Meet your Doula

My name is Nika Helaku. I am a traditional bEarth keeper, student midwife, home birther of two humans, unschooler, and all around self-directed multidimensional being remembering ancient practices while evolving and creating new ways.  

I became a birth worker when I had the privilege of birthing my sun into this world in a way that honors my body, my sovereignty, elder Earth, my community, and my ancestors. I was empowered to step more fully into my capacity as a healer and human upon carrying life in my womb. Bringing forth life was the catalyst that helped me not only interrogate the systems and scripts that deny certain people reproductive experiences of their choice but to get free of them altogether.

I birthed both of my children at home and breastfed them for four years consecutively. I allowed myself to receive sacred support from a doula and a midwife who witnessed me autonomously direct my births from start to finish. I honor those who can show up to support, hold space, form deep connections, and not interfere with the instinctual unfolding of birth.

I was raised by my grandmother and she taught me to be compassionate. I actually learned compassion when I birthed life from my womb and all her lessons that were stored in my body manifested in the form of new life. I see my work as a doula and birth keeper as a love offering to the universe and as a means to pay the love shown to me forward for our collective evolution.

I am inspired to work with BIPOC families because of the rich and often untold and unseen experiences of the past and present that have been drowned out in our society. Our families have a wealth of wisdom around honoring the Earth and the rhythms of nature when it comes to fertility, pregnancy, birth, and death. I celebrate these offerings of wisdom and integrate them with other practices for a holistic, inclusive, and sacred approach to reproductive/physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health and overall wellness. 

As a birth keeper who supports families well beyond birth, I encourage people to consider styles of parenting that extend well beyond their own children and cultivate deeply connected relationships to other people and other life on our planet. I hold space for the continued transformation that is reparenting and unschooling that tends to follow when one births a child in a self-directed way. I am an advocate for uninterrupted birthing, breast/chest feeding, cloth diapering, baby wearing, intuitive diets, natural/homeopathic remedies, placenta medicine, rituals, and ceremony. I believe that there is very little that clean water, fresh air, and skin-to-skin connection can't cure.

We are all interconnected and connection is our truest protection; we have the power to bring consciousness into every element of our lives and offer mindfulness to continuously birthing our best future self as we get free. I believe all of our liberation is tied together and therefore I strive to embody the South African philosophy Ubuntu--I am because we are!