Next Herb Walk: November 6 at Huckleberry Preserve in Oakland
"The Pacific School of Herbal Medicine is dedicated
to meeting the healthcare needs of our student's future clients."
Adam Seller
School Director
Angelica sp.
The Pacific School of Herbal Medicine offers community classes and a professional clinical training program in American herbal medicine based in Western physiology and anatomy, modern clinical use of plants, and the gentle traditions of simpling, wildcrafting, and folk medicine. All our teachers are experienced practitioners, wildcrafters and community health organizers. We teach people about their environment and bodies, raise people's awareness of plants, and train practitioners to be physiologically literate, culturally competent and sensitive, and ecologically aware.
The School is a resource for everyone, from those wanting to know the edible weeds in their neighborhood, to medical professionals wanting to enrich their field of knowledge. Whether we are in the classroom or out in the wild, classes are small, affordable, intellectually stimulating, thought provoking, hands-on and fun.
Our clinical training program emphasizes Western-states' plants- especially the plants of California, physiology, harm reduction, client-centered counseling skills, and public health perspectives. A rich understanding of physiology is the basis of diagnosis and therapeutics in acute, chronic and constitutional care. This knowledge allows the student to clearly communicate holistic understanding of the body to clients and other medical practitioners. Counseling skills give the students tools to understand themselves and listen to others with clarity and compassion. Hands-on work in the mountains and deserts of California grounds the students' growth in the beauty and complexity of nature. It is this knowledge of the plants that gives the herbalist depth.
The Pacific School offers the longest standing clinically or practitioner oriented program in Western herbal medicine in the Pacific West, and the second longest standing clinical program in the Western states. We offer a closely supervised, in depth and very successful program, in which students may only move from one level to the next with approval of the director. This program trains clinical practioners, and serves professional herbalists who come here from around the world to refine, polish, enlarge and deepen their skills and understanding of healthcare and medicine. Expect to spend a few years studying hard, digging roots in the low desert, picking flowers in alpine meadows, being challenged by working with clients in the student clinic, and coming to a richer understanding of working with clarity and compassion. Expect to be tempered by human tenderness and pain, along with joy, beauty, and strength.
We will offer you tools for healthcare, and encourage you to develop clinical excellence as a tool and expression of your compassion. We are committed to helping you approach pain and suffering with articulate tools, professional skill, compassion, clarity and respect for all life.
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