In this episode, Kimberly speaks with Andrea Terrones, founder and lead teacher of Ma School and of Ma, her women's health and bodywork practice in Valle de Bravo, Mexico. Andrea traces her path from doula work, where she saw a gap in postpartum care, through a decade of seeking out traditional Mexican midwives and sobadoras, internal pelvic work, and scar tissue training, to building the long-form school she wishes had existed when she started. They talk about sobadas as lifelong community care, her teachers who saw every girl monthly from her first bleed to her deathbed, and what it means to learn a tradition's practices with respect rather than extraction. Kimberly lays out the professional landscape for anyone who wants to work with the pelvis, birth, and women's health, and why two years of hands-on training builds what a weekend cannot. They discuss the normalization of prolapse and incontinence, postpartum depression as incomplete physiological recovery, the shame that keeps women from looking at their own bodies, and why the field needs collaboration rather than competition. They close on a shared vision: a practitioner in every town, and women's care back in women's hands.
Bio
Andrea Terrones is the founder and lead teacher of Ma School and of Ma, her women's health and bodywork practice based in Valle de Bravo, Mexico, working with women worldwide. She left medical school in search of a medicine that could hold the whole body, and spent more than a decade apprenticing with traditional midwives, sobadoras, and curanderas across Mexico, a path that led her back to the matriarchal lineage of Juchitán, Oaxaca, that she comes from through her grandmothers. She began her career as a doula and specialized for many years in postpartum care, pairing traditional Mexican medicine with formal training in pelvic bodywork, body-mind psychotherapy, and functional medicine and nutrition. Her work brings together hands-on work in the pelvis, womb, and abdomen, functional nutrition, somatic practice, and ceremony. Founded in 2023, Ma School offers a two-year certification for Womb Continuum Practitioners and has trained more than 70 women from over 15 countries. She is a mother of two.
What She Shares
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The postpartum gap that set her searching for teachers for nearly a decade
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Grieving the support she knew was possible but could not receive in her own postpartum
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Sobadas, the traditional Mexican bodywork that realigns the organs and the womb
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How internal pelvic work, fascia, and scar tissue work joined her practice
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Why weekend trainings left her and other women unsure of their hands
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Her teachers as community holders, tending girls monthly from first bleed to deathbed
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What her teachers said when she asked permission to teach their work
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Why being trained in a circle of women heals the sister wound
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How the two-year program is structured, and why it is built for in-person practice
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Why the field needs more teachers and more practitioners, not fewer
What You'll Hear
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Kimberly on the professional paths open to people who want to work with birth and the pelvis
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Sexological bodywork, STREAM, and Holistic Pelvic Care: what each offers and what is missing
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Why a two-year training is not too long for someone with no touch background
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Kimberly's 35-minute session that resolved a new mother's tailbone pain
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Advanced doula training without the on-call life
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Prolapse and diastasis as diagnoses no one actually looked for
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Cultural appropriation, cultural continuity, and the problem with learning rebozo in a weekend
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Womb work traditions in Thailand, India, and the Philippines
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Kimberly's 800 sessions in three years and the waiting lists that followed
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Competition, proprietary attitudes, and the case for standing shoulder to shoulder
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How hands-on work changes the practitioner's own anxiety, depression, and isolation
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The myth of inevitable prolapse, and studies that normalize decline
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Postpartum depression as incomplete physiological recovery
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The siloed care that sends a crying postpartum woman from PT to psychotherapy and back
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Why so many women have never looked at their own vulva
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What Kimberly will teach in the training: intakes, session framing, and the nervous system in the tissues
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Dates, retreats, and how to apply
Resources
Website (Ma School): https://maschool.co
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mawomenshealth/
Apply: https://form.typeform.com/to/PBmpdC4P
Practitioner Directory: https://maschool.co/directory
Next cohort: Begins March 2027. Applications open.
