Episode 215. The Doula Era Is Evolving, Expanding — And I’m Back
You may have been taught that the most important thing you bring into a birth room is your training.
Your certifications. Your techniques. Your beautifully packed doula bag.
And while those things matter… They’re not the deepest layer.
The most important thing you bring into the birth room is your nervous system.
A Shift Is Happening
Over the past several years, the doula industry has moved through different phases.
There was a strong focus on certifications and techniques.
Then came the rise of digital doulaship—bringing education, support, and resources to families online.
And now something deeper is emerging.
The doula era is evolving.
The work is expanding.
Because no matter how much you prepare your clients—or how much you educate yourself—you can’t out-prepare a dysregulated nervous system.
In This Episode, You’ll Hear About
• Why the nervous system may be the most important thing you bring into a birth space
• How the doula industry has evolved over the past several years
• Why regulation changes the entire energy of the birth room
• How inherited patterns can influence how you hold space for clients
• The connection between nervous system work, burnout, and sustainability in birth work
• Why healing through the mother line changes both your work and your life
The Deeper Layer of Birth Work
When you begin regulating your nervous system and healing the patterns held in your body—especially those inherited through generations of women—something shifts.
Your presence in the birth room changes.
The way you hold boundaries in your business changes.
Your capacity to hold space for clients changes.
Even your relationship with power, money, and leadership can begin to shift.
This isn’t just about birth.
It’s about how you live and lead as a woman.
Why I’m Back
I’m stepping back into the doula world because the conversation is evolving.
And the next era of birth work isn’t just about techniques or certifications.
It’s about regulated nervous systems.
It’s about healing what we carry in our bodies and in our lineage.
It’s about becoming fully expressed versions of ourselves rather than living a modern-day version of our grandmothers’ survival.
If This Work Is Calling You
The Mother Line program is where we go deeper into this work together.
Inside this experience, you’ll explore healing inherited patterns through mother line work and Expansion Principle energy healing.
The next cohort begins March 23 and includes:
• a six-week virtual container
• an intimate in-person retreat option in November
• limited private support opportunities
If you feel called to explore this deeper layer of healing and leadership, you can apply here: https://www.nicholejoy.com/mother-line
Links & Resources:
Mother Line experience: https://www.nicholejoy.com/mother-line
Connect with Nichole Joy on IG: https://www.instagram.com/nichole_joy__/
Try me! Schedule your complimentary 30-min chat & let’s see how I can best support you: https://nicholejoy.hbportal.co/public/64fa005ec70ae50024c65155/1-Inquiry_form
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Transcript:
Okay, I am stepping back into doula ship, but this time I'm not squeezing hips. I'm not teaching childbirth ed classes like this on [00:01:00] Zoom, and I'm not texting and doing virtual doula support anymore. So it's not the digital doula era. This is something different. This is a regulated nervous system doula and birth worker professional era.
And so let me explain.
When I first entered the birth industry in 2018, it was really because I was preparing for a natural birth, and I felt like if I were going to be giving birth without drugs, I needed to know everything that there was to know about childbirth and about how to support myself through that birth.
Hi, I'm a one line in human design. Can you tell. And what I realized back in 2018 was there was a lot of emphasis on certifications, on techniques, on what tools go in your doula bag. And I think those things are very helpful and , they can be very important, but , I don't think they're the most important thing.
We then moved into. The next era, which was bringing many of those tools to people in the comfort of their own homes, effectively empowering people through , digital doula ship. And I hosted a community of, I don't know, I think [00:02:00] 2000 doulas at the time who, um, wanted to become. Some form of a digital doula and had an interest in creating some kind of online platform, , digital course or virtual doula stuff.
And this was before 2020, before it was necessary. So that was that next era was empowering these families to take action into their own hands. If. They didn't necessarily have access to the resources for that in-person. , Support that many birth workers really love, and that is very important, but not everybody has access to.
So we did the digital doula thing and it became a big thing obviously with COVID and 2020
and really it helped so many birth workers build a business. They didn't require them to always be present at births, of which I've personally helped about a thousand of those folks, whether they were working with my digital doula content toolkit, my course creation for doulas, program, selling courses, online audience expansion.
Then I had the premier coaching center, which was for birth professionals and various masterminds and programs, uh, marketing courses, things of that nature in [00:03:00] between. So combined, I had approximately a thousand birth workers learning how to take their businesses digital. Now that was also a very important and continues to be a very important era of the doula world.
The next era, the era that I feel coming is deeper, and I talked about this a little bit in the last episode, but I wanna bring it specifically into the context of birth workers and birth work . . I don't care how much you've prepared your clients or how much you've prepared and educated yourself and even practiced being a doula, you can't out prepare.
You can't out educate a dysregulated nervous system. .
It is the same concept of you can't out supplement a dysregulated nervous system. I don't care how many supplements you're taking, I don't care how much education you're signed up for, how many classes you're taking. I don't care how many births you've been at. If you're not working on regulating your nervous system, truly getting to rewiring, restructuring your foundation from inside, it's very difficult , to have the experiences [00:04:00] that you.
Want to be having that you desire to be having, right? So if you're in a high stress environment, if you are living in a high stress environment and you're taking all the supplements in the world and you're eating well, and you're eating whole foods, and you're exercising, you're moving your body, you're hydrated, you're drinking your electrolytes, you're doing all the things, but your body is still giving you hell, it's because your nervous system is dysregulated and you're in a high stressful environment.
Now, how does that transfer to the birth room? You as a doula have a very important job when you're entering a birth space, and it's not just making eye contact. It's not just bringing this beautiful bag. It's not just having certifications and experience that you've been at hundreds and hundreds of birth.
It's also rewiring your system , because when you are rewiring your system, it changes. Everybody's experience around you, it changes what you bring into the birth space.
I've worked with a lot of doulas in the past and other birth workers, and many of them had really beautiful rituals, um, and practices how they would [00:05:00] check their energy at the door, and that is helpful, that is beautiful, uh, so that you're not walking into a birth with your own crap. But again, it's really difficult to do that stuff if you haven't gone to the core, to the origin of where the dysregulation lives.
When you do that, when you heal to the root, heal to the origin, my personal preference and , favorite tool for doing this kind of work is expansion principle, energy healing. , I'm offering the mother line program starting March 23rd. The last episode is all about that work and the program that's coming, link in the show notes.
When you do this work and you shift your spiritual soup and you clear what's in your body. Related specifically with this conversation to what you experienced in your mother lineage, and we can even take it more specifically through the lens of birth. How you hold space for your clients in labor and in postpartum changes, client outcomes and their experiences no matter what the outcome changes.
Your level of burnout as a [00:06:00] business owner and your boundaries change. So it's not just about the birth, it's about you , as an entrepreneur and holding firm and clear boundaries that are a loving gift to yourself so that in part you don't burn out. Again, per episode two 14. That last one. This is your reclamation of power and it doesn't just change the way you give birth and how you hold space in the birth room.
It changes how you approach business and interacting with your business, interacting with clients, , and sometimes that means holding boundaries. Sometimes that means how you receive funds and what you believe to be true about receiving funds, and how open are you to receiving more funds? How comfortable are you?
, How? Does your nervous system feel receiving and holding more funds?
This is big fucking work. And it's not just about money, but listen, we need money to live. , We live in a human world. I talk about spirituality and all of these beautiful energy things, but at the same time, I'm a human being too. I need to go to the grocery store and buy food as well. I need to put gasoline [00:07:00] in the car as well.
So money is a really fun thing that we get to use to live a very fun life and experience everything that we desire. So money is important, but can your nervous system hold it? Can you hold more?
What are the stories that you inherited through the women in your line about what it means to be a woman with access to money? And as an entrepreneur, you are in this work. Because you give a shit because your heart is in this work. Doula work is not something you go into to be a multimillionaire. You go into it with a big open heart doesn't mean you can't become a multimillionaire, but the way that you receive and hold more and more and more money is through clearing the old shit that's in your body, that's in your spiritual soup, sometimes through the mother line about what it means to be a woman with power and a woman with access to money.
I think that the world would be quite different today if women were the one with access to all the power and a lot of the money.
The way that you do this, the way that you move forward, particularly with me, is through working on the mother line
we're starting March 23rd. It's a [00:08:00] virtual experience. It runs six weeks through May 1st, check the link in the show notes for all of the details on everything that we're gonna be doing, or go back to episode two 14 for a little bit more of an explanation.
There's a virtual option and then there's also an in-person retreat option in November, and if neither of those work for you and you'd prefer private support, I have a few spots of private support available. All of them you have to apply because I'm protecting the space, I'm protecting the virtual container, the in-person retreat, and obviously who I'm working with one-to-one.
Because we're not here to be living our lives in a modern day version of who our grandmothers were. We can love them and love our family, love the women in our line, and respect what they had to experience and not carry it forward and not pass it on to our children and their children. We're here to be fully expressed versions of ourselves, and this is how you do the work.
The links in the show notes. Reach out to me if you have any questions and have a wonderful week.