Maria Jose Maldonado Leon ( AYA MARIA ) 

CPM, TAAMP

I am a mother, an Autonomous Midwife-Partera and an Elemental Fertility Guide & Educator. 

I work with women and families desiring to activate their cyclical-elemental memory and approach their reproductive care consciously and ceremoniously. 

I also organize in person retreats to connect with ancestral technologies & original birth arts for our collective empowerment and regeneration. 

I hold a BA from Parsons The New School for Design focused on Somatic Art Therapy. After working with special needs children the path opened to begin accompanying gestational, birth and postpartum processes. Simultaneously, I developed a chronic disorder that occidental-allopathic medicine says has no cure. This catalyzed a reconnection to my ancestry and homelands in the Andes & Amazon.

Healing mentally, emotionally, and physically through ceremony and with plant medicine led me to meet traditional doctors and midwives with whom I apprentice(d). From there the need to wield skills and tools from the allopathic realms became clear and I entered a clinical midwifery program at Maternidad La Luz in El Paso Texas where I became a CPM (certified professional midwife).

I’ve supported over 300 births, including VBACs and teen pregnancies, in birth centers and at home.

Since 2017 I've had over 400 women and families attend my online & in person immersions and formations.

 ROOTS

I am rooted in the understanding that menarche, our first sexual relations, gestation, childbirth, and postpartum are sacred physiological rites-of-passage that transform the biography of our bodies and initiate us into new psycho-social roles and responsibilities. 

Moving through these initiations consciously, while witnessed and supported by the elements, our family, and communities, is ceremony. 

Ceremony sustains harmony: ser-en-armonia. 

I am rooted in the understanding that joy and pleasure are our birthright and that we can channel these frequencies when we are healthy, fertile, and in coherence. 

I am rooted in the understanding that we are natural parts of the Earth. As natural parts of the Earth, we have the energy and power that is the Earth, and the more we remember and regenerate a living culture that honors the Earth, the more we will thrive. 

The teachings that sustain me on this life-path come through Ancestral Plant Medicine Work, Traditional-First Nations Doctors, Eclectic Urban Physicians, Comadronas & Matronas of Central and South America, OBGYNS, Animal Births, the Mothers in my life, every Woman and Family that has invited me into their sacred process, and the Activation of my Ancestral & Intuitive Memory through daily disciplines and commitments.