Goal Of Sacred Vibes Herbalist Apprenticeship

During the 12-month Sacred Vibes Apprenticeship Program, I will study the foundations of plant spirit medicine as related to eight different body systems, learning over 25 different plants through an in-depth study of the materia medica. Through the study of materia medica, I will learn core information about each plant, such as botany, plant identification, energetics, historical uses, current applications, contraindications, methods of preparation and dosages, spiritual uses, wildcrafting, and cultivation. I will delve into indigenous and traditional healing approaches to cultivate a wider scope in my practice of herbalism in application to cultures, children, elders, birthing folks, and animals.

My intention for joining this program is to deepen my knowledge of spiritual and medicinal herbalism that feels authentic to me and my lineage. I have been grateful to be able to contribute to the community by offering herbal remedies, including tea blends, tinctures, capsules, hair oils that also serve as protective oils, and more. Community care and anti-oppression values are the focus of my herbalism work. In practice, I have been working as a Doula, and I am especially called to keep building my medicinal and spiritual herbal knowledge toolkit.

I applied and received a $3000 scholarship from Sacred Vibes Apprenticeship. I’m grateful to be able to widen my knowledge of community herbal work. My goal is to create medicine with and for folks to navigate their holistic needs--physically and spiritually. I am asking for support with this program as I was recently fired from the Citywide Doula Intiative program within the Department of Health. I have not financially recovered. My father recently passed, and during this time of grief, I have been navigating my overall health and wellness. I have felt empowered to slow down and create intentional space for diving in-depth into decolonization and reindigenizing work, with emphasis and rooted in herbalism. Your support will allow me to navigate my learning with the care, intention, and focus it deserves. I would like to be able to give my full presence to learning and digesting the material; with this grace, I will be showing up with integrity and care reflected within my herbal offerings.

About Thee Brujx, Future Spiritual Herbalist

My connection to herbal medicine began at home with my grandmother. I was inspired to keep centering the land, ancestor work, and herbal medicine after studying native potatoes in Peru for three weeks in college. I was drawn to community development. After, I was awarded a grant to conduct food security and gentrification research in the Bronx called “Chopped Cheese versus the Sub-cheese Burger On a Roll.” I graduated with a Bachelor’s in Social Work and a minor in Community Development and Agricultural Economics. Additionally, I completed the majority of my coursework for a Master’s in Social Work. Throughout my graduate school experience, I dived into community gardens within the Bronx to Harlem, nonprofit liberation-based youth work where I was the co-executive director of The WomxnHOOD Project in the Bronx. During this time, I also conducted peer-support groups and workshops within community-based organizations that center Indigenous modalities of healing. I was a part of and still am a team member within The Indigenous Mental Health Awareness Network International, dedicated to helping people learn how Indigenous ways of knowing can be used for improved mental health. We aim to empower communities by encouraging people to lovingly reclaim and explore the Indigenous healing modalities of their ancestors that became fragmented or lost due to colonization, slavery, and other forms of oppression.

Herbalism and its kaleidoscope connection to transforming grief, PTSD, and Complex-PTSD has encouraged me to listen, be still, and gain clarity. Three years ago, I dropped out of my Master's in Social Work program because I was triggered coming into a NYC public school as no longer the student, but the clinician. Unpacking my experiences and the experiences of the youth via a trauma-informed and socio-political-economic-ecological lens forced me to ask myself questions around what my life purpose is and what is truly for me. I kept coming back to my experience growing up in public schools in the Bronx, and navigating the stigma of mental health helped me to see just how many people needed herbal remedies. Unpacking the correlation between mental health and herbalism, I realized how many people across the diaspora in my community/family benefited from herbs in necessary and empowering ways. As a clinician, I felt very strongly against the lack of funding, the violent intersectional results of the school-to-prison pipeline, etc. I know it is necessary to keep upholding ancestral wisdom and the ideologies of navigating wellness, such as herbalism, so that the normalization of mental health stigma may lead to the welcoming of full body and community holistic wellness. From working with young people to selling herbal remedies, I feel my experiences have shaped the vision I hold for community work and individual transformational work where embodiment is possible and celebrated across underserved communities and the Diaspora.