Excavating Europe’s Healing Roots

Before wellness was an industry, our ancestors healed with what grew around them. In the Baltic region, much of that knowledge never disappeared.

Join Līga Reitere for a three-hour early spring workshop rooted in the living plant traditions of the countryside. This gathering will take place outdoors - please come ready to walk, forage, and be in the elements. Together, we’ll work with the first wild greens and swelling buds of the season, learning how they become simple foods and home remedies, and exploring the deeper philosophy that healing follows seasonal rhythm, relationship, and respect.

We’ll also be introduced to the foundations of the Latvian pirts (herbal sauna) tradition — where heat, steam, fresh plants, rhythm, and song were woven into ritual acts of cleansing and renewal after long winters. In Baltic culture, tending the body was never separate from tending the spirit or the land.

Baltic healing practices are among the oldest surviving European lineages — carried primarily through women as knowledge keepers, and preserved in a region where modernity arrived late and rural lifeways endured.

This gathering is an invitation to reconnect with something older than modern wellness — a seasonal, land-based way of tending the body and spirit.

About Līga Reitere

Līga Reitere is one of Latvia’s leading teachers of traditional plant medicine and pirts (sauna) practice, and a recognized bearer of Latvia’s intangible cultural heritage.

Born and raised in rural western Latvia, she grew up close to land, seasonal rhythms, and living tradition. A teacher by profession, she has devoted her life to sharing wild plant knowledge, ritual practice, and the restorative wisdom of the Latvian herbal sauna.

She teaches widely in Latvia and internationally, and has received national recognition for her contributions to preserving and transmitting Latvian cultural heritage.