​

Peace y’all! Shanika, here. The tribe calls me Mama Nika and you can too! 

 

I am a family centered queer bEarth worker and self-proclaimed water whisperer with roots on the south side of Chicago. As a certified birth and postpartum doula and a certified lactation consultant I offer full spectrum birth and postpartum services in Chicago where I currently reside with my co-creator and our two children, Kavi Solstice (5 years old) and Alkhemi Sage (2 years old). I birthed my children at home and nurtured them from my bosom like it was my birthright. So now, you can’t tell me NOTHING! (jk…kinda)

 

In all seriousness, birthing and birth work have served as a portal to more deeply accessing my intuition, my ancestors, and my innate healing intelligence. My experiences with unassisted and uninterrupted birth have revealed so much to me about human nature and how, no matter what, we always have and always will find our way. My philosophies around life and learning are deeply rooted in the idea that from the womb to our graves and all the life experiences in between, we find our way through our instinctive motivation to connect, learn, and grow. Consequently, my approach to supporting my children’s learning has been to let them guide their own! 

 

I resonate with unschooling because I create spaces for my children to lead in their own learning experiences through their unique inspirations and streams of curiosity. Unschooling allows me to intricately weave my dual role as a learning guide and a parent together, and as a result I see learning as an ongoing process for myself and my children that doesn’t just happen in one way or in one place. In fact, supporting my children’s learning through parenting has facilitated my journey in reparenting myself. Sometimes we have to unlearn a few things to make space for learning new things! 

 

I am a Pisces sun, Scorpio moon, and Cancer rising water woman, if you couldn’t tell by now. You can catch me feeling all the emotions for me and you, yo’ momma and yo’ cousin too! It’s a big job but somebody has to do it. It brings me great honor to facilitate children in their feeling, expressing and releasing a full range of emotions. A major goal I have for my children is to co-create a childhood that they don’t need to recover from. By investing in their emotional intelligence my hope is that they are able to experience limitless joy and gracefully navigate all of life’s transitions. Emotional labor can be consuming, which is why homeschooling with a tribe is so attractive and beneficial for me. I am able to take necessary time to replenish my ever-pouring cup through self-care, tapping into my passions, and building with families who are also striving to care for themselves, learn with their children, and actualize their dreams. 

 

In between births and learning you can find me and my family studying plants, gardening, dancing hard (not to be mistaken for well), singing, praying to the water, redesigning our DNA, loving on each other and building with our kinfolk.