Jovan Sage

Jovan Sage (they/she) is a Heart Consoler, Death Midwife, and Grief Weaver who threads sacred space and heart medicine together. Their work is to guide those navigating deep transformation and tender thresholds of grief. Their practice is grounded in Black ancestral healing and land practices, queer liberation, and intimacy with the natural world. Their teaching centers tending to our body’s way-knowing, and our communities of Ancestors, people, plant, and animal kin.

Death, A Calling

I was birthed into my doula work through death but that was never meant to stay there. There is an expansiveness to what my calling continues to open into. This calling is asking me to ground into relationship, to deepen into community, and to show up again and again in my full authenticity. It’s asking me to go slow, develop trust, and connect.

My calling shows up in helping people plan for their death, educating people on the process of dying, and empowering people to take responsibility for their death (and in turn their life). This calling asks for laughter, flowers, shedding light in the darkness, and having hard conversations with empathy. My calling is asking for me to use my creativity, space-holding, and energy work to create opportunities for communities to navigate grief and the fear of dying.

Miscarriage as a portal has been a recurring part of my own life. As a rainbow baby, I held the expectations of a life lost and I also held my mother’s hand (at 11 years old) as she miscarried another life. My own miscarriage would become a portal to my own unfolding and led me to my professional full-spectrum doula and certified Pregnancy and Infant Loss Advocate work.

I expanded my herbal training into herbs and flower essences in grief; deepened my understanding of the energy body and techniques to support trauma and grief; and grew my training in grief support, breathwork and somatics, and trauma-informed practices.

However, the deeper into fertility and birth work, the more death showed up. The more I understood how intertwined they all are and how prepared I was to release the way my work looked and operated. When the student is ready…

I stumbled upon a podcast from Narinder Bazen on Death Midwifery. The resonance couldn’t have been clearer. As I felt the death of my life in the South, grace showed up in her Nine Keys Death Midwifery Apprenticeship.

Make the path by walking

When I returned from a trip to Massachusetts, who I thought would be my final birth doula client in Georgia, would need me to show up as a Death Midwife instead.

This nine-month apprenticeship shadowed my leaving my life in the South and returning to the Northeast and Nonotuck ancestral homelands.

The Four Core Principles of Death Work from Narinder Bazen

  1. Death is the teacher.

  2. Letting Go is the art we aim to master.

  3. The lessons taught by Uncertainty far outweigh any other lesson.

  4. The Calling to the work lays the work out for us. It is through developing a sound relationship with the Calling that we learn our unique style of Death Midwifery

Being a Nine Keys Death Midwifery Apprentice had me doula deeper into my grief and relationship to death. I’ve emerged on the other side, a Death Midwife and I continue to make the path by walking.

TRAINING + TEACHERS

    • Reiki Usui Shiki Ryoho First & Second Degree with Reiki Master Drea Aguilar

    • Energy As Currency and Etheric Gardening Apprentice with Maryam Hasnaa

    • Tantric Meditation Teacher with Tracee Stanley

    • Flow Breathwork with Shanila Sattar

    • Trauma Sensitive Yoga Training with Holle Black

    • Trauma Sensitive Meditation Instructor with Kierstin Graham

    • Institute for Integrative Nutrition, Integrative Nutrition Health Coach

    • Florida School of Holistic Health (Beginning, Intermediate)

    • Herbal Academy (Intermediate, Entrepreneur)

    • Dr. Aviva Romm Herbal Medicine for Women (in progress)

    • American Herbalist Guild (Narrative in Practice: Case Studies in Clinical Herbalism)

    • Chestnut School of Herbal Medicine (Herbal Medicine Making)

    • Divine Birth Wisdom (Grandma's Hands Pregnancy & Postpartum Herbs and Nutrition in the Southern Tradition)

    • Holistic Fertility Doula, National Black Doulas Association

    • Rebyrth Doula, National Black Doulas Association

    • Postpartum Doula, National Black Doulas Association

    • Sex Doula, Level 1+2, National Black Doulas Association

    • Maternal Support Practitioner (Fertility, Birth, Postpartum), Bebo Mia

    • Women's Herbal Educator, Dr. Aviva Romm (in progress)

    • Grandma's Hands Pregnancy & Postpartum Herbs and Nutrition in the Southern Tradition, Divine Birth Wisdom

    • Trans Masculine Fertility & Birth CE with SeaHorse Educational Services

    • Queer & Trans Reproductive Support CE, Birth Advocacy Doula Trainings

    • Nine Keys Death Midwife

    • Pregnancy and Infant Loss Advocate

    • Herbalism for Grief and Nervous System Support with Mara June of Motherwort & Rose