Meet Kayla Stroughter

Licensed Massage Therapist (LA4848) · Certified Lymphedema Therapist · Postpartum Doula

I believe healing isn't about fixing what's broken. It's about returning to relationship: with your body, your emotions, your lineage, the land beneath your feet, and the children in your life and the world they'll inherit.

MEET THE woman behind Cycles of becoming

My Story

I became a mother three times, in three very different seasons of life: as a teenager, at 30, and again at 39, as what medicine calls a "geriatric" mother. My children are now 25, 12, and 2. I've given birth in a hospital with an epidural, with a midwife and no medication, and on my own terms. I know these thresholds from the inside.

For 20 years, my hands have worked with women's bodies as a therapeutic bodyworker. For 12 of those years, I sat beside women in labor and in the raw weeks after birth as a doula. And again and again, I watched the same thing happen: brilliant, capable women reached birth, and later midlife, already depleted. Then they blamed themselves for it.

It was never a personal failing. It was a cultural one. For most of human history, there were people for this: someone to cook for a new mother, bind her belly, keep the house, and know what the change of life would ask of her body. Much of that care has been lost.

Cycles of Becoming is my answer. It's care for every season of a woman's life, so she can learn the language of her changing body, trust herself again, and build the life she wants.

Licensed Massage Therapist, LA4848

20 years as a therapeutic bodyworker

12 years as a birth & postpartum doula

How I Work

I'm not a purist in any one technique. Over 20 years, I've studied fascial science, structural integration, myofascial release, lymphatic therapy, movement, and somatic practice through countless hours of training and continuing education. From all of it, I've formed my own integrative way of working, shaped by what I've seen bodies actually need.

I see the body as a living ecosystem, not a machine to be managed. Its symptoms are messages worth hearing. My work is rooted in an animist and Daoist understanding of life: everything is alive, and everything is in relationship. I found Daoism before I ever went to massage school, and it has shaped my path ever since. More recently, I've spent three years studying Chinese Medicine theory through Qigong and food therapy.

Every session is a collaboration. You are the highest authority on your body. My job is to help you hear it, and trust it, again.

What I Believe

Nothing is wrong with you. Something is missing around you. Our culture runs on the care work of women, then looks right past the women doing it. I don't fix women. I hold the space and tend the soil. What grows belongs to you.

On medicine. Modern medicine saves lives, and I'm grateful for it. When a bone breaks or an infection takes hold, go. But most of a woman's life is not an emergency. I believe in knowing your body well enough to decide for yourself when you need that system, and in caring well for yourself and your family the rest of the time.

Training & Credentials

  • Licensed Massage Therapist, Louisiana (LA4848)

  • Certified Lymphedema Therapist (CLT)

  • Certified in Manual Lymph Drainage, Vodder Technique

  • Certified in Complete Decongestive Therapy

  • 20 years of therapeutic bodywork, with extensive training in fascial science, structural integration, and myofascial release

  • 12 years as a birth and postpartum doula

  • Years of study in women's health, herbalism, and traditional ways of caring for women's bodies, with teachers from many traditions

  • Three years of study in Chinese Medicine theory through Qigong & Chinese food therapy

What Clients Say

Let’s create more spaciousness & internal okayness for your body-mind!

Room to breathe, move, and rest. Ease in the places that have been holding on for years. And the steady, settled sense that you're okay in your own body, even as it changes. Every way of working with me begins there.

Ways to work with me

Prenatal & Postpartum Care Massage for pregnancy and recovery after birth, plus in-home postpartum doula care in New Orleans.

→ Explore prenatal & postpartum care

Therapeutic & Myofascial Massage Structural, fascia-focused work for chronic pain, plus a 7-week bodywork and movement package.

→ Explore therapeutic massage

Post-Surgical & Lymphatic Massage Certified lymphatic drainage and scar work for recovery after surgery.

→ Explore post-surgical & lymphatic massage

Sessions are available in your New Orleans home or in-studio in Greenwell Springs on Wednesdays.

Not sure where to start? Book a free 30-minute call, and we'll find the right care for you.

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Kayla Stroughter, Licensed Massage Therapist · LA4848 · Certified Lymphedema Therapist · Postpartum Doula
Concierge in-home massage · New Orleans
Studio sessions · Greenwell Springs · Wednesdays
504-615-8442

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