Our Founder

Francisca Santibanez is the founder of Plant Spirit Talk. Her work is rooted in South American curanderismo, plant spirit medicine, and the living tradition of ancestral healing.

Francisca is also a mama, plant devotee, vegetalista, yerbera, consejera, clinical herbalist, ritualist, medicine maker, educator, and artist. She offers Plant Spirit Initiations, Spiritual Wellness Consultations, and various programs and workshops out of her private practice and garden sanctuary in Sebastopol, California - on Pomo and Miwok territory.

Born in Brazil and raised between São Paulo, Santiago, Chile, and California, Francisca spent her young adulthood quietly carrying a love for plants until her body brought her to a halt. In 2011, a severe lumbar disc injury along with glaucoma and thyroid disease. For eighteen months, she lived in a state of disability - migraines, chronic pain, deep fatigue - cycling through allopathic care that could manage symptoms but could not reach the root. It was through Naturopathic Medicine, then an Herbalist, and finally through her first encounter with Amazonian plant medicines, that her healing truly began. Each step was a teaching. Each teaching an initiation.

That turning point became a calling.

She formalized her herbal studies through the Western Clinical Herbalism program at the Berkeley Herbal Center with its Founder and Master Herbalist, Pam Fischer, in 2013-2014. In that same year of 2014, a vision received through meditation with Tobacco called her back to Chile - her first return to South America in twenty-three years - in search of her ancestral healing traditions. What she found was largely absent: the legacy of traditional plant knowledge in her family had not survived. Sitting at the shore of a lake across from Volcán Osorno, she wept and prayed for guidance. In the wind, she heard: "Go deeper with your prayers. Listen to the Plants and call on the Ancient Wise Ones in your practice. They have not forgotten."

That moment opened a path she has walked ever since - receiving downloads of ancestral inheritance, hidden lineage, and guidance for supporting others in their own healing and reconnection.

She continued to return to South America and deepened her path through apprenticeships with Shipibo Onanya Maestra Amelia Panduro de Sinuiri of Pucallpa, Peru, from 2016 to the present. Plant Dietas became her primary practice and language of learning. 

In 2018, she launched Plant Spirit Talk - beginning with a thirteen-part course weaving together her initiatory knowledge, clinical and folk herbalism, and the Andean-Amazonian cosmology that underlies these plant-venerating traditions. Since then, she has offered ongoing programs that form the heart of Plant Spirit Talk today.

All of her work is oriented toward the same intention: to create sacred community space where healing, remembrance, and the fulfillment of soul purpose become possible - through intimate relationship with the plants, the ancestors, community and the earth herself.