Herbs, Body Systems & Field Herbalism

Next class, August 9: Herbs & Wellness Strategies for the Immune System.‍ ‍

We are living through a period of compounding instability. Healthcare is increasingly inaccessible and impersonal. Food systems are fragile. Communities are fractured. Ecological, political, and economic pressures are converging in ways people feel every day in their bodies.

This is not a collection of individual problems. These conditions emerge from systems that prioritize extraction over relationship, profit over care, and disconnection over community.

In this landscape, knowing how to work with plants, how to read the body, and how to support the people around you is more than a hobby. It is a practical skill. It is community infrastructure. It is a form of continuity.

Herbal medicine has always been part of how people cared for one another when institutions failed to meet their needs. The plants have not changed. What changes is whether we know how to work with them skillfully.

This series is for people who already know some herbs and want a deeper framework for when and how to use them. We build discernment, pattern recognition, and sound clinical reasoning. We learn to assess presentations, recognize meaningful patterns, and match herbs to the person in front of us rather than to a symptom list.

We practice that reasoning out loud in every class, working through what you'd actually ask the person in front of you. In the final two classes, we’ll go over the art of intake.

Because same diagnosis does not mean same pattern.

The goal is not simply to know more herbs. The goal is to become more useful.

Take one class or take the series

The same clinical framework travels with every class. Terrain, energetics, tissue states, pattern recognition, and formula reasoning are the spine of each day, applied to a different system. Late starters are not behind. Each class is designed to be entered on its own, and each one deepens the last.

Remaining classes

August 9 — Herbs & Wellness Strategies for the Immune System

We leave behind immune boosting as a clinical strategy.

The immune system rarely fails to respond. It struggles to finish responding. Inflammation without resolution. Activation without rest. Repair without the conditions to complete. This is why someone can be inflamed and exhausted at the same time, why flares follow stress rather than exposure, and why so many people say the same sentence: I'm not sick anymore, but I still don't feel well.

We work with the phases of immune activity, response, repair, and adaptation, and learn to ask what phase a system is in before choosing an herb. We cover barrier integrity, the gut-immune axis, stress physiology and psychoneuroimmunology, lymphatic drainage and resolution, cellular renewal, cumulative load, and autoimmune terrain as unresolved immune activity rather than a confused or aggressive system.

We cover the herbal actions with immune affinity: immunomodulators, immune stimulants, lymphatics, demulcents and barrier protectives, diaphoretics, anti-inflammatories, adaptogens, and the reasoning that tells you which of them the person in front of you can actually use right now.

Timing is the whole thing. Stimulation helps when the system is cold or sluggish and has capacity to recover. It backfires when terrain is hot, congested, or dominated by stress physiology. Echinacea is real medicine, and it is the wrong medicine in a body with nothing left to recover with.

You will leave knowing how to tell the difference between a system that needs stimulation and one that needs to rest. Throughout, we practice the questions you'd actually ask the person in front of you.

September 13 — Herbs & Wellness Strategies for the Respiratory System

The lungs sit at the intersection of immune, nervous, and gut-lung signaling, which makes respiratory presentations some of the most layered you will see. Upper versus lower respiratory tissue states, acute versus chronic pattern differentiation, demulcents, expectorants, antispasmodics, and the environmental and systemic drivers that shape the picture: air quality, mold exposure, chronic stress, structural inflammation. Formula building for the whole person, not just the cough. Throughout, we practice the questions you'd actually ask the person in front of you.

October 4 — Herbal Pain Re~Leaf: Acute and Chronic + The Art of Intake

Pain is a clue. The question an herbalist asks is what terrain this pain is emerging from and what it is communicating. A warming herb in a hot inflammatory presentation makes it worse. A cooling formula in a cold stagnant pattern misses the root.

Pain mapped by terrain: inflammatory, neurological, digestive, emotional, stagnant. Herbal actions in depth, with energetics and reasoning for each: analgesics, antispasmodics, muscle relaxants, anti-inflammatories, nervines, circulatory stimulants, bitters, lymphatics, mast cell stabilizers, mineral-rich herbs. The 7Song hierarchy of relief and how to calibrate dose and preparation. Palliative care as legitimate care, alongside root cause work rather than instead of it. Influences on pain sensitivity including constitution, nervous system tone, trauma, and systemic oppression. Natural alternatives to NSAIDs. Favorite topicals: Hypericum oil for nerve pain, Arnica for trauma and bruising, Mahanarayan oil for deep musculoskeletal pain. Sensory and nervous system tools that shift a body out of alarm. Emotional recovery after pain, what it looks like and why it matters. OPQRST applied to herbal intake

October 25 — Herbal First Aid for Events, Disasters, and the Front Lines + The Art of Intake

Whether you are supporting a neighborhood gathering, a regional festival, a mutual aid response, or a community in crisis, the skills are the same. Drawn from a best practices manual for herbal first aid and wellness spaces at events and on the front lines, a fifty-hour clinical training distilled into one day, informed by Wilderness First Responder training.

Acute presentations in field conditions: wound care, pain, respiratory distress, digestive crisis, trauma response, heat and cold exposure, anxiety and shock. Scope of practice: when to refer, when to hold, when to act. Safety, consent, and trauma-informed care under stress. Setting up a wellness space: layout, flow, intake, documentation, team coordination. Mutual aid framing, because herbal first aid is collective care, not individual survivalism. Working with what you have: improvised preparations, local plants, community resources. We review intake for field conditions.

Who this is for

Come if you are a practicing herbalist ready to sharpen clinical reasoning. Come if you are a student who wants to move past foundational herb knowledge into the art of it. Come if you have ever sat in an intake feeling uncertain and wanted a clearer framework. Come if you want to be genuinely useful at a gathering, an event, or a moment of community crisis.

That shift happens best in community. Each class is a circle where everyone's knowledge is in the room. We learn from one another as much as from the curriculum.

Hosted in Decatur, Georgia.

How each class works

One Sunday a month, 10 AM to 5 PM.

For body systems classes, you arrive having completed a one-page write-up on the day's topic. Anatomy, physiology, whatever has already landed for you. We come in refreshed on the basics and move into clinical work faster.

Breaks as needed. After a 45-minute lunch we go deeper into conditions and pattern work. Every class closes with an intake practice worked through in circle.

The day runs on a clear structure and a real clock, and it stays conversational. Each session makes space for practitioners to bring their own knowledge and experience into the room. You leave with detailed handouts built to be used in practice, and written feedback on your submitted write-up.

Pricing

Individual class: $150. A $30 non-refundable deposit holds your spot, balance of $120 due by the class date.

Remaining four classes: $520, which is $130 per class, a savings of $80. A $130 non-refundable deposit holds your spot. The balance is paid as three monthly payments of $130, due the Sunday of each class.

Pay-It-Forward Sustainer rate: $175 per class, or $620 for all four. This supports community access for those who cannot pay full price.

Active Fleur + Forage Free Clinic volunteers receive a discount code. Reach out.

Healing justice pricing. Cost should not be the thing that keeps you out, and I want the work that goes into it to be held. Reach out.

A percentage of proceeds goes back to Fleur + Forage Free Clinic for hosting. Payment supports the continuity of care and the ability to show up consistently for others.

Deposits may be applied to a future class date if you need to reschedule with prior notice.

Registration

To register for an individual class, click here.

To register for the remaining four classes, click here.

Questions, reach out directly.

About the instructor

Deia Pauline is a clinical herbalist and educator based in Atlanta, practicing since 2008 and registered with the American Herbalists Guild since 2014. Her path to herbal medicine began in 1997 through activist and Indigenous solidarity work: gatherings and actions on Western Shoshone land, frontline care at Atomic Cafes serving miso and coffee to downwinders, and sacred site defense alongside Indigenous communities.

A longtime Wilderness First Responder and former EMT, she brings field medical grounding to her herbal practice. Trained at Berkeley Herbal Center, Blue Otter School of Herbal Medicine, and The Dhyana Center in Ayurvedic foundations, she now teaches in Berkeley Herbal Center's Village Herbalist 2 program and runs Grassroots Apothecary, a community herbal practice rooted in mutual aid and collective care.

Her field clinical work spans more than two decades: street medic work with Bay Area Radical Health Collective, disaster relief in New Orleans after Katrina and in New York City, MASHH Clinic Collective, and her own herbal wellness clinics at Sunset Campout, Oregon Eclipse, Envision, multiple Women's Herbal Symposiums, Buckeye Earth Skills Gatherings, California wildfire relief, and Fleur + Forage Free Clinic's work serving those most underserved in Atlanta.

Past classes have covered psychedelic support and integration with clinical herbalism, longevity and healthspan, depression and anxiety, and running herbal clinics on the front lines.

You may catch her on a dance floor somewhere, preferably outdoors and under the stars.

This practice exists to keep care alive inside a system that actively devalues it.Registration:

To register for an individual class, click here.

To register for the four part series, click here.‍ ‍

*Deposits may be applied to a future class date if you need to reschedule with prior notice.

Questions, reach out directly.