SACRED
TEACHINGS OF
TOBACCO
Elemental Lessons: Earth
With Francisca Santibanez and Eve Ekman
Saturday, April 19th
1pm-4pm PT
IN PERSON
In Inverness, California
Join us for an enriching afternoon in beautiful Inverness with this beloved Plant Teacher.
We will gather to learn, sit, and participate in a ceremony focused on tobacco's teachings with the Earth Element, understanding grounding, deep listening, cultivating prayer and sacred reciprocity.
We will engage in communing with Tobacco in various ways, including: meditation, medicine making, ceremonial tool making, rituals, and more. You will have the option to work with tobacco energetically, topically and internally, with preparations of flower essence, happé (snuff), and/or ritual smoke.
Participants will receive some happé medicine(tobacco snuff), a bottle of flower essence plus the supplies to make together a copper kuripe (happé self-applicator)
*ALL SUPPLIES AND PLANT PREPARATIONS ARE INCLUDED IN TUITION FOR THIS CLASS
About Francisca Santibanez
Francisca Santibanez is a passionate plant lover and devotee. An animist, herbalist, ritualist, wellness guide, counselor, medicine maker, educator, artist, and founder of Plant Spirit Talk, she is dedicated to healing, growth, and liberation. She is continually inspired by the empowerment and deep wisdom that emerges when we reconnect with the earth for healing and remembrance.
Raised in Brazil, Chile, and California, Francisca later ventured to the lush jungles and mountains of Peru to study with Indigenous teachers from Mestizo, Quechua, Shipibo, and Q’eros lineages. There, she met her current teachers, Amelia Panduro De Sinuiri of the Shipibo tribe and wisdom carriers and healers from the Q’eros family of the Quispe Apaza and Chura Flores lineages.
Her intimate connection with plants, the earth, and the spirit world began in infancy. This profound love for nature guides her life, along with her devotion to Pachamama. In 2012, a severe health crisis left her disabled for two years. Through herbal medicine and plant initiations, she healed physically, emotionally, and spiritually, leading her on a path of decolonization, self-discovery, and accelerated growth.
In 2013, Francisca formalized her herbal studies through the Western Clinical Herbalism program at the Berkeley Herbal Center, where she later taught. In 2014, she embarked on an ancestral reclamation journey to South America, learning from Indigenous teachers at the Raizes del Sur gatherings in Chile and Peru. Throughout her healing journey, she has been guided by a diverse array of teachers—human, plant, ancestral, and spirit.
Francisca’s path is one of purpose, sovereignty, and deep commitment to guiding and uplifting others as they awaken to their own Medicine.
About Eve Ekman
Eve Ekman, Ph.D., MSW, is a contemplative social scientist, teacher, author, and Senior Fellow at the Greater Good Science Center (GGSC), UC Berkeley. Eve has been a lead teacher for the Cultivating Emotional Balance, CEB, training program for over 15 years, guiding hundreds of students and teachers in training from over 21 countries through retreat and online learning. Additionally Eve is a published academic researcher in the fields of meditation, compassion, psychedelics, and burnout. Eve endeavors to hold both the secular and scientific alongside the sacred and spiritual in her approach to leading teachings, retreats, and research studies.
Eve delights in creating unique opportunities for groups to deepen their knowledge and practice of emotion awareness drawing upon her cutting edge scientific knowledge, direct clinical work, and personal practice.Eve's early clinical work as a front line health care provider, inspired her intervention research to support compassion and prevent burnout during her Ph.D at UC Berkeley and postdoctoral training at UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Medicine.
In recent years Eve has brought her interdisciplinary approach to various roles including a Director of Training for the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley to develop science informed trainings that support a meaningful life; Wellbeing Lead in the Health team at Apple, Inc. creating and shipping apple's first ever well being related experiences ; and creating a contemplative curriculum for the facilitator training at the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics. Eve leads a weekly meditation and emotion awareness group in the heart of San Francisco dedicated to supporting students in their work of seeing themselves more clearly and developing greater compassion.
