Overview: Dr. Priya Kalyan-Masih, a full-spectrum bilingual doula, certified lactation and education specialist, will host a ribbon-cutting ceremony on January 12 to celebrate the three-year anniversary of her doula service, Love Your Best Life LLC. Dr. Kalyan-Masih provides culturally competent care to help families with their prenatal, birthing, postpartum, and pregnancy loss journeys. She has served over 100 families in the High Desert and Inland Empire communities and is a Medi-Cal provider. Dr. Kalyan-Masih is also a teacher and trainer of doulas and hosts a High Desert birth worker and family expo called “Stronger Together” on March 28.
Alyssah Hall
On Jan. 12, Dr. Priya Kalyan-Masih hosted a ribbon cutting ceremony in honor of the three-year anniversary of her doula service, Love Your Best Life LLC.
Dr. Kalyan-Masih became a doula in 2023, and started Love Your Best Life LLC to offer culturally competent care to help families with their prenatal, birthing, postpartum, and pregnancy loss journeys. Now, Dr. Kalyan-Masih is a full-spectrum bilingual (English/ Spanish) doula, certified lactation and education specialist.
As a Medi-Cal provider, she has served over 100 families and serves the High Desert and Inland Empire communities virtually and in person. Dr. Kalyan-Masih attended medical school in Mexico, where she focused on women’s health and preventive medicine. When she returned to the United States, she began working in an OB-GYN clinic in the High Desert. At the clinic she focused on health education due to a lot of her patients being diabetic. She taught them how to have healthy pregnancies and avoid gestational diabetes and preeclampsia. Dr. Kalyan-Masih had a desire to do more bedside, hands on work with families and it was recommended that she become a doula.
“I have been doing doula work, unofficially, since I was 16, which I never realized…As a candy striper when I was in high school, I was a medical Spanish interpreter in a prenatal clinic. [I’d] interpret for Spanish speaking patients and the providers and be their advocate in that space,” Kalyan-Masih said.
Dr. Kalyan-Masih’s career shift and business name was inspired by her late father who passed away in 2020. He was an obstetrician-anesthesiologist. Love Your Best Life LLC came from her dad always watching her study and saying, “Priya, just live your life, you’re so studious.”
The logo of the company is a hummingbird merged with a butterfly because when Dr. Kalyan-Masih’s father passed, she began to see hummingbirds and the butterfly was added because of their representation of change. When Dr. Kalyan-Masih first joined the Greater High Desert Chamber of Commerce she didn’t take advantage of the ribbon cutting benefit. Instead, she decided to celebrate three years as a big mark. She decided to honor her father by holding the ribbon cutting on Jan. 12 because it would have been her father’s 75th birthday.
Across Southern California, dozens of maternal wards have shuttered, which has resulted in less access to maternal health care. Doulas like Dr. Kalyan-Masih helps fill those gaps in care and access by supporting birthing patients as early as the first trimester in pregnancy, providing education, and resources.
“I live in the High Desert, so we are already at a big disparity in terms of distance from many resources. By having a doula, you’re able to get connected with the resources that are currently active,” Dr. Kalyan-Masih said.
Dr. Kalyan-Masih shared that the High Desert has a large Medi-Cal population and when the U.S. government experienced its historically long shut down in the fall of 2025, many of her patients lost their SNAP benefits. During this time Dr. Kalyan-Masih searched for the food banks and pantries in their community to share with her patients because they needed the right amount and types of nutritious food during their pregnancy in order to maintain a healthy pregnancy and carry their babies to term.
“I really felt like, in that moment, having a doula was really essential during that time,” Dr. Kalyan-Masih continued.
Being able to support her repeat patients during their second pregnancies has been rewarding for Dr. Kalyan-Masih. She enjoys seeing how much her patients have grown as people, as well as seeing the children she helped deliver, grow. Many of her patients are repeat clients, and their desire to come back to Dr. Kalyan-Masih makes her feel valued in her role and has reaffirmed her calling to this field of work.
She began training doulas last year, two English cohorts with Victor Valley College in April and July, one Spanish cohort with Victor Valley College in September and one English cohort with Naebor Medical Group in October. Dr. Kalyan-Masih helped train a total of 69 doulas last year and has a goal of assisting them in becoming Medi-Cal doulas. She ultimately wants to help onboard them under Love Your Best Life LLC so she can begin expanding her business across the IE and get more families served.
“I’m always about getting more resources in the hands of my patients. What are the things that are available? Especially with things closing and with budgets changing, I think that’s going to be really essential to know what are the things that we can still connect them to,” Dr. Kalyan-Masih stated.
Dr. Kalyan-Masih is hosting an event called “Stronger Together,” a High Desert birth worker and family expo on Mar. 28. The expo will focus on pooling all the birthing resources in one area so that families can become aware of them. Dr. Kalyan-Masih shared that there are many resources available for families in the High Desert that many aren’t aware of. She wants to connect families with resources local to them, so they no longer have to go down the hill for all of their needs.