Nessa Hayes is a Birth Keeper, Educator, Clinical Herbalist, and Mother based in Peterborough. A storyteller at heart, she began with a camera and a filmmaker’s lens, and today moves fluidly between audio, video, and live conversation—always in service of women’s voices. Her work honours the oral tradition we’ve been separated from: women speaking to women, stories passed like medicine from one hand to the next.
Through her podcast Mother’s Instinct and her business Radical Mother Wellness, Nessa shares her own stories of motherhood while listening deeply to the women she serves - in consultations, in community spaces, and in moments that often go unrecorded but not unfelt. Her project The 12 Days of Birth Stories brought to life 14 birth journeys - raw, tender, complex - each one a window into the lived experience of birth across settings and emotions.
At the heart of all her work is the belief that women’s stories - past and present, spoken or embodied - carry wisdom worth honouring.
As a Clinical Herbalist, she listens carefully to the story a woman’s body is telling in order to offer grounded care. As a Birth Keeper, she walks alongside women as they dream, shape, and reflect on their birth stories. And through every medium she touches - whether photo, film, or sound - Nessa holds space for those stories to live, to be witnessed, and to connect us in ways only truth can.
For the Reclaiming Birth Conference in Montreal, Nessa offers an audio project that continues this legacy: listening as an act of remembrance, storytelling as an act of reclamation.
IG @radicalmotherwellness
