About me

Cortney is a professional adventure guide to pregnancy, labor, birth, and early parenting. From pregnancy through the postpartum transition, she helps new parents find their footing, gain confidence, and feel more peaceful so they can be fully present for the joy of their child’s first years. Cortney offers mentoring and coaching for individuals, couples, and groups, and offers Birthing From Within® Childbirth Preparation classes. She is a mother, daughter, granddaughter, sister, aunt, and friend. She’s also a reproductive health and wellness therapist and National Certified Counselor, Birthing From Within® Mentor, Birth Arts trained doula, and yoga teacher trained through EmbodiYoga. She’s been leading and facilitating dialogue and support groups, and leadership trainings for over two decades. She is passionate about every pregnant person and every family feeling supported and nourished during the journey and transformation through pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting. Cortney holds a B.A. in Environmental Studies from Brown University and a M.A. in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She completed clinical training at The Midwife Center for Birth & Women’s Health in Pittsburgh, PA, the nation’s largest freestanding birth center, and with Forward Wellness Counseling’s Reproductive Counseling Center. She still teaches and works at those practices. Her clinical style is person centered, strengths-based, trauma-informed, feminist and mindfulness based. She is LGBTQIA+ affirming and committed to understanding and challenging systemic oppression and bias that affects mental health, the counseling field, and maternal and child health. Born and raised in Central Vermont, after many years of traveling and exploring, she has been making her home on a small urban homestead in Pittsburgh since 2009 with her partner and three children. For the last year, she and her family have let the gardens go a little wild and been living and working out of an RV, hiking, biking and eating their way across the country. She loves sunshine, traveling, growing, harvesting and preparing food, designing spaces and adventures, moving her body, and creating celebrations and rituals that feed bodies and hearts. She spends most of her days caring for people, feeding people or cleaning up, writing, reading and listening, and working to build up communities that are supportive to all children and families.

Education

MA, Clinical Mental Health Counseling, Indiana University of Pennsylvania (2020)

BA, Environmental Studies, Brown University (1998)

Certification and training

Birth Arts Birth Doula Training (2010)

EmbodiYoga Teacher Training (2013)

Birthing From Within Certified Mentor (2018)

Credentials

Specialties

Languages

English

Service introduction

I offer a unique group coaching model supporting people from pregnancy through the first year of the postpartum transition. I also offer individual and group coaching, Birthing From Within Childbirth Preparation classes.

Ratings and reviews