“We both feel so happy to have chosen you as our doula, your positive energy, calmness, wisdom and kindness have made the whole experience a really positive one”

About Nicola Mahdiyyah Goodall

I am Nicola Mahdiyyah Goodall, a traditional midwifery educator, doula, birthkeeper, teacher, writer and founder of Red Tent Doulas.

I have been working alongside women and families through pregnancy, birth, postpartum and the wider cycles of women’s lives for more than two decades. My work sits at the meeting place of traditional knowledge, practical hands-on care, physiology, community, activism and the understanding that women have always cared for one another.

I grew up in South London, from deeply rooted South London Irish heritage, surrounded by hip hop culture. I became a Muslim and then a mother, all by the age of 24.

Sometimes I think birth work was quietly following me long before I knew it was going to become my life. I was named after the maternity ward I was born in. My mother, Olga, was named after the midwife who cared for her mother in 1930s Leeds. My sister began attending births before I did, and another generation of our family has since found its way into this work.

Perhaps it really is in the genes.

Finding my way to birthkeeping

In 2002, while living in South London, I trained with obstetrician Michel Odent and doula Liliana Lammers as one of the early Paramana doulas.

Before that course, I didn’t really know what a “doula” was.

Then I read the description and realised that women in my family and community had been doing versions of this work for as long as I could remember: sitting with women, feeding them, listening, massaging, comforting, protecting the space, caring for babies and mothers, and passing knowledge from one woman to another.

What struck me during that early training was the simplicity of so much of what I was learning and the physiology and evidence underneath it.

I hadn’t intended to make birth work my career. By the end of the course, I knew I couldn’t not share what I had learned.

When I moved to Edinburgh in 2004, I became one of the founding members of the Scottish Doula Network. Since then, my work has taken me into homes, hospitals, classrooms, kitchens, community centres, birth rooms, gardens and gathering spaces across the UK and internationally.

I have supported families through birth and postpartum, taught generations of doulas and birthkeepers, worked with maternity organisations and NHS bodies, spoken publicly about birth and women’s health, and continued to learn from traditional midwives, elders, activists, teachers, students and the families themselves.

Red Tent Doulas

In 2014 I founded Red Tent Doulas to create the kind of education I wanted to see in the birth world.

I wanted something deeper than simply teaching people how to “be a doula”.

Red Tent is about preparing people for the responsibility of sitting alongside women and families. That means understanding physiology and practical skills, but it also means examining ourselves, our assumptions, our histories and the systems in which birth takes place.

Our work brings together traditional birthkeeping, evidence, hands-on skills, reflection, community learning, mentorship and continuing education.

Today Red Tent Doulas has grown into an international community offering doula education, traditional postpartum training, menstrual medicine, plant medicine and Herbarium teaching, end-of-life work, workshops and gatherings.

I am particularly interested in keeping traditional knowledge alive, not as something frozen in the past or borrowed without context, but as living knowledge carried through relationship, practice, storytelling and lineage.

I believe knowledge should move.

Women teach women. Elders teach younger generations. Students become teachers. Families teach practitioners. Communities remember things institutions have forgotten.

That exchange sits at the heart of Red Tent.

My teachers and lineage

I have been fortunate to learn from many extraordinary people.

Over the years I have studied with and learned alongside Michel Odent, Liliana Lammers, Ina May Gaskin, Jane Evans and many other midwives, doulas, breastfeeding supporters, activists and birth workers.

My great friend Ibu Robin Lim has taught me enormously, both about birth and about service.

One of the greatest influences on my work has been my mentor and adopted mama, traditional midwife Rifat Peggie Nafisa Brown, whose own knowledge carries lineages of traditional and Indigenous midwifery.

I have also continued my studies in traditional midwifery, including learning with Mexican traditional midwife Naoli Vinaver.

But some of my greatest teachers have never stood at the front of a classroom.

They are the women whose births I have attended. The mothers I have cooked for. The elders who have told me stories. The students who have challenged me. The traditional practitioners who have allowed me to watch their hands. And the families who trusted me enough to let me enter some of the most intimate moments of their lives.

I am still learning. I hope I always will be.

More than birth

My work has always stretched beyond the birth room.

I hold a Diploma in Antenatal Education and have trained in aromatherapy, holistic and traditional massage, anatomy and physiology and Reiki, alongside many years of practical study in acupressure, herbs, homeopathy and traditional birthkeeping skills.

My first book, 10 Oils: Aromatherapy for the Childbearing Year, was published in 2019.

Long before all of this, I trained as a chef. That particular skill has never gone to waste. Postpartum care and food belong together in my world, although what comes out of my kitchen these days is considerably more grandmother’s-kitchen than executive-chef.

Food is medicine. Touch is medicine. Rest is medicine. Being listened to is medicine. Community can be medicine too.

My teaching now reaches beyond pregnancy and birth into menstruation, postpartum recovery, plant medicine, traditional healing practices, menopause, grief, death and the changing seasons of women’s lives.

For me these aren’t separate subjects.

They are one long conversation about bodies, community, care and what happens when we remember how to tend to one another.

Birth, justice and autonomy

I have also spent many years involved in maternity advocacy and service improvement, including working alongside NHS services and sitting on maternity service liaison and advisory groups.

I care deeply about autonomy in childbirth.

I believe the person giving birth remains the central decision-maker.

Our job as birth workers is not to become another authority standing over women. It is to bring knowledge, practical skill, calm, experience and presence while remembering whose body, baby and birth this actually is.

That philosophy has shaped the way I support families and the way I teach.

It also means being willing to talk about the things that maternity education sometimes prefers to leave outside the room: racism, poverty, trauma, religion, culture, power, medical authority, colonialism and whose knowledge gets recognised as legitimate.

Birth does not happen outside society. The birth room carries the world into it.

If we want to serve families well, we have to be prepared to look at that world too.

Teaching around the world

Birth work has taken me far beyond London and Edinburgh.

I have taught, studied, gathered and worked with birthkeepers and traditional practitioners in different parts of the world, and international learning continues to be an important part of my life.

Wherever I go, I am interested in what women know locally: the foods prepared after birth, the plants growing nearby, the ways babies are carried, the hands-on practices, the rituals, the stories and the knowledge held by grandmothers, traditional midwives and community birth workers.

I am interested in what survives.

And I am interested in what happens when we create respectful spaces for those traditions to speak to one another without pretending that everything belongs to everyone.

And underneath all of that…

I am a mother of four.

I am a Muslim woman.

I am a South Londoner with Irish roots who has made homes in more than one place.

I am a teacher who remains a student.

I love herbs, kitchens, stories, women’s gatherings, traditional medicine, good food, radical education and the peculiar magic that happens when people sit together and share what they know.

More than anything, I believe in women’s capacity to know themselves.

My role isn’t to stand at the centre of somebody else’s experience.

It is to bring what I know, use my hands when they are needed, speak when speaking is useful, be quiet when it isn’t, and help create the conditions in which another person can hear themselves.

There is a passage from The Tao Te Ching that has travelled with me through many years of this work:

“You are a midwife, assisting at someone else’s birth. Do good without show or fuss.

Facilitate what is happening rather than what you think ought to be happening.

If you must take the lead, lead so that the mother is helped, yet still free and in charge.

When the baby is born, the mother will rightly say: ‘We did it ourselves!'”

That, for me, reaches far beyond birth.

It is still the work.