Maine Women's Herbal Retreat 2021

  

Third Annual Maine Women's Herbal Retreat

July 16-18 2021

Mindful Earth Farm and Apothecary

Durham, ME 04222

 We would love to invite you to join us for a transformative weekend of herbal education, locally sourced nourishing meals, unique hands-on workshops, and an opportunity to dive deep within and nurture your relationship with yourself, the plants and the land, and a really incredible group of ladies which some are guaranteed to become lifelong friends.

This weekend will take place at Mindful Earth Farm and Apothecary in Durham, Maine with 12 acres of land to explore and enjoy throughout your stay. We realize that this is a delicate and transitional time within our worlds - and want to remain respectful of these events. This is a small outdoor event - please only make the choice to join us if you feel absolutely safe and comfortable doing so.

  This weekend you will have the opportunity to expand your knowledge about wild and cultivated plants, cannabis medicine, medicinal mushroom foraging, and experience a variety of workshops created to encourage expansion of the Heart and Spirit through community and sisterhood.

 We have a very special weekend planned – One of our favorite aspects of this time together is the opportunity to create and bring to life a really beautiful unique menu focused on medicinal herbs, locally sourced veggies and fruit, and a variety of raw vegan mouth-watering sweet treats. We also welcome back Cassandra the very talented mocktail bar medicinal drink creatress! Cassie blew us away with her mocktail bar the last two years – we can’t wait to see what she comes up with this year. We will hold space for true connection and sisterhood around a big beautiful fire, get mini massages from Tara Cavanaugh of Health Resonates, and enjoy the summer night sky overlooking the lit up gardens on our land.

 We have a full weekend planned that will sure be inspiring and memorable to say the least! Please plan to arrive Friday between 1130-130pm, and stay until early Sunday evening. This is an outdoor event – camping is allowed anywhere on the property!  Our full schedule and detailed workshops descriptions with teacher bios will be available soon!

  The cost for the weekend is 800$. There are payment plans available on an individual basis. We have six opportunities to be volunteer staff, and also two scholarship spaces from generous donors - one for a woman in recovery from substance use disorder, and one for a BIPOC woman. Please email for applications for both volunteer and scholarship if you feel called. The monetary cost includes:

All meals and beverages. All ingredients sourced organically and as locally as possible. 2 breakfasts, 2 lunches, 2 dinners with dessert, snack and tea/hemp honey bar available all day. Mocktail/Cocktail Bar Saturday night. Please inform us of any allergies - the menu will be gluten and dairy free, vegetarian options always available for every meal.

Welcome bag with offerings from all workshops presenters, a notebook and pen, custom made mug by Chloe Treu of Treupots, and Professional Photos capturing the weekends special moments.

All Workshops:

Opening Weaving Ceremony with Angela Coron

Hi, my name is Angela . I am a grower of many things , and an artist using life as my canvass. I am a grounded optimistic.  I am a fire keeper , with dirty feet and calloused hands. I am Wild, Resilient and Magical. I am an herbalist, and hobby homesteader.

Community Weave
In this community weave we all will be leading with love and creating connection.  Connection with the natural world and rhythm of the seasons as well as each other. As humans, we long for honest, deep connection. Weavers make the effort to build those connections and make others feel valued.

Please bring something from home to add to the weave. It can be fabric, clothing, a bead , a dried plant, hair , almost anything. Just a something that will stay and be added the the story of the weave .

 Plant Monographing with Kelly and Angela

When starting to go down the plant medicine rabbit hole and using the earth's medicine to support ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities- it's crucial to learn the plants characteristics, actions, uses, contraindications, energetics, harvesting practices, and in my opinion - get to know their spirit and personality a bit. I'll show you how I monograph when learning new plants - and since I am not a wonderful artist - Angela will share some plant drawing guidance.

Petal Portal- A Healing Flower Balm Workshop with Brooke Frost

In this workshop, we will be celebrating the transcendent + healing magic of all things FLOWERS! 

A guided vibrational flower meditation will help shift us into a realm of whimsy, as we intuitively infuse a healing medley of flowers into oil and learn how to create our own skin balms using luscious, yet easily accessible ingredients. We will have a shimmering scent bar; a collection of artisan distilled essential oil blends, earthen mineral pigments and hand pressed flowers to customize our own face + body nectar to bestow upon us truly ethereal beauty, as we immerse in a loving circle of petal play. 

Bio:

Brooke Frost, founder of LunaRoots Botanicals, is a budding herbalist and skincare potions creatress based out of southern Vermont. Her work is whimsically woven with intuitive plant beauty and bio-regionally sourced botanicals. She has spent the last 5 years developing one of a kind beauty medicine. Her hopes are to support the work of inner/outer beauty alignment through the cultivation of rituals that evoke magical moments and embrace the acknowledgement that what we put on our sacred bodies not only matters, but can create powerfully transformative experiences. 

This class will start with a meander through the woods to get acquainted with any mushroom friends that may be fruiting!  We will go over proper identification and poisonous look a-likes(if any) and best ways to sustainably harvest.  We will discuss at least 7 mushrooms that can be found locally, and how to process them and make your own medicine.  This class will hopefully instill enough confidence for you to start foraging your own medicinal mushrooms!

Bio

Alyssa has been a plant and mushroom enthusiast for 8 years and counting.  She studied herbalism at the California School of herbal Studies, completed a 3-month permaculture internship on Maui, has a 200 hour YTT certification, attended the Wild Living Soils Program in Durango, CO, and has peppered in dozens of classes, educational gatherings, and workshops throughout the years. Her love and knowledge of mushrooms started in Washington State at the Green Gathering, held by students and teachers from Bastyr University, and has continued here on the east coast by attending classes held by NH Mushroom Company and Maine Mycological Society, and largely is self-taught.  Between the months of July and October, you can usually catch her lying on the ground in the forest with her phone out snapping pictures of mushrooms with a few field guides in her basket. 

With Kelly

I think its very safe to say that this work and offering is critical in the times we currently live in. There is deep confusion, anger and resentment, desperation, hopelessness, enormous grief, and anxiety - sometimes swallowing us whole and keeping us in this cyclical Fear loop. Not only that, our society is built and literally thrives off of trauma. The modern world as we know it very literally creates the conditions of emotional and mental turmoil and confusion. Passed down from generations, for some of us, it has always been our “normal” and we often function in fight/flight mode. Trauma and emotional turmoil, when left unprocessed and un-acknowledged, gets stuck in our bodies and festers in our tissues and fascia. From a young age, some of us are taught that being an emotional creature is not “normal”. We are taught to suppress and deny any sort of negative emotion, and if we allow it space to release there is “something wrong with us”. What comes next? Often times a trip to a western medical provider who diagnoses and labels us, then slaps a prescription on top. Backwards? Not always - but more often than not.

As human beings incarnated into this earth body - we long for meaning and purpose. This is our birthright - to contemplate these notions, and to experience the full spectrum of the emotional body. Deep Pain, Joy, Sadness, Fear, Grief, and most importantly, Love - are incredibly important emotional experiences which teach us lessons and bring meaning to our earthly lives. While the system to address adverse and painful emotions is backwards - there are many practices we can implement to support ourselves in allowing these emotions to resurface, and to cultivate deep healing on a cellular level.

The path of plant medicine has provided me with an immense amount of healing - not only through the way they support the physical body, but also the deep healing the earth’s medicine provides our Soul. In this workshop, we will explore the notion of trauma and stress and how they affect our bodies in a physical, spiritual, and emotional way - and learn about my favorite plants to support healing and emotional wellness in a sustainable way.

Returning to the Self: An Embodied Movement Journey with Joanna Marquis

Bio:

Hello Hello! My name is Joa. I am a momma and movement enthusiast. 

I grew up most of my childhood in dance classes & theater which then turned into an integrative bundle of all forms of dance & eventually became a spiritual practice. 

I shed most of all my training & focused solely on how my body told me it needed to move. 

My belief is that the body is a vessel for sacred movement. The power that lives under your skin wants to be known through your expression. It’s not about what it looks like, It’s about the quality of it within. The only movement that truly matters is the one inside.

Movement is direct communication with Spirit and the core essence of who you are.

 Hearth Song - A Song Sharing Circle Around the Fire with Andrea Apice

Andrea Rose is a community herbalist, alchemist, green witch, and lifelong percussionist. She is the owner of Honey Rose Botanicals out of Philadelphia - a sustainable and wildly natural skincare company. Andrea loves to build and tend to the fire of the hearth and of the heart which she does in drumming and song. She has collected many empowering songs to share by sitting in circle with women and would love for you to join her for a song sharing circle around the fire at our women's retreat.

 Mini Massages around the Fire with Tara Cavanagh

 

Tara is a wellness entrepreneur with extensive experience in many Healing Arts and the visionary behind Portland’s Health Resonates, a unique wellness and beauty center inspired by the healing nature that surrounds.

Tara’s talent for one on one intuitive engagement uses holistic prescription of massage therapy, energy work, holistic skincare, expert gua sha techniques, polarity therapy, chakra clearing; crystal healing, and space cleansing. Her customized approach encourages individual innate mechanisms of well-being using well-researched practices in traditional life sciences.