Doula Training
An in-person, immersive 9-day training rooted in traditional birth wisdom and physiologic birth weaving the clinical and the ceremonial to empower whole doulas in service of the next generation.
February 6-14, 2027
Casa Curativa, Tzununá
Lake Atitlán, Guatemala
Become a Birth Keeper
A 9-day immersion into the ancient and essential work of the doula: the one who holds the invisible architecture of safety so that a mother and her baby can remain intact, undisturbed, and sovereign.
Birth is not merely a moment. It is an initiation that reshapes a woman's entire being, and those who tend that threshold carry a profound responsibility.
Together we will walk the full arc of the reproductive journey from conception, pregnancy, physiologic birth, postpartum, and pregnancy release. Learn what it truly means to protect the sanctity of each stage.
You will study the hormones, nervous system, biomechanics, fetal rhythms, and birth ecology that physiologic birth depends on. Discover how to tend the subtler, unseen dimension of birth: the realm where intuition, presence, and ceremony anchor trust into the room.
This training is a weaving of classroom learning, ritual, hands-on practice, and embodied knowing. The mentorship, practical skills, and deep inner inquiry needed to serve as a Doula with integrity, devotion, and clarity.
You will leave rooted, ready, and aligned with the sacred nature of this work.
Our Curriculum
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Female reproductive anatomy in depth: uterus, cervix, pelvis, pelvic floor
The hormonal cascade: estrogen, progesterone, oxytocin, prolactin, cortisol
How the body changes across pregnancy, birth, and postpartum, trimester by trimester
The menstrual cycle as a map of women's health
Reading the body's signals: what's normal, what needs attention
Nine threads, nine days. Woven for both the practical and the sacred of being a doula.
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The cuarentena: the sacred 40 days and why they shape a woman's health for decades
Postpartum physiology: uterine involution, hormonal shifts, milk arrival, mood and energy changes
Warming, nourishing postpartum foods and traditional recipes that rebuild
The practical work: tending the household
Matrescence
Supporting the whole family
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Fetal development week by week
The three trimesters: what shifts physiologically, emotionally, and relationally at each stage
Prenatal nutrition: what truly nourishes mother and baby
Supporting a woman's nervous system through the vulnerability of early pregnancy
How to prepare her body and mind for the threshold of birth
Birth preferences and building trust within a care team
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Miscarriage, stillbirth, termination, and neonatal loss: the physical process and the emotional terrain
How to hold space for grief
Ritual and ceremony for honoring family
How to care for yourself after witnessing this depth of loss
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The hormonal cascade of undisturbed labor: oxytocin, endorphins, adrenaline, and why they must be protected
Fetal positioning and biomechanics: how a baby navigates the pelvis and how to help
Movement, positioning, breathwork, acupressure, counter-pressure, the rebozo
What disrupts birth ecology and how to protect the container so labor can unfold
Navigating medical environments while holding the sacred
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Nourishing infusions, mineral-rich broths, and warming postpartum teas
Healing sitz baths, womb steams, and herbal smudges for the birth space
Herbs for labor support, afterbirth recovery, milk supply, and the postpartum nervous system
Hands-on formula and recipe making
Placenta encapsulation and tincture
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The songs, prayers, and practices that open and close sacred space
Coming into relationship with your elemental nature
Holding a blessing way, the ancient gathering of women around a mother before birth
Working with altar, smoke, water, and song as medicine in birth
Traditional practices from the lineages present in this training, shared with reverence
Finding your own ceremonial voice: what feels true to you and how to offer it authentically
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The theory behind Mayan abdominal massage
How tension, scar tissue, and misalignment affect fertility, pregnancy, and postpartum recovery
Hands-on technique practice under guidance with prenatal and postpartum applications
The art of the faja: traditional belly binding and how it supports the postpartum body to close and integrate
Proper wrapping technique and when to use it
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What it means to practice with reciprocity
Building relationships with midwives, care providers, and other doulas
Navigating the tensions between traditional wisdom and medical systems
How to build a practice that sustains you
Community structures, peer support, and referral networks that hold you over the long arc
The inner landscape of the birth worker and the vision of birth culture you are here to build
It is our birthright to be held through the full journey of conception, birth, and matrescence.
The path back to wholeness runs through each other.
Why Train with Us?
The world needs more birth keepers. Women have been slowly an deliberately separated from the knowledge, the hands, and the community that once surrounded them through the transformation of birth. A doula is part of the remembering. Someone who brings that support back within reach.
This work is both practical and profound. As a doula you will offer emotional presence, evidence-based guidance, and skilled hands that help a woman stay rooted in her own power through pregnancy, through labor, through the tenderness of postpartum. You become the bridge between what she knows in her body and what the system may ask of her.
To train as a doula is to join a revolution. The rebuilding of woman-centered, community-rooted reproductive care. It is the reclaiming of a lineage: women holding women through the thresholds of life.
That tradition is older than any institution, and it is ours to carry forward.
Join this training and become part of the generation of women rebuilding a world where birth is sacred, mothers are sovereign, and no woman walks this threshold alone.
Is this training for You?
This doula training is for the women who feel the ancient pull in their bones. Who know, without being able to explain it, that they were always meant to stand at this threshold. A reclamation of something older than language.
You know this is your work, even if you can't explain why yet
The mysteries of womanhood stir something in your belly that logic can't settle. You have always felt drawn to the threshold, to birth, to the places where women are most raw and most powerful. You don't need to justify it. This training will feel like coming home to the best parts of yourself.
You are a new or aspiring doula craving hands-on learning
You've looked at online trainings and felt nothing. You want the heat of a fire, the presence of mentors, the living transmission that only happens in circle and on the land. You know this kind of knowing can't be downloaded. It has to be felt, practiced, and received in person.
You are a mother who knows this threshold as a profound initiation
You know what it means to be changed by birth the way it breaks you open and reconstitutes you as something new. Now you feel the call to carry that torch for others. To walk beside other women on their path.
You feel the ache of severed lineages
Something in you grieves what was lost. The midwives, the aunties, the birth keepers who once wove the fabric of a woman's passage. You long to reweave yourself into that web. This immersion will feed that hunger.
You believe in the revolution of community-based care
Women's sovereignty.
Mother-baby protection.
The village.
You see the birth culture we're rebuilding and you want to be part of it with real skills and a real community behind you.
You already serve women and you're ready to go deeper
Herbalists, yoga teachers, therapists, bodyworkers, space holders: you've been orbiting this work for years and you know it's time to step fully into it. You want tools that are embodied, ancestral, trauma-informed, and rooted in the real physiology of the feminine.
You are an activist committed to protecting reproductive rights and dismantling institutional birth trauma
You're devoted to rebuilding a world where mothers, babies, and families are protected. You understand that real change requires embodied knowledge, not just good intentions. This training gives you the tools, the language, and the backing to stand firm inside medical systems and outside them.
Meet Your Guides
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Clinical Herbalist • Natural Builder • Birth Keeper • Educator
Ashley McDonell is a birth keeper, clinical herbalist, natural builder, and educator whose work weaves together physiology, ancestral wisdom, and the sacred arts of womanhood. For more than 15 years, she has served families across the reproductive continuum—guiding women through conception, pregnancy, physiologic birth, postpartum, and pregnancy release with deep presence, sovereignty-centered advocacy, and unwavering devotion.
Her lineage of study includes mentorship with Whapio, Rachelle Segal, traditional midwives, birth attendants, and teachers of the Wise Woman and physiological birth traditions. Ashley’s approach blends evidence-informed understanding with ancestral knowledge, nervous system literacy, and trauma-aware birthkeeping. She holds a rare capacity to translate complex physiological processes into embodied, intuitive knowing.
As the creator and lead educator of Casa Curativa’s Doula & Birth Keeper Training, Ashley teaches from the intersection of activism, ritual, and biology. Her work centers the protection of the mother–baby dyad, the restoration of undisturbed physiologic birth, and the remembrance of birth as a profound initiatory rite. She is known for helping women reclaim their sovereignty while preparing birth workers to stand as guardians of the sacred, skilled advocates within medical systems, and compassionate stewards of community-based reproductive care.
Ashley’s teaching style is both deeply rooted and radically human—equal parts technical, poetic, and fiercely aligned with the values of reciprocity, reverence, remembrance, relationship, and responsibility. In every container she leads, she brings her full self: the herbalist, the builder, the ritualist, the activist, and the woman devoted to reweaving our connection to the earth and to one another.
Her mission is simple and profound:
to restore the dignity of birth, to return power to women, and to train a generation of birth keepers who can hold the thresholds of life with skill, integrity, and sacred regard.
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I am a mother, a devotee to humanity’s umbilical connection to life itself, to reciprocal prayer and intuitive medicine.
I am a woman weaving together the threads of tradition and new culture to create a continuously evolving and integral ways of collective living.
I am one of those that bridge the teachings of elemental laws to become part of our everyday living prayer.
Meet Your Guest Teachers
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Family Zavala come from an unbroken lineage of traditional mayan birth keepers [parteras], of pregnancy and post partum care.
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Midwife, Mother, Herbalist & Abdominal Massage Specialist
Mariu is a Guatemalan, born and raised midwife, healer and massage therapist. After working with indigenous midwives for ten years in the Maya highlands and studying midwifery for 4 years she gracefully integrates traditional and professional midwifery. Offering her services to local indigenous women and foreigners alike. Especially to women who seek a safe humanized birthing space, in the comfort of their home.
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Midwife
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Venus has been driven by her main passion: What does it mean to be embodied in a female body?
Exploring, feeling and studying for more than 10 years through Tantra, Motherhood, Dance & Movement, Yogatherapy, Breathwork, Somatic Healing, Conscious Touch and Ritual, her devotion towards the Heart is her commitment to Spirit.
Her life experience of birthing three daughters and her devotion to womenhood has taken her to mentor women through their paths of Maidens, Mothers and Crowns,
Her spiritual path is to explore and practice Tantra in a devoted way, accepting and understanding her own duality; believing that if we live sexuality consciously, it can become a door to awakening, and that consciousness and energy are our essential polarity, opening the profound path of communication between the Feminine and the Masculine within.
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Prenatal Yoga Facilitator: Jessi Luna, E-RYT 500
Jessi has been teaching yoga since 2009 and facilitating yoga teacher trainings since 2012. She attended the Holistic Doula Training with Holistic Midwifery in 2019 and immediately knew it was an offering for Seven Springs. Jessi gave birth to both her sons, Kai and Cedar, in the Peru yurt at Seven Springs, and she is delighted to open this space to empower more women and mothers in the power of birth. Jessi will offer morning yoga, she teaches a Vinyasa based practice to combine elements of dance and natural movement with traditional yogic sequencing. She incorporates attention to rhythm of the breath, and allows for organic movement to flow in each pose. A creative entrepreneur at heart, Jessi explores how to do business in a good way for the planet and people. Jessi is a cofounder of Kula Collective Yoga School along with 6 other friends, as well as Seven Springs along with her husband and parents.
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I am Jibreska, a Devoted Mother of 3, former MD, root cause medicine doctor, craniosacral and Innate Postpartum practitioner. My devotion for the mother baby dyad started during my own motherhood journey, sensing the biological, nutritional, behavioral and emotional needs that women need to thrive and experience vitality together with their children and the next generations to come. My work is focused on molecular nutrition, behavioral aspects, imprints and generational patterns for Mothers and Families as I deeply believe it to be the foundation of society, health and community.
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Isa is a Certified Nurse Midwife (CNM) guided by values of healthcare equity and compassionate, person-centered care. She started her path as a birth doula working with underserved communities around her home-land of the Twin Cities. Inspired by these experiences, she committed herself to become a midwife in order to better serve people throughout the reproductive lifespan and beyond. Her undergraduate bachelor of science in “cultures of healing” was completed through the University of Minnesota and focused on the intersection between modern and traditional medicine. Isa graduated from Marquette University with a post-master’s certificate in nurse midwifery and worked as a labor and delivery nurse during the years she lived in Milwaukee. Isa started her midwifery career at the US border with Mexico in Texas, where she attended births at a free-standing birth center and honed clinical skills with community-based programs focused on accessibility. Bilingual in Spanish and English, she enjoys opportunities to travel particularly throughout central and south America. Isa is inspired by traditional and integrative approaches to healing from wisdom keepers in Minnesota and the broader Americas. When not midwifeing, she loves to make craftwork, cultivate plants, practice yoga and eat delicious food. Isa is honored to serve as a midwife and educator for the next generation of birth workers.
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Rosa Maya Cubides Sánchez was born in the Colombian Andes region of Boyacá.
For over ten years, she has walked the path of traditional medicine within the Chibcha/Muisca, Maya, and Mexica territories. She is also a Moon Dancer in Mexico. For the past decade, she has lived in the territory of Guatemaya alongside her children and her partner.
She has been practicing massage for as long as she can remember; her work focuses specifically on traditional therapeutic bodywork and healing massage.
She also emphasizes how to care for the body using traditional methods rooted in the elements—including steam baths and Temazcal ceremonies.
She supports women through their various life transitions, as well as during pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period.
Her practice centers on reconnecting with the roots of our ancestral lands, applying the wisdom of herbal medicine and ancestral steam therapies, and—above all—maintaining harmony within our physical, mental, and emotional bodies.
Our Daily Flow
A typical day during this 9-day training looks like this:
8:00-9:00
Embodiment Practice
9:30-1:00
First lecture (ex: birth physiology)
1:00
Lunch at the Lodge
2-5:30
Guest teacher and hands on practice
5:30-7 pm
Optional Evening Activity
(Sauna, Fire, Etc)
WHAT OUR STUDENTS ARE SAYING
Doula Training
without Accommodation
All inclusive course and 3 meals per day,
without accommodations.
Payment plans available upon request.
Total: $1,900
Pricing
with Accommodation:
GARDEN TENT
Tent nestled in the heart of the garden
Comfortable bedding and cozy rug
Shared hot showers and bathrooms
Access to shared kitchen
All inclusive course, accommodation and 3 meals per day.
$2,305
SHARED ACCOMMODATION
Stay in our newest and largest shared accommodation The Lodge:
Comfortable single beds
Full shared kitchen and living room
Private terraces to rest and enjoy the nature
All inclusive course, accommodation and 3 meals per day.
$2,548
PRIVATE ROOM
Stay in our private accommodation we have three options to meet your unique desires and needs!
Click bellow to tour each of our magical spaces.
All inclusive course, accommodation and 3 meals per day.
starting at $2710
Course Investment
A 9-DAY DOULA TRAINING :
Full Course + 3 meals daily · Accommodation not included: $ 1,900
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Full 9-day course curriculum across all nine threads — anatomy, birth, postpartum, herbs, ritual, and beyond
In-depth notes packet to take home and return to throughout your practice
Three nourishing meals a day prepared with love on the land
Daily yoga and embodiment practice to open the body and ground the learning
Multiple temazcales: the ancient sweat lodge ceremony woven into the rhythm of the training
Practical rituals, ceremonies, and tools you can bring directly into your work with clients
Lifetime access to recorded supplemental classes to deepen your learning long after you leave
The Casa Curativa community: a living network of birth keepers, herbalists, and healers
A circle of sisters forged in 9 days of shared learning, who will tend you as you grow in this work
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When you stay at Casa Curativa you wake up in the garden, share meals with your sisters, and let the lake hold you between sessions. That immersion is where the deepest shifts happen.
We offer a range of accommodations to fit every budget from a simple garden tent to a private cabin with lake views. See the pricing section below to find what fits you best.
Prefer to stay off-site? You're welcome to book nearby and commute in each day, just be sure to choose the tuition-only option at checkout.
Any questions about travel or where to stay? Message us! We're happy to help.
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This training is genuinely rare and not just because of the curriculum. Most doula trainings are either clinical and evidence-based, or ceremonial and ancestral. This one is both, held in equal measure, on the land at Casa Curativa on the shores of Lake Atitlán.
You'll study physiology, hormones, biomechanics, fetal positioning, birth ecology — alongside ceremony, herbal medicine, ritual, and embodied practice.
You'll be held in a small circle, which means real mentorship, real relationships, and a container that actually transforms you rather than just training you.The educators you'll learn from aren't drawn from one tradition. This gathering brings together Maya parteras from an unbroken lineage, Guatemalan midwives trained in the highlands, clinical herbalists, movement teachers, and more who each carrying a different thread of this work. The perspectives here are as wide as we can make them, and they honor many different lineages of birth keeping.
You'll leave not just with skills but rooted in who you are as a birth keeper.
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Fly into La Aurora International Airport in Guatemala City. From there it's a 3.5-hour journey to Lake Atitlán (traffic dependent). We recommend arranging a private transfer directly from the airport, or taking a shared taxi from arrivals. A travel tip worth taking: consider flying in a day early and spending a night in Antigua to break up the journey — it's a beautiful city and a gentle way to arrive.
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Passport and important documents
Comfortable clothes and light layers
Comfortable walking shoes — we spend time outdoors
A reusable water bottle (filtered drinking water on site)
Sunscreen, hat, and sunglasses
A light jacket or sweater for mornings and evenings
Shower and bathroom toiletries
Herbal or non-toxic bug spray
Earplugs if you're a light sleeper
Your journal
Any personal herbal supplies or altar items you'd like to have on hand
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Let us know in advance and we'll do our best to accommodate you. Email us at info@casacurativa.com before the course begins.
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Guatemalan Quetzales. The current exchange rate is approximately 1 USD = 7.2 Quetzales. ATMs are available in nearby towns.
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Yes. We offer optional on-site bodywork, herbal baths, and sauna sessions. Some students book something early to decompress after travel or others toward the end to integrate the experience.
WANT TO TALK TO A HUMAN?
Discover personalized guidance and answers to your questions about our in-person doula course. We want you to feel sure that this course is what you are looking for. Book your call today and take the first step on your journey with us!