TARYN MICHELE KULURIS
Founder and creatress behind Botanical Awakenings (and formerly The Botanical Kitchen), Taryn Kuluris is a plant alchemist, holistic chef, empath, wordsmith, and artist. She is guided by a fierce belief in radical healing and transformation, earth medicine, magical phenomena, and folk knowledge.
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In 2013 and 2014, Taryn completed two season-long internships on organic farms in the foothills of Colorado and on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. In 2016, after several years of self-study, she graduated from a 9-month herbalism and holistic wellness intensive at the California School of Herbal Studies. In 2017, Taryn founded The Botanical Kitchen as culinary and plant medicine workshop series, which quickly grew into a popular food-as-medicine business.
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Taryn's long struggle with (and eventual recovery from) alcohol addiction and eating disorders, guides her desire to spark healing in the world around her. She pulls from a deep well of experiences, many profoundly beautiful and many incredibly challenging, in order to support others on their healing journeys.
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Though originally from the vast Southwest desert (which is still home-in-the-heart), Taryn has lived in the splendor of the Pacific Northwest for over 7 years, and resides on a small island in the Salish Sea, with her husband, Chance, and their extended community of humans, plants, beloved animals, and other beings.
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Taryn can usually be found somewhere between the kitchen and the garden, when not wandering her favorite forests, mountains, lakes, and beaches, or making music with her talented husband.
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Botanical Awakenings began as a personal healing journey, and is forever unfolding into a myriad of experiences and services. In a culture stricken by fear and divisiveness, Botanical Awakenings strives to remind us of our innate capacity for compassion, grace, forgiveness, and wonder.
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An excerpt from Taryn's essay "Tender Days of Autumn Rising" :
"My tender heart will always follow beauty, and embrace hope as an action... as a prayer and a practice...and yet my wise heart does not look away from the great changes at hand, does not hide from the imminent shifts we are witnessing together. I was told once, that in the paradox you'll find the truth. The paradox is neither one, nor the other, but the entirety of what is possible. We are bewildered by our differences...yet perhaps should be more bewildered by how easily seeds of division, sown by hands unseen, have germinated in these precarious, dusty soils.
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Perhaps in the great paradox we find ourselves in, commonality underlies our many shades of being, and belies the stories we've been told that say otherwise. Perhaps the soil should be tended to with care, by lovestruck hands...hands remembering the greatness in our differences, remembering the community that is woven stronger with threads of sovereignty, remembering the immense compassion that is born of challenge and hardship"
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