The 2024/25 Lunatic group is full, please email brittany@thymeherbal.com to be added to the waitlist.
This in-person course is for those who want to connect with and bring deeper awareness to their authentic selves – their inner lunatic as a being who feels deeply, honors their needs, follows inner knowings, and invests and believes in inner longings. This is work of self-knowing and affirmation – leading to more self-awareness, self-acceptance, and ultimately deep love and connection with self and other. We’ll use astrology and specifically your natal moon placement and the moon’s cycles as a lens and entry point into doing this work. The moon offers us a profound way to look inward and care for parts of our identity we have been denying or neglecting in part due to societal/cultural norms.
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Course Overview:
The moon represents our inner emotional landscape, how we feel, our needs for connection, and how we nourish ourselves and others. Our personal relationship with our inner archetypal moon and astrological moon placement speaks through our body. It is the realm of the inner, personal sacred temple,* a place long oppressed and repressed by patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, and other power over narratives, structures, and institutions. We internalize the values and expectations held in the culture and in our past and current histories – we enforce them on ourselves and project them onto others. This has led to a deep cultural lunar wound that has in large part denied us of an authentic relationship with our inner world – our emotional landscapes and intimacy with our feelings, as they live in our body and our psyche.
The moon is an ever-present mirror of the life cycle. In its continuous illustration of waxing and waning it models transformative, cyclical, wholistic process. When we embrace this process within our inner emotional landscape, in our relationship with our body and our nervous system, and in relationship with others we can begin and continue the work of connecting, reconnecting, and reclaiming our parts.
Worshiping* at the altar* of the moon is about connecting with our inner lunar temple – our unique, sacred inner landscapes, our bodies, and ultimately our families, communities, the earth and the celestial realms, and all relationships that mirror these parts back to us. It requires taking the time to listen to ourselves, to feel our feelings, to admit and embrace our needs, to connect with our identity narratives, the motivations behind our personal adaptive strategies, and our beliefs in ourselves and our capacities – all the while re-imagining and re-integrating ourselves in our continually emerging authenticity and wholeness.
The group container of this class will mirror the inner work we take on as individuals – equalizing power, acknowledging the unspoken and the unseen, and owning and stepping into our unique contributions to the group organism. We will learn to see and feel ourselves as individuals, as well as the group, as complete, wholistic organisms – the group as a macrocosm of its members and a microcosm of the cosmos and the cultural contexts we encounter and bring with us.
The archetype of the moon in the collective and in our birth chart is also about the relational field – how we experience connection, how we desire to and most authentically connect with others, what nourishes us in relationship, and how we both give and receive care from ourselves and others. The group serves as a laboratory for witnessing and experiencing ourselves in the relational field – through sharing, listening, and witnessing ourselves in relationship with ourselves and others our relational tendencies, patterns, longings, and gifts rise into awareness. Embodied in our Lunar parts, we see the ways our relational patterns both serve and don’t serve our continually emerging authenticity and authority.
My, Brittany’s, group leadership style follows a biomimetic process that sees and holds the group as a dynamic, cyclical organism – both a product of and a creatrix in the web of life. All members are held as both members and leaders – nourishing our unique leadership styles as they emerge organically from our continually evolving embodiment and authenticity.
The structure of the course and the course content will support and encourage diverse and non-linear ways of knowing – through continual validation of somatic body awareness, intuition and inner knowing, dreaming, and communication with and deep listening to ourselves, group members, the more than human world, and the otherworld.
The class journey includes a 2-hour one-on-one birth chart reading with me before the class begins where we explore your natal moon sign and house placement as well as the web that it weaves with the rest of your birth chart, your life experiences, and the stories, values and beliefs you carry. Additional one-on-one mentoring is available at a discounted rate throughout the duration of the program.
The work of this class is in:
- connecting and reconnecting with your inner emotional landscape, your body knowing and wisdom, and your deep authenticity and personal evolutionary journey in this lifetime.
- embodying the truth that we are not separate from our bodies, the earth, or the collective. Bringing our lunar parts into equal partnership with our other parts.
- acknowledging and dialoging with the ways that internalized values of culture, family, and place both hinder and support (y)our beliefs, narratives, and (y)our authentic homecomings.
- experiencing ourselves as vessels of the microcosm and the macrocosm as both members and leaders in community belonging and group process that is committed to self-reflection, transformation, restorative justice, and affirmation.
- apprenticing with the life cycle and learning to worship at the altar of the moon as it is mirrored above, as it exists within your body, and as manifest in your individual and the collective psyche.
- recognizing and validating our relational needs for connection and exploring the ways our patterns and tendencies in the relational field serve and deny the meeting of those needs.
- bearing deep witness to ourselves and others in the group we become more fluent in recognizing and relating to our own and other’s wholeness – cultivating lenses of compassion in service to collective liberation.
*A note about how I use the words worship, altar, and temple:
The term worship by definition is usually associated with reverence and devotion to a deity. The term temple is also usually associated with specific religious or spiritual contexts. In the context of this course, we subvert and challenge most religious and social institutional power dynamics by turning the source of worship and the space of the temple inward toward our inner parts, our inner knowing, and the connections that our individual cycles of body and psyche have with the broader life cycle around us (notably the moon and its cycles/phases).
The term Altar is commonly associated with Christianity, but the term and concept are used historically and currently in many spiritual and religious traditions. I use the word altar to denote a sacred place either virtual or tangible, that is held with intention, tended to, and used as a place of awareness and contemplation, and for personal or communal sanctuary and worship.
All are welcome in this class – people of all genders, sexualities, relationship constellations, ages, ethnicities, races, abilities, and religious and spiritual beliefs.
Accessibility: This class will be held in English. My teaching space is not handicap accessible. If you have any accessibility needs or questions, please contact me so we can address your needs.
The 2024/25 Lunatic group is full, please email brittany@thymeherbal.com to be added to the waitlist.
Have Questions? Want to learn more?
Wondering if this class is a good fit for you or ready to apply?
Please email me to set up a time to talk – brittany@thymeherbal.com
This class consists of 9, day-long workshops in-person at the Thyme Herbal classroom and gardens in Conway, MA. With a few exceptions, each class will take place on a Saturday near to the Equinox or cross-quarter. In the event of weather-related unsafe travel conditions, the class will be held on the same date and time via Zoom.
In our first meeting we will begin to craft our container, setting up our group agreements and intentions and opening ourselves to the journey. We will set ourselves up for the spiralic journey that will involve inquiry into our personal identity narratives and our inner emotional processes, belief systems, and stories using the phases of the moon as our guide. Subsequent classes following the wheel of the year will correspond to particular moon phases – each phase will guide curriculum and exploration as it relates to our inner journeys and the larger group journey.
More than a class, Lunatic is a laboratory, a place to both talk about and experience our lunar parts. While each class does include some presentation of formal content, ritual and ceremonial practices hold the shape of the day, alongside time for personal inquiry, reflection, and sharing. We will use each group member’s astrological moon placement as the basis for personal exploration and inquiry – deepening our understandings of how our moon placement helps us understand our inner needs, longings, emotional landscapes, personal relationship styles and processes, and membership and leadership styles in group, family, and community contexts.
Class dates:*
Saturdays from 9:30 – 4:30 pm
This class meets in-person in Conway, MA
November 16, 2024
January 4, 2025
February 8, 2025
March 22, 2025
May 3, 2025
June 14, 2025
July 26, 2025
September 13, 2025
November 1, 2024
*Although it is unlikely, it is possible that class dates will have to shift over the course of the program. Students will be notified as soon as possible of any necessary date changes.
*It is OK for students to miss classes for anticipated or unanticipated reasons throughout the course of the program.
Have Questions? Want to learn more?
Wondering if this class is a good fit for you or ready to apply?
Please email me to set up a time to talk – brittany@thymeherbal.com
Exploring my lunar parts in the context of Brittany’s Lunatic course has been an integral part of my journey of healing and becoming. Under Brittany’s adept leadership and with the steady presence of my course cohort, Lunatic provided the safe container, framework, and encouragement I needed in order to bravely dive deeper in my exploration of inherited and experienced traumas and wounds that I hold in my body and psyche and the ways in which these wounds influence and limit my thoughts, experiences, relationships, and energy.
Throughout the course I grew more comfortable with and indeed befriended my inner world of feelings. I came to understand the wisdom that this terrain holds and to experience the spaciousness and increased energy and vitality that arises when I honor and respond to the needs of these wise feelings. I have noticed that as I become better at identifying these feelings and needs, I have more confidence in areas of my life that involve decision-making, asserting needs, setting and holding boundaries, and communicating with others. And, when I put less emotional energy into these places, more energy becomes available for joy, fun, adventure, creativity, and play! Overall, I have witnessed parts of myself that I have been working on for years in traditional therapy begin to transform, which has enabled me to relate to my inner and outer worlds from a more grounded, present, and peaceful place.
Brittany is a truly gifted teacher. The depth of content and course structure felt just right and her ability to break down complex, big-picture themes into perfect-sized bites for tasting and digesting is impeccable, as is her way of both firmly holding and gently guiding the group organism. She is equal parts unconditionally loving Mother and fierce, truth-seeking Warrior– both vital companions on any journey of the soul! I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to have journeyed with her in this way and I highly recommend this course to anyone interested in personal and/or planetary healing and evolution.
It is hard to describe the true impact and experience of this course, and it is simply because the nature of Brittany’s service and work is that it touches those indescribable places in us – the sacred, the liminal, the lunar, the places where– especially in our culture and language– there really are no words available.
-S.B.
Brittany’s ability to weave together astrology, herbalism, ceremony, and the work of soul and psyche is a unique gift. She is warm, caring, and kind and the container she creates for the group feels safe, spacious, and generous.
Throughout the class, I was inspired to get to know myself deeper by listening to my feelings and understanding the needs that emerge from my intimacy with them. Brittany’s guidance helped to orient me, opening new doors into my inner emotional landscape and the stories and beliefs that live there. Her example and guidance has inspired what lives deep in me to come forward into the world to be heard and received – I feel more empowered to share my unique gifts. I am deeply grateful.
-G.K.
The 2024/25 Lunatic group is full, please email brittany@thymeherbal.com to be added to the waitlist.
Two spots in this class are reserved for BIPOC scholarship applicants. Please email brittany@thymeherbal.com with interest.
To learn more about the course or to register please contact me directly via email: brittany@thymeherbal.com.
The cost of the program is $1,375. This includes 9, 7 hour classes over the course of 13 months and a 2 hour one-on-one astrology reading with me prior to the start of the program. Additional mentoring is available at a discounted rate throughout the duration of the program.
Payment Plan Option
You can choose to pay for the program in full or pay via a payment plan. For the payment plan, a $270 deposit is required at the time of registration, followed by 13 monthly payment of $85/month. The first monthly payment being made in November of 2024 and the final payment made in November of 2025. (If an alternative payment arrangement would work better for you, please reach out.)
Partial scholarships for BIPOC are available, please email me to inquire.
…from the heart of my unique identity narratives and personal passions – as an astrologer, herbalist, inter-spiritual minister, apprentice to the earth, the moon and the life cycle, and as a personal seeker on the evolutionary journey, continually connecting, reconnecting, and reclaiming my own identities as a child, parent, partner, citizen, and as a white, cis-woman with class privilege. My work is inspired by my love and passion for personal growth and healing, and the interconnections between self, society, the natural world, and the life cycle. Healing from the influences of structural authority, trauma, and separation from nature and self is part of my personal path of growth, as well one of my paths of service in this lifetime.
-Brittany