A WOMEN'S FOLK MEDICINE APPRENTICESHIP

&

GREEN WITCH INITIATON JOURNEY


  

 

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THE GREEN ROAD


A NON-DUAL PATHWAY TO RESPONSIBLE, CREATIVE, LIBERATED EMBODIMENT



We walk in such a way that acknowledges that we are and have always been journeying with plants alongside us as master teachers, friends, and guides to personal, community, and planetary healing. One of our main intentions for gathering is to explore the ways that our relationships with our green family can help us to remember who we are and how to live from that place of  presence,  interconnectedness, integrity, authenticity, and intimacy with the rest of the living world. 

We were not meant to do this alone! 

When we look to cultures past and present who live a village way of life, and wonder how they navigate the complex social dynamics of intimate communal living, we often forget the equally complex cosmologies and reliable connections to spirit guidance that were regularly renewed through seasonal ceremonies. The "western" gaze often minimizes or discounts the pivotal role that plant medicines play in shaping the identity, best practices, flavors and textures of our inherited ancestral Earth honoring cultures. 

We may look to the past for guidance while ultimately acknowledging that we live very different lives than our ancestors. We are charged with the enormous task of composting all manner of outdated belief systems, healing and resetting our nervous systems, and becoming once again humble, curious and willing to continue to evolve our understanding of our unique role in the planetary ecosystem.  We can not do this without the guidance of our wise plant elders. To this end, a large part of the program content will be delivered in nature's classroom, in the context of seasonally themed plant medicine ceremony. 


community + Communication = communion


The journey of healing or deepening our relationship with plant family and connection to the spirited world around us requires an honest assessment of our current relationship and communication skill set and our level of satisfaction in all our relations. It begins with healing our relationship with ourselves, and working intimately with our emotions, thoughts, judgements and projections. Self love and self acceptance are prerequisites for being capable of remaining healthy in our relationships with others.

An important part of what makes our program unique is our commitment to working with the principles of Non-Violent Communication or NVC  to cultivate an environment where we can come to terms with and begin or continue to shift away from the rampant assumptions and severe judgement addiction that are normalized in our culture,  and take full responsibility for the power of our words, both to heal and to harm. Together we practice speaking the English language in a way that reliably reveals the opportunity for deep transformation hidden within our  everyday interactions.

We also explore boundaries in depth and believe that developing or re-establishing flexible healthy boundaries is the difference between the relating as a Maiden versus relating as a Mother or Crone within the Triple Goddess Archetype. (Maiden/ Mother/ Crone )We remain a child in some regard until we have deeply quested an in depth understanding of our needs and boundaries. We walk as a woman when we have developed the strength of character to respect our own known needs and boundaries and take responsibility for educating others as to how to engage with us by role modeling respectful loving behavior towards ourselves. Our  program aims to provide many facilitated and supported opportunities to take our relationship with ourselves to the next level and watch ourselves, our lives, and all our relationships transform before our very eyes as a result. 

2024/ 2025 FORMAT & PROGRAM DATES


This is a hybrid learning program that combines online and in person instruction. Our group beginning in November 2024 (Cohort 1) is now full. Our next group (Cohort 2) will begin online February 2nd, 2025




Important Dates for Cohort 2:  


• Live online opening ceremony ( Sunday February 2, 2025) 


• Monthly recorded video lessons to watch whenever is convenient for you


• Monthly LIVE online group office hours: Q&A sessions with Yaya via zoom to connect and  discuss the content. Office hours will take place the last Thursday of each month at 11 am pt for 15 months.


•One (1) four day in person graduation gathering in Descanso, CA ( May 1-4th of 2026. Camping Accommodations )


PROGRAM THEMES



Preventative Herbal Medicine 

• Support in working daily with nourishing, toning herbs for improved vitality

•  An introduction to medicine making including tinctures and salves, botany, plant identification,  ethical wild-crafting and more.

•Multidimensional friendship and partnership with plants through plant spirit medicine 

Traditional Nutrition

Together we quest Intestinal integrity and a working understanding of the gut/ brain connection, including support for those wishing to enter into a complete gut healing protocol and engage their food as healing medicine. Our program provides opportunity for apprentices to map the connection between their diet and their mental, emotional, physical and reproductive  health. Together we experience first hand the deep pleasure of nutrient dense foods.

Relationship Sciences

We invest a significant amount of time in creating a shared vocabulary, shared skillset, and clear agreements that support us in feeling safer to go within to heal ourselves  in community. 

Shamanic Dreamwork 

Participants will recieve potent and effective tools that enable us to enter into naturally occurring altered states such as dreaming in order to seek guidance, clarity, and assistance from ancestors and guides in remaining on our path. These lessons include guidance in working with non-linear ways of seeing and being, and deeper teachings of the Wheel of the Year ( The medicine wheel of our own Irish ancestors) Real time is understood to be a circle and a spiral and many of the worlds living traditions find their unique identity through their study of sacred wheels as maps to embracing and participating with the truth of our cyclical nature.

Goddess Studies

Together we will explore the contemporary relevance of Goddess energy, teaching stories, and iconography as timeless, timely maps to the transpersonal nature of the women's initiatory process. 

Movement & Embodiment Practices

The elements, plants & animal spirits, our ancestors and Goddesses, all speak to us directly through our nervous systems. During our time together we will meet with lineage holders in the Yogic, Tantric and other indigenous and western  traditions to learn practices that bring everything we are learning about the nature of organic reality into the intimate and personal terrain of the body. For many this means learning to regulate the flow of information between us and the rest of the living universe so we may be invigorated, inspired, and courageous as we face the many unknowns of modern life.  Understanding the  nervous system, engaging it in healing ways through breathwork, movement, and rest practices speed our integration and emodiment of the tools we are exploring together. 

Ancestral Research & Remembering

Throughout the program, you are supported  in engaging in deep inquiry and independent study into the roots of your own inherited ancestral traditions. We will unlearn and liberate ourselves from colonial perspectives and as if (slowly or all at once) waking up from a dream, find ourselves remembering how to move with the rhythms and cycles of Earth. Like Planet Earth, Medicine Mandala  is a one room school house and we welcome all levels of sincere practitioners. Because we are all at different places on our journey, coming together to share the fruits of our efforts across the Maiden-Mother-Crone continuum is exponentially more effective then researching on our own. We can learn so much from one another's methods and means of reclaiming,  integrating, and rejoicing in what is uncovered on the journey.

IT TRULY DOES TAKE A VILLAGE!

 

Although the instructions for this altar, or the recipe for this medicine, was originally received (and continually adjusted) by Río Cósmico steward Yaya Erin Rivera as part of her own creative work and ongoing Wise Woman & Red Road initiations, the medicine you will experience during our time together has been and will be co-created by many hands, including your own!

As an earth magic initiation journey, we practice at the intersections where our ancestral lineages share core beliefs and practices about the care and stewardship of our bodies as extensions of our planetary earth mother.

Click below to read more about some of the elder, auntie and sister guides you will have the opportunity to learn from on this journey. (Please note that although the facilitators chosen to deliver the curriculum units are subject to change each year, the curriculum remains more or less the same, and recordings with most past facilitators remain in your additional resources library.)

EACH UNIT INCLUDES:

  • Instruction with time set aside for group check ins and Q & A

  • Hands on learning and or movement/ embodiment practices

  • Access to an additional resources library of links and recordings to enable students to go deeper into areas of particular interest

  • Access to a private discussion area to discuss lessons with members of your learning cohort

EXPLORE INDIVIDUAL UNITS COVERED BY OUR CURRICULUM

  • Introduction to Folk Herbalism

    We begin with an introduction or refresher course in folk herbalism. Together we take a comparative look at the ancient European roots of western herbalism, contemporary lineages like the Wise Woman Tradition, and the ancestral herbal lineages of the facilitators and participants present in the group, celebrating what has been preserved of the original instructions for how to thrive in harmony and reciprocity with our living Earth. We also invite each participant to work with a specific nourishing and toning herbs protocol that has been designed to calibrate the body to receive, integrate, and share increasingly subtle frequencies.

  • Ethics of Medicine Making

    Grow your understanding of the issues that can be considered when endeavoring to make good medicine. Together we take time to explore the history and cultural context of the plants we work with together. This unit includes exploration of important issues facing healing arts practitioners and community oriented mystics alike, such as how to be in respectful cultural exchange and sincere exploration/ practice with tools that have been shared with us without engaging in harmful appropriation.

  • Medicine Making Practicum

    Participants will start or grow their home apothecary and leave the program feeling more confident in their ability to prepare and safely administer herbal infusions, tinctures, tonics and salves made at home from common and readily available plants. Together Marianna of Trinity Herbals & Wellness Center, Josie of curandera Remedies and Nazdira of Nazdira's natural Remedies will guide us through the basics of botany, plant identification, ethical wildcrafting and working with plant spirit medicine to enhance other energy medicine modalities, all with a focus on herbal alliances specifically for women's health.

  • Non Violent Communication

    Sometimes called NVC, Compassionate Communication or The Language of Life, we work with the framework of Non Violent Communication to demystify social exchanges by identifying the skillset necessary for healthy multidimensional relating, including growing our vocabulary for our emotions, somatic awareness and capacity for mindfulness of our own feelings and needs in real time, active listening, pathways to effective emotional processing, what to do when we feel triggered, accessing support within the program, and more.

  • Spirit Medicine

    In growing our ability to relate skillfully with other humans, we learn to regulate our nervous systems, becoming increasingly capable of the kind of subtle communications offered by our plant, mineral, animal and ancestral allies. Together we learn intuitive and lineage based practices for deepening our friendships and working relationships/ alliances with our extended family (sometimes called spirit guides).

  • Dream Yoga

    In dreams, we bypass both ego and cultural programing, and enter into a deeper exchange with primordial reality. Actively engaging with the content of our dreams is an extremely effective way to open a portal that allows for exploration of the multiverse. Learning to more consciously navigate in all of the dimensions we exist in, is a time honored way of accelerating our learning, growth and evolution in this body and in this timeline. In our time together we will share tools for dream recall, dream interpretation, healing ourselves and others in the dreamspace, lucid dreaming and more.

  • Fungi Medicine

    Mushrooms are not plants! They exist on a completely different axis and contract with life on earth. Together ee will explore mushrooms as food, as preventative medicine, as spirit medicine and more, emerging with a renewed appreciation and respect for these generous beings contribution to our earthwalk.

  • The Way of The Cauldron

    Coming home to the hearth, we connect with the heart of the nourishing traditions, revive the cauldron as central ritual tool of women's ritual spaces, and become confident in using the simple and readily available tools of the kitchen witch.

  • Shamanic Journeywork

    Participants are provided with reliable effective framework for traversing the multiverse and make safe journeys into other dimensions of our being using the ancient consciousness and frequency altering rhythms of the frame drum, which exists in each of our ancestries, on every continent wherever human life is found.

  • Nourishing Embodiment Practices

    Our journey begins with a breathwork ceremony with Brooklyn based Jordan Catherine Pagan of Deerheart Apothecary to welcome participants to a new chapter of their journey. We will be joined mid way through the journey by experienced guide Yoli Maya Yeh to nourish up with a Yoga Nidra journey to commune with the elements, ancestors and nature spirits within the sacred ritual space of our own body.

  • Womb Steaming

    Together we will learn the cross-cultural Herstory of working with herbal steam for maintaining reproductive health. We will also be joined in person by Oaxaca based practitioner Jaguar Womban of Womb Nation to open the womb portal that will allow us to feel the presence and support of our healthy aligned ancestors of the light as we walk the pathway of initiation as a Green Witch Servant of Gaia.

  • Traditional Tobacco Teachings

    Renowned Indigenous elder Carmen Vicente joins us as we prepare for our final in person gathering and initiation ceremony to share with our group about the time honored practice of creating prayer ties, a means of working with Tobacco that enables us to pray with our whole bodies, and is suitable for those seeking to heal from addiction and misuse of plant smoke as delivery system and come into right relationship with this potent and wise teacher plant.

“ Thank you for this anchor in the cosmic universe!"

“ I remember writing that this would change the story of my whole bloodline. I don’t think I fully comprehended what that meant or entailed at the time, and I am just beginning to skim the top of understanding now. I do know this: my future ancestors will be something else entirely with the knowledge and understanding of the earth and how to work with and honor her that I now carry, mil gracías Yayita.” ~Cecilia Aeon, 2020
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" I have slowed down a bit and I am allowing the herbal infusions to nourish me."

" The ceremonies and rituals that we experienced during the weekend were incredible. The Samhain ceremony was very transformative for me, and later getting a sign from my ancestors in the yurt was emotional. I felt their love and support, and I was reassured that they are with me and have been waiting for me to become more conscious in this work…" -Tiffany White (2018)
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"It was truly life changing"

" I wanted to take the time to give my truest, deepest bow of gratitude for you, Medicine Mandala, and my time in the container...The friendships, practices, and wisdom cultivated during that year have become an integral part of my being, and I still find myself unpacking what I learned on nearly a daily basis… It was truly life changing, and you are such a gifted teacher and guide. Again, my sincerest thanks." ~ Dr. Marlene Hampton, ND (2018)
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TUITION

What's Included In Your Tuition?

  • A printable PDF course manual with 75+ pages of original instruction and support materials, recipes, songs, worksheets, and more for those desiring access to the course materials offline for a more analogue experience of the home study portion of the curriculum

  • Guidance for sourcing bulk herbs and other basic materials from your local botanica, health food store, and online.

  • 13 recorded skill share lessons with Yaya Erin Rivera & our care-fully curated group of 12 experienced & engaging guest Wise Woman guides.

  • Lifetime access to an easy to navigate online portal where you will find all lessons, dates, recordings, contact info, and access additional resource library and discussion forum for each unit.

  • 1 one-on-one private zoom session with primary facilitator Yaya Erin Rivera to make the lessons as relevant as possible to your individual needs.

  • Active private group online discussion forum (Not FB) and email support for the duration of the program.

  • One In Person 4 day Ceremonial Skill Share Gathering in San Diego, CA, including Farm to-table local home cooked organic gluten free, gut health friendlier meals and snacks

  • Green Witch Initiation Ceremony

  • Certificate of Completion Available

  • 1 group integration session after graduation

TUITION DETAILS

A variety of payment plans are available. Click below to learn cost, tuition distribution and more.

Tuition Details

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