Sacred Tree Keepers / Ojai

MASTER TREE DIET

WHITE BIRCH || LIVE OAK || METASEQUOIA

MAY 27 – JUNE 4, 2027

THE DIAMOND TEMPLE || OJAI, CALIFORNIA

$2200 // SELF-CAMPED

01 / Master Tree Diets

The purpose of a master tree diet is to allow a living intelligence, far older and larger than the human species, to help reorganize the human system towards coherence. The ancient tradition is to isolate one's self from stimulation and turn the attention inwards, to establish a direct, experiential relationship with a specific tree as a master teacher and commune with the living spirit of its intelligence.

Sometimes described as a vipassana with trees, the concept of "dieting" refers to a traditional and timeless method of lowering the noise floor through foregoing strong foods, erotic engagement, social communication and technology, and placing all focus in personal prayer, receptivity to the tree's transmission and the primordial wisdom flowing through the connection.

A bark tea is consumed throughout the MTD and the signal of a tree is continuously "boosted" through ceremony. Within a week, the tree's medicine will begin to land in the system, as the energy of transmission heightens during in the prolonged practice of deep listening. The process is held and supported by beautiful, highly charged wilderness locations around the world, a team of devoted guardians, gentle breath work sessions and a communal reverence for universal, timeless wisdom beyond any creed or ideology.

MTDs are life-changing medicine and can take time to integrate. We hold a support container for 6 weeks post-diet and have a community membership for those who desire to keep in contact with a beautiful web of souls healing, learning and evolving with the master trees. A successfully integrated MTD supports a person to become more regulated, coherent in thought, feeling, speech and action and with more capacity to live life integrity.

A woman resting against a tree during a Master Tree Diet

02 / Master Trees

WHITE BIRCH || COAST LIVE OAK || METASEQUOIA

Deep down, at the molecular heart of life, the trees and we are essentially identical.-Carl Sagan

Sacred Tree Keepers community gathered beneath a large tree in Australia

Master Trees are Earth's ecological leaders and have supported the evolution of human beings since the beginning of our kind. They're trees with deep ancestral lines of connection and exchange with human beings, stretching back into the pre-history of our species. In a very real way, returning to study with Master Trees is like returning back to the old altars of connection kept by our ancestors.

Some say Master Trees are akin to angels, or highly evolved spiritual beings. Grounding down from mysticism, what we do know is that what we call Master Trees are of deep importance to the interspecies webs that have evolved over many millions of years around the consistency or centrality of these particular trees. That is to say, Master Trees "hold" profound knowledge about the inner workings of nature and embody or live that knowledge out in their existence.

At the Sacred Tree Keepers School of Earth Medicine, we offer work with a trinity of trees which have been revered by the peoples and lineages of the Northern Hemisphere, from Asia and the Americas, to Europe and North Africa. The traditional trinity of the druids was considered to be Birch, Oak & Yew. We with work Birch, Oak & Metasequoia - an evolutionary cousin of the Yew divergent in the cretaceous period, which can actually be safely consumed, as Yew cannot.

RESTORATION || SAFETY || PURITY || MOTHER LINE

White Birch

White or Silver Birch comes from the ancient European word Bhereg, meaning to shine. Unequivocally known as a mother tree by nearly all cultures living within her stead, she is thought to be one of the first trees to sprout after the last ice age and is known to lead the regrowth of forests after fires. She purifies and regenerates ecosystems and is the exclusive host of the medicinal, chaga mushroom, as well as a common shade tree for the psychotropic, Aminta Muscaria mushroom.

Like the delicate balance of ecosystems she guards, White Birch has the capacity to help us harmonize mind, body, spirit and soul, guiding into the places where we resist surrender. Her soft touch moves our emotions and leads our awareness into the crevices of the unconscious, teaching us to sooth and nurture our core wounds, revealing the strength, beauty and power in healing.

DIVINITY || INTEGRITY || POWER || PATERNAL LINE

Oak

Throughout the Indo-European old world, Oak has a principled reputation as the king of trees. But this ancient and pervasive attribution does not stop there. Greeks, Romans, Celts, Slavs, Germanics, Luwians, Hittites, Hurrians, Jews & Vedics all considered Oak to be an altar of the Sky Father: what we in the West call God.

Oak is an altar of the Old Way of relationship to life: To embody beauty in virtue and strength in humility above all else. These qualities can awaken us to life force moving through us and our environment, and show the way to right relationship with this primordial power lurking within all things. Oak calls forward the sovereign self, asking us to step into radical self-ownership and release our grip on the things which are taking us away from our potential to rise as servant leaders. As a keystone species supporting over 500 other creatures, Oak is a teacher of what it means to embody power in service of community.

NOBILITY || SELF-KNOWLEDGE || VISION || MEMORY

Metasequoia

Around 100 million years ago, when tropical climes covered the Arctic circle and dinosaurs walked the Earth, a small redwood species developed an evolutionary competitive edge and spread the seeds of its miniature cones across North America and Eurasia. At the peak of WWII, a Japanese paleobotanist discovered fossils of this small and mighty redwood species. Her 50 million year old+ fossils match the DNA of living Metasequoia trees. That means the tree has not evolved for at least the last 50 million years, placing her amongst the few living fossils known on Earth: Gingo, Wollemi Pine & Yew.

Having evolved and thrived at our planet's magnetic North, Metasequoia is a living Tree of Life, bridging Earth & Cosmos inside our bodies. Metasequoia teaches trust in the long vision, the innate nobility of life, Gnosis or the birthing of deep self-awareness and wisdom grounded in the historical witness of creation. She is a true ancestral teacher and tree from which many others have been born.

03 / Which tree is best for me now?

HEALING

WHITE BIRCH

A Master Tree Diet with White Birch heals by gently clearing old emotional residue, restoring healthy boundaries, and resetting the nervous system toward quiet safety—so renewal can occur without force or collapse.

Mastery of healing mind, body & spirit.
Going deep, but with gentleness.
Calling forth & maturing the feminine.
Clearing chronic stress & negative emotion.
Repatterining co-dependence.

STRENGTH

OAK

A Master Tree Diet with Oak is a disciplined, grounding process oriented toward strength, authority, and the capacity to hold responsibility without collapse. Oak diets are often initiatory-strength portals of learning.

Connecting with purpose.
Strengthening nervous system capacity.
Calling forth & maturing the masculine.
Ancestral lineage repair.
Coherence of thought, word & action.

GUIDANCE

DAWN REDWOOD

A Master Tree Diet with Dawn Redwood holds an open forum of communion with the web, calls out deeper listening, embodiment of innate nobility and matures personal vision, resulting in a refined and grounded sense of alignment.

Developing & maturing vision of life.
Strengthening capacity for subtle listening.
Endurance and spiritual strength.
Awakening innate knowledge.
Sitting with nobility in the mystery.

Sacred Tree Keepers community gathered outside a stone house

04 / Root Protocol

Herbal Tobacco

During a Master Tree Diet we offer the option to work closely with a few different forms of herbal tobacco as part of the root protocol we hold. The purpose of working with tobacco alongside our given master tree is to help activate the tree medicine within the system. The herbal qualities of tobacco can be thought of as catalytic and its spiritual qualities as diplomatic, carrying and supporting the prime transmissions taking place within the field.

FORMS OF HERBAL TOBACCO OFFERED IN OUR ROOT PROTOCOL:

Orally Ingested Herbal Tobacco Paste

Intranasal Infusion of Tobacco & Garlic

Pipe Smoking of Nicotiana Rustica

All work with Tobacco is optional per personal needs.

Master Tree Medicine

The practice of tree medicine is a global phenomenon and in its essence consists of drawing life-force energy from a tree into the human body. Even though, in the Americas, many earth-based practices drawing upon tree medicine are inseparable from Herbal Tobacco practices, the Ancient Taoists of China have a potent tradition instructing learners how to plug into the energetic channels of a tree and directly study its alchemical movements by temporarily merging with them.

In our community, tree medicine is ingested daily during a Master Tree Diet in the form of a bark tea. Around 1L per person is brewed each morning and offered following our morning practice session. More tea can be given upon request.

Primordial Breath

Primordial Breath is the source practice underlying Taoist modalities of Inner Alchemy, Martial Arts & yogas such as Tai Chi / Qi Gong. It is an ancient breathing technique that firmly roots the practitioner in a developmental process of deep circulation through the lower belly, cultivated spinal strength and an ability to steadily down-regulate the nervous system in order to be-with subtle and gut-level signals.

Each day during a Master Tree Diet, we sit in a group Primordial Breath practice. The purpose of holding this practice during the MTD is to help digest, ground and integrate the tobacco & tree medicine in the body and shared field. It is a practice held in the community throughout preparation and integration periods as well and the knowledge cultivated in Primordial Breath practice will benefit any other breath breath modality or root somatic practice.

05 / What our community is saying

Voices from friends, learners & leaders.

Tobacco opens the heart and the Tree Medicine weaves up your spine and straightens you. Through the Tobacco practices, everything is distributed and with Primordial Breath you learn to hold all of that energy with yourself as the structure. The core of what I've learned is how to hold the energy that is coming through and I'm taking this lesson with me on all of my journeys.
Nora

I’ve been unraveling threads from my childhood and finding a greater sense of acceptance and peace towards situations where I didn’t feel loved. I’ve been connecting strongly to the divine feminine while deepening my relationship with nature. The stress I’ve been carrying in my neck has been melting away and opening to a spaciousness physically, as well as mentally. I’m noticing the difference in how I’m holding myself while sitting. I feel rooted and the trust I feel in myself is growing.
Josh

06 / Diamond Temple

Diamond Temple

THE CEREMONIAL GROUNDS FOR OUR PRACTICE

The Diamond Temple is a sacred structure nestled atop Sulfur Mountain in upper Ojai, a place where ancient and modern wisdom converge. Perched high above thousands of acres of undeveloped land, it offers breathtaking views from sunrise to sunset, surrounded by majestic Coast Live Oak trees and the profound stillness that is so rare in today’s urban world. This sacred space represents a union of the earth’s ancient wisdom and the ever-evolving technologies of the present, creating a nexus for personal and collective evolution to catalyze.

07 / Nuts & Bolts

The Ojai gathering

Dates: May 27 – June 4, 2027
Location: The Diamond Temple, Ojai, California
Exchange: $2,200 · Self-Camped

Includes:

8x Night Master Tree Diet
Daily Liter of Tree Medicine Tea
Daily Tobacco Ceremonies
Daily Primordial Breath Pratice
2x Organic & Vegan meals per day
6x Week Post-Diet Integration Container
3x Integration Calls
3x Months of Free Access to Sacred Tree Keepers Members Portal

Camping on the Ojai hillside overlooking the valley

Schedule

DAY 1

2 - 5pm: Check-in
6pm: Medicine Harvest
7pm: Opening Tobacco Ceremony

DAYS 2 - 8

Morning: Tobacco Prayer
Mid-Morning: Breakfast
Mid Day: Primordial Breath
Evening: Dinner
Night: Tobacco Prayer

DAY 9

8am: Diet Close
10am: Closing Meal
12pm: Depart

Maria resting among the branches of a tree

08 / Lifestyle Boundaries

To receive the medicine in a good way and do our part in holding integrity in the community, we practice adherence to the traditional Lifestyle Boundaries that make a Master Tree Diet safe and effective. During our MTD, the following Boundaries will be held with strict discipline:

During the tree diet

Sex, Masturbation, Drugs, Alcohol & other Medicines including pharmaceuticals, Phones & Screens, Work & Communication with The Outside World. Cosmetics & Scents, Soap & Toothpaste, Salt, Meat, Sugar, Dairy, Oil, Spice and Talking (outside of sharing circles.)

After the tree diet

For 14-days following our Tree Diet, the following Boundaries will be held with strict discipline:

Sex, Masturbation, Ejaculation, Substances & Medicines including Alcohol, Drugs, Pharmaceuticals, Strong medicinal herbs including medicinal mushrooms, Shamanic medicines & Plant Medicine Ceremonies, Pork, Shellfish, Red meat, Dairy, Fermented foods, Canned or Preserved foods such as Smoked Fish, White sugar, Iced / Freezing Cold drinks, Spicy (Chilli Peppers), Caffeine, Heavy Oils // Deep Fried Food, Seed Oils and Processed Food.

Sunlight streaming through a Coast Live Oak in Ojai

09 / Integration

Integrating a Master Tree Diet is 90% of the work.

It is powerful and beautiful thing to undergo the ceremonial experiences of root practice. But if we come back to our lives with new insights, understanding and feelings, and opt out of doing the work to make changes in our behavior, attitude and and environment, then we have done nothing except had an exotic vacation from reality. When engaging in the powerful practice of Master Tree Dieting, the choice to resist change can be costly.

To keep a grounded field post-diet, we hold a 6-week integration container as a community that includes access to our private members portal where you can login in, post, chat and share with other members of the Sacred Tree Keepers web. During the 6-week integration cycle we holding calls every two weeks with the cohort from our MTD.

Guardians in the community are available for one-on-one integration calls at an affordable and honest rate.

A person sitting in meditation at the base of a large tree in a green forest

10 / Let's Talk Ancient Tree Medicine