Today we’d like to introduce you to Tiara Burtin.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I’ve always felt like my womb chose me for this work. The body has a way of demanding our attention, and sometimes what feels like a disruption is actually an invitation into something much deeper.
From my very first period, I experienced painful menstruation, and by 19, I was diagnosed with endometriosis. But at 19, I didn’t have a relationship with my womb. I knew my vagina was a part of my body. I knew I bled every month. I knew that this was the part of my body associated with sex, menstruation, and carrying babies. But beyond that, I hadn’t really considered my womb as a part of me that I could know, listen to, or have a relationship with.
After my surgery for endometriosis, the pain eventually returned. But while I was healing from the surgery, I started to feel like my womb was talking to me. It sounds strange to say, but I could feel something there. She felt sad, hurt, angry, and raw. I had spent years wanting to detach from my womb because of how much pain it caused me. But as I sat with my womb, I began to build a relationship with Her for the first time. What had once felt like my enemy became my best friend.
As I was learning to listen to my womb, my mom shared that she had also experienced painful periods like mine when she was younger, but her grandmother and her sisters had laid hands on her, and afterward, she no longer experienced the same pain. My mom told me that she felt like I was the one strong enough to heal it for the family. I knew health conditions could be passed down through family members, but I didn’t understand what had caused this womb condition to begin with.
When my endometriosis returned after surgery, I started asking different questions. I wanted to understand my womb beyond the surgical table. I became curious about how women cared for their wombs before modern surgery, what traditional and natural practices existed, what role food, herbs, movement, and spirituality played, and what our ancestors understood about the womb that I had never been taught. That search is what led me into the different practices and certifications I have today. I studied yoga, birthwork, herbalism, Reiki, and Thai massage, and eventually deeper womb work. I wasn’t collecting certifications just to build a résumé or even to help others, if I’m being honest. I was trying to heal myself, and each practice gave me another language for understanding my body.
As I continued following this path, I began sharing what I was learning with other women. My personal search was becoming a body of work I could share to help other women. I became a birth doula and supported more than ten births, witnessing women move through fertility, pregnancy, labor, birth, and loss. I also began working with women around their womb health through herbs and natural wellness practices. I supported women in exploring their relationships with their bodies while I was still deepening my own.
In 2019, I had an intuitive feeling that I needed to create a business name to offer services to help the women who were coming to me for support. Free Flow(er) came to me during a meditation about what to name my business, and it became a home for my womb work, birthwork, and herbalism. Then, in 2020, my life changed in a major way, and I stepped away from Free Flow(er).
I returned to school and graduated with my bachelor’s degree, while continuing to study and deepen my understanding of the body. I became certified in Sexual-Trauma-Informed yoga, continued developing my spiritual and ancestral practices, and explored the ways sexuality, spirituality, embodiment, and the womb intersect. Then I started writing a book, A Body Re-Membered, which became a way for me to document my womb journey and everything my womb had taught me along the way.
As I wrote, I had that same intuitive feeling I had experienced years earlier when Free Flow(er) first came to me. I began to feel that all of the work I had been doing with my womb was for more than just me. I couldn’t prove it. But I knew it as surely as I knew my own name. I could feel that there were women being touched by this work who I couldn’t yet see or name.
Then, while I was writing the book, my maternal grandmother passed away. As my family grieved her transition, we also discovered my grandmother had been adopted, and we learned that her birth mother’s name was Thelma Flowers. I was grieving my grandmother while simultaneously birthing this book, and somehow, alongside the grief, I felt an incredible sense of joy and confirmation. It felt like my ancestors were saying, Yes. This is what you are supposed to be doing.
I knew it was time to come back to the work, but I also knew I couldn’t return as the same person who had left. As I re-entered the work, I was called back into birthwork through studying as a Student Midwife, and back into womb work through becoming Sexual Trauma-Informed in my yoga practice. Eventually, that path led me to become a womb practitioner.
The training confirmed so much of what I had intuitively known through my own womb journey, while giving me new language, practices, and a deeper framework for the work. More importantly, it helped me return to myself. After years of rebuilding my relationship with my body, my sexuality, my spirituality, and my sense of self, I finally felt like I had come home to my body.
That is the spirit I’m bringing back to Free Flow(er).
In many ways, I feel like I’m finally standing inside the thing I was trying to find when I first began listening to my womb.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Some of the most important parts of my journey happened when I had no idea if I was still on the right road at all.
One of the hardest things has been learning that the work I was called to do would also require me to do a lot of work on myself. I started this journey because I wanted answers about my womb, but the deeper I went, the more I had to confront the ways I had disconnected from my body and from myself.
In 2020, I experienced sexual trauma and domestic violence, and it changed my relationship with my body and with the work I had been doing. I stepped away from Free Flow(er), and for a while, I didn’t know what coming back would look like (or if I would come back at all).
But stepping away gave me the space to understand that many of the women in my family were survivors, but they had not always had spaces where they could speak about what happened to them, process it, or be held in their vulnerability. Over time, I began to understand how that silence created internalized shame around the trauma, but also around our womanhood, our bodies, our sexuality, our needs, and our vulnerability. I began to see endometriosis through that lens, too. I started wondering whether the shame, silence, survival, and constant need to be strong had manifested in my body. I shifted from looking at my womb as something that was broken and needing healing to asking what kind of life I needed to live to feel safe, loved, and at peace because of what has been inherited.
So stepping away from Free Flow(er) wasn’t me giving up on the work. It actually became part of the work. My transformation around sexual trauma and domestic violence became about learning what it actually meant to feel safe in my body, safe in my sexuality, safe in my life, and safe in my relationships. This required me to clear house in my life. I had to look at what I was carrying, what I had normalized, what beliefs no longer belonged with me. I rebuilt my life from the root up because I realized this wasn’t only for my personal healing; it was generational, too.
Returning to Free Flow(er) became liberating. It felt like a return to (and a reclamation of) my work and my calling. Part of my return has been learning to use my voice where there had once been silence. I didn’t choose this work because it was trending or looked interesting. I lived my way into it, I questioned it, I walked away from it, and coming home to myself meant coming back to this work.
I think that is what makes the work real for me.
I am not offering people a path I haven’t walked. I’m creating from a life that has required me to listen, clear, rebuild, remember, and reclaim. And now, I get to take everything I have lived through and turn it into something that can help other people remember that they don’t have to carry everything they inherited.
Some things can be transformed and end with us.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
Free Flow(er) is a Black-centered healing justice organization rooted in the belief that our bodies hold memory, wisdom, and gifts. At its heart, Free Flow(er) is about helping people come home to their bodies and remember that they are not only what has happened to them or what has been passed down to them. We create spaces for people to explore the relationship between the body, creativity, ancestry, spirituality, sexuality, movement, and community.
The work began as a small offering centered around womb work, birthwork, and herbalism, but it has grown into something much bigger. Today, Free Flow(er) is evolving into a nonprofit organization that brings together womb-centered wellness, reproductive justice, restorative justice, ancestral practices, embodied care, and the healing arts.
We offer and develop programming such as womb circles, educational workshops, somatic and movement practices, artistic experiences, ancestral and earth-based practices, and one-on-one womb-centered services. I specialize in womb-centered work, but I don’t see the womb as isolated from the rest of the person. The womb exists within a whole body, a whole life, a family system, a cultural history, and a spiritual relationship with self. So our work naturally touches embodiment, sexuality, birth, menstruation, ancestry, creativity, relationships, and self-determination.
One thing that sets Free Flow(er) apart is that we don’t separate art from wellness. I am an artist as much as I am a wellness practitioner, and I believe creativity has always been the way Black people have processed, expressed, remembered, survived, and transformed. We also don’t approach transformation as something that happens because someone else “fixes” you. We create the conditions for people to hear themselves, reconnect with their own wisdom, and make choices from a more embodied place. The practitioner can hold the space, offer tools, witness, educate, and walk alongside you, but your body and your life still belong to you.
One of the things I’m most proud of is how much Free Flow(er) has evolved through listening. I’ve spent a lot of time sitting in circles with other women, listening to what they are carrying, what they are asking for, what they are searching for, and what they wish they had somewhere to bring their whole self to. Free Flow(er) isn’t based on what I think women should need. It is rooted in what I have heard women crying, praying, and searching for. Free Flow(er) is a place where women don’t have to perform being okay. The work is about helping women identify what may be standing between them and their fullest expression of who they are—and giving them tools, practices, knowledge, and community to move through those things.
I think that is also why the name Free Flow(er) means so much to me. A flower doesn’t have to force itself open. It needs the right conditions to bloom. Free Flow(er) is about supporting women in identifying and creating those conditions for themselves.
I’m proud that Free Flow(er) has grown into something authentic. It isn’t an offering I created from the outside and then tried to fit myself into. It has evolved with me, with my community, and through the women who have trusted me enough to share their stories. I’m proud that the work can hold the spiritual and the practical.
If we knew you growing up, how would we have described you?
I was a very expressive child. My family called me “TiTi Mama,” and I was definitely the kid who had something to say. I was outspoken, curious, bossy, and somehow always seemed to think I knew what was going on more than anyone in the room. Looking back, I think I had a strong sense of self very early.
I was also a very creative child. I loved singing, drawing, dancing, rapping, poetry, and performing. I loved being able to express myself through different forms of art, and I think creativity was always one of the ways I made sense of the world around me.
I also started doing yoga as a child, although I didn’t understand then how significant that relationship with my body would become. It was simply something that was part of my life. In a lot of ways, my journey eventually brought me back to something my younger self already knew.
I was curious and academically gifted, too. I was always in the principal’s office for talking too much, even though my work was done early and I made the honor roll every year. I remember being tested in school and being told that I had a high IQ. I spent most of my elementary school years doing work that was years ahead of my grade level. I think that combination of creativity, intelligence, and being naturally inquisitive made me the kind of child who was always asking questions and looking beneath the surface.
I was sensitive, too, although I didn’t always have the language for it. I noticed things. I felt things deeply. I would dream about things before they happened. I was fascinated by people, and I could often sense the experiences that had shaped them and understand something about why their hearts were the way they were.
When I look back now, I can see so many pieces of the person I am today in that little girl. The artist was there. The teacher was there. The performer was there. The question-asker was there. And the woman who could see people—and make people feel seen—was there, too.
I didn’t know any of that would eventually become my life’s work. I was just being TiTi Mama.
Pricing:
- All of my services begin with a womb consultation to determine was services or ceremony is required. Consultations are $125
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.freeflowerlove.org
- Instagram: @freeflowerlove and @tiaraburtin
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@theflowofabundance
