A plant immersion experience exploring Oak, St John's Wort and Meadowsweet through folklore, storytelling and traditional medical practice.
Step into this summer in partnership with plants, exploring how our native flora can help us to better know ourselves and rekindle our relationship with our wild and precious world.
Guided by veterinary surgeon and acupuncturist Emily Valentine Powell and storyteller and ethnobotanist Pridie Tiernan, this unique whole day experience will immerse you in a world heady with Meadowsweet and bright with the light of St John’s Wort...all safe in the embrace of meadow, hedgerow and ancient towering Ash and Oak.
A rich mix of plant ID, herbal medicine practice, foraging, folklore and storytelling, this workshop is a celebration of the power and magic of our native plants to support and revitalise our bodies and souls. Through careful identification, gentle sensing, collective exploration and shared practical experience, we will engage deeply with our seasonal native flora.
Beginning with an introduction to the five elements in Traditional Medicine, Emily will lead us in exploring our own elemental balance, and gift us a taster of moxibustion (the ancient practice that uses plants to access energy within the body). We'll then embark on a journey about the farm to delve deeper into the elemental nature, folklore and uses of Oak, St John's Wort and Meadowsweet, and sit beneath the boughs of some of our oldest trees for some spell-binding storytelling.
The day will feature plenty of opportunity to discuss our three star plants, considering them on a practical, elemental and sensory level, and, in doing so, deepening our relationship with each. What better way to immerse yourself in that bounty of green this summer?
No previous experience of traditional medicine, foraging, plant medicine or botany is required. This day is very much about beginning, and/or deepening, your relationship with wild plants, and a chance to spend time together celebrating them.
Your hosts:
Emily Valentine Powell is a practitioner of Acupuncture and Moxibustion , a veterinary surgeon and farmer committed to a deeper exploration of indigenous plant medicines in the UK, weaving them into her practice and acknowledging our native flora as guides when it comes to including magic and spirituality in dialogues around health.
As a vet and farmer she has spent over three decades immersed in our plant and animal communities and absorbing their teachings - unwittingly at first, but over time more consciously. The timeless wisdom of Traditional Chinese medicine has provided Emily with the rhetoric to include spiritual (or those less tangible) elements into our frameworks for health and healing, firmly rooting our health back into the domain of our wild but perfectly balanced planet earth .
In her healing work Emily has long been drawn to our native plants and the resonance and language we share with them. She encourages more conscious dialogue with the natural world , as a tool for understanding how we personally resonate with our environment and to illuminate areas we may have become blocked or discordant.
This workshop is an opportunity to create a space where we can begin to better understand the elemental carnival in which we partake, from the moment we take our first breath until the last .
Pridie Tiernan is a storyteller and ethnobotanist committed to reconnecting us with the plants we once used to nourish, nurture and heal. She weaves a rich mix of oral storytelling into the teaching of wilderness skills; rekindling our relationship with the natural world and empowering us to feel at one with the wild.
As a storyteller , she has spent many years performing stories that create a sense of familiarity and connection with nature, especially in those that gift us the opportunity to explore the concept of the "wild woman" - that powerful, untamed force connected to the natural world that can be both nurturing and fierce, instinctual, passionate and creative. Her work encourages a reconnection with that wildness - rediscovering our feral inventiveness and power - through the sharing of ancient stories and the teaching of practical survival skills.
As an ethnobotanist , Pridie has long been fascinated by the power of plants . Her sensory herbalism, seasonal woodcraft and rewilding workshops, draw our native flora onto centre stage, embracing them as a potent way of gaining insight into ourselves and our place in the world, taking control of our bodies , and tapping into the magic of the natural world .
This retreat takes place at her home in the heart of the Black Mountains—a safe and beautiful space where the sharing of stories and ancestral skills brings people together in community and encourages a change in the way we interact with nature. Here, we can return to that state of ‘awakeness’ we once enjoyed when we thrived in the wild - all senses firing, the herbs and flowers our allies, and the powerful, untamed force that is our wildest self fully embraced and unleashed!
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