About this Event
Wednesday, January 29 | Remembering How to Heal: Salve Making with Sebastian Bouknight
This workshop will teach the practice of making healing salves - particularly for a salve that helps soothe tense muscles and frayed nerves. We'll learn about hops, St Johns wort, rose, and calendula (all of which can grow in NYC), first through sensory exploration and intuition, and then through their documented uses and energetics. In the sensory exploration, we'll tune into our bodies and the knowledge and memories they hold around these plants. We'll learn how to make a salve with infused oil of these herbs (pre-infused), and how to use the salve to care for our bodies in an intentional way.
About Your Facilitator Sebastian Bouknight:
I am a garden grower, land steward, environmental educator, and longtime student of herbal medicine. My great-grandmother, who grew up in a rural mountain village in southern Italy and immigrated to Astoria in the 1890s, was committed to becoming "American," and never passed on her knowledge of the land and healing to my grandmother. I'm committed to undoing this loss - to learning practices of land stewardship, herbal medicine, and ritual lost through assimilation and displacement, and sharing these gifts. Everybody comes from a land and every land co-evolved with cultures of care - I want to help folks connect with their embodied healing memory, and learn the hands-on arts of medicine making.
Join us for Recipes and Rituals for Collective Care every week!
What does it mean to heal in community? What does it feel like when we extend care to ourselves and the collective? How do plants and our local ecologies care for us? How can we care for the plants and local ecologies in return? How doe we extend this medicine to others?
Weave in rituals and recipes into your own self-care and community care practices through weekly explorations in herbal arts, somatic movement in the greenhouse and garden, folk remedies, and other wild-crafts and meditative activities that foster a deeper connection to plants to care for the body, mental health, and the people you move with. Amplify this knowledge through mapping out how you will work with plant medicine to extend the care to others.
Each week, be guided by a guest herbalist, healing artist, or wellness practitioner who will help you create your own toolkit and apothecary for self and communal care.
Workshops are rain or shine.
When inside the greenhouse and kitchen we will open our double-doors and windows to vent the space and encourage masking and social distancing when in more closed-in spaces.
Accessibility: Our kitchen/classroom space is wheelchair accessible. With prior planning, we can add a few small mats onto the pebbled ground of greenhouse to make a small wheel-chair accessible path. Our learning garden has grass paths, and the entrance is through a gate with a small, raised entrance. Our tables can be lowered/raised, and we have several backless benches or stools. Our kitchen is in regular use, and while we try to cook without peanuts, much of our cookware is shared and we cannot guarantee a nut-free environment. We have a first aid kit, and the closest AED is in another building several yards away. Drinking water is made available in refillable pitchers.
Our closest bathrooms are a building away, about a one-minute walk. A gender neutral bathroom is also available, and this is accessible by key which you can request from staff. We are not a scent-free zone, and because herbalism classes take place here, cannot guarantee that the site will be clear of any essential oil smells. If you have needs not addressed here, please reach out to Mallory Craig at [email protected].
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Greenhouse and Education Center at Denny Farrell Riverbank State Park, 679 Riverside Dr, New York, United States
USD 0.00