Sacred Birth Centre Academy

Joy Horner is a compassionate Perinatal Consultant, Educator, Speaker, Birthkeeper, and Mentor who has been caring for families since 1984. With 37 years of experience as a health professional, including 21 years as a Registered Midwife and 17 years as a nurse, Joy has supported thousands of families through pregnancy, birth, and early parenting in hospitals, birth centres, and homebirth settings, including 16 years as an Independent Midwife.

Her work is grounded in the belief that birth is not only a physical event, but also a profound emotional, spiritual, and transformative rite of passage. After leaving the midwifery register in 2021, Joy expanded her practice to offer holistic support that honours each person’s emotional well-being, inner wisdom, and individual choices.

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Joy’s approach has been shaped by extensive professional experience, advanced training in Shamanic Womancraft with Jane Hardwicke-Collings and Integrative Baby Therapy with Matthew Appleton, as well as her own life experiences of trauma, healing, parenting, loss, and personal transformation. She is especially passionate about supporting women and birthing people who have experienced previous trauma, complex maternity journeys, or who are seeking informed, compassionate guidance.

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Warm, inclusive, and deeply nurturing, Joy provides education, mentoring, birth planning, debriefing, and postnatal support for families around the world. She believes that peace on earth begins with birth, and that healing birth is part of healing Mother Earth, and humanity itself.

Jady is a mother, birth doula, and senior menstruality mentor at Red School, exploring the evolutionary arc of menstruators from first bleed through to menopause and beyond as a pathway to leadership rooted in cyclical consciousness. She is also trained in rebirthing breathwork and bodywork and opening into the world of soul midwifery.

In all her work she responds to the individual's unique journey, respecting that everyone is challenged, gifted and shaped by life in different ways.

She has been serving the local community for the past 18 years. At present, she co facilitates local pregnancy and postnatal groups, attends births and helps craft and hold rites of passage ceremonies, including Blessingways and Closing the Bones. She is a core member of the Mamma Village team, which supports pregnant and postnatal mothers and their families in and around Glastonbury.

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She offers inclusive and trauma informed mentorship for pregnancy and birth that weaves the psychospiritual initiation into the physiological and practical. Jady can provide individually tailored antenatal and postnatal support in your home to help you make informed choices and engage consciously in all aspects of the journey to parenthood. She is passionate about tending and repairing the culture around birth through bridge building, advocacy, education and compassionate practice.

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Paced by her menopause, she is moving more and more into teaching, both at schools for Birthkeepers in Europe and locally through the Birthkeeper's Path 10 Moons course founded by Joy Horner.

Kristina Turner is a writer, birth activist, and women’s circle facilitator with over 25 years of experience. She is the author of Natural Birth – A Holistic Guide to

Pregnancy, Childbirth and Breastfeeding and Revolution i BB-fabriken (Revolution in the Birth Factory), She publishes regularly on birth, women’s health, and culture through her Substack.

Across her work runs a central thread: the intelligence of the female body, the physiology of birth, and the ways institutional systems shape women’s experience of themselves at moments of profound transformation. Kristina completed a year-long Sacred Birthkeeper apprenticeship in Glastonbury, exploring the ceremonial, relational, and psychospiritual dimensions of birth and motherhood. Her work has also been shaped through engagement with leading voices in physiological birth and maternity reform.

Kristina completed Gabor Maté’s Compassionate Inquiry-informed professional training for the perinatal period, which became part of the foundation for her own trauma integration method, Transforming Birth Trauma. Her work integrates

compassionate inquiry, an understanding of the hormonal physiology of birth, systemic analysis, and somatic and ceremonial approaches to healing. Through this work, she supports women to rebuild trust in their bodies, reframe traumatic experiences with clarity and compassion, and reconnect with their innate Intelligence. Kristina works internationally as a birth educator and practitioner and is currently writing a book exploring the industrialisation of childbirth and its consequences for women, babies, and society.

Robyn Sheldon has spent thirty years working at the threshold where souls arrive. Trained as a direct-entry midwife in the United States and South Africa, and as a Soul Integration facilitator in Amsterdam, she has accompanied hundreds of parents through the territory of sacred birth, not only the physical passage, but the inner one.

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Her primary offering is The Lost Art of Landing, a nine-month immersion that weaves soul integration, nervous system regulation, and deep embodiment work to support parents in arriving more fully in themselves before they welcome new life. Alongside this she offers slow, Lomi Lomi-informed bodywork sessions for connecting to the soul of the unborn babies and sessions designed to release chronic stress and restore deep calm in the nervous system.

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She is the founder and co-creator of Mama Bamba, a doula training organisation rooted in the understanding that birth support is fundamentally relational, and a co-founder of SADAA, the South African Doula Association. Her book The Mama Bamba Way, published by Findhorn Press, was endorsed by Thich Nhat Hanh and Jon Kabat-Zinn. Her novel Elsie October was published in 2025.

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Meditation has been central to her own practice for over thirty years and threads through everything she offers. She believes that how a soul arrives matters. It matters for the child, the parent, and the world they enter together.

Ashleigh Dodd is a former Registered Psychiatric Nurse with experience across a range of adult, child, and adolescent mental health settings, including acute inpatient care, long-term rehabilitation services, and community case management. Following a series of profound and transformative life experiences, she stepped away from clinical mental health work and relocated from Australia to the UK, where her experiences in Glastonbury deeply shaped her journey into motherhood and ultimately led her towards Birthkeeping.

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Through her own explorations of the matrescence threshold, Ashleigh became increasingly drawn to the profound psychological, emotional, relational, and spiritual transformations that can emerge through pregnancy, birth, and motherhood. Alongside this came a growing recognition of the importance of compassionate and informed support during these rites of passage, particularly within spaces that can hold both the vulnerability and depth of these transitions.

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Ashleigh now weaves together the knowledge and skills gained through her background in psychiatric nursing with her training and work as a Birthkeeper. Her work centres around the psychospiritual dimensions of matrescence, mental health awareness within the perinatal period, and creating spaces for deep reflection, education, and support as people navigate pregnancy, birth, postpartum, and the ongoing transformation into parenthood.

Josephine Vaillant carries the red thread of her great-grandmother and namesake, a traditional Irish Handywoman, meaning that her work is deeply integrated in lineage. 

Through a combination of embodied experience and years of committed study, Josephine shares contraceptive wisdom and reproductive health in pursuit of cultural regeneration. She believes that honouring our cyclical nature is beyond a practice, but a movement that reconnects us to the Earth, offering relational repair to ancient traditions that have otherwise been forgotten. 

After many years of tending red tents, fires, births, losses, and thresholds, Josephine culminates all her teachings through the integration of science and earth-based practice. Sharing Fertility Awareness education, Functional Hormonal Health and guiding others through the transitional spaces of Menarche, Matrescence and Menopause.  

With 10 years of experience, Josephine qualifies in Jing Remedial Massage and Shoden, Okuden and Shinpiden levels of Usui Reiki. Her lifelong enquiry of holistic wellbeing has also led her to train in nervous system regulation, dance, nutrition and Family Constellations.

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Weaving together this tapestry of holistic endeavours, Josephine's approach is rooted in physical touch, energetic presence, expression and connection.   

Louise-Marlena Tarrier is the Centre Manager and one of the Directors of the Sacred Birth Centre in Glastonbury, a space dedicated to reimagining birth, community, and women's role in shaping culture. Her work there is based on a simple but radical belief: that birth stories change culture, and that how we hold one another in times of threshold matters.

She works at the intersection of leadership, myth, and lived experience, bringing a rare ability to translate complex, often intangible ideas into grounded, practical pathways. With a background as a Director, CEO, and finance leader in purpose-driven organisations, she has led large-scale transformations, built partnerships, and guided organisations from vision to delivery.

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Alongside this, her work is deeply rooted in transpersonal psychology, earth-based practice, and the mythic landscapes of Avalon.

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She is also a writer and teacher, known for her podcasts, Substack and her work on Second Spring, eldership, and women's roles as memory keepers and cultural guides. 

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Her work in the environmental sector has culminated in the planting of millions of trees across Australia and the Tropics. Her approach speaks to those who sense that something is changing, and who are ready to meet that change with awareness, courage, and care.

Lisa Fletcher has lived in Glastonbury, Avalon for over 23 years and has been part of the Goddess Temple Community since 2003. She is a Mother, Priestess of Avalon, Morgen Sybil and Goddess Luminary leader. Lisa is a temple director, Sacred Birth Centre director and manages Goddess Temple Teachings and the temple’s members-Madrons. 

Lisa loves to work collaboratively, is dedicated to servant leadership and working in community. She is qualified in baby and child development and work with children and parents/carers. 

In previous roles Lisa has worked as an early years inspector/trainer, Children’s Centre Family Support Worker, a lecturer at a college teaching Early Years  and Childcare and as an Internal Quality Assurance (IQA) and Assessor at a further education college for all the childcare apprentices studying at levels 2-5.

Lisa is passionate about bringing the inner awareness, mindfulness and values of her spiritual path to the work of the Sacred Birth Centre and blending this with her knowledge, experience and qualifications in babies, children and families to support the Sacred Birth Centre’s mission, values. and role in supporting all aspects of birth preparation, birth and early parenthood.