Our ethos and values:

A Community of Practice for Insight Herbalism

At the heart of the school is a Community of Practice. This means that learning here is not about instruction or certification, but about participation in a shared field of practice that deepens over time. Knowledge is shaped through experience, reflection, dialogue, and embodied encounter, rather than delivered as fixed truths. We learn with the plants, not merely about them.

Learning through relationship

Our approach centres direct learning from plants — listening, sensing, and responding — and attending to the inner and outer changes that these relationships catalyse. This work often moves at a slower pace than conventional training, because it honours the complexity of healing, perception, and integration.

Learning in this way sometimes asks us to engage and deconstruct some of our prior experiences of learning where they were rooted within hierarchical systems – this unlearning is very much part of the process.

Training and shared practice

At the core of the Community of Practice is the professional training — a collective of committed people developing their skills together over time. Training here does not imply obedience or the reproduction of a single model, but long-term engagement, mutual accountability, and learning through doing.

Within this shared practice, students develop their unique capacity in relational, somatic, process-orientated, and trauma-informed herbalism. We support each other to discover and refine the unique ways we carry this work into our own lives and communities. We do not train people to become replicas of a teacher or tradition; we support the emergence of diverse practitioners, situated in their own ecology of community and land. We do not claim a lineage; rather, we support one another in discovering the deep lineages we each hold within our own bodily knowing.

Peer support and sovereignty

Two core values underpin the school: peer support and sovereignty.

We become stronger as we feel seen – learning is strengthened when it is witnessed, reflected, and held within community. Students are encouraged to learn with one another, to offer authentic feedback, and to recognise each other’s growth and capacity. At the same time, we hold practitioner sovereignty as central. Once someone completes their training, they step forward as an independent herbalist, responsible for shaping their own practice, ethics, supervision, and ongoing development.

The school may continue to offer colleagueship, resources, and guidance, but authority does not follow graduates into their professional lives. This distinction is intentional and important.

Leadership, power, and responsibility

We recognise that any meaningful training involves leadership and asymmetry, particularly in the early and middle stages of learning. Clear leadership creates safety, coherence, and direction, and we do not pretend otherwise. At the same time, we are explicit about the realities of power within teaching relationships and commit to speaking about these dynamics openly rather than allowing them to operate unconsciously.

As students mature in their practice, authority is gradually decentralised.

Skills, confidence, and discernment are intentionally recentred to individuals and to the peer group, so that dependency on the teacher or institution does not become a feature of the work. Power is treated as something that must be reviewed regularly and actively dismantled once it no longer serves the purpose of training.

This reflects our wider ethical commitment: to support the emergence of practitioners who are capable, grounded, and sovereign in their practice.

An evolving, living field

Insight Herbalism is not a closed system. It is a living field of practice that continues to evolve as we all bring our experiences, questions, mistakes, and insights into shared space. The school acts as a cauldron for this Community of Practice, holding the conditions for learning, dialogue, and reflection, while allowing the work itself to remain alive.

We, as are the plants, are constantly learning and growing – we invite you to come learn and grow with us.