Dear friend,

I’m Irida. I am a woman, mother, friend, wife, artist lover of many things and a Rite of Passage Doula – I accompany women through the big life thresholds — first bleed – Menarche, birth and motherhood, the shifting landscape of menopause — moments that often stir the ground beneath our feet.

This work is personal. I was born and raised in Albania, and left home at 19. Since then, I’ve uprooted my life more than once — moving to England in 1998, where I studied, worked, became a mother, and began shaping a life in a city far from where I started. And then, five years ago, at 41, I moved again — this time to the Netherlands. These moves weren’t just physical. They were inner passages too. Grief, rebirth, disorientation, possibility — I’ve lived them. I’ve been initiated into what it means to start again, and again.

In my late twenties, burnout and depression arrived as a kind of rupture. That painful phase cracked something open. I turned to Hatha yoga and began a long journey into listening to my body — not pushing, not overriding, but gently asking what it needed. That question has become a thread I’ve followed ever since, through work, study, motherhood, and menopause.

In my early 40s, I began experiencing early perimenopause. Again, I found myself in unknown terrain. The usual systems offered little support, but when I discovered Wild Power by Alexandra Pope and Sjanie Hugo Wurlitzer, something clicked. Their work opened up a deeper understanding of the menstrual cycle — not just as a biological fact, but as a map, a teacher, a rhythm rooted in nature itself. I trained with Red School as a Menstruality Mentor, and also as a facilitator of Active Birth workshops and Birth Art sessions.

Now, I offer one-to-one mentoring, workshops, and programmes for women preparing for birth, new mothers, and those navigating the deeper thresholds of life. I also hold ceremony spaces to honour Menarche, Motherhood, and Menopause — for women and for mothers with young daughters.

These passages aren’t problems to be solved. They’re invitations — to slow down, to listen more closely, to let ourselves be changed.

I bring this work from both training and lived experiences. I know what it is to feel unmoored, and what it takes to find your footing again.

If you’re standing at the edge of something — tender, unsure, becoming — you don’t have to walk it alone.