Cohort 6 · Now enrolling

Caribbean Herbalism in Practice

On location in St. Lucia — teaching where the plants grow

“Plants are not for emergencies.”

Someone catches a cold and goes looking for a tea. Someone can’t sleep and goes looking for a tincture. That is the pharmacy talking. In the Caribbean, medicine is not an emergency room. The plants are in the morning pot and the evening bath. They are the smell of the house.

Illness is one small corner of the work. The rest is a relationship you keep every day. This course teaches that relationship.

Who is teaching you

CHRISTOPHER SCIPIO · RH (AHG)

I have been in active clinical practice for 39 years, since 1986. I did not learn this from a textbook, and I do not teach it from one. I teach it as a way of living that never broke.

Caribbean medicine is not one thread. It is many old traditions that met on the islands and kept living together:

  • Indigenous Carib and Arawak knowledge of the island barks, roots, and coastal plants.
  • African plant knowledge, carried across the Atlantic in memory and kept alive by word of mouth.
  • East Indian Ayurvedic medicine, brought to Trinidad by generations of indentured families — nara, the abdominal massage tradition, and the bitter vegetables at the root of our cooking.
  • European humoral botany, worked into the kitchen gardens of the islands.
See Cohort 6

What this training is — and what it is not

Before you enrol, here is what we are doing.

Not a plant encyclopaedia

If you want a 500-page book listing 200 herbs and their symptoms, buy a paperback. A list gives you information. It does not teach you how to see.

Not symptom-matching

In traditional practice we never say, “If someone has Symptom X, give them Plant Y.” That is western pharmacology dressed up in green leaves.

A living practice

You learn how an experienced Caribbean herbalist listens to a person, reads their daily balance, and works plants into the rhythm of an ordinary day — repeatable, and in your own kitchen from the first week.

The Four Pillars of the Course

The spine of the teaching, in the order we build it.

PILLAR 1

The Worldview & Ancestral Relationship

Go back just 20 generations and more than 4,000 ancestors stand behind you. Every one of them lived close to plants, every day, because they had to. Our reliance on synthetic bottles is less than three generations old.

Every Caribbean grandmother knew it: who makes your medicine, and how it is made, matters as much as the plant itself.

PILLAR 2

The Lifestyle Foundation

Herbs sit on top of a daily discipline. The 11 foundational rules, including:

  • Where you eat, eating slowly — and why an elder does not like to see you eat alone.
  • The “wet pot” tradition: 80% of what you take in should be living moisture, soups, stews.
  • Physical balancing: 20 minutes a day at home.
  • Touch in the home: massage dates and the Trinidadian nara tradition.
  • Joy, laughter, and letting go of the chemicals we lean on.

PILLAR 3

Listening & Intake

How an experienced practitioner hears what a person is not saying:

  • What did you eat as a young child? Childhood food anchors the adult body.
  • The two hours before sleep, what your dreams say, and how you digest emotion.
  • Why handing someone a plan they cannot keep is worse than doing nothing.
  • I notice how your day runs: when you rise, who you sit with, where your time goes.

PILLAR 4

The Hands-On Apothecary

Step by step, the traditional Caribbean forms:

  • Teas & decoctions — the thermos that goes everywhere, root and bark extractions.
  • Bush baths — wild leaves gathered, not bought, boiled in a big pot in the yard, then poured into the bath or over a person. In Jamaica they belong to Saturday, beside bush tea: the same leaves, one drunk, one poured.
  • Herbal steams & inhalers — your own blends.
  • Moon-cycle tinctures — made by hand, small batches, new moon to full moon.

Plants, In Their Place

I won’t bury you in dozens of plants you can’t find. What matters is a small circle of plants, used well: what each one is for, how it is prepared, and when to leave it alone.

“You do not learn plants from a chart. You learn them by smell, by touch, and by watching an elder’s hands.”

Cohort 6 — Enrolment open

Cohort 6 is live, and I guide it myself.

  • 8 core video modules — full lectures, slide decks, and transcript study guides to download.
  • Proprietary visual blueprints — the ancestral field charts, the traditional extraction map, the intake checklist.
  • Lifetime access — every recording and every future cohort update stays yours.

Cohort 6 Tuition

$197

One payment for the full cohort, lifetime access.

Enrol in Cohort 6

Dates: Cohort 6 starts within 30 days of the first student enrolling. If it doesn’t, you are refunded in full.
Secure checkout. Your address is never sold or shared.

You won’t find a countdown timer on this page. Registration closes when Cohort 6 begins, so I can give my full attention to the students in it.

Have questions?

Is this training suitable for beginners?

Yes. I teach a way of watching and relating to plants, not academic chemistry, so a beginner can follow it. Experienced herbalists will find depth here too, the kind Western herb schools rarely teach.

Who teaches Cohort 6?

I do. I have been practising for 39 years, and I guide Cohort 6 myself.

Do I need rare tropical plants to participate?

No. Nothing rare is needed, and nothing has to be bought. The core of the work is listening, daily rhythm, baths, steams, and inhalers — and that works with what grows near you or what you can pick up in any ordinary market, wherever you live.

Does this course certify me as a medical practitioner?

No. This course is for education only. It teaches traditional, ancestral herbalism and how to keep your daily life in balance. It gives you no medical licence and no clinical authority to diagnose disease.