Did we trade our elders’ wisdom for white coats and convenience?

This is more than a title or a profession — it’s a way of being. Shannon Gowland is a clinical and Indigenous herbalist, an Ancient Chinese Medicine practitioner, a Medical Qigong practitioner, a Reiki Master, a naturalist, and a generational Indigenous farmer. But beyond those designations is a woman deeply rooted in the heartbeat of the Earth.

Shannon’s story began long before credentials were earned — before language even fully formed — guided by the hands of her Muscogee grandfather, who passed down the sacred knowing of plant and Earth medicine. By the age of three, she was already immersed in the rhythms of nature, learning to listen to the whispers of the wind, the pulse of the soil, and the quiet intelligence of the plants.

Her lifelong reverence for the natural world led her to formal studies in biology and organic chemistry. She became a bridge between two worlds, merging ancestral medicine with modern science in a way that few can. Her work today integrates ancient Chinese and Indigenous wisdom with clinical insight, helping others remember what the Earth has never forgotten: how to heal.

But her medicine goes deeper than herbs and protocols. It’s about multi-dimensional wellness — the recognition that healing is not linear, and it cannot be reduced to symptom suppression or quick fixes. The body is not separate from the mind, the spirit, or the Earth. Each is an integral thread in the web of well-being. From her view, true healing means tracing the symptom back to the imbalance, and then tracing that imbalance to its root — be it emotional trauma, spiritual disconnection, toxic environment, or energetic depletion.

This means listening differently — to the breath, to the body’s cues, to the grief that hides behind shoulder pain, or the unspoken sorrow held in the lungs. It means understanding Chi, not as a foreign concept, but as the vital life force that moves through all living beings, connecting us to each other, to nature, and to ourselves. In her practice, she teaches clients to feel that energy in their own hands, to cook food grown in living soil, to reclaim breath, movement, ritual, and presence.

Healing, she says, starts not with a pill or a supplement, but with a question: Why? Why can’t you sleep? Why does your shoulder ache? Why are you so disconnected from your body? And from that inquiry, she gently guides people toward balance to dance to Earth’s drumbeat once again.

Contact Shannon at Seeds of Wellness or SOW Institute HERE

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