Micha facilitates embodied herbalism and ritual as a heartfelt communion with our living ecosystem. As a birth doula, herbalist and facilitator of transformational retreats, her clients find sanctuary and grounding in connection with the earth.
I began my journey…
growing up in an old farm house, a back-to-the-land family, planting gardens, practicing meditation, yoga, reading Tolkien and celebrating the seasons. My parents ran a youth runaway crisis shelter in the city. They allowed the soothing balm of nature to give themselves inner strength, to effectively hold space for healing in a (more or less) peaceful way. I integrated much of what I witnessed from my family’s practices and from the families they served; the grace of healing that genuine humanity can provide. They became counselor-healers, meditators and yogis to accelerate their own needed self-healing path, and I continue this lineage of ancestral unwinding, with self compassion though awareness in service.
After a decade of a very different career in the performing arts, I came home to the true path of my roots. Turning towards the healing arts, I became a yoga teacher and Esalen massage therapist in 2009. Even though I created a successful yoga program (including Prenatal and Mother & Baby yoga) for Club Med Resorts, I had a heartfelt desire to dive deeper. My mentor at the time Idrissa Diallo, a West African meditation teacher, business man (and mystical being) gave me his intuitive advice: “Before you start your own business, take time to got out into the world and study with the original people, the tribal people. First you should go to Chiang Mai and study with the women’s healers.”
The very next week a guest at the resort offed me a job teaching yoga at an herbalist clinic in Chiang Mai Thailand. I followed this clear nudge from the universe and my life transformed!
I’ve spent much of the past decade in mentorship with traditional women’s healers…
These relationships took time to cultivate and have provided a wellspring of reciprocal support. I’ve studied with many skillful women in Chiang Mai, each sharing a unique approach to touch, intention and plants: Mor Noi, Timmy Kaossaard, Pi Jem and Homeprang Chaleekanha and woman’s herbalism at Watpo Royal Medical School in Bangkok. Above are images from my studies in the matriarchal Lahu Shele Tribe, the village of Huay Nam Rin (village of waterfalls.) My teacher Nalae, is a shamanic medicine woman, herbalist and midwife. It took two years of consistently showing up in the village before she consented to transmit her teachings… she agreed only if I would share them with people in the west. Here she demonstrates shamanic herbal massage, energy sweeping and birth practices while I practice on her for feedback.
When I undertook this path, something in my bones told me that my ancestors did something very similar. I later learned that, yes, the use of herbal massage (with ritual healing intention) is common across many original cultures worldwide, including ancestral Europe, Americas and Africa. Thailand has never been colonized, never lost contact with it’s earth-based traditions. I am beyond blessed to receive direct transmission, of a deeply human experience, from a unbroken lineage of sincere practitioners. This transmission helps revitalize connection with my own diverse ancestral roots, and serves as a conduit to witness and awaken your ancestral magic, belonging to the earth.
Even as I share and grow my practice, I continue to return to my teachers to receive teachings and blessings.
To heal the human spirit…earth-based original cultures worldwide retain uniquely nuanced, elegant understandings of what it means to be fully human in relationship to each other and the earth.
Loving hug from Midwife Robbin Lim during my Doula apprenticeship at Bumi Sehat Gentle Birth Center in Ubud
For me, getting to know another culture is not about appropriating world views or directly copying rituals. Coming to know another way of being can be a cross pollination that allows the mind -and heart- to move in new adaptive directions across a broad horizon of possibility
I developed a relationship with the Bumi Sehat Birth Center, in Ubud Bali…
While based in Thailand, I traveled regularly to Bali to teach prenatal yoga, meanwhile apprenticing as a spiritual doula with Robin Lim, Debra Pascali-Bonaro and the amazing team of Indonesian midwives.
I was eager to put into practice the things I’d learned in Thailand. I asked the local Bali Hindu midwives if I could start working with the mothers. They laughed and said “you can massage the secretaries in the office” so without question, I did. A week later I asked again. “You can massage the nurses” they replied, and I massaged each and every one. Again, I asked to work with the mothers, “you can massage us midwives.” Only after I massaged them all, with humility, was I allowed into the birth room, and the postnatal sanctuary. This was such a beautiful initiation because by that point I knew everyone and the touch built mutual trust. Over the next three years they mentored me and helped me refine and my skills. This began a cultural cross-pollination as they taught me their powerful birth practices, including the use of flowers, mantras and meditative presence while I shared with them the herbal massage practice, transmitted to me by Thai healing women.
From that point onward I began my practice. Working with Midwife Katherine Bramhall, of Gentle Landing Midwifery, in Vermont. From her I learned the New England wise-woman ways, herbal tinctures and fierce determination. I discovered that my own Great-great grandmother was an herbalist-midwife in New Hampshire. I expanded beyond New England, taking personal clients and offering trainings worldwide. Now I’ve settled down in Big Sur California. I continue the path of curiosity, diving into the study of historical herbal magic-traditions of the early Nordic, Celtic and Saxon women’s healers (which often include song/sound and words of clear intention along with herbal applications) similar to my current expression of the practice. I’m enjoying living off grid in a magical yurt-cabin, offering herbal rituals at Esalen Institute and tending my mountainside garden.
