Seeking a way back to the earth through the old ways.
The Gaia School of Healing & Earth Education was founded by Sage L. Maurer in 2001 with a vision of guiding people into deep connection with the plants, honoring ancestral wisdom, and supporting holistic healing for mind, body, and spirit. For over two decades, we have offered sacred plant medicine courses, herbal apprenticeships, and workshops in traditional herbalism across New England. Alumni such as Alessandra De Oliveira and Constanza Leal-Woods have joined our faculty, and our apprenticeships are now also offered in Canada and Colombia, and will soon be offered in Sweden as well. Explore our alumni page to see how former students are bringing plant medicine into their communities around the world.
Blessings & Welcome
Welcome to a community that has been growing for over twenty-five years of sacred plant medicine circles!
The Gaia School of Healing was born from a deep devotion to Gaia, a commitment to healing our communities, and love for the sacred nature of plants. We bridge the realms of science, spirituality, and ancestral herbal traditions, guiding students to work with plants as conscious beings through hands-on experience. Our Sacred Plant Medicine Apprenticeships focus on learning from plants for personal and community healing. While we teach aspects of Western scientific herbalism, the foundation of our practice is rooted in sacred, ancestral ways—honoring plant spirits as our teachers and partners.
We recognise that many of us are relearning traditions of herbal medicine that have been kept alive by our families, ancestors, and communities around the world. The medicine plants we learn from in class are sacred to many cultures and peoples, including long histories of medicine traditions from every continent. Our hope is for herbal medicine to be remembered and rediscovered by more communities in need of health care. Our courses are not simply a training in herbalism! Students attend our courses for community, personal healing, and intimate connection with nature. Through our courses, many students go on to combine herbal medicine with many other healing modalities. They incorporate plant medicine into their careers in a myriad of ways - through growing plants, selling medicines, teaching, opening healing practices, working with friends and family, and using plant medicine to benefit social, environmental, and collective change.
As we return home to our intimate connection and love for the earth, and the roots that nourish us… an incredible healing journey begins.
A Letter from Sage
In Love with Plants
The story of The Gaia School began in my childhood. The roots of my passion for plants grew from a family of gardeners, nature lovers, environmentalists, and a long lineage of farmers. Growing up in the city in the 80’s, my family spent a lot of time seeking wilderness adventures, forest walks, and time playing in the garden. My nana, a master gardener, used to walk us through the woods sharing the latin names of the ferns, delighting in lady’s slippers and other native plants. Her father Leo was a grower of roses. My mother was a fierce advocate for the protection of New England native plants, and my father a devoted lover of trees. They gave me small plots of earth in the city to plant, which became sanctuaries for joy, plant connection, and ceremony. My strongest memories of childhood were spending time in intimate connection with nature.
I began partnering with plants spirits at 14 years old, inspired by ancestral pagan traditions of the Celts. Rituals in nature, meditating with spirits of the garden, and the earth-honoring Celtic holy days became the basis of my spirituality and witchcraft. I journeyed from the Celtic wheel of the year through earth rituals and plant magick, learning the rhythms and cycles of nature. I focused on learning directly from the spirits of plants as wise conscious beings through meditation, dreamwork, and ceremony. For the next handful of years, I dedicated myself to partnering with the spirits of the earth as my sole teachers, and on Imbolc night when I was 15 years old, I devoted myself to living in service to Gaia. I did not understand then where this vow would carry me! That year, I received the spiritual name Sage from a beloved old salvia officialis plant I tended — still thriving in my father’s garden today.
Through years of sacred partnership, the plant spirits became my greatest support and source of healing. They nurtured me through the struggles of life, tended my heart through loss, and the pain of growing up queer. They were my wise elders, safe space, and greatest confidants. After going to college for pottery in the late 90’s, the plants finally made their way into my tea bowls. From there, I spent the next 10 years studying the sacred and medicinal uses of plants, through herbals schools, universities, wise herbalists — and always — from the plants themselves.
The Gaia School was born from my desire to bring people into greater intimacy with the spirits of the earth. To support others in receiving the medicine they need, listening to the inner realms of the body and soul. My devotion has been to the plant healers and teachers in all forms who have supported and guided me since childhood, following their wisdom and instructions along the way the best I can. My prayer is to honor the gifts they have given me my whole life, and help to keep alive the medicine traditions all our ancestors have carried through time.
My love goes out to the students who have become my family over many years, you are my inspiration and my hope. Thank you for shining your incredible love and tenderness into the world. May we serve the earth well, and help others remember the medicine they carry.
The medicine plants are waiting for you with nourishment and love, offering the drink of true enlightenment. They will lend you courage and show you the gate, but you have to choose to pass through it. Blessed be your journeys beloveds.
In peace and love,
Sage
Beloved Gaia
At The Gaia School we honor the earth as our teacher. Gaia, our earth mother, nourishes and guides us through the healing plants. Through developing a deeper connection to the earth, we heal ourselves - mind, body, and soul. Gaia is our guide, her spirit supporting us through the trees, plants, animals, and ecosystems we depend on. All her many voices guide us back to wholeness. We learn from the plants as our most wise elders and grandparents to find our way back to union with ourselves and with all of life.
Gaia teaches us the rhythm of change, transformation, and the cycles of life. She helps us remember the spiral dance of life, death, and rebirth that we see in all living things. She teaches us when to be active and when to rest, how to heal through illness, and to nurture ourselves back to health. Gaia reminds us of our history as a people, the ancient practices that helped us to flourish on this earth for hundreds of thousands of years - before we began to destroy ecosystems. When we lose our connection to the earth mother and take in over abundance, we see serious illnesses of mind, body, and spirit result. Through a lost connection to the earth, our nurturer, life giver, and healer, our souls have become sick. It is only through healing our mother who gives us life, that we can heal and create wholeness for ourselves.
At The Gaia School, we are seeking to find our home again; our root. A way of living in deep harmony and connection to the earth. We seek a way of healing ourselves and the damage we have caused to the living beings we share this earth with. We are seeking to find the old ways of living peacefully, which support a diversity of life on this earth, necessary for our own survival. We understand that it is only through all beings on earth continuing to live and thrive in health that we will ourselves can thrive.
“Gaia existed before everything; she existed before time. Gaia, the eternal, prehistoric earth mother goddess, is fertility incarnate, moist, mysterious, strong. She is life energy itself; everything that lives, breathing or not, overflows with her life. She is the earth and all the powers of the earth.
All bodies eventually return to her, into the black, fertile earth, to be devoured and to receive her life to live again. As goddess of the soul, Gaia reminds us that the soul develops in dark places and that ultimately soul must be rooted in body, in earth. She is a reminder that we must ground ourselves in the reality of nature...”
- Michael Babcock
Sustainability & Stewardship
At The Gaia School of Healing, we teach sustainable living as a path to holistic well-being and ecological harmony. We practice mindfulness when we harvest our medicinal plants, re-plant endangered and over-harvested medicinal plants that have been taken for profit, and teach respect towards all living beings. We ask permission and listen to the guidelines our elders and ancestors have given us.
We awaken to the impact we have on Gaia and other living beings. We join with others who wish to live simply and sustainably, teaching each other about affordable, local plant medicines and food available to all, supporting sustainable agriculture and business practices. We seek to re-learn and re-educate ourselves in the old ways of living, producing and re-using our own recourses. In the spirit of union rather than competition, we learn together in service to the earth and all her beings.
