The Founder
Master Massage Practitioner. Doula. Teacher. Mother of two. Three decades in the soft and fiercely powerful work of bodywork and birth.
Hello
I'm Rain. I've been in practice since 1994 — first as a massage therapist, then as a doula from 2000 onward. The thread between those two callings has always been the same one: that the body knows what it's doing, and that the right kind of touch, the right kind of presence, can return us to that knowing.
The Gentle Birth Ball is what I made for the women I've held in labor — the ones I knew, and the ones I'll never meet.
Two Births
In 2005, I gave birth to my first daughter at home — held by my midwife and my sister. It was a sacred passage. The kind of birth I had spent years preparing other women for, and now finally got to inhabit myself.
Three years later, in 2008, I had my second daughter — this time in the hospital, but with the same intention. We made it a "home birth" inside those walls. Soft lighting. The people I trusted. The same ball I would later put my name to.
Both experiences shaped me. Both showed me that the environment around a laboring body matters as much as the body itself.
Lineage
The Gentle Birth Ball draws on thirty years of training across a dozen traditions. Each one taught me something I needed to hand back.
Pelvic and reproductive bodywork rooted in ancestral Mesoamerican practice — restoring proper alignment to the uterus and abdominal organs.
The womb-honoring tradition carried by indigenous midwives of Aotearoa — touch as ceremony, as homecoming.
Connective Fascial Technique — releasing the deep web of tissue that holds the body's habits.
The energetic and plant-based practices that taught me to read what the body cannot say in words.
Movement, compression, breath. A whole-body practice that trained my hands to move with rhythm.
Two decades supporting laboring women — at home, in hospitals, in the in-between hours that birth so often asks of us.
By being held and supported, you have access to the portal of surrender. Having access to the portal of surrender, you can safely melt into something higher.
— Rain Gentle
The Practice
The poses Rain has guided women through for two decades — now printed directly on the ball, and brought to life through video.
Explore the Practice