Vermont Main Branch
The Gaia School of Healing has been rooted in New England for 20 years!
Our school’s home is settled on 10 beautiful acres of land and gardens in Southern Vermont, ancestral homelands and territory of the Abenaki peoples. Classes run in our herb and food gardens year round, with students traveling from all across New England to attend classes. We are joined by large communities of nettles, motherwort, violets, burdock, mugwort, and many other plants that cover the land.
Check out what we are currently offering, and come join us in the gardens!
Our Sacred Plant Medicine Apprenticeships focus on working with plants as medicine for the body and spirit, weaving scientific research with ancient traditions of folk plant medicine. In our courses we partner with plants as conscious beings, learning through direct hands on experience with them. We recognize that many of us are relearning traditions of herbal medicine that have been kept alive by our families, ancestors, and communities around the world.
We focus mainly on local Northeastern American plants, and some that have long traditions of use medicinally and spiritually in other parts of the world. Plant harvesting will mostly center around local natives and naturalized plants of New England, though plants of Europe, Africa, Central and South America, Polynesia, and Asia are also brought in 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.
Certification for each course in sacred plant medicine and holistic healing will be given upon completion of each apprenticeship. Students combine herbal medicine with many other healing modalities and often go on to incorporate plant medicine into their careers in many different ways - growing plants, medicine making, teaching, opening a healing practice, working with friends and family, and using plant medicine to benefit social, environmental, and collective change.
“One of our greatest fears is to eat the wildness of the world. Our mothers intuitively understood something essential: the green is poisonous to civilization. If we eat the wild, it begins to work inside us, altering us, changing us. Soon, if we eat too much, we will no longer fit the suit that has been made for us. Our hair will begin to grow long and ragged. Our gait and how we hold our body will change. A wild light begins to gleam in our eyes. Our words start to sound strange, nonlinear, emotional. Unpractical. Poetic. Once we have tasted this wildness, we begin to hunger for a food long denied us, and the more we eat of it the more we will awaken. It is no wonder that we are taught to close off our senses to Nature. Through these channels, the green paws of Nature enter into us, climb over us, search within us, find all our hiding places, burst us open, and blind the intellectual eye with hanging tendrils of green. The terror is an illusion, of course. For most of our million years on this planet human beings have daily eaten the wild. It’s just that the linear mind knows what will happen if you eat it now.”
