27 years ago.
Long before I became a midwife, I had the extraordinary honor and privilege of apprenticing traditionally at the knee of a Native American Elder. For six years, I lived in community with my Elder and with healers, medicine people, and practitioners from many different traditions around the world. My Elder took me as his caretaker, and through that relationship I was given opportunities to travel, learn, serve, and participate in ceremonies that profoundly shaped the way I understand healing, community, and the sacred passages of human life.
I was blessed to participate in traditional rituals and ceremonies with Sangomas in South Africa, with Māori and Waitaha traditions in New Zealand, and within a traditional Celtic lineage in England. I lived alongside practitioners and healers from Indigenous, Eastern, European, and other traditional lineages, learning that while the languages and practices may differ, there is a common thread of reverence for life, for the Earth, for our ancestors, and for the sacred transitions that shape us.
It was during this apprenticeship that I first discovered midwifery.
I was only 17 years old, and one of my fellow apprentices was preparing to give birth. I was honored to be one of the women invited to hold space for her by chanting and drumming. Witnessing Chris give birth with such incredible grace to her daughter, supported by a midwife under each arm as she pushed on the birthing stool was like a light turning on within me. Something inside me immediately knew: this is what I am meant to do.
A few months later, I found the book Spiritual Midwifery, and I began studying everything I could about birth and women’s health. At the time, I could never have imagined where that first spark of recognition would lead me. Twenty-seven years later, my path has carried me across continents, through thousands of births, and ultimately here to The Farm, where the book was born.
I went on to study at Maternidad La Luz in El Paso, Texas, where I became a Certified Professional Midwife. After graduating in 2004, my first position as a midwife took me to a water birth center high in the mountains of Peru. Later, I traveled to Brazil, where I became involved in supporting the movement addressing the country’s cesarean epidemic and advocating for physiological, respectful birth.
In 2007, my journey took me to Uganda, where a 23-year civil war was coming to an end. Doctors Without Borders had recently evacuated following the earthquakes in Indonesia, and the border community of Atiak, in northern Uganda near the South Sudan border, had been left without adequate maternal healthcare support.
With the blessings of the local council of elders, we began a project there that eventually became a midwife-run birth center dedicated to supporting and strengthening the work of traditional midwives. I had the extraordinary honor of being adopted into the local tribal community and of developing a collaborative model of care that brought traditional knowledge and midwifery training together.
Over the eight years I spent in Uganda, I helped train and equip 54 traditional midwives and attended more than 3,000 births, including breech, twin, and triplet births. During this time, our work also expanded to Haiti, where we opened and supported a birth center in the aftermath of the earthquake.
These experiences profoundly shaped my understanding of what midwifery can be. I learned that birth belongs to families and communities, and that midwives have the opportunity not only to attend births, but to strengthen the people and communities surrounding them by empowering mothers to give birth with dignity and compassion.
Alongside my midwifery journey, I have been an ordained minister since 2006. My ministry grew naturally from my understanding of life as a series of sacred thresholds and my calling to hold compassionate, intentional space for people as they move through them. Aligned with Indigenous teachings, I believe all life is sacred and that diverse spiritual and religious beliefs need not be a barrier to deepening community. Supporting families and individuals in creating personalized ceremonies that reflect their unique beliefs, traditions, ancestry, and relationships is one of my favorite parts of this work.
I have a particular passion for the sacred passages surrounding pregnancy, birth, womanhood, and motherhood, including Mother Blessings, rituals of welcome, placenta burial ceremonies, and postpartum closing-the-bones ceremonies. These practices can help families honor transition, restore balance, and integrate all that they have moved through.
Over the years, my work has also included developing innovative approaches to maternal and newborn care. I am a pioneer in placenta medicine and have trained hundreds of midwives, doulas, and birth professionals in my approach to placenta tincturing. I also developed the Heart String, a counter-bead system created to help midwives assess fetal well-being in communities where literacy and access to technology may be limited, for which I received an SFF Award for Health Innovations.
After more than two decades of attending births around the world, I find myself deeply grateful for where this path has brought me.
Today, I am here in Middle Tennessee with my wife, musician and ceremonial artist MonÁxi, and our two children. And perhaps one of the most beautiful parts of this new chapter is realizing that the path that began when I was 17, with a book called Spiritual Midwifery, has somehow brought me to The Farm.
It is an extraordinary blessing to be here.
I am honored to join the Community Birth & Wellness team and to collaborate with these incredible women to share knowledge, experience, laughter, stories, and the responsibility of caring for birthing families together.
After traveling so far, I am especially moved by the opportunity to put down roots.
I believe deeply in the power of community. I believe that birth is not simply a medical event, but a profoundly human and spiritual passage. And I believe that when we empower families with knowledge, respect, skilled care, and genuine community, we create the possibility for something much larger than a healthy birth.
We create a foundation for healthy families, healthy relationships, and ultimately, healthier communities.
It is my honor and my blessing to be here.