|
|
 |
Welcome to The Gaia School of Healing
REGISTER NOW FOR FALL '09 APPRENTICESHIPS
|
New!
Advanced Course now offered for former graduates.
Offering courses and workshops in Shamanic and Medicinal Herbalism,
Plant Spirit Medicine, Holistic Healing, Spiritual Ecology, and Shamanic journeying with plant devas and earth spirits.
Herbal medicine courses are currently being offered in Brattleboro, VT and Boston, MA year round. Sage recently returned to the mainland from Hawaii where she spent two years studying ethnobotany, anthropology, Hawaiian herbal healing, spiritual ecology, and plant medicine of the rainforest. Currently Sage is teaching herbal healing apprenticeships and workshops in New England.
Plant Medicine Apprenticeships are currently running and will be offered again in November of 2009 in Brattleboro, VT and in Boston, MA. To register for the next fall apprenticeship, send in a completed registration form to the address provided, or contact us for more information. If you are interested in other classes being offered, or private consultations, please email us your questions.
The Gaia School of Healing & Earth Education founded by Sage Maurer in Boston, Massachusettes, has offered a variety of courses and workshops in green medicine and healing over the years in Vermont, Massachusetts, and Hawaii, since 2001.
We offer 9 month long apprenticeships in magical and medicinal herbalism, plant spirit medicine, shamanism, holistic healing, spiritual ecology, and journeying with plant devas and earth spirits. Course listings are continually updated, so check out what's new!
The Green Woman refers to the Earth Mother which supports our life, as we are remembering the ancient path of living close to her. The Green Woman refers to the millions of midwives and herbalists who carried this knowledge before us. We seek to awaken a collective desire to protect and understand the earth, and our relationship to her. Through working with both women and men to restore this ancient practice and knowledge of plant medicine, we hope to heal the separation that has occured between ourselves and wild nature.
If you are interested in what we offer, contact us at thegaiaschool@hotmail.com or leave a phone message for Sage at (617)-838-8094.
"As herbalists we seek nature's power, the medicine Earth Mother has placed in our hands since the beginning. This is our most ancient medicine. The plants teach us to understand our own bodies as living breathing beings, transforming and changing every moment. Moving with the stars, the seasons, with the rise and fall of the sun and moon, the turning of the earth and the flow of tides. The plants come into our rivers of blood and fluid, sending their energy and power to every cell. Their chemicals dance with ours, soothing our nerves, calming the mind, awakening movement. For every need, there is a plant who can help us. Clear our thoughts, relieve an aching muscle, an upset stomach, a tight heart, opening us to life again.
Nature holds all of the treasures we seek. The drink of enlightenment, our awakening, our nourishment. The teachings of the Earth Mother are what is needed now. There is one healer of our bodies and minds, only one. She is the source of all, the one we go to when we die, the one we spring from when we are birthed into a new life. She is who holds us at night in dream, she is in every tree, each drop of rain, in the winds, in the soil under our feet. In the budding flower, the wet forests, the song of frogs, the quiet moon.
It is her that we seek. One earth, one body, many manifestations. It is Earth Mother that we find within us, her voice, her wisdom in our minds, her love in our hands. It is her power that we call from deep within. To grow as the plants, to transform our own bodies, heal and die as nature does. To listen and speak as the trees do, in constant silent communication. It is her harmony and balance that we re-learn in our own lives. Her changing pace from dormancy to ripening, returning to the source, and beginning again. This is our natural rhythm, our internal dance.
Earth Mother, bless me to be present today, to the magic of life as it is unfolding, perfectly, and with immeasurable beauty. May all awake to your presence within and around them."
- Sage L. Maurer, 2007
The Plant Medicine Sutra
by Robert Schrei
"Thus I have heard. That night the bodhisattva awoke and found herself surrounded by vines, branches, flowers, roots, sap, essence of the plant world, and the wildness of nature, all supplicating her for a teaching... The bodhisattva spoke: It is you, not I who needs to speak; it is you, it is your voice that is needed to awaken the self-centered human species to the vast web of life and love and awareness that is the intimate birthright of us all. Your sap, your juices, your fibers, your chemistry. We ask that all of you speak through and to our species, blood and bone, in a language that is unmistakable, unfettered by the intellect we have come to value so highly.
Speak to us of our interconnectedness, teach us how to hold each other in love, teach us how to experience our own primal essence, true nature, teach us how to know the essence of each sentient being, trees, grasses, rocks, mountains, stars, clouds, aminals, insects, spirits, other realms of existence. We have lost our connection and wander here and there without center, unaware of the web that you sustain...
Teach us how to enter the stream, the stream of vows, the stream of wishes, the stream of the hearts and minds of our ancestors... We bow before you and ask your blessings."
|
"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."
-Steven Buhner
"In the churchyards and cathedrals of Europe we still find the foliate face of the Green Man peering at us with eyes as wild as the very first forest, Sheela-na-gig as the Green Woman with her smiling face and spread legs. She is eternally giving birth to the plant world, disgorging dark foliage from her fertile womb. These are the timeless faces of Gaia, the plants twining together to form a mirror and a teacher for each still wild woman. "
-Kiva Rose
I have some prayers for you. They are spilling out of my prayer basket
and trickling into your wild heart.
Hear them and they will grow like nettle shoots in the spring:
I pray that you come to trust in your own spirit power.
I pray you can put the power of prayer to work for you in your daily life.
I pray that the God/dess, in her many names and incarnations, comes into your life.
Allow her to inspire your days.
I pray that you understand that herbs are not drugs.
They carry powers and properties not measurable by scientific means.
They are gifts from Great Mother intended for your spiritual, emotional, and physical sustenance.
Herbs will assist you greatly along your life and spirit path.
I pray that you open your wild heart and learn to listen to the herbs.
They are important friends and allies and have many secrets to share with you.
- Gail Faith Edwards
These are the ways of our grandmothers, the ancient ones. Every pain, every plant, every problem is cherished. Night is loved for darkness, day for light. Uniqueness is our treasure, not normalcy.
These are the ways of our grandmothers, the ancient ones. Receive abundance with compassion, knowing you will be food for others. Know that dying is a portal just as birth is. Celebrate all comings and goings, they are the turnings of the spiral.
These are the ways of our grandmothers, the ancient ones. The joy of life is the give- away. You are the center of your universe. You are the axis, life's matrix, the still point in the ever-moving. The designs of the universe radiate through you. You are god, goddess, unique and whole.
- Susan Weed
|
|
|
|
|
