Our Lineage, Our Offering

Together Taya and Shiela have 37 years of cumulative service as midwives.

For years before we met, our community was constantly stating, “The two of you really need to meet!”  And indeed once we did, we immediately reunited with a sisterhood that felt like a homecoming. Together we share in the calling of midwifery as a way of life and a soul level dedication to honoring the wisdom keeping traditions of midwifery, herbalism, following the earth’s rhythms, and living a life that has reverence for personal cosmology and collective liberation. Heart Folk was born out of this mutual commitment and we are so glad you are here!  

Shiela and Taya 

“The telling of female stories as ‘epigenetic inheritance’ underscores the reality that women’s goddess stories are inseparably linked to our environment, both physical, and cultural. “ - Leslee Della-Madre

About the practice and our story of how we came to be…


Midwives, Medicine & Mission

Answering your questions about the hearts and hands behind Heart Folk.

  • Taya and Shiela were each called to midwifery through a deep reverence for reproductive choice, goddess and earth based traditions. They were each drawn to the midwifery model of care for how it weaves these values and traditions into tending the sacredness of birth, upholding the apprenticeship model of learning and practicing community-based care. 

  • They offer full-spectrum midwifery care—including prenatal visits, home birth planning and support, postpartum care, lactation counsel, newborn wellness, nutritional, herbal and supplemental counsel. Their care blends clinical knowledge with intuitive presence and somatic practices always centering the birthing person’s autonomy, well-being and family system.

  • Taya and Shiela are based in Sebastopol and serve families in Sonoma County, Marin County and Napa County offering care at Brigid Well Center and in families homes. They support people of all identities and backgrounds, creating inclusive, affirming environments for birth and beyond.

  • Herbal medicine is a foundational part of Taya and Shiela’s care model. They use plant-based remedies to support the body and spirit through all stages of the childbearing cycle—offering nourishment, healing, and energetic grounding. Their product line reflects this deep relationship with plants and their commitment to accessible, earth-based wellness.

  • Wisdom keeping refers to the honoring and continuation of ancestral practices—especially those that have been passed down through midwives, herbalists, and medicine women for generations. Taya and Shiela practice and teach through an apprenticeship model, carrying forward storytelling, ritual, folk medicine, and the remembrance of birth as a sacred, sovereign experience.

Woven in Story & PracticE

In the last seven years since meeting, Taya and Shiela have planted the seeds that now have bloomed into what is Heart Folk Midwifery, Medicinals, and Refuge. Our collaborations are committed to preserving and evolving the art, spirituality and lineage of the wisdom keeping traditions of midwifery. We honor our ancestors and the long line of midwives by practicing through relational based care, upholding the apprenticeship model of learning and stewarding the folk practices of herbal medicine as our foundations. Safeguarding humanity's capacity to love, to cultivate self-authority and to choose humility while honoring birth as a rite of passage.  

To learn more about Taya, visit Community Midwifery. To learn more about Shiela, visit Comadres Midwifery.

Both Shiela and Taya became Midwives in the high desert mountains of Taos, New Mexico where midwifery is primarily the people’s first choice.  A place where we both felt a sense of belonging and remembering what was already inside of our cells, an immersion inside of physiological birth and the unique role of midwifery in maternal and child health care. We learned the contours of rural maternity care and the power of working in true collaboration with obstetrical care providers who respected and deferred to the midwifery model of care.  Our mentor Elizabeth Gilmore is forever embedded in our hearts and our hands for her profound and powerful leadership.