Meet Jan Yanello, Mother, Midwife, and Founder of The MotherRoot Collective
Jan began witnessing births in her early teens, beginning when her mother invited her to be present for the midwife-tended home births of her youngest siblings. Life subsequently extended a series of invitations, and at age sixteen she began accompanying her mother, a home birth midwife, to births when clients requested her presence as doula and midwife’s assistant.
Despite originally walking a path of preparation for a long-held dream of medical school, she found herself called instead to the path of holistic traditional midwifery. She completed five years of traditional midwifery apprenticeship, after which she has continued to support women as an autonomous community midwife. In the course of training and independent practice, she has been honored to attend over five hundred births, and has taken part in caring for hundreds of women through fertility support, well woman care, miscarriage and pregnancy loss, and prenatal and postpartum care. She now maintains a small private traditional midwifery practice in southern York County, PA, where she lives with her family and a growing flock of sheep.
Currently Jan is maintaining continuing education and peer review in keeping with the standards set by the North American Registry of Midwives for Certified Professional Midwives (though currently she is not carrying certification). This includes regularly re-training hands-on skills in neonatal resuscitation, as well as continuing to take accredited continuing education classes. It also involves regularly sitting in community with other midwives and conducting peer review for accountability and professional development.
She is a certified INNATE Postpartum Care Practitioner, and offers support for clients well beyond the first six weeks post-birth. She is deeply interested in the role of storytelling and story integration in birth experiences, and continues to study the influence that birth imprints and somatically-held traumas have on the wellbeing and unique needs of mothers and babies. She also continues to expand her awareness as a practitioner by learning from leading teachers and wisdom-keepers in areas such as physiologic breech and twin birth, physiologic menstrual and menopause care, biodynamic craniosacral therapy, applied herbalism, endocrinology, and mental wellbeing.
Jan views her most profound ongoing education as taking place in relationship. This includes relationship with her elders (including those who sit at the feet of birth) and with the mothers, babies, and families she serves within her community. This also encompasses her most intimate relationships, including with her body, her family and lineage, and with the land upon which she lives.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In every area of my life the path has been cleared for me by the work and wisdom of the women and elders before me. I remain in ongoing gratitude for all that the work and lived experiences of others have made possible.
I honor midwives Heidi Yanello and Diane Goslin as my first and most influential teachers in the realm of traditional, family-centered and mother-led midwifery care. Their patient teaching, living wisdom, and willingness to provide generous opportunities for hands-on experience in the arts of birthcare are the fertile soil from which my own work with women and their families continues to grow.
I honor Rachelle Seliga for her transformative teaching on physiologic postpartum care, and for the integrity with which she holds her vision. Sitting in studentship with her and the other teachers she has called into her field has laid groundwork for my ever-deepening embodiment as a woman, as a mother, and midwife.
I have been deeply blessed by the hundreds of women who have invited me into their realities of lovership, motherhood, birth, and loss. I would not be a midwife without them. I also hold a deep and abiding gratitude for those women and men whose wisdom-infused knowledge, vision, and invitation to relationship have nourished my own way of being within the world. I am the recipient many times over of unfathomably abundant care and generosity, which has sustained me and my family through those incredibly challenging seasons which visit every human at some time or another.
I cannot express adequate appreciation for both my extended and my immediate family. My heart is daily cracked open to the fulness of life and the richness of relationship through the tenacious love and care shown by those who call me theirs. Nor can I omit mentioning my beloved son, who continues to bring me profound clarity, understanding, and delight through the joyful obligation of motherhood.
Lastly (though in no way least) I honor my mother, Heidi Yanello, whose body has returned to the earth and whose heart of gentle devotion remains my ever-guiding light. Even now she continues on as my teacher, my mentor, my first and most enduring memories of love. Every breath I draw is rich with her wisdom and presence.