Who we are
PLANT SPIRIT TALK
Plant Spirit Talk is an initiatory community rooted in earth-based wisdom, plant medicine, and the sacred work of ancestral healing.
We are healers, therapists, artists, and medicine carriers - people called into deeper relationship with the living world. We learn by listening: to plants, to land, to the ancestors moving through our bloodlines, and to the intuitive knowing that connects all life.
Our work is guided by Pachamama, the spirit world, and the cosmological teachings of Indigenous elders from the Amazon and the Andes. We hold these traditions with reverence and reciprocity - integrating ancestral practices not as tools to acquire, but as living agreements to embody.
We believe healing is remembrance. That transformation moves across time - through the individual, into family, community, and the earth herself. We do not heal in isolation. We heal in relationship, in ceremony, and in service to the web of life that holds us all.
From Sebastopol to Bahia, from the redwoods to the Atlantic Forest, we are building a living community of stewards - people dedicated to carrying earth's wisdom forward as medicine for this moment and for the generations to come.
Our Mission
To initiate individuals and communities into earth-based wisdom and plant medicine, cultivating healing and harmony rooted in our sacred interdependence with all life.
Plant Spirit Talk walks people into right relationship - with plants, ancestors, body, and earth, so that healing ripples outward from the individual into family, community, and the living world.
Our Vision
A world where humans remember their place in the living web- as medicine carriers, ancestor healers, and stewards of life and the earth's wisdom traditions.
Our Values
Reciprocity
Reciprocity is the glue that binds all our relations with the living world. Every act of healing is an exchange - with plants, ancestors, earth, and community. We honor sacred reciprocity as a core pillar of the health and thriving of our communities and the earth.
Remembrance
We honor the wisdom carried in bodies, bloodlines, and the land itself.
Initiation
We believe transformation requires passage, not just information. We walk people across thresholds, into deeper relationship with themselves, their lineage, and the living world.
Sacred interdependence
There is no individual healing that doesn't ripple outward to all corners of Pachamama. We tend the web as the web tends us.
Rooted presence
We integrate the wisdom of the earth, plants, and ancestors into embodied, everyday life. This work is not retreat from the world - it is medicine for living fully within it with more presence and embodiment.
Cultural integrity
We work with, not from, the traditions that inform us. Every expansion -from the Amazon to the Andes and now in Bahia, into new communities, is built on relationship, attribution, and reciprocity with source.
Our Name
PLANT SPIRIT TALK is a transmission.
A call through our flora kin to connect with and remember who we truly are.
Our Founder
Francisca Santibanez
FOUNDER AND EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
AT PLANT SPIRIT TALK
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.
Our Staff
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Margaret Zhou
ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT
Margaret Zhou is a Fertility Awareness Educator, a student of Traditional Chinese Medicine, and an environmental and human rights advocate. She works toward personal and collective health for people and the planet.
Margaret believes that each of us carries an important piece of the remedy for our times. She envisions a world in which all people have the sovereign freedom to feel, honor, and delight in the life force flowing through them – as an expression of our connection to the divine.
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Asha Kohli
SOCIAL MEDIA COORDINATOR AND CONTENT CREATRIX
Asha Kohli is a visual storyteller, creative director, and multidisciplinary artist whose work lives at the intersection of beauty, medicine, and meaning. With a background spanning journalism, photography, dance, and ancestral arts, she brings a deep reverence for lineage, land, and the living world into every image, word, and design she brings to life. Of mixed Punjabi and Colombian heritage, Asha draws from a rich creative and ceremonial inheritance that shapes everything she touches. Through her practice Way of Nitara, she weaves embodiment wisdom and plant spirit medicine into community offerings, workshops, and 1:1 guided journeys. As a PSI Practitioner who has been walking with Plant Spirit Talk since 2018, she brings not just creative skill but genuine devotion to this community and its medicine.