Guest Teachers
Metta Earth hosts guest teachers offer workshops and classes about farming, herbalism, yoga & many other exciting topics
Laura Ahrens
Yoga & Meditation, Faculty
In her work, physically challenging asana kindles the fire of transformation and focuses strong attention into meditation. Storytelling, metaphorical language, and precisely directed options for alignment teach the tale of our becoming more human.
Laura loves teaching others to be discerning practitioners who synthesize information for themselves. In that spirit, she co-created The New School of Yogic Arts, a teacher training school for those who want to learn to teach the practice of yoga as a living system that breathes differently in each body. Her current work is a melding of all the different truths of moving and living in yoga that she has had the privilege of learning. Her teaching is an approach to practice and is not style focused. Her classes and other offerings prioritize attention to breath and commitment to the inner work necessary for personal evolution. Laura’s greatest commitment is living the practice of yoga in the world, and to teach others to do the same.
Her 500 hour training with her teacher Sarahjoy Marsh concentrated on yoga therapeutic concepts at the intersection of tradition and science, emphasizing neuroscience, interpersonal neurobiology, adaptive yoga, and yoga psychology. She also holds a 200 hour certification in Hatha Vinyasa, 200-hour and advanced certifications in Forrest Yoga taught by Ana Forrest, and completed a year-long mentorship under the guidance of Dr. Heidi Sormaz. She holds a BFA from The University of the Arts, where she honed her own use of story and song, which, since ancient times, has served as instruments of connection and community. Her teachers have paved her path, and she is forever grateful to them and to the teachers of the teachers.
Anna Blackwell
Plant Medicine, Faculty
Anna Blackwell, Director of The Village Shala ~ Ashtanga Yoga and Wellness Center in Bristol, Vermont, Anna has been a practicing “Ashtangi” for nearly ten years. The practice has become her teacher, and she continues to learn everyday from her wonderful community of students. She has been a bodywork practitioner for 10 years, specializing in therapeutic, deep tissue, and Ayurvedic Abhyanga treatments. Anna is also a clinical herbalist having completed a three year program at the Vermont Center for Integrative Herbalism. She offers individual consultations, plant walks, and group classes ranging in topic from herbal medicine making, specific body systems, and herbal body care products. She draws knowledge from traditional Chinese, Ayurvedic, and Native American energetics to create personal formulas to address the specific needs of her clients. Anna loves matching plants to people in need of digestive support, nervous system nourishment, immune system boosting, or anyone looking for a rise in overall vibrant health.
To learn more about Anna, visit The Village Shala.
Cameron Davis
Environmental Art, Faculty
Cameron Davis (Cami) is a Senior Lecturer with the University of Vermont’s Department of Art and Art History. She teaches painting, drawing, and courses on art, ecology and community. Her own work includes painting, performance, installation and community art activist projects exploring issues of conscious perception as fundamental to living sustainably in a warming world. She considers her painting to be her primary conversation from which the wider community projects evolve.
In 1999 Davis and artist Sally Linder created the community art Temenos Books Project and event For Love of Earth, A Celebration of the Earth Charteras a way to introduce the Earth Charter, an international document that outlines principles for building a just, sustainable and peaceful global society. With over 22, 000 participants, Linder designed and painted the Ark of Hope as a holding place for the Temenos Books. They traveled to four continents including Johannesburg South Africa for the World Summit on Sustainable Development, Bangalore India for the 2005 International Women’s Conference, and to the Netherlands, for the Earth Charter +5 event, where 8000 children and Queen Beatrix participated in creating books.
Davis continues to collaborate with artists, filmmakers, poets, students and the public including the Quantum Community Project, a participatory ecological event of film, poems, veiled drawings, and yoga practice, created with Metta Earth Institute Co-Director Gillian Kapteyn Comstock.
Davis’ solo and community work addresses climate change. Waxwing Medicine 2006, Messages to Earth 2007, Let Ours Be a Time Remembered 2008, and the Dear World Project 2009, part of the Human=Landscape, Aesthetics for a Carbon Restrained Future exhibition at Burlington City Arts, Burlington, Vermont, were all responses to 350.org climate activist events.
In 2013 Davis created 12 large scaled paintings titled Endless Spring as the stage set for the Emergent Universe Oratorio composed by Sam Guarnaccia. The work represented a three-year collaboration between Sam Guarnaccia, Paula Guarnaccia and Davis collaborating with writers on the Oratorio’s content to articulate a “new story” of shared purpose and emergent possibility at the threshold of the Anthropocene era, where human’s impact is now the major evolutionary driver of Earth’s future. They worked closely with Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim using the book and film, Journey of the Universe by Brian Swimme and Tucker, as the framework for the Oratorio.
Currently Davis is working with Ben Bach, Cinematographer, and Fletcher Bach, Creative Technologist, on The Orchard Project: video sketches for the 2015 exhibition, Eyes on the Land, 14 Artists Paired with 14 Vermont Land Trust Properties, Pizzagali Center for Art and Education, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne Vermont.
Katherine Elmer
Plant Medicine, Faculty
Katherine Elmer, MS grew up in the green hills of Central Vermont and revels in the opportunity to connect with clients around a shared love of place and nature through whole foods nutrition and herbal medicine. She is a clinically-trained community herbalist and lecturer on Herbal Medicine, Integrative Health and Food Systems topics at the University of Vermont.
She has a Master’s in Natural Resources from UVM and has completed professional training through the Vermont Center for Integrative Herbalism. Katherine manages medicinal plant gardens on UVM campus and is the faculty advisor for the UVM student Herbalism Club. She also teaches regular community classes and herb walks in the Burlington area.
Katherine is the co-founder of the Burlington Herb Clinic at the Railyard Apothecary as well as an educational organization called Spoonful Herbals, which offers a local Herbal CSA share program, a Community Herbalism Apprenticeship, “Backyard Apothecary” consultations to farmers and homesteaders, and medicinal plant gleaning events (“Herb Mobs”) on area organic farms and public green spaces.
She is a proud mom to an 8-year-old son Liam, a 9-year-old labradoodle Maatje (pronounced Mott-yeh) and she lives in Burlington’s Old North End.
Carl BrokenHorse
Plant Medicine, Faculty
Seneca/Haudenosaunee Medicine Keeper, Herbal Remedy Maker, Story Teller
BrokenHorse is an author and historian; sacred activist and medicine keeper of European and Seneca/Haudenosaunee (Ho-den-o-son-ee) descent. He has been studying indigenous medicine for over 20 years.
Coming from a long line of peacemakers and great orators, BrokenHorse uses the written and spoken word and the power of indigenous tradition to decolonize, rematriate, and heal.
Emily French
Plant Medicine, Faculty
Emily French is a clinical and traditional herbalist working with a wide range of clients and medicines. Her work revolves around her love for reconnecting people with the sophisticated art and science of plant-based healing that we’ve all known, somewhere in our bones, for thousands of years.
She is a passionate and intuitive clinician, educator, wildcrafter, farmer and medicine maker, and is proud to carry on the age-old medicine tradition that has been passed down from her grandmothers’ grandmothers and grandfathers’ grandfathers.
With over 4,000 hours of clinical experience, Emily has a broad understanding of both acute and chronic health issues, and how to work with the healing plants to help people move toward balance and vitality.
Emily holds an advanced degree in Clinical Herbalism from the Clearpath School of Herbal Medicine, a degree in Holistic Medicine & Sustainable Agriculture from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, served as Farm to Cafeteria Director of the Massachusetts Farm to School Project, and has served on the Council of the Northeast Herbal Association.
She is the founder of Sweetgrass Herbals, based in Montpelier, VT.
Ross Conrad
Beekeeping, Faculty
Ross Conrad learned his craft from the late Charles Mraz, world-renowned beekeeper, father of apitherapy, and founder of Champlain Valley Apiaries in Vermont. Former president of the Vermont Beekeepers Association, Conrad is the author of Natural Beekeeping: Organic Approaches To Modern Apiculture (Published by Chelsea Green, 2007), and has written numerous articles on organic farming, natural healing, and health issues.Read more… His 12-year-old small sideline beekeeping business, Dancing Bee Gardens, supplies his friends, neighbors, and local stores with honey and provides bees for Vermont apple pollination in the spring.
To learn more about Ross, visit his website Dancing Bee Garden’s.
Janet Fredericks
Faculty
Janet Fredericks is a practicing visual artist for 40 years who has her home and studio in Lincoln, Vermont. A Vermont Council on the Arts and New England Foundation for the Arts Fellowship recipient, Janet exhibits internationally and is in many corporate and private collections. Janet’s current work expresses her continuing interest in the natural environment. With wonderment at its intelligence, interconnectedness and complexities JanetRead more…offers insight into our relationship to what is common and extraordinary in the world around us. Janet is also co-founder of Magicians Without Borders with her husband Tom Verner. Together they perform around the world for children of all ages bringing love, laughter and hope into difficult lives.
To learn more about Janet, visit her website janetfredericksstudio.com.
Tom Verner
Faculty
Tom Verner was born in an Irish Catholic coal mining town in Western Pennsylvania under the sign of Aquarius. He has degrees in Philosophy, Literature and a PhD in Psychology. He spent two years in Iran as a Peace Corps Volunteer and seven years in a cloistered monastery meditating, chanting and learning the importance and power of ritual and community. Tom has been a practicing clinical psychologist, professor of psychology and literature and a professional magician for forty years.
In 2002, along with his wife Janet, he founded Magicians Without Borders, an NGO that uses the art of magic to entertain, educate and empower many of the most forgotten refugee and orphan children around the world. Tom is a lover of poetry and dreams and for forty years he studied with the psychologist James Hillman and the poet Robert Bly. Tom regularly lectures and conducts workshops and retreats on dreams, creativity, magic, journal work, and poetry. The journal work that Tom will teach at Metta Earth with his wife Janet, he learned from his study with the renowned Jungian Psychologist, Ira Progoff.
To learn more about Tom, visit Magicians Without Borders.