Mischa Schuler: Practicing Herbalist

Plants provide us with so many different things. From producing food to making our homes beautiful, there’s endless possibilities to the things plants offer us. As an herbalist, Mischa Schuler knows this well, utilizing many varieties of plants as therapeutic tools. 

“My first memory of being startled and awestruck by a plant was when I was probably five, and I was astonished that there was this sunflower that was taller than me….My dad is a scientist, and I think what he gave me through his scientific mind was the gift of being curious and not needing to know the answer.”

Mischa offers apprenticeships that allow people to come learn about herbalism practices. One of the first things that she does with her apprentices is drink tea with them - without telling them what plant it was made from.

“We don't know who the plant friend is that we're drinking until after we've explored our stories, our memories, or our thought processes, our emotions that might have come up while we've been sitting with this plant.”

This method allows everyone to develop their own ideas about what they’re drinking before sitting down and learning about the plants in a more scientific way. 

“Once we know the name of a plant, we can look it up in a book. However, what we read in a book doesn't describe a lot of the energetic pieces that people bring forward.”

Going to school to become an herbalist opened Mischa’s eyes to how rich the history of medicinal plants was and how we tend to overlook how ingrained it is in our lives. 

“At that time, I didn't even appreciate that there was this whole history of plants as medicine, despite the fact that my grandmother gave me camomile tea if I had a bellyache…It just was what you do.”

Mischa doesn’t take much credit for her work, stating that all she truly does is observe the plants she works with to bring out the best qualities of them, something that she believes that everyone has the ability to do if they sit down and learn. 

“Nothing that I do is magical…So much of the work with the plants is reminding ourselves that the mundane is actually where so much of the magic is.”

Visit Mischa’s website to learn more.

A film by Juliette Sutherland.