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Guardians of Birth, 

 the Art of Birth Care 

A 4-month transformative immersion for birth workers and women to embody guardianship, awaken ancestral wisdom, reconnect with original birth arts, and reweave relational, elemental birth care.

We Begin April 02, 2026

꩜Early Enrollment (Feb 2–12)꩜

꩜Regular Enrollment (Mar 16–30)꩜

Join Early Enrollment

Guardians of Birth  is, 

“…beyond a birth training, its a step closer to liberation…”
— Blaine, @sanasanawellness

“...a transformational experience that empowered me to self direct my birth & pregnancy & facilitated much needed healing for my partner and I”
— Alisa Gonzales, @terrabonitabndita

“…opened the path for me to connect to my origins & return to my practice in greater vitality”
— Jillian Murphy, LMT, IBCLC

Guardians of Birth Is

A non-clinical immersion for those who recognize that our collective health and power rely on the reclamation of our birthrights—and who feel called to empower women and families through their gestational and birth initiations.

It's a series of didactic, creative, and investigative experiences that invite you beyond titles, roles, and identities, so you may give birth and/or accompany birth processes in coherence.

A virtual birth arts residency where, through connection with original birth arts, we open collective pathways toward intergenerational regeneration.

"...guardians of birth has brought spirit and balance back to my life as I move through my clinical midwifery program..."

Anaya Wilson, LMT

𖦹

What You Will Receive

You will receive knowledge, practices, resources, and inspiration to support you in becoming a grounded resource within your community.

This immersion offers comprehensive, non-clinical education to support you in self-directing your perinatal experience and in accompanying others with clarity and integrity to do the same.

This work is not passive.
It will ask you to:

  • Face your own conditioning and inherited narratives around birth and care

  • Activate your investigative sovereignty

  • Commit to your personal, relational, and professional evolution

𖦹

Who This Is For

This space is for you if you:

  • Are taking your first steps into birth work

  • Are already serving as a doula, midwife, or birthworker and seeking deeper coherence

  • Feel called to hold this knowledge and wisdom for your family or community

  • Recognize birth as a site of initiation, responsibility, and intergenerational impact

𖦹

In Guardians of Birth, You Will:

  • Develop trust in your perception, intuition, and clinical discernment

  • Understand physiology, gestation, and birth as living, relational processes, rather than just checklists or protocols

  • Learn how to orient yourself calmly within complexity, uncertainty, and intensity

  • Activate the practice of birth care as an art form—rooted in listening, presence, and skilled response

  • Cultivate the capacity to self-direct gestational-birth care and to accompany others in doing the same, without coercion, or fear

This Formation Offers

𖦹 ~18 Classes
𖦹 ~4 Integration Sessions
𖦹 ~2 Arte-Sana Workshops (taught by AYASHAM + Senna
𖦹 ~2 Food Ways Classes (taught by Monica + Catherine )
𖦹 ~1 Grief Arts Class (taught by Tamate Uta)
𖦹 ~1 Earth Offering Ceremony
𖦹 ~1 Movement Class for Tending to Common Gestational Discomforts (taught by Kia)

Foundations of Cyclical Life & Conscious Conception

→ Gain embodied fluency with human physiology, so you can support yourself and others with confidence and coherence.

Develop an integrative understanding of the anatomy, physiology, and energetics of menstruation, conception, gestation, and childbirth.

You will explore:

  • The art of consciously preventing or inviting pregnancy

  • Orientation to the hormonal matrix of preconception, gestation, and birth

  • Cyclical intelligence as the foundation of reproductive health and decision-making 

Prenatal Care: Ancestral, Elemental & Holistic

→ Learn to tend pregnancy as a relational, ecological process

You will learn how to:

  • Guide health histories and lineage mapping with depth and sensitivity

  • Tend common discomforts and challenges without pathologizing pregnancy

  • Work with nature as mirror, understanding how the elements support balance and resolve imbalance in gestation and childbirth

Physiology, Energetics & Consciousness of Birth

→ Understand birth as both a physiological process and a transformational state of consciousness.

You will study:

  • The physiology and energetics of the phases of labor

  • The cervix as a living, responsive space, including the benefits and pitfalls of cervical exams

  • The benefits and limitations of natural induction methods

  • Brain waves and the shifting states of consciousness that accompany labor and birth

Intuitive & Somatic Technologies

→ Develop skilled presence and embodied tools that support safety, regulation, and trust.

Integrate intuitive and somatic practices that support prenatal care and childbirth.

You will explore:

  • Sound, breath, and movement as supportive technologies

  • Activating the intelligence and sensitivity of the hands

  • Original birth arts for personal practice and community care

Systems, Immunity & Sustenance

→ Support vitality, resilience, and immunity for both parents and baby.

You will gain orientation to:

  • The nervous, lymphatic, endocrine, and endocannabinoid systems and their roles in healthy pregnancy and birth

  • Sacred lactation and innate immunizations

  • Honoring placenta birth as a physiological, emotional, and ceremonial process

Ritual, Grief & Inner Work

→ Learn to hold life transitions with honesty, reverence, and emotional fluency.

Connect with ancestral rituals and practices to support your inner work so you can discern your authentic way of providing birth care.

You will learn how to:

  • Navigate grief processes with presence and integrity

  • Hold holistic pregnancy release and loss without bypassing physical, emotional, energetic needs and spiritual realities

Integrity, Responsibility & Reclamation

→ Accompany others without collapsing into authority or abandoning yourself.

This work centers reflection, accountability, and responsibility as essential to ethical birth care.

You will engage in:

  • Practices of self-reflection and relational accountability

  • Dispelling pathologized and medicalized narratives of gestation and childbirth

  • Reclaiming birth as a site of sovereignty, responsibility, and intergenerational healing

And more—

Join Guardians of Birth, Early Enrollment Offerings 

1 Payment of $973
2 Payment of $496
3 Payment of $343
"Maria's Guardians of Birth Immersion was the most comprehensive and integrated birth training I have received. Her teachings helped me to bridge the gap between the necessity of practical knowledge, ancestral wisdom and my own embodied experience within them as a birth worker. Guardians of Birth and Maria's guidance have helped me to forge a foundation of deep knowing, relative to how I show up for myself, and the families I serve at the thresholds of birth. Maria's mentorship was so very welcomed at a time of transition in my work, and I am grateful to walk forwards with her teachings. 
 
Alli, Birth + Postpartum Care Provider
Canada
“The Guardians of Birth immersion was pure medicine. As a practicing midwife, I was called to join because I felt like the spiritual component of my work was underdeveloped. I knew that the difference between how I practice now and how I want to practice was a matter of introspection and self-exploration. I knew this but I needed a trusted guide to “midwife me” through the process. Aya Maria’s gentle guidance and programming prompted the self-reflection needed to put me on the path to better develop and understand myself as a midwife. What Aya Maria gave me were the tools to uncover and deepen my spiritual relationship to my work/calling. I felt held and cared for. I now have life-long tools and practices to incorporate in order to have a healthy, balanced and aligned relationships with myself and my clients. ”

— Janell Moore CPM, LM

“I remain amazed at the depth of knowledge and applied wisdom that is woven together in this curriculum and how deeply transformative and illuminating it is. I remain amazed at how I feel so much clarity about my path and what I am here to do, my confidence and inner fire of inspiration remains lit as I walk deeply listening, trusting, and using some tools I learned in this immersion. This is more than a knowledge based learning course.. this is also an immersion into our inner world where there is a living memory of who we are and why we’re here.. and we are able to touch that and actualize it into our lives. Before Guardians of Birth Immersion I had taken many of Aya Maria’s courses online which were also rich with knowledge and wisdom that I feel propelled me deeper into the path of my heart— the work I am here to do. With all my trust, I would (and do) 1110000000% recommend any of her online courses and if you can, any future in-person immersions where you will for sure leave with your basket full. <3 Gracias Aya Maria for deeply listening, trusting, and leading by example!!!”

— Wasi Rivera @wasiflora

 

Guardians of Birth is for aspiring, new or established birth-care practitioners who recognize the importance of:

  • Elevating their birth-care by connecting to Original Birth Arts,
  • Reclaiming pregnancy & childbirth as natural rites of passage,
  • Weaving together evidence based science & ancestral science, to provide integral birth-care,
  • Dispelling the indoctrination that pregnancy & childbirth are inherently medical events,
  • committing to their own personal evolution.
     

    This is also for you if you recognize the value of preserving this knowledge and wisdom for your family and feel called to embrace the path of self-directed pregnancy and birth care.

     

What to Expect

The Guardians of Birth immersion unfolds through a carefully woven blend of study, ritual, embodied practice, and communal integration.

Core Classes

~18 Core Classes
Approximately 2–3 hours each, offered live and recorded.
These classes form the foundation of the curriculum.

Opening & Closing Ceremonies

Rituals  (6 total)
Guided rhythmic practices, including:

  • Conception

  • Elemental Guardian

  • Lineage

  • Nesting

  • Earthside / Placenta

  • Sealing

Integration Spaces

~4 Live Integration Sessions
Intentional spaces for reflection, shared dialogue, and communal integration—supporting you in metabolizing the depth and transformation inherent in the Guardians of Birth immersion.

Arte-Sana (art heals) Workshops 

Hands-on, guided creative practices:

  • Clay with AYASHAM

  • Fiber / Textile with Senna

Food Ways Classes (2)
Taught by Monica and Catherine, exploring nourishment, ancestral foodways and prayerful cooking

Movement for Common Gestational Discomforts (1)
A practical, somatic class taught by Kia, offering movement tools to support comfort and care during pregnancy.

Grief, Earth & Reciprocity

Grief Arts Class (1)
Led by Tamate Uta, honoring grief through pregnancy release, as an essential and artful part of birth work and life transitions.

Earth Offering Ceremony (1)
A collective ritual rooted in reciprocity, land relationship, and ancestral remembrance.

Throughout the program, you’ll be invited into guided practices, exercises, and integration initiatives that bridge theory, ritual, and lived experience.

Guardians of Birth emerged in 2021 to create an evolutionary space for birth-care providers, mothers, and families to connect with the art of birth care. Responding to the polarized landscape of the birth world—either firmly rooted in allopathic, clinical approaches or swinging to the opposite extreme of rejecting all aspects of modern medicine —Guardians of Birth offers a balanced framework. This approach integrates ancestral wisdom with modern science to meet the genuine and unique maternal-infant needs of our times. By honoring and elevating all tools, resources, knowledge, and wisdom to an art form, it creates an empowering pathway for comprehensive birth care. Central to this mission is the belief that individuals must assume their rightful place as the ultimate authority over their sexual and reproductive health in order to be able to inspire this in others. Maternal and neonatal well-being relies on environments that safeguard natural physiology, support the transformative journey of gestation and birth, and expands our ability to channel life-force energy. By doing so, we initiate a journey of consciousness expansion that society often neglects to facilitate.

This immersion has proven to provide: 
  • The environment and opportunities to build or transform your practice, aligning it with your unique gifts and the needs of your community
  • The conditions to catalyze pilgrimage and rekindle ancestral memory—literally many past participants  journeying to their matrilineal homelands and/or healing estranged or fragmented relationships—and emerging with greater clarity and purpose.
  • The framework to inspire clients, families, and communities (yourself) to connect with the transformative power of their creativity and he(art) throughout gestation and birth.
  • A space that grows meaningful connections and community. Many past participants have formed lasting friendships and professional alliances—becoming roommates, supporting each other in career transitions, and actively collaborating in motherhood and birth work.

 

Sessions

We will meet on Mondays and Thursdays starting April 02, 2026, at 3:00 PM Bogotá time (please check your local time zone).

all sessions will be available for replay for 6 months.
During each session there will be a space for questions, reflections and collective dialogue.
First Session: Opening Ceremony
  • Introductions + Orientation.
  • Conscious Conception Ritual-despacho earth offering
Second + Third Sessions: Origen pt 01 & 2
  • Reclaiming our origin stories.
  • Womb-complex anatomy and physiology.
  • Elemental fertility awareness & cycle mapping
  • Anatomy & physiology of
    • menstruation,
    • conception & implantation.
  • Anatomy & physiology of the placenta.
Fourth Session: History & Anthropology of the Evolution of Birth Guardians 
  • Overview of the History & Anthropological Evolution of Parteras, Midwives + OBGYNS.
  • Discerning our authentic way of care-giving and guarding + who we’re meant to serve.
  • The art of interweaving ancestral + allopathic birth-care models.
  • Visioning pathways 
Fifth, Sixth, Seventh + Eighth Sessions: Sacred Systems pt 01, 02, 03, 04
  • Anatomy, Physiology & Energetics of the Nervous System & its role in preconception, gestation & birth.
  • Anatomy, Physiology & Energetics of the Lymphatic system & its role in preconception, gestation & birth.
  •  Anatomy, Physiology & Energetics of the Endocannibinoid system & its role in preconception, gestation & birth.
  •  Anatomy, Physiology & Energetics of the Endocrine system & its role in preconception, gestation & birth.
  •  Anatomy, Physiology & Energetics of the Musculoskeletal system & its role in preconception, gestation & birth.
  • Father/Partner Matrix and their Preparation for Childbirth
  • Foundational Neurobiology; biochemical changes in pregnancy and birth 
Ninth Session: Lineage Mapping + Health History

  • Introduction to the Seed To Body; Lineage mapping & devotional observation  modality for practitioners, care providers, and family units

Tenth, Eleventh & Twelfth Sessions: Elemental Gestation pt 01, 02, 03
  • Anatomical, Physiologic & Spiritual Development 1st-3rd Trimester.
  • Tending to common imbalances and discomforts
  • Benefits & pitfalls of Medical Protocols & Diagnostic Testing.
  • Ancestral analysis and assessment.
  • Palpation, pulse, breaths + fluids
  • Understanding the culture and law around birth locally and collectively.
  • A la carte - self directed care
  • Benefits & pitfalls of due dates and inductions.
Thirteenth, Fourteenth & Fifteenth Sessions: Elemental Childbirth pt 01, 02, 03
  • Anatomy, Physiology & Energetics of Labor
  •  Brain waves + expanded states of consciousness
  • Understanding inductions and their effect on labor outcomes 
    • Clinical induction
    • Phyto-therapeutic induction
    • Ancestral-Elemental perspectives of induction
  • Babies as active participants in their Birth.
  • Childbirth as a psycho-spiritual initiation & social transformation.
  • Childbirth as a hologram of family/communal health.
  • True informed consent + response-ability
  • The art of intrpartum assesment and analysis 
    • Maternal Vitals
    • Baby Vitals
Sixteenth & Seventeenth Sessions : Honoring Placenta Birth
  • Physiology & Energetics of Natural Placenta Birth
  • Dispelling collective fear body of 3rd stage.
  • Discerning projections from emergencies; consciousness prevents negligence 
  • Blood essence and sacred offering

  • Physiology and energetics of fluids/blood

  • Placenta curing & seeding
Eighteenth + Nineteenth Sessions: Golden Hour + Sacred Grief pt 01, 02
  • Anatomy, Physiology & Energetics of hormonal matrix during the golden hour.
    • Laction & Innate Immunizations
  • Immediate postpartum infant observation + care
  • Immediate postpartum womb/perineum care

  • Physiology and energetics of miscarriage and pregnancy release.

  • Psycho-social initiation into matrescence and fatherhood.

  •  Addressing common realities, discomforts and needs within the immediate postpartum.

Twentieth Session: Praxis in coherence + the art of sealing

  • Birth guarding as an infinite non-linear tending to the umbilical cord of continuity 

  • Group Q+A and integration.
  • Presentation of Inititatives
  • Closing- Sealing Ceremony 

 

I am (Aya) Maria Jose Maldonado Leon CPM, TAMP.

I've had the great privilege of attending over 300 births, giving birth to my own children at home on my terms, and supporting women and families through their perinatal journeys, both within clinical settings and outside of the healthcare system, for the past eight years.
 
I recognize my path of parteria-midwifery as an ongoing apprenticeship to the elements, physiology, and the intangible mysteries.
 
Guardians of Birth is an extension of my practice and lived experience, where I interweave ancestral and original birth arts with clinical skills and resources when needed, to provide impeccable, heart-centered care. It reflects my embodied journey of gestating and birthing my children at home, in alignment with my terms and innate coherence. And the pivotal role creativity and art hold in this process. 
 
All the content of Guardians of Birth is rooted in the teachings that sustain me on this life path. These teachings come from ancestral plant medicine work, traditional First Nations doctors, eclectic urban physicians, comadronas and matronas of Central and South America, OBGYNs, animal births, the mothers in my life, and every woman and family that has invited me into their sacred process.
 
read more about my story & experience here

arte-sana; art heals

Central to this immersion are the ancestral arts and the activation of our intuitive technologies—sound, breath, and movement. These practices nourish the soul and spirit, and form the foundational formula for ceremony. They also serve as a powerful remedy for health-care systems that have lost touch with the transformative power of the he(art).

Clay: arte-sana workshop with AYASHAM

  • learn to mold & fire the vessel for your initiative *details upon registration

AYASHAM 
Maria Del Mar and Maria Jose are Colombian twin ceramists, currently based in Miami and Colombia. Founders of Ayasham, a project dedicated to rituals through the process of
sculpting. The sisters have been studying sculpting techniques from western and traditional indigenous practices and have merged these two styles as a statement of migration and the intertwining of two cultures.The process of making these creations is a journey of remembrance and the return to ancestral practices. 

Fiber: arte-sana workshop with Senna

  • learn to weave / work with fiber for your initiative *details upon registration

    Raised in rural Canada on Sinixt Territory, Senna has deep ties to her community, which inspired her to earn her Emergency Medical Responder license. She spent her young adult life working on ambulance and in harm reduction clinics, supporting individuals navigating addiction and homelessness. During this time, she developed a passion for practices and teachings that helped her maintain emotional and spiritual
    well-being. She leaned on the methodical, meditative handworks introduced to her
    during her formative years at the Nelson Waldorf School. Believing in the connection between head, heart, and hands, she sees the potential for grounding, deeper learning, and processing experiences through craft. After leaving health services, she attended
    the Kootenay School of the Arts in 2024, where she deepened her sewing skills, learned
    about plant dyes, and was introduced to weaving on floor looms. As an emerging textile
    artist, she is excited to share her love of working with her hands, natural fibers, and
    plants!

Movement with Kia

  • For tending to common discomforts in pregnancy
Kia Islam is a yoga & meditation instructor, multidisciplinary artist, the co-founder of Good Juju and a Nike Well Collective Trainer. Growing up between the East Coast and the Middle East, Kia has been exposed to a plethora of devotional and cultural practices from a young age. Kia is a graduate of the New School, where she double majored in Photography and Culture & Media. During this time she was introduced to Hatha Yoga under the teachings of Sri Dharma Mittra. Asana practice totally transformed her understanding of the mind body soul, truly igniting a deep sense of wonder about the transformation that this practice encourages. Kia completed her 200 Hr RYT through the Bhakti Center in 2016. She has studied Meridian Yoga Therapy under Science of Self Yoga, 75 Hour Spiritual Warrior with Jivamukti and completed both 200 Hr Meditation and 200 Hr Yoga Teacher Training at Three Jewels NYC. Kia has dedicated herself to a lifelong study of the healing arts, creative expression, culture and spirituality. Kia's classes are focused on awareness of the breath while making shapes, using intuitive movement and music to inspire and nourish on all levels.
 

Grief Arts:  with Tamate Uta

  • honor pregnancy release artfully + elementally  *details upon registration

    Tamate uta is a birth and death worker, drum keeper, and artist devoted to the mending of culture and ancestry. she attends to lineage healing through animist ritual work, with a particular focus on gestation, birth, and pregnancy loss. her postpartum work focuses on facilitating rites of passage for those who have experienced abortions and miscarriages, drawing from her ancestral tradition of Mizuko Kuyo, which means water baby ceremony in Japanese. she is the director of a magical realist documentary visual album called Kizuna, about the spirit of an aborted baby born into a taiko drum and the unbreakable bonds between people, earth and stars. she works with a collective of silkworm farmers in rural japan to restore the relationship between traditional fiber and birth arts, stoking matriarchal and land-based memory. she weaves home and belonging between the territories of ainu and ohlone people.
     

Foodways with Monica

Monica is a Zainichi Korean / Canadian based in rural Japan. She works with traditional food skills and land-based practices to move in rhythm with the seasons, centering the hearth as a space where food, community, ritual, and ancestral remembrance become everyday medicine.

A birth guardian and postpartum care provider, Monica’s practice is rooted in traditional East Asian womb-tending practices and folk medicine, shaped by her cultural lineage, deepened over the last eight years since returning to her motherland of Japan, and expanded through studies in Thailand. She sees the mother as part of a larger ecosystem – body, community, and land – and tends these interconnected layers through pregnancy, birth, postpartum, and beyond.

reflections

Tlamatquiticitl, Huachaychiq, Yatuqa, Partera, Midwife, Doula are some of many names for those who carry the organic technologies of Guarding Birth. Although they express themselves uniquely within their cultural context, they channel a universal ability to tend to the physical, psycho-emotional, and spiritual requirements of pregnancy and childbirth.

We are now in a collective time-space where Pregnancy & Childbirth have been absorbed by the medical industrial complex, and most people have been indoctrinated to believe that Pregnancy & Childbirth are inherently dangerous medical events. We see reflected in the failing health of mothers & children worldwide, and the high rate of maternal and infant mortality in hospitals, that this system is not serving our collective wellbeing.

Additionally, we now see the way that many licensed and certified midwives & doulas are conditioned to be agents of the medical industrial complex and are beholden to regulations and laws that don’t always reflect the best interests of women and families. Unless the individual practitioner is committed to honoring physiologic birth and chooses to answer, above all, to their conscience, they simply perpetuate the same fear-based and pathologizing programming, just at home.

Furthermore, in order to truly reclaim birth, families have to commit to the journey of connecting with their lineage history, health history, and orient themselves to their reality so they can make empowered decisions about their birth and reproductive care.

Guardians of Birth is a non-clinical immersion for those who recognize that our collective health & power relies on the reclamation of our birthrights + creativity and who want to empower women and families through their gestational and birth initiations.

This space will provide information, practices, resources, and inspiration to support you in becoming a resource to your community. And, it will require you to face your own programming, activate your investigative sovereignty, and commit to your personal evolution.

Your ability or readiness to accompany a gestational-birth journey is determined by your coherence, your embodied knowing, and an organic recognition of your abilities by your community. This is a lifelong path, and the learning is infinite.

In recognition of the fact that we live in times where many compounding factors affect our fertility and the health of pregnancy and birth, Guardians of Birth will explore the art of interweaving ancestral birth-care with certain elements of allopathic medicine.

FAQ