First, we’d like to start with the symbol of Chanchka. 
Chanchka is a Lakota name for our powerful relative the red tail hawk. This nation frequently helps me in my life and medicine work.
Remedios is the Spanish word for herbal remedies. I have also received much help and influence from the plants and the medicine people from northern Mexico. I have chosen the name Chanchka Remedios to acknowledge and honor these great teachers in my life…
This symbol is a fire blessing that we use to call the fire. It was given to my son, Farel, by the fire spirits when he was 5 years old when he and I were first learning to call the fire with the bow drill.
This symbol recognizes and honors the four directions, the four winds. All things are encompassed in the four directions. When I smoke the medicine pipe I offer it to the four directions. Part of the significance of this symbol is that it acknowledges that the medicine powers that I have do not come from me.
About Doug Simons
At 11 years old, Doug Simons began learning about the native plants of Colorado from his mother. His awareness, knowledge and connection to the plant world has only grown stronger through his life and travels across the American continent. His learning and practicing of medicine has taken place in the Western U.S., Mexico, Central and South America. Through these travels he has learned from many indigenous cultures, some of which include the Tarahumara, the Tohono O’Odham, and the Navajo.
Doug has also gained a vast amount of firsthand knowledge with regards to edible/medicinal plants and primitive skills through his experiences living primitively in the Sonoran Desert and Gila Wilderness of Southern New Mexico for over 20 years. Recently, Doug has been inspired to come out of the wilderness and share this living knowledge.
Throughout Doug’s abundant life-experience, he has adopted an incredible lifestyle that is reflected in his teaching. His lessons are expressed through story and firsthand experience. This rare style of teaching is accentuated by his ability to hold space for each student in a positive and fun way as they begin or continue to establish their connection with the plants. All lessons are taught in a hands-on way and are applied whenever possible. When discussing plants, for example, students are not just encouraged to visually identify, but also smell, taste, feel and interact with the plants. Doug believes this creates a deeper connection with them as well as solidifies the learning experience.
As a true medicine person and healer, Doug has been gifted with an awareness, respect, and joyousness needed for guiding and inspiring students to actualize their full potential.
About Deb Buck
As an herbalist, Deb has an incredible passion for facilitating the transmission and reception of herbal medicine in the oral tradition. She see’s the significance of conveying the messages of the Earth and the voices of the plants. Deb feels it is important to bring awareness to the way these messages are being portrayed. As a co-facilitator of Chanchka Remedios, she supports by holding space for learning and exploration, allowing the workshops to come together, and supporting Doug in his wisdom sharing. One of her main focuses in supporting these workshops is to bring presence and awareness to every part of the process, from outreach to teaching and making medicine, and so to maintain the integrity and sustainability of Chanchka Remedios.
Having studied permaculture and organic farming in several different climates, and living in several communities around North America and Hawaii, Deb realized the important gifts the plants have to offer us –and us to them. In all of these communities, she noticed an essential aspect of sustainability which was not being addressed. That aspect is the loss of knowledge of how to live harmoniously within our bodies on the levels of maintenance and acute illness. The knowledge of how to use the medicines of the Earth was hard to find. This stimulated her curiosity and drive to dig deeper, to embark on the adventure of creating relationships with our plant relatives and seek out those that had the knowledge, the wisdom keepers.
Deb has studied and practiced herbal medicine for the last 8 years, attending the herb program at the New Mexico College of Natural Healing in Silver City, NM, apprenticing with Michael Cottingham, working for Hummingbird Herbals in Durango, CO and creating a practice in Durango, where she now resides. She currently is finishing Michael Moore’s distance learning program and has spent the last two years learning with Doug.
And, Deb is a yoga teacher and a mom to a wonderful son.
I have been facilitating herb walks and medicine making classes locally in Durango for the past few years. Most of all, my time is spent learning with the plants and building lifelong relationships with them. My gift lies in the ability to fuse passion, strength, integrity, and grace in order to inspire contagious enthusiasm in service to Mother Earth.
