Cohort 1 · 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 1

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 clinical 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 eating alone is a clinical concern.
  • 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 as medicine: massage dates and the Trinidadian nara tradition.
  • Joy, laughter, and letting go of the chemicals we lean on.

PILLAR 3

Clinical 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.
  • Reading vitality in the body: skin, eyes, the tone of the voice, the tongue.

PILLAR 4

The Hands-On Apothecary

Step by step, the traditional Caribbean forms:

  • Teas & decoctions — the thermos that goes everywhere, root and bark extractions, the 5-day cycling rule.
  • Bush baths — the skin, the body’s largest organ, for exhaustion, grief, and touch deprivation.
  • Herbal steams & inhalers — your own blends, dosed 14–20 drops: copaiba, vetiver, frankincense.
  • Moon-cycle tinctures — made by hand, small batches, new moon to full moon.

Five Caribbean Touchstone Plants

I won’t bury you in dozens of plants you can’t find. We take five and go all the way into them. One of the five is waiting for you in every supermarket and Caribbean kitchen in North America.

Sorrel

Hibiscus sabdariffa

The festive blood tonic. Celebration, nourishment for the heart and blood vessels, and deep vitality in one cup.

Cerasee

Momordica charantia

The great bitter cleaner. Why bitter is the taste missing from modern diets, and how elders used it to restore metabolic tone.

Caribbean Bay Leaf

Pimenta racemosa

Nothing like the European kitchen bay. The warm, fragrant engine of circulation in island medicine.

Blue Vervine

Stachytarpheta jamaicensis

Restoring the nervous system, settling frayed nerves, cooling heat from the inside.

Soursop

Annona muricata

Deep, restorative sleep and a steady nervous system. Where to source the leaf, how to cycle it safely, the traditional decoctions.

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

Cohort 1 — Enrolment open

Cohort 1 is live, and I guide it myself.

  • 8 core video modules — full lectures, slide decks, and transcript study guides to download.
  • Hands-on preparation demonstrations — videos of me making bush baths, decoctions, and custom herbal inhalers.
  • Weekly written Q&A with me — post your questions and what you’re seeing; I answer every week inside the course.
  • A private 30-minute live Q&A call with me — one on one, video, once you complete the eight modules. Your questions, your practice, your kitchen.
  • 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 1 Founder Tuition

$197

One payment for the full cohort, lifetime access.

Enrol in Cohort 1

Dates: Cohort 1 start date confirmed to enrolled students first.
Secure checkout. Your address is never sold or shared.

You won’t find a countdown timer on this page. Registration closes when Cohort 1 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 clinical depth here too, the kind Western herb schools rarely teach.

Do I get live time with Christopher?

Yes — one private 30-minute live video call with me, booked when you complete the eight modules. Your questions, answered one on one. And every week I answer the course question board in writing.

Do I need rare tropical plants to participate?

No. You can find all five touchstone plants, dried or fresh, across North America, the UK, and Europe. And the core of the work is listening, daily rhythm, baths, steams, and inhalers — that works with the plants 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.