Life as Medicine Way
Reflections from my experience and an opportunity to consider.
In 2024, I participated in Life as a Medicine Way (LAMW), a nine-month program with Plant Spirit Talk (PST). It was a life-shifting experience and a big part of a transformational year.
I learned about PST and LAMW from my friend Dustin, who participated in 2023. His growth during the course was visible and inspiring, as was his encouragement to try it for myself. So, I’m paying it forward by sharing my experience and its impact on me and encouraging you to consider if this kind of work could support your journey.
If my story resonates with you, like Dustin’s did with me, click or tap a link or button to learn more. Enrollment for the 2025 cohort of LAMW is open now.
How it works
From February to October, our cohort met weekly. Three weeks of each month, we met online for three hours in the evenings. The fourth week of each month, we met in person on a beautiful, plant-full, and well-loved property on Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok land (in Sebastopol, California). Conveniently, this was 10 minutes from me, but others lived throughout the Bay Area.
During our gatherings, we learned together, journaled, held vulnerable discussions, sang songs, made medicine, and shared meals. The community we cultivated during, between, and beyond our gatherings gave us space to support each other’s journeys and forge friendships.
With guidance, knowledge transfer, and support from Francisca (teacher and founder of PST) and other guest teachers, we studied Andean-Amazonian cosmology, studied plants and initiated with their medicine spirits, remembered and reconnected with our ancestral lineages, and found support for integrating learnings into our personal and shared paths.
My experience
Throughout the year, I gained vital knowledge and developed new skills, practices, and rituals that have become integral to my lifestyle and well-being. I connected with kind, like-hearted souls — all of whom had something unique and valuable to teach me. Together, we fostered a tight-knit community that served as a foundation for growth and evolution.
Every time we gathered, new doors of awareness and insight opened in front of me, often bringing me to tears — of joy, gratitude, and grief.
We learned about ancient people, cultures, and traditions and witnessed how ancient ways persist through people who carry on their ancestors’ ways. I remembered and reconnected with my own lineage, gained a better understanding of the roots of my family tree and where they’re planted, and identified patterns and contracts I’ve inherited from my ancestors.
I was inspired by my peers’ processes and persistently motivated to go deeper and open myself further.
Course highlights
Below are some highlights from my experience in LAMW.
Cosmovisions
We learned about and from the cosmologies of Indigenous tribes in South America, specifically the Q’eros of the Andes and the Shipibo of the Amazon. The Andean codes — six pillars of wisdom that support a harmonious, well, and wise existence — were particularly valuable because they’re timelessly relevant, immediately relatable, and ready to integrate.
On occasion, we had the privilege of learning directly from tribe members (online and in person) and practicing their traditions with them.
Integrating this knowledge and perspective gave us an opportunity to imagine our personal cosmovisions.
Plant spirit initiations
Plants have limitless wisdom and healing properties. This truth isn’t limited to the often-cited plants with molecules that induce psychedelic experiences. It includes the often-overlooked plants that surround us everywhere we walk.
By slowing down, quieting ourselves, reducing the noise and stimuli around and within us, paying attention, and noticing, we can commune with plants, listen to them, learn from them, and receive their medicine.
I held three- to four-week ceremonies with Rosemary, Rose, and Tobacco. Beginning during my time in the Amazon, I worked with an elixir of five plants for 40 days. During each initiation, I humbly received the plants’ teachings and gratefully found healing.
If this sounds foreign to you or is difficult to understand, I understand. It’s also hard to explain. But if my description piques your interest and the nine-month course isn’t feasible for you, PST’s Hive offering could be a good option.
*In my apprenticeship with PST in 2025, I’ll initiate with four more medicine spirits…and report back.
Ritual-making
Throughout LAMW, I learned about different rituals, practiced them with others and on my own, and integrated rituals into my life through daily, weekly, cyclical, and seasonal practices.
For my final project in October, I designed a ritual to support people in all kinds of relationships—romantic or platonic, between two people or more (couples, friends, families, teams). If you check it out, please consider its potential usefulness in your relationships - I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Medicine-making
During our in-person gatherings, we learned to make:
Agua de Florida — cleansing, purifying, and calming water of plants and flowers.
Flower Essences — a carefully captured solution containing the energy of a flowering plant.
Seguros — a protective potion made of ingredients from the maker’s lineages and lands of their ancestors.
In DIY fashion, I also learned how to make hydrosol — a simple way to turn your garden into refreshing room and body sprays.
These medicines are useful for ritual and ceremony. Making them from ingredients I’ve collected/harvested has been empowering and gratifying.
Side quests
To complement the core LAMW curriculum, workshops and group sessions are offered by PST apprentices and community members (at additional cost). Here are a few that excited and rewarded me the most:
Amazon immersion
In November, I traveled with a small group of peers and our teacher to Peru. We stayed in the Amazon jungle and held ceremony with elders and members of the Shipibo and Q’eros tribes. We communed with and received teachings and healings from plants and trees of the Amazon.
I lived in a single-room abode called a “Tambo” (which I nicknamed the “Timbo”), swam daily in a lagoon fed by natural warm and cold springs, had many flower baths, made plant medicine from sacred cacti and vines, painted with plant-dyes (like that from Huito seeds), learned how Alpaca wool is turned to thread to weave stunning symbology-rich fabrics, climbed and swam in falls of the clearest water I’ve ever seen, saw Blue Morpho butterflies IRL, and found the cutest little jungle frog
Dreamwork
For a few decades, I hadn’t dreamed (or recalled my dreams) due to heavy cannabis consumption. As soon as I stopped using cannabis, I began dreaming vividly and consistently. Thanks to skills and knowledge gleaned from a workshop called Garden Under the Moon, facilitated by Adam Elmaghraby, dreams have become a source of insight, understanding, and direction for me.
Somatics & embodiment
Gracious, wise, and generous offerings from Asha (Kohlibri Creative) reintroduced me to somatic work in ways that felt resonant, tangible, and accessible. Her virtual and in-person workshops/sessions helped me reconnect with my body, remember what it’s like to be embodied, and counterbalance the disembodiment I’d grown accustomed to in my chronic pain era.
Womb tending
Hanna Pearl Apothecary facilitated a lovely workshop called Hearth: Herbal Toolkits for Womb Tending.
This helped me develop a more holistic perspective on “the womb” — to remember and acknowledge everyone comes from a womb, that the Earth itself is a womb that holds all life, and that, though my body doesn’t carry a womb, I have a role and responsibility to understand and support the womb-carriers around me (my mother, sister, nieces, partner, friends, and strangers).
We also learned about plants that offer medicine specifically useful for bodies with wombs.
Card reading
With Sami (Ritual Herb), I learned the history of Tarot, how to approach Tarot “through an animist lens,” and established a relationship and regular practice with Tarot and Oracle decks. My go-to’s are:
Landscapes Tarot by Francesca Matteoni and Yoshi Mari
📽 → I recorded a short video with PST to comment on my overall experience.
I hope my reflections illustrate the potential of participating in Life as Medicine Way and the Plant Spirit Talk community.
I hope I’ve painted a picture that you can envision yourself in, and doing so helps you understand whether this kind of work is right for you at this time.
I hope what I’ve shared offers you tools, resources, and inspiration to explore new and uplifting paths on your spiritual journey.
🤲🏽 → PST just announced additional scholarships for BIPOC folks!
Thanks for reading. Please reply or comment with questions, reactions, etc.
With Love,
TF