Malaika Maitland is a mother, yoga therapist and Mama Glow Doula. She is also the co-founder of Spice Harmony Yoga studio in Grenada, in the Caribbean, where she lives and works.
We discuss her experience supporting other women through pregnancy and birth, whilst also being pregnant herself. She shares about her home birth, the landscape of medicalised birth in the Caribbean and ways we can break intergenerational patterns and cycles through conscious relationships.
She explores what it means to consciously and mindfully love ourselves through new motherhood and the effects of new parenthood on a relationship.
I hope you feel the sunshine, warmth and wisdom in this conversation.
Key Themes:
- “My career has evolved through responding to areas of need, stepping into the field but then you see the see those little spaces that our are longing for resources.”
- Once you have support (in birth) you have the power. It’s not about where you are or the options that you have. It means that there’s a lot more power in your hands and in the hands of your community.
- The landscape of birth in Grenada is one where many have bought into this idea that birth needs to be highly medicalized.
- People moving back home to the Caribbean can get frustrated with how they are received but it takes a different way to approach situations so as not to be patronising.
- Motherhood guilt begins in pregnancy.
- Motherhood really awakened a new wave of motivation towards being my best self, because this being has come into the world. And there’s this idea that I need to raise him but really, he’s here to raise me.
- Having a Growth mentality is at the heart of my relationship.
- There’s no blueprint and there’s no right way.
- I’m actually not even trying to grow and change anything. I’m trying to dust off get to the core that already exists.
Resources mentioned:
About Malaika
- Check Malaika’s website here
- Follow Malaika on Instagram here
Let me know your thoughts on Instagram
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Thank you and Much Love,
Nehanda xx
“We’ve got this golden moment, this beautiful bright consciousness, this awakening possibility, this generous and loving heart. Are we going to squander that or are we going to cultivate that? Are we going to allow from our own practices our own way of looking at the world, some flourishing within ourselves and let it ripple out, are we going to squash it? And ultimately, that’s kind of the choice we’re faced with when we really sit deeply with change and control resists change.“
Mimi Kuo-Deemer