Heal.
Heal the Healers
Heal the Healers is a weekend workshop program created specifically for frontline healthcare workers by the frontline healthcare workers of the Deep Medicine Circle.
As the Covid pandemic continues, rates of PTSD, depression, suicide, anxiety and burnout have increased in frontline health workers. This program will directly address those mental health concerns, while giving healthcare workers space to collectively grieve pandemic experience and re-conceptualize our healing purpose on land together.
UCSF Frontline Health workers at the Farm Clare Van de Mark, RN, Rupa Marya, MD, Rosa Villarroel, RN, Ashley Bernon, RN
DMC members Rupa Marya (UCSF Associate Professor of Medicine/artist, founder), Sage LaPena (California Indigenous herbalist, Director of Indigenous Plant Medicine and Traditional Ecological Knowledge) and artist Charlotte Sáenz (artivist scholar of Seed Pedagogics/Director of Creative and Learning Exchange) together with nurse Rosa Villarroel (UCSF Advanced GI nurse/Indigenous Mapuche) and Ramaytush Ohlone elder Catalina Gomes developed this program at the Ma Da Dil farm site to support for the wellness of frontline health workers.
We know land can heal us and we wish to open this place we steward to our colleagues who we know are also suffering and deeply need support to compost the trauma the pandemic has brought.
Decolonizing Food and Medicine
Bringing together decades of experience in healing work from Plant medicine to Western medicine to work in social change, our circle of healers starts with the growing connection between Sage LaPena and Rupa Marya, who are building the vision for clinical work that decolonizes food and medicine, prioritizing care for those most harmed by the systems put in place through colonization that have separated people from the earth and her offerings of care. The work is starting in building bridges in our understanding, in mapping out the vision of decolonizing practice, in creating an herbal apothecary and bringing together communities for care. The work will progress with our first mobile clinic to take the medicine where it is needed most. Sage and Rupa are developing curriculum and training for healers to advance their care in directions that harmonize people to the web of life around them, supporting community immunity, enhancing vitality and lowering systemic inflammation. In cultures living with intact tradition, food and medicine are never separated—they are always a force of healing. From how we grow and prepare foods from seed to patient, the circle of health we create is founded in principles of reciprocity and care.
DMC Healers—Certified Herbalist/Plant Medicine Doctor Sage LaPena and Physician/Musician Rupa Marya
Root Cause Analysis for Diseases that Plague Colonized People and Places
