Nona Birth Doula Foundations Training

The Foundations Birth Doula Training is a four-month, cohort-based program designed to help you step into doula work with confidence, clarity, and compassion. This training blends a physiologic approach to labor with mindfulness skills and practice. Through structured learning, guided practice, and mentorship, you will develop the skills to support families with steadiness and calm while staying grounded in your own role and scope.

Why This Training

Families remember more than what happened in labor, they remember how they felt. In moments of intensity, the doula’s presence can shape that memory. Parents need support that is calm, responsive, and grounded in both knowledge and skill.

This training prepares you to offer exactly that. By centering mindfulness, physiologic birth, and practical tools, you will learn to orient yourself and your clients in ways that reduce fear, strengthen coping, and foster trust. You will leave this program with both a clear framework and embodied practices that carry into the unpredictable reality of birth work.

What You’ll Gain

• Steady presence that helps you and clients orient, breathe, and settle under pressure

• Clear communication that reduces fear and builds collaboration with clinical teams

• Practical coping that pairs mindfulness with positions, movement, and other comfort measures

• Decision support with frameworks that help families make grounded choices when plans change

• Professional confidence in understanding your role, scope, and place within hospital systems

• Sustainable practice supported by routines for reflection, debriefing, and growth

Why Nona Is Different

Most doula trainings emphasize information and techniques. The Nona Foundations Training goes further by integrating mindfulness as a central practice and emphasizes the foundational role of the nervous system in labor progress.

Developed and taught by a perinatal counselor, educator, and retired doula, this training draws from over 25 years of experience in childbirth education, mental health counseling, and professional training. Alongside the foundations of anatomy, physiology, and birth support, you will learn practical psychotherapeutic tools, language models, and mindfulness practices that prepare you for the birth room .

Already trained? Explore Advanced Trainings.

What You'll Learn:

Core Knowledge and Skills

• The anatomy of labor, birth, and the immediate postpartum
• Common hospital protocols and procedures
• How to support clients navigating medical systems
• Pain management techniques
• Optimal fetal positioning and birth positions
• Physiological approach to labor and birth
• The doula’s role, ethics, and legal considerations
• Supporting partners
• Starting and sustaining a doula business
• Professional relationship building and collaboration
• Maternal health statistics and disparities

Mindfulness and Emotional Support

• Mindfulness for doulas and birthing parents
• Mindfulness as a method of coping with pain
• Language use and the mind-body connection
• Neuro-hormonal physiology and emotional regulation
• Trauma-informed practice
• Non-judgmental support and psychological safety
• Basic psychotherapeutic tools for labor support
• Identifying and referring perinatal mood and anxiety disorders
• Navigating personal bias and using mindfulness to prevent interference in client support

Cultural and Historical Context

• Social, cultural, and historical influences on birth in the U.S.
• How systemic factors have shaped birth practices