The training at a glance
- Who it's for: Doulas, birth workers, childbirth educators, yoga teachers, midwives, and perinatal therapists
- Format: Hybrid. 16 weeks online (self-paced video plus weekly live Q&A), ending with a 4-day in-person teaching practicum in Columbia, MO, or hosted in your area
- Time commitment: 2 to 4 hours per week, plus practice time
- Prerequisites: None. No yoga credential or prior yoga experience required
- You'll learn to teach: The Nona® Prenatal Yoga & Support 6-Week Curriculum for expecting parents
- Credential: Certification as a Nona® Prenatal Yoga & Support Facilitator, plus one year of professional membership and curriculum licensing
- Continuing education: Eligible hours count toward Yoga Alliance CE
- Investment: $1,899
- Next cohort: January 2027. Cohorts run once or twice per year
Prenatal yoga, taught as birth preparation
This training is for doulas, birth workers, childbirth educators, yoga teachers, and perinatal therapists who want to teach deeper, mind-body birth education, build a steady, repeatable offering, and develop relationships with the families they serve.
In this training, yoga functions primarily as a felt metaphor for birth and a gentle way to build resilience and ease discomfort. You do not need any prior yoga experience. The sequence you will learn is already developed to be safe and gentle, and the training includes all the yoga and movement instruction you need to teach the Nona Birth Coherence™ Prenatal Yoga Sequence with confidence.
Join the Waitlist
Coping is a skill. You'll learn to teach it.
You've already learned comfort measures, mindset, and positioning. This training goes deeper, adding mind-body coping skills built on how the nervous system responds to stress and safety. You learn them as frameworks you can carry into every part of your practice, including the birth room.
You will learn the original Nona® models, including:
- Rhythm, Receive, Rest™, a contraction-cycle coping model: rhythm supports mobilization during the contraction, receiving support allows co-regulation as it resolves, and rest supports recovery before the next one begins
- Recognize, Respond, Regulate™, a state-reading model: recognize the nervous system state, respond with appropriate support, and regulate toward safety, connection, and agency
- Language of Safety™, a language model for labor and birth education, built on the idea that words are safety cues the nervous system reads
Together, they give you a structured, neuroscience-informed way to help students and future clients be with discomfort and cope effectively. What you learn is transferable. You are not only adding tools for yourself. You are learning to teach a way of being with discomfort that your students and prospective clients can practice and take with them into their birth.
For doulas, teaching this class also builds your client base. The parents who take it spend six weeks learning and practicing the same frameworks you will use beside them in birth. By the time they are choosing a doula, they have developed a relationship with you, share your language, and have rehearsed your approach to coping. When labor comes, that alignment is already there, built over weeks of practice together.
This training is for you if...
You're a yoga teacher
You already teach yoga or prenatal yoga and want to deepen your understanding of birth physiology, neuroscience, and how to hold space for the full perinatal experience.
This training gives you the frameworks and curriculum to teach with intention and confidence and to facilitate meaningful discussions for group support.
You're a doula or birth worker
You support people through labor and birth and want to integrate community-building group support and embodied practice into the services you offer, grounded in a clear, science-informed framework.
You're a midwife or perinatal care provider
You work in clinical or community birth settings and want to bring movement, breath, group support, and nervous system tools into your practice in a grounded, evidence-based way.
You're a therapist or perinatal counselor
You work with people navigating pregnancy, birth, or early parenthood, and want a group option to integrate support, movement-based, and somatic tools that complement the one-on-one relational and therapeutic work you already do.
Learn to facilitate the 6-week Nona® Prenatal Yoga & Support curriculum
Nona Prenatal Yoga is a 6-week prenatal yoga and support series that helps parents prepare for birth through embodied learning.
You will learn to facilitate the curriculum for this support-based prenatal yoga experience that weaves together movement, mindfulness, discussion, childbirth education, and nervous system awareness. It is designed for professionals who want to offer something more integrated than a class focused solely on poses or childbirth education.
I've taught and refined this mind-body birth education model for over 25 years for hundreds of students. It is consistently reported as their favorite course. It can be offered in community, clinical, and educational settings.
Slow is the skill: you will learn to pace a class so the pace itself signals safety to the nervous system. Teachers learn how to guide:
- prenatal yoga that supports comfort, stability, and adaptation in pregnancy
- resilience-building movement and coping
- mindfulness and deep relaxation practices that can become coping tools in labor and early parenting
- intimate group discussions around themes like fear, identity, relationships, and trust
- childbirth education through an embodied, nervous system-informed lens
What parents carry into birth
Teaching this class gives birthing parents practical skills for working with pain, fear, and anxiety, built through repetition rather than instruction. The practices you teach are uncomplicated on purpose. Simple enough to recall during labor. Effective because parents have done them enough times that the body knows them without being told.
Through movement, mindfulness, childbirth education, and peer connection, parents develop resilience and adaptability during a time that brings both intensity and change. They arrive at birth with a somatic vocabulary for coping, a community they built alongside you, and six weeks of practice behind them.
What the research suggests
Prenatal yoga has a growing evidence base. Systematic reviews and controlled trials suggest it may reduce anxiety and depressive symptoms in pregnancy and support pain coping and childbirth self-efficacy. This training builds on that foundation and pairs it with structured childbirth education and nervous system science, so that what you teach is grounded in evidence as well as experience.
What parents say about the class you'll learn to teach
These quotes are from parents who took the Nona® Prenatal Yoga & Support class, the six-week curriculum you will learn to facilitate:
Amber O'Keefe
"This class is so amazing! It really helped me purposefully think through some of my feelings and expectations in regards to labor, delivery, and motherhood. Thank you!!"
Kristin Veteto
"This is the only place I have full permission to just be pregnant. It is a glorious feeling."
Audrey Stewart
"I absolutely loved everything about this class! I’ve always known I want to incorporate these philosophies into my pregnancy-before, during, and after. You taught me how to do that. I am even more confident in myself & body now. Thanks again for everything-you truly opened my mind!"
Taught by someone who has stood in every role
Erica Kroll, LPC, E-RYT 200, RPYT
Licensed perinatal therapist · Childbirth educator · Prenatal yoga teacher-trainer · Retired doula
I have been supporting families and training professionals for more than two decades. Since 2000, I have worked as a doula, childbirth educator, and prenatal yoga instructor, walking alongside families through the joys and difficulties of the childbearing year. In 2012 I became a licensed professional counselor specializing in perinatal mental health and retired from attending births as a doula.
Even as my counseling practice grew, I continued to teach prenatal yoga, offer childbirth education, and train doulas. This ongoing work keeps me closely connected to both the families in my community and the professionals who serve them.
Because I've stood in all of these roles (doula, educator, yoga teacher, and counselor), I bring a truly integrative perspective to this training. My teaching is informed by lived experience with families, deep study of physiology and neuroscience, and years of mentoring professionals in developing their own confident, grounded presence.
This training is the integration of everything I have learned across those roles. I hope it gives you what I spent years looking for: a framework that holds up in the birth room and in the classroom, and a class you are proud to teach.
One training instead of piecing together three
Many professionals want to offer a prenatal class that is more supportive, more embodied, and more useful than a poses-only or education-only model, but can't piece together several different trainings and credentials to make it happen. Nona® Prenatal Yoga & Support was developed by a perinatal therapist with over 25 years of experience teaching mind-body birth education and group support, so everything you need is in one training.
Graduate with a free year of professional membership, including mentoring, community support, and curriculum licensing.
Interested? Click below to get the syllabus.
Get the SyllabusHow this training is held
What's in the Curriculum
Who tends to be a good fit for this training
The thread running through the training
All Nona trainings are grounded in Birth Coherence™: the alignment of mind, body, and support, so that birth preparation is grounded, realistic, embodied, and responsive to the nervous system. In this training, that framework shapes how classes are sequenced, how discussions are facilitated, and how teachers learn to recognize, respond to, and teach nervous system cues in themselves and others.
Rather than treating prenatal yoga as a separate wellness activity, this approach teaches it as part of a larger preparation for birth, coping, connection, and support.
Leave Ready to Teach Your First Session.
You leave prepared to teach the Nona® Prenatal Yoga & Support 6-Week Curriculum with a clear, coherent framework for every element of it: safe and adaptive movement, nervous system regulation, mindfulness and deep relaxation, pain coping, emotional preparation, and facilitated group support. You will know how to explain to parents why what they are doing in class matters for what they will experience in birth. You will know how to hold the emotional complexity of the perinatal period without overstepping your scope.
This training includes a certificate of completion and a one-year professional membership, which includes:
- Use of the Nona® Prenatal Yoga & Support Facilitator title
- Access to curriculum and updates
- Community learning, mentoring, and live Q&A with Erica
- Continuing education eligibility through Yoga Alliance
That is what this training is.
Ready to Learn More?
If this is the kind of prenatal class you have been wanting to teach, join the waitlist to hear when the next training opens.
Join the WaitlistNona® Prenatal Yoga Teacher Training
$1899
- 16-week hybrid training plus 4-day in-person practicum
- Complete 6-week parent curriculum, licensed to you
- One year of professional membership included
- Yoga Alliance CE eligible
Professional Membership and Use of the Nona® Name
Use of the Nona® Prenatal Yoga & Support Facilitator title and branded offerings is reserved for those who have passed certification assessments and hold active professional membership in good standing with Nona Birth Education.
Professional members in good standing may:
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Identify publicly as Nona Prenatal Yoga & Support Facilitators
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Advertise and teach classes under the Nona name
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Offer Nona Prenatal Yoga & Support as a branded program
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Be listed on the Nona Birth Education website
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Participate in ongoing mentoring, peer support, and professional community
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Receive curriculum updates and continuing education
Professional membership reflects ongoing engagement, ethical alignment, and continued competency, rather than training completion alone.
*This training includes one year of professional membership and curriculum licensing with the option to renew.
Common Questions
How do I become a prenatal yoga teacher?
Do I need prior yoga experience or a yoga credential?
I'm not a yoga teacher. Can I really teach prenatal yoga after this training?
Is this training online or in person?
What is the time commitment?
What does the professional membership include?
What is the difference between certification and professional membership?
When does the next cohort open?
How is this different from an 85-hour RPYT program?
Does this training count toward Yoga Alliance continuing education?
Will I learn to sequence prenatal yoga classes?
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