Bianca Correa

Remedios Ancestrales, How to make Agua De Florida: 1.5 hour, Adults, All Levels
This class will focus on the uses, folklore, and making of Agua de Florida, an ancient cleansing & protection remedy traditionally used in Central and South American countries. 

Mythic Medicine, The wisdom of Seasonal Allies, Herbs of Leo: 1.5 hour, Adults, All Levels
This class will focus on the mythic medicine journeys I teach in northern New Mexico at my apothecary. this will have a focus on Astro herbalism, the energetics of summer and the archetype of the mother.

Plant Alchemy; Intro into Spagyrics & Herbal Magic: 1.5 hour, Adults, All Levels
This class with explore the foundations of spagyrics, a brief history of alchemy, & how to practice alchemical herbalism

Read on for more on these classes:

Class 1: Remedios Ancestrales: The Art, History, and Folklore of Agua de Florida

In Remedios Ancestrales, participants are invited into the rich tradition of ancestral healing through the creation and understanding of Agua de Florida, commonly known as Florida Water. More than a fragrant spiritual cologne, Agua de Florida carries generations of cultural memory, ritual practice, and folk wisdom throughout Indigenous, Afro-Caribbean, and Latin American traditions.

This class explores the origins and evolution of Florida Water, tracing its journey from 19th-century perfumery into sacred and ceremonial use among curanderos, healers, medicine people, and spiritual practitioners across the Americas. Participants will learn how this aromatic preparation became known as a powerful cleansing and protective remedy used in limpias, blessings, altar work, prayer, and everyday spiritual care.

Together, we will discuss the folklore, symbolism, and medicinal qualities of the herbs, flowers, and citrus traditionally infused into Agua de Florida. Special attention will be given to the ways our ancestors used scent, plant medicine, and ritual as tools for emotional, physical, and spiritual balance. Through storytelling and cultural context, this class honors the resilience and knowledge carried through generations of community healing practices.

Participants will also learn how to make their own handcrafted Agua de Florida using traditional ingredients and intentional preparation methods. The process itself becomes an act of connection — to the plants, to the elements, and to ancestral memory. Each participant will leave with a deeper understanding of how everyday remedies can serve as sacred medicine when prepared with respect, prayer, and purpose.

This class is open to beginners, practitioners, and anyone interested in ancestral traditions, folk healing, herbalism, and spiritual practices rooted in the wisdom of the people. Whether you are reconnecting with your lineage, expanding your healing practices, or simply curious about the cultural history of Florida Water, Remedios Ancestrales offers a welcoming space for learning, reflection, and hands-on experience.

At its heart, this class is an invitation to remember. To remember the remedies passed from grandmother to grandchild, the prayers whispered over herbs and water, and the sacred relationship between healing and community. In a time when many seek reconnection to ancestral knowledge, Agua de Florida serves as both medicine and memory — a bridge between past and present.

Class 2: Mythic Medicine: The Wisdom of Seasonal Allies — Herbs of Leo

In Mythic Medicine: The Wisdom of Seasonal Allies — Herbs of Leo, participants are invited into a lived and embodied relationship with the natural world through herbalism, myth, ritual, and seasonal awareness. At the heart of this offering is a simple but radical teaching: nature is not separate from us. The earth is alive, intelligent, and relational, and we are continuously in conversation with its cycles through our bodies, emotions, creativity, and spirit.

Rooted in animism and mythopoetic perception, this class invites students to experience the seasons not as background scenery, but as active forces shaping inner life. The turning of the year becomes a mirror for human experience — revealing rhythms of expansion and contraction, expression and rest, clarity and dissolution. When we begin to listen to these patterns, the natural world becomes a teacher, guide, and companion in the unfolding of our lives.

This class is centered in the fiery midsummer current of Leo season — a time associated with vitality, courage, radiance, creative expression, and the full flowering of life force. Leo teaches the medicine of the heart: how to shine without apology, how to create from authenticity, and how to embody presence with warmth and confidence. Yet this solar peak also carries its shadow — burnout, overextension, pride, and depletion — reminding us that even fire must be tended with awareness.

Within this seasonal field, we explore herbal allies traditionally associated with solar energy and heart-centered support. Plants such as rosemary, hawthorn, motherwort, lemon balm, and other midsummer medicines are approached not only for their physical properties, but as living intelligences that reflect and support the emotional and spiritual qualities of this time of year. Herbalism here is not only a system of remedies, but a way of listening.

Through mythopoetic storytelling and embodied reflection, participants are guided to recognize how archetypal patterns move through both nature and the self. The Mother, the Lover, and the Creatrix are not distant mythic figures, but living energies expressed through seasonal cycles and personal experience. The outer landscape of summer becomes a reflection of inner becoming: moments of visibility, growth, intensity, tenderness, and transformation.

In this approach, herbalism becomes soul work as much as physical medicine. Plants are engaged as teachers and allies who help us navigate the changing seasons within and around us. Participants will learn foundational principles for working with herbs in alignment with seasonal qualities, including how intention, timing, and relationship shape the way medicine is received and understood.

Together we explore traditional and intuitive methods of medicine-making, including tinctures, infused oils, hydrosols, herbal syrups, and flower essences. Each preparation becomes both practical and symbolic — a way of translating relationship with plants into form. The “Witch’s Apothecary” is understood here as both physical space and mythic threshold: a place where healing is crafted not only for the body, but for emotional, ancestral, and spiritual alignment.

This class is experiential and reflective, welcoming herbalists, seekers, artists, healers, and anyone drawn to reconnect with the living intelligence of the natural world.

At its core, Mythic Medicine is an invitation to remember that we are seasonal beings. Like the earth, we move through cycles of blooming, burning, shedding, and renewal. By learning the wisdom of seasonal allies and entering into relationship with the plants of Leo season, participants are supported in cultivating deeper embodiment, belonging, and reverence for the rhythms that shape both nature and the soul.

Class 3 Plant Alchemy; Intro into Spagyrics & Herbal Magic:

Participants are invited into the ancient and living practice of herbal laboratory alchemy—known as spagyrics. This class explores herbalism not only as a system of physical remedies, but as a sacred science of transformation in which plants are understood as complete living intelligences composed of body, soul, and spirit.

At the heart of spagyric practice is a simple but profound principle: separation, purification, and recombination. Plants are first divided into their essential components—traditionally understood as salt (body), sulfur (soul), and mercury (spirit). Each aspect is then refined through alchemical processes and ultimately recombined into a more integrated form of medicine. Nothing is discarded in this process; instead, every part of the plant is honored, transformed, and returned in wholeness.

This practice emerges from a long lineage shaped by early Greco-Arabic medicine, Renaissance natural philosophy, and mystical approaches to nature. One of its most influential figures, Paracelsus, helped redefine medicine by emphasizing that healing must address the whole human being—physical, emotional, and spiritual. In this worldview, plants were not inert substances, but expressions of a living, intelligent cosmos.

Within spagyric herbalism, the laboratory becomes more than a place of experimentation—it becomes a space of transformation and reflection. Processes such as fermentation, distillation, calcination, and extraction are understood not only as chemical actions, but as symbolic stages of refinement. To work with a plant in this way is to enter into relationship with its deeper intelligence and to participate in its transformation from raw material into integrated essence.

Spagyric remedies are traditionally used for their capacity to support deep and multi-layered healing. Because the full structure of the plant is reassembled in its final preparation, practitioners often describe these medicines as carrying a more complete expression of the plant’s energetic presence. They are used for emotional grounding, energetic alignment, long-term constitutional support, and ritual or meditative practice. Rather than targeting isolated symptoms, spagyric medicine is understood to work holistically—supporting coherence across body, mind, and spirit.

This class also explores the cosmological dimension of plant alchemy through the lens of planetary correspondence. In classical herbal traditions, plants are associated with celestial archetypes such as the Sun, Moon, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Mercury, and Saturn. These planetary forces are understood as symbolic intelligences reflected in both the cosmos and the plant kingdom. For example, solar plants are associated with vitality, heart energy, and illumination, while Venusian plants reflect harmony, love, and emotional balance. In this system, working with plants becomes a way of engaging both earthly and celestial intelligence simultaneously.

Rather than viewing these correspondences as abstract symbolism, plant alchemy treats them as part of a living relational cosmology—one in which nature is continuously expressing itself through both material and mythic forms. The practitioner becomes both observer and participant, engaging in a process where science, ritual, and imagination converge.

At its core, Plant Alchemy invites a shift in perception: from seeing plants as resources to experiencing them as intelligent beings within a vast, interconnected cosmos. Healing becomes not only a physical process, but a relational and transformative one. The laboratory becomes a threshold where matter is refined, awareness is expanded, and relationship with the natural world is deepened.

This class offers an introduction to that worldview through both conceptual understanding and experiential reflection, inviting participants into a practice of curiosity, reverence, and alchemical imagination.