Community Herbalism
Our Field & Garden Plant Medicine Apprenticeship focuses on working and learning exclusively hands on with medicinal plants in the outdoors. We will spend each class day growing, harvesting, and wildcrafting medicinal plants from our gardens, local forests, and field sites. Students will learn about the medicine of each plant through guided plant walks, harvesting, medicine making, and meditation. Teaching will all be done only through hands on practice, rather than through any lecture.
The Field & Garden class has been added to give students a chance to focus exclusively on learning experientially working with live plants both in the wild and in cultivation. This course does not include a syllabus as our other courses, since we will be growing, harvesting, and making medicine according to the seasons and the plants. Each class students will harvest what is in bloom and in season, as well as tend to medicinals we'll be growing in class. Unique to all our courses, each student will be able to harvest plants from our gardens each class for their own personal and communal use.
In each of our courses we partner with plants as conscious beings, relearning and rebirthing traditions of herbal medicine that have been kept alive by families and rural communities around the world. We focus on local Northeastern American plants as well as non-local plants that have long traditions of use medicinally and spiritually in other parts of the world. In all of our courses we learn about the medicine of each plant through direct relationship and experience, listening to the voices of the plants themselves as they speak through us. Plant harvesting each class will center mostly around local natives and naturalized plants of New England. Plants of Europe, Central and South America, Polynesia, Ayurveda, and Chinese herbal medicine are also worked with and grown throughout the course. Students are able to harvest an abundance of medicinal plants, herb seeds, and wild foods from the Gaia School gardens for their own personal use and learning at home.
Our Field & Garden Plant Medicine Apprenticeship was created to give students the chance to spend entire classes outdoors, learning about medicinal plants in the wild and in our gardens. This course will give students needed experience growing medicinal plants, identifying plants in the wild, harvesting, and medicine making. Classes include meditation with plants, daily plant walks, harvesting & medicine making, tasting plant infusions and extracts, earth and body exploration, and journeys with the spirits of the earth. Students learn to identify and use plants for medicine, form plant allies, and prepare medicinal teas, tinctures, essences, infusions, oils, and vinegars with plants from around the world. We will dive into the many ways to use fresh plant material for medicine, food, juice, and gardening!
This apprenticeship is both a course in folk Western herbalism and in plant spirit medicine, with the primary focus placed on our own personal relationships with the plants. This course is intended to be a healing journey of sacred time outdoors with the plants, building a deeper connection to the spirits of the earth and medicine plants. Doorways that are opened and the wisdom gained during class will seep into each apprentice's home and everyday life. The plants that each student forms relationships with changes their lives on deep levels, helping to guide and support them through life - body, mind, and spirit.
This apprenticeship is open to anyone interested, regardless of their gender, belief system, past experience, or knowledge of plants. We believe strongly in creating a safe space that honors and welcomes diversity, difference, and many voices. We have had both advanced students and beginners as apprentices, and both men and women. Though the course does often stress the energy of the Mother present in the earth, both yin and yang energies present in all things is honored. Women-identified students tend to be the majority in our apprenticeships but green men are welcome and greatly appreciated in our circle. We are a safe space for queer and gender non-conforming people.
