Our Fertile Choice:
a 6 week workshop exploring the breadth of the menstrual cycle and how plants can help us take charge, and take care of our fertility.
Jan 20 - Feb 24, 2025
With Jen Bredesen and Frieda Kipar Bay
“be softer with you.
you are a breathing thing.
a memory to someone.
a home to life.”
The menstrual cycle is the seed and source for all creative life. For thousands of years, we’ve conditioned ourselves to ignore it, abuse it, become ignorant of it. This is one of the roots of patriarchy, which can only perpetuate as long as our fertility rests in the hands of others.
In this six week workshop, we will dive into what it truly means to hold our fertility in our own hands. We will address unwanted conception, desired pregnancies, tending our menstrual cycle as we age, and how to center plants as our allies in this complex journey.
If you are just beginning your fertile journey, reaching the end of it, looking to become pregnant, or prevent untimed pregnancy, you are welcome. All of these are part of everyone’s story in some way, and by including the full arc of fertility, we begin to understand its complexity, mystery, and our sacred responsibility to sharing this knowledge through generations. This knowledge is for all of us.
rosehips, all from one bush.
Curriculum Outline
week 1: fundamentals of the menstrual cycle and fertility tracking (FAM+), the nuance of hormonal input, and herbs that support equanimity through the cycle.
week 2: disorders that arise, why, and how to find rebalance, viewed from the western and eastern energetic standpoints.
week 3: plants to support fertility, pregnancy, prevent miscarriage, and support unplanned miscarriage. Getting clear about safety, efficacy, and when to use what.
week 4: working with plants and cycles to address fertility choice and pregnancy release. Banned herbs, sisters of extinct medicinals, and how to call on our strongest plant allies.
week 5: peri-menopause and menopause: preparation, myths, and acceptance. It is not a disease.
week 6: how to protect and support your fertility and creativity within the cycle phases, and sharing this knowledge with others.
milkweed pod and her seeds.
Logistics
6 Mondays
Jan 20, 27; Feb 3, 10, 17, 24
12-3pm Eastern / 9am-12pm Pacific
Sessions will happen on zoom, and only portions where Jen and Frieda speaking will be recorded. You do not have to have an account to participate.
Session will be 3 hrs. in length, and include a short break, time to ask questions and share experiences, and be fully interactive. This is not a seminar - you will be invited to lean in and contribute questions, insight, experiences, as you feel comfortable.
Registration
Cost: $333
Scholarships are available, please email to inquire.
About Jen Bredesen
Jen (she/they) brings overs 2.5 decades of experience working with plants into her life, teaching, parenting, mentoring and client work. They weave herbalism, nutrition, bodywork & ayurvedic assessment framing into their clinical practice in Sebastopol & remotely. Jen is passionate about herbal first aid, and community care, and has worked within the herbal first aid collective MASHH/ Medicine for all seeking health & healing. She has offered community herbal first aid support in natural disaster relief work on all levels of leadership, first responders, and those directly hit by the loss & trauma of natural disaster. Jen has previously organized & staffed the Wellness Tent of the NCWHS herbal symposium event for over a decade. Nourishing community with food as medicine, microbiome restoration, and brewing and consulting on brewing herbal beers, she loves to support teachers, farmers, parents/grandparents & community mentors as they nourish & guide their circles and the next generations, connecting them with their land and organoleptic ways of relating to plants & their bodies.
Jen has been part of the land in Sonoma county, in Northern California for 23 years, in the Green Valley-Atascadero watershed, living near the area traditionally known as Elderberry House, a traditional site near the Laguna de Santa Rosa, where the Southern Pomo residents have been living and tending the land since time immemorial. Elderberries, Valley Oaks & Mugwort are some of the local plants they are in community with. Jen continues to learn from her Prussian, Tsalagi/Cherokee, Norwegian & Celtic ancestral roots, and has been studying & re-membering the Tsalagi language within their words & bones.
Jen acknowledges many of her beloved plant, body & herbal teachers along the journey: Matthew Wood, Tieraona LowDog, 7Song, James Snow, Gail Julian, Rosemary Gladstar, Cascade Anderson Gellar, Rosita Arvigo, DeAnna Batdorff, Dr Vasant Lad, Roger Eischens, Lori Seaborne, Jesse Conaway, Adam Seller, the Institute of Conscious Bodywork, & Dr Aviva Romm.
About Frieda Kipar Bay
Frieda is a weaver of knowledge, overlapping different threads to better understand the whole. Some of the threads she weaves with: Daoist medicine, qigong, five element theory and diagnostic practices, gardening and native plant restoration, tracking, writing, CI and improvisational dance, The Work That Reconnects facilitation and grief processing, making ritual and equity practice. She finds that beautiful things get made when she weaves with many perspectives. Find her full bio here.
Frieda sees clients as a clinical herbalist, unschools her 2 children, and teaches qigong and herbal medicine in Western Mass.
white peony in bloom.