The goal of the Blue Ridge School of Herbal Medicine is to teach students how to identify, harvest and use the abundance of plants that grow all around us. By understanding the natural medicine of the earth, students will begin to grasp how they can work to harmonize imbalances and improve health.
We hope that we can provide students with the gift of connecting to the plants and seeing the world in a new way. This vision is about treating the person with the disease, not just the disease the person has. While this is a simple statement, the knowledge, wisdom and intuition behind this paradigm shift takes months to learn and a lifetime of practice.
It is a new way of looking at life.
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PROGRAMS
Essentials of Herbalism Program
This practical class will give you a strong introduction to the culturally rich world of alternative medicine and directly engage you with the herbs. Each weekend includes lectures and hands-on medicine making, along with plant walks in herb gardens and richly diverse local forests.
Holistic Herbalism Program
This program is for anyone who wants to be self-sufficient for their health or a community healer. We will focus on constitutional diagnosis and holistic treatment through tonic herbs, food and lifestyle. You'll learn how to identify and gather plants and make high-quality preparations.
Advanced Clinical Program
This class focuses on learning traditional diagnostic strategies and treatment protocols, balanced with a holistic view of what client-practitioner client should be. We teach an intuitive approach to interaction with clients combined with modern science and traditional approaches.
The mission of the Blue Ridge School of Herbal Medicine is to help students heartfully connect with nature, the collective and themselves through an awareness of body and ecology to promote healing in the world.
WHAT SETS US APART?
COMMUNITY
Creating community in the classroom is a big advantage of doing an in-person versus an online class. The direct connection with teachers and fellow students throughout school will create a time in your life that you'll remember.
EXPERIENCE
CoreyPine and the other core teachers have years of clinical experience seeing clients and an intimate knowledge of the wild plants that we will study.
LONGEVITY
BRSHM was started in 1999 and has been running for 20 years. Several hundred people have graduated over that time.
LOCATION
Asheville, NC is a forward-thinking town, famous for its large presence of organic foods, permaculture and herbal medicine. The Blue Ridge Mountains have wide plant diversity, some say the most diversity of any temperate area in the world. It has also been a major location for wild herbs for hundreds of years, dating back to the Cherokee use of wild plants and continuing through the 19th century when Asheville was an epicenter of herbal commerce.
EAST & WEST
We teach a sensory approach to Chinese medicine, with an emphasis on how to integrate these concepts into a western herbal practices. The principles of Chinese medicine help us understand the body better and start thinking in terms of patterns of imbalances so that we can better choose what plants to use for whom.
EXPERIENCE
The school has a body-centered approach to learning herbalism so that, in addition to textbook information, students learn to experience how the herbs affect them through trying different forumlas, spending time in the woods learning wild plants, and more.
