My skin wouldn't hold water. It was dry, irritated and scaling. I wasn't well. I suffered nightmares and knee aches, back pains and painful menses, low iron, low energy, low libido, will power and self esteem. It's hard being a mermaid that lives in the aird Rocky Mountains. My ancestral genetics resemble the humid, coastal bioregions that shaped them. My work making a home in the mountians was a work towards bioregional adaptation and it has wielded a treasure trove of teachings.
After spending thousands of dollars on traditional therapies that didn't work, I invested in years of apprenticeships, mentorships and friendships to ground into belonging to earth and community. Through intentional design, experimentation and deep listening to source, I finally innerstood the communication patterns of my body in relationship to place. I not only accelerated my own healing but discerned simple, safe and powerful ways to help others design wellness.
The Winter has lessons to teach and medicine to share and 2023's Winter Herbal Immersion is your opportunity to remember how to listen. Join us.
Asia Dorsey is a biorgeional, rootworking herbalist from Denver. She has apprenticed with elders in, India, Ghana, New Zealand, New York and more to discern a practice of a People’s Medicine grounded in the movement for reparations , healing justice, and her ancestral earth-based practices. Asia teaches ecological design and uses her talent of pattern recognition to decipher and reintegrate the sacred instructions of plants and ecosystems into people systems. Find her on the Petty Herbalist Podcast helping her people to rise together in power. Follow her @bonesbugsandbotany.
Black American, self-taught herbalist, rooted in the Wise Woman tradition. Founder of the Petty Herbalist and co-creator of The Petty Herbalist Podcast. Her herbalist practices are based in plants native to Los Angeles, CA, the Caribbean, and Mesoamerica. She comes from a powerful legacy of healing; both great grandmothers (in Guatemala and Dominican Republic) were medicine women. She is an aspiring OB/GYN physician, with a Business Administration degree. She blends her herbalism with her barista skills as she is competing to qualify in the 2023 US Coffee Championships.
Sheree Brown (she/her) is an experienced writer, Afrofuturist, worldbuilder, creative, educator, and mother. As a daughter of celestial and earthly Diaspora, she practices the medicine of plants, healing timelines, and curating creative space. In 2016 she co-founded the Ancestral Herbalism Collective here in Denver, and organized community around the concepts of futurism, healing, skill-sharing, and reclamation of community medicine. As a creative consultant, she is deeply invested in cultivating opportunities to live, breathe, and exist uninterrupted.
An integrative holistic healthcare practitioner who works predominantly in the fields of Curanderismo and Chinese Medicine. She is a ceremonialist, ancestral medicine practitioner, acupuncturist, herbalist, pasista, spiritualist, indigenous birth worker and more. She learned hands-on-healing as a child, raised in the intergenerational home of her maternal “mestizo” lineage. In her private healing practice and as an educator/ facilitator, Eutimia specializes in harmonizing the 4 pillars of wellness, anchoring the mental, emotional and spiritual into the physical.
Lynn Flanagan-Till (she/her), is a folk-futurist herbalist and a veštica in Serbian-Roma lineage who also works within Folk-Catholic and Ifa/Lucumi traditions. Her spiritual work is based in love, abolition and disability justice and she is known for her tea leaf readings. Lynn started studying botanical medicine in the late nineties and has been teaching both locally and nationally for over 20 years. She is a world class fragrance blender and perfumer who now specializes in botanicals for reproductive and community health. Lynn is a neurodiverse, disabled, queer, mother of four.
A spiritualist and Olorisha (Oni Sango) initiated to the orisha Sango in 2007 through a blended spiritual inheritance of Afro-Cuban Lucumi and West African Ifa lineages. Drawing from his training in Afro-Carribean Espiritismo that began in 2000 as well as some elements of southern style African American Hoodoo to compliment the cowrie shell divination sessions he provides. His core philosophy centers around assisting people to strengthen their own individual relationships to spirit and supporting everyone to live their best lives.
Asia Dorsey is a biorgeional, rootworking herbalist from Denver. She has apprenticed with elders in, India, Ghana, New Zealand, New York and more to discern a practice of a People’s Medicine grounded in the movement for reparations , healing justice, and her ancestral earth-based practices. Asia teaches ecological design and uses her talent of pattern recognition to decipher and reintegrate the sacred instructions of plants and ecosystems into people systems. Find her on the Petty Herbalist Podcast helping her people to rise together in power. Follow her @bonesbugsandbotany.
Black American, self-taught herbalist, rooted in the Wise Woman tradition. Founder of the Petty Herbalist and co-creator of The Petty Herbalist Podcast. Her herbalist practices are based in plants native to Los Angeles, CA, the Caribbean, and Mesoamerica. She comes from a powerful legacy of healing; both great grandmothers (in Guatemala and Dominican Republic) were medicine women. She is an aspiring OB/GYN physician, with a Business Administration degree. She blends her herbalism with her barista skills as she is competing to qualify in the 2023 US Coffee Championships.
Sheree Brown (she/her) is an experienced writer, Afrofuturist, worldbuilder, creative, educator, and mother. As a daughter of celestial and earthly Diaspora, she practices the medicine of plants, healing timelines, and curating creative space. In 2016 she co-founded the Ancestral Herbalism Collective here in Denver, and organized community around the concepts of futurism, healing, skill-sharing, and reclamation of community medicine. As a creative consultant, she is deeply invested in cultivating opportunities to live, breathe, and exist uninterrupted.
An integrative holistic healthcare practitioner who works predominantly in the fields of Curanderismo and Chinese Medicine. She is a ceremonialist, ancestral medicine practitioner, acupuncturist, herbalist, pasista, spiritualist, indigenous birth worker and more. She learned hands-on-healing as a child, raised in the intergenerational home of her maternal “mestizo” lineage. In her private healing practice and as an educator/ facilitator, Eutimia specializes in harmonizing the 4 pillars of wellness, anchoring the mental, emotional and spiritual into the physical.
Lynn Flanagan-Till (she/her), is a folk-futurist herbalist and a veštica in Serbian-Roma lineage who also works within Folk-Catholic and Ifa/Lucumi traditions. Her spiritual work is based in love, abolition and disability justice and she is known for her tea leaf readings. Lynn started studying botanical medicine in the late nineties and has been teaching both locally and nationally for over 20 years. She is a world class fragrance blender and perfumer who now specializes in botanicals for reproductive and community health. Lynn is a neurodiverse, disabled, queer, mother of four.
A spiritualist and Olorisha (Oni Sango) initiated to the orisha Sango in 2007 through a blended spiritual inheritance of Afro-Cuban Lucumi and West African Ifa lineages. Drawing from his training in Afro-Carribean Espiritismo that began in 2000 as well as some elements of southern style African American Hoodoo to compliment the cowrie shell divination sessions he provides. His core philosophy centers around assisting people to strengthen their own individual relationships to spirit and supporting everyone to live their best lives.
The People’s Medicine Bag Seasonal Herbal Immersions were designed to connect everyday people to their own powers of transformational healing through building lifelong relationship with safe, simple and powerful plants. These immersions help us to learn and heal as a communal whole.
Satya Yoga & Nidra Meditation
People’s Medicine Frameworks
Unravel the Mystery of Remineralization
Learn the Infusion Method
The Kidneys & The Ancestral Worldview w/ Eutimia Cruz Montoya
Nourishing & Tonifying Herbs
+ more
Satya Yoga & Nidra Meditation
People’s Medicine Frameworks
Subtle-Tea Making
The Herbalism of Coffee w/ Karina DesRoses
Aromatic Herbs
The Genius of Tea Blending w/ Lynn Till
Making a Materia Medica w/Sheree Brown
+ more
Satya Yoga & Nidra Meditation
People’s Medicine Frameworks
Spiritual Bathing w/ Maurice Ka
Washes & Soaks
The Secrets of Salt
Herbal Discuitients
+ more
A materia médica is the the body of remedies used in the practice of herbal medicine. Unlike the unchecked growth model of extractive cultures, we believe that less is more. The People’s Materia Medica fosters what our auntie Robin Wall Kimmerer might call a culture of reciprocity. It is deep rather than broad, embodied rather than theoretical and accessible rather than exotic.
Gain the discernment to experiment, research and build your own community of plants, their properties, their stories an the way they like to share support.
Traditional models of healing center “experts” whose identities often correspond with structures of dominance. We democratize herbal medicine with simple and easy to remember frameworks which make the practice of herbalism simple, safe, and effective.
You will learn the principles of People’s Medicine throughout the course.
Herbal medicine making needn’t be complex for it to create profound and powerful transformations. With a few pieces of wisdom your remedies will not only be easier to produce but far more effective than “precision medicine.”
You will learn to make powerful herbal remedies and learn how to avoid raggedy ones.
We are deeply inspired by Aboriginal Indigenous scholar Tyson Yunkaporta and his work Sand Talk which deeply challenges colonial epistemologies or ways of knowing and asks us to “unbraid our minds” to find soloutions to common problems. Yunkaporta describes pattern-mind “…as seeing entire systems and the trends and patterns within them and using them to make accurate predictions…” This course helps us to cultivate pattern-mind in relationship to our bodies and their healing by leaning on the patterns discerned by our ancestors.
Identifying and recognizing these ancestral patterns gives us a framework to craft elegant solutions to our common health problems and we will do just this throughout the course.
Our ancestors created wholeness by following the rhythms of the natural world rather than impeeding those rhythms. Each season brings new opportunities to heal or harm our bodies and learning to adapt to the season connects us to the wisdom of our blood ancestors and the ancestors of the land.
In this immersion we not only center the season of our study but we learn how to utilize the gift that the seasons have to offer.
Knowing the name of body parts isn’t synonymous with being a healer. The colonial imagination envisions the human body as a group of isolated mechanical parts and believes that breaking it down to its tiny bits can teach us how to remedy the whole. This has caused a proliferation of “specialist” who loose the forest for the trees. We prefer what indigenous scholar Tyson Yunkaporta calls a kinship-mind approach which is a way of thinking and learning that depends on linking knowledge though relationship.
Learn the body at the level of systems, the relationship of these systems, and the patterns that govern these relationships.
Our Ancestors practiced healing as a collective. They grieved as a collective. They lived collectively. When we learn as a collective, the knowledge we grow and cultivate is greater than the sum of our individual parts. No one person has to know everything, or carry everything, we dissolve our individual perfectionism and lean on one another as a pillar of greatness. Healing together is as powerful as learning together.
We will accelerate each others learning and wellness though collective participation in this course.
Our bodies are our project.
What are you going to create of yourself out of this course?
We selected the lowest possible price that would allow your team of black women herbalist and organizers curate a cadre of our favorite Queer and BIPOC healing practitioners to bring you a live and immersive herbal learning and healing experience. You are welcome. If you would like to proliferate these teachings, please consider becoming an immersion sponsor. Each sponsorship directly lowers the cost of participation for our beloved students and supports the visible and invisible labor of our beloved teachers and organizers.
