At the heart of Women for Healthy Rural Living (WHRL)’s commitment to empowering wellness through education and community lies a number of dedicated individuals, and among them is Jen May, a clinical herbalist whose work beautifully blends traditional herbal practices with modern healthcare sensibilities.
Jen has been an integral part of WHRL for the past two years, sharing her deep knowledge of plants, healing, and personal wellness. Each summer, she leads programs that focus on Integrative Energetic Medicine (IEM), wild flora, and how we can harness the power of plants to promote greater well-being. Her classes go beyond identification and usage — they invite participants into a relationship with the living world around them.
A Career Rooted in Connection
With 26 years of experience in the field, including 17 years in private practice, Jen brings a wealth of knowledge to everything she does. She’s a clinical herbalist who focuses on weaving together herbal medicine, flower essence therapy, and energetic medicine around various subject matters. She also includes some programming around chronic conditions, including autoimmune diseases and Lyme disease. But Jen’s work is about more than just symptoms and diagnoses — it’s about asking deeper questions: Why is that pain there? How are you sleeping? What is your relationship with water, with rest, with others?
Jen practices a form of herbalism that is both scientific and deeply intuitive. Rooted in folk traditions, her approach invites people to understand their own bodies and to build meaningful connections with the plants around them. She emphasizes that herbal medicine isn’t meant to replace pharmaceuticals, but to complement them, offering additional support and promoting healing from the inside out.
Her focus on flower essences and energetic medicine highlights the emotional and energetic barriers to wellness. Flower essences, she explains, carry subtle energetic imprints that can help shift long-standing patterns and promote healing, particularly in complex conditions like Lyme disease.
A Life in Herbal Practice
Before moving to Cherryfield, Maine, in 2022, Jen owned a brick-and-mortar apothecary in Ellsworth. She currently runs a private practice and an online school that focuses on chronic health conditions. Jen teaches classes at the Seacoast Mission and various locations on Mount Desert Island. She is passionate about making herbal knowledge accessible and empowering, drawing on her own studies with renowned herbalists such as Leslie and Michael Tierra, Sean Donoghue, David Dalton, and Matthew Wood.
Her upcoming series, Grandmother Medicine, will offer a community-focused exploration of natural approaches to stress, anxiety, pain, and sleep, weaving in generations of traditional wisdom.
A Quiet Life Filled with Curiosity
Originally from California, Jen moved to Maine in 2005, drawn by the quieter lifestyle and deep-rooted traditions of herbal knowledge in local communities. “People will often say, ‘My grandmother used to do…’” she notes — a sign of the ancestral connection to plant medicine that she is helping to revive.
When not teaching or seeing clients, Jen loves researching the history of disease and health, crocheting (yes, she made the sweater she is wearing!), homeschooling her children, and tending to her home life with her husband, five children, two dogs, and eight chickens. She recently became a grandmother for the first time — a new chapter in an already rich life.
A Giving Spirit
Volunteering is another extension of Jen’s dedication to community and healing. Through her work with WHRL and other local initiatives, she continues to share her time and knowledge generously, always seeking to uplift and connect others.
Jen May is not only a wealth of herbal knowledge — she’s a deeply compassionate person whose presence is a gift to the community. Through her work with WHRL and beyond, she reminds us that healing is not only about remedies, but relationships — with our bodies, our environment, and one another.
Contact Jen at sagemoonalchemy@gmail.com or visit her website.