For caregivers and practitioners who want a more inclusive and relational way to work with the young people and families in their care.
The Gathering Our Medicine
Practice Circle
A membership circle with ongoing peer support and live calls with the Gathering Our Medicine team, where you bring the real-world situations you’re stuck with.
Peer Reviewed
Peer reviewed and published in AlterNative, 2023.
Indigenous Advisory
Developed with an Indigenous advisory of Elders, parents and practitioners from across British Columbia.
5 Pilot Communities
Piloted in 5 communities, guided by the developmental paradigm of Dr. Gordon Neufeld.
Valued Practice Model
Adopted as a practice model by the Maples Adolescent Treatment Centre and Vancouver Island Health.
The work asks you to sit with a family in real trouble, and then it leaves you to do it on your own.
You were trained to assess, document and intervene. Then you met the fourteen-year-old whose file says defiant, and everything you were taught said hold the line. Something in you knew it was a call for connection.
And you held the line anyway, because that’s what the plan said and there was nobody in the building to tell you what else to do.
That instinct you had was right. What nobody has given you is a way to act on it.
The root of trauma is separation. The medicine is relational togetherness.
A young person is already held inside a kinship circle made up of family and friends. You step into that circle to support them and read every situation through two questions.
- What does this young person need in order to heal?
- Who belongs in their circle?
You’ll use them in situations where nothing else has worked, and the answers give you somewhere to go that isn’t another consequence.
"We are the medicine. How incredible is that?"
Gathering Our Medicine participant
Healing Conditions & Wisdom Practices
A relational framework weaving ancient lineages of care and collective recovery. Explore the foundational conditions needed to heal, paired alongside our core wisdom protocols.
Healing Conditions
Togetherness
Closeness and belonging are a biological need. When it’s missing you’ll see clinginess or shutdown.
Care
Care is instinctive to give and hard to receive. A defended heart shows up as sarcasm or avoidance, and it softens through warmth held steady over time.
Movement
Emotion has to move before it can settle. Aggression and irritability are emotions with nowhere to go.
Rest
Rest is where healing begins. A young person who can’t trust that their needs will be met stays braced, so you slow your pace and give more belonging than they asked for.
Wisdom Practices
Gathering
How you bring someone into safety and connection. It has to happen again and again, especially after something has gone wrong between you.
Introductions
Someone new gets introduced into relationship. Arrive without an introduction from someone they trust and you stay an outsider to them.
Continuity
How a relationship gets carried across an absence. The way you say goodbye decides what’s still there when you return.
Grieving
Tears bring transformation. Your job is to keep a young person’s ability to cry intact—sit with them while they do it.
The W.I.S.E. Practice Relationship Resource puts the whole framework in your hands in the middle of a hard week.
Gathering Our Medicine builds wise practice for work that’s community, family and youth specific. The healing conditions and the Wisdom Practices tell you what someone needs to heal. W.I.S.E. is what grows in you while you give it, and it stands for Wisdom, Influence, Skill Building and Empowerment.
Wisdom
The wisdom is already in you. The resource helps you find it and put it to work with the young person in front of you.
Influence
Your influence with a young person grows out of the relationship you build, so the resource works on the relationship first.
Skill Building
The practice gets stronger with use. One situation at a time, you get better at reading what’s underneath the behaviour.
Empowerment
A young person who is met rather than managed comes back to their own power, and so do you.
The membership is built around a tool you’ll open in the middle of a hard week. You describe what’s happening in the words your team already uses and writes on the file.
What you get back is the relational reframe for the language on the file, and what to think about before you respond.
You’ll get recommendations for which of the four healing conditions may be under-resourced and the Wisdom Practice that will help, with practical suggestions of what to try that are specific to your situation.
The W.I.S.E. Practice Relationship Resource isn’t a diagnostic tool or a crisis protocol.
You already have the innate relational capacity that this work needs, but your training buried it under documentation.
What’s missing is the insight that helps you to tap into your intuition about what people need.What a young person in trouble needs is relationship.
But sometimes a situation is so tangled and complex that you can’t see the forest for the trees. The tool will help you to see what’s happening underneath the behaviour and how to build the relationship back, and the more you use it the more you’re working from your own judgement.
Gordon Neufeld says to give people a map, because directions only get you from one point to another while a map shows you all the different routes to your destination and lets you trust your own guidance system to get there.
The W.I.S.E. Practice Relationship Resource is a compass that guides you to increased wisdom as a practitioner. Use it alongside your supervision, your agency’s safety procedures and the guidance of Elders and knowledge holders in the community you serve. It doesn’t replace any of the human connections this work needs.
The Gathering Our Medicine Practice Circle is where you'll learn Eldership for practitioners.
I’m Dr. Denise Findlay, a Sḵwx̱wú7mesh knowledge keeper and researcher, and Gathering Our Medicine is the practice framework I developed in consultation with Elders, parents, social workers, health care professionals, youth and knowledge carriers from throughout British Columbia.
The Maples Adolescent Treatment Centre came to me in 2019. Indigenous communities were telling them the program they had was failing their kids and families, and they wanted something Indigenous. I’d trained as an attachment expert under Gordon Neufeld and I was living in my own community, so my name kept coming up.
We formed an advisory, and I built Gathering Our Medicine from what I heard there. The BC government funded a pilot across five communities and inside Child and Youth Mental Health agencies, and we supported community facilitators to lead it themselves.
The framework is informed by Dr. Gordon Neufeld’s lifetime of work with young people and families in the most complex cases anyone sees. He supervised the development of Gathering Our Medicine and was an important part of conceptualizing what this program has become.
What makes it different is where the expert stands. The professional steps out of the centre and walks alongside the family to repair the ruptures underneath a young person’s behaviour.
Since then my team and I have taught it in kinship circles and in rooms across Canada. A delegated child and family services agency took it on as their practice model, and they used it to guide a residence for youth aging out of care where Elders lived in residence alongside them.
Gathering Our Medicine has since grown into a framework informing community and family healing work well beyond parenting. The people using it now are counselors, social workers, educators and health practitioners.
Although Gathering Our Medicine was successfully piloted virtually, up until now, we’ve mainly focused on delivering it in person inside Indigenous communities. That limits its reach, and there are many people around the world who can benefit from the teachings.
So for the first time, we’re opening it up as an ongoing membership so people can connect from all over the world and learn a different approach. It’s a chance for everyone to come together from wherever they are, and for us to share our Indigenous wisdom with the adults who want to show up better for the young people in their care.
Your training didn't prepare you for the day to day reality of this work.
The definition of healing is to be whole again, with body and mind and heart and spirit connected. Conventional programs go at that from the outside in with an “I can fix you” mindset. The problem with that is it puts the damage inside the child and leaves the conditions around them untouched. You can’t force healing from the outside. We provide a safe relationship and let nature do the rest.
Conventional methods name the symptoms and treat the child in isolation from connection, which just moves the symptoms around, because you’re not looking for the root cause. A young person who is aggressive receives medication and therapy and learns that attack is unacceptable so they turn that anger inwards and it becomes anxiety. The emotion just got redirected because these methods don’t teach you how to process them effectively so you can heal and transcend the trauma safely.
Culture on its own cannot heal so when it gets applied to a western model as a finishing layer, everyone in the room can feel that nothing has changed. Without the relationship underneath it, culture becomes something you do to a child. That’s because relationships are culturally scripted. Ceremony, learning a song and being on the land are all shaped by a young person’s culture and place, and that’s what makes it theirs. No wisdom teaching can reach a young person through a hard heart, no matter how much culture is in the room.
The families you work with have told you they don’t want to be pushed through another impersonal service model, and the uncomfortable part is that you agree with them. You’ve seen a full service plan run its course and change nothing about the week that family goes home to.
The Gathering Our Medicine Practice Circle is where you learn to walk alongside a family supporting them to repair the relational ruptures and emotional disconnection due to trauma.
Stop managing behaviour. Start gathering relationship.
Every month, our members receive:
Unlimited Access
Unlimited access to the W.I.S.E. Practice Relationship Resource, so you have somewhere to take a situation the moment it happens. Updated as the framework grows.
Teaching Circle
A live 90-minute Teaching Circle, following a twelve-month curriculum through the healing conditions and Wisdom Practices. You learn each part of the framework and how to apply it properly to the people in front of you.
Case Consultation
A live 60-minute Case Consultation, where you bring a de-identified situation and we decode it together. You leave with practical steps to try that week.
Monday Medicine Note
Each Monday, receive a short teaching with a reframe you can use straight away and a question to sit with. Short enough to read on the go, but focused enough to apply at your next meeting.
Weekly Decode Video
A new Decode of the Week video, where we take a real-world situation and work it through the resource in under fifteen minutes. Watch how the framework gets applied so you can see how to use it yourself.
Printable Medicine Cards
Printable Medicine Cards and practice guides, plus the full recording library archived by theme, so you can find the resource you need easily.
Members' Circle
A members’ circle of practitioners doing this work in agencies, schools, clinics and communities, with the Gathering Our Medicine team in there alongside you. Ask a question midweek and get an answer from the people who built the framework.
Participation Record
A participation record of your live hours for your professional development file.
From inside Gathering Our Medicine
You’ll feel the difference this makes on your caseload
- Gathering Our Medicine gives you a relational lens to view the world through, so you can work across cultures without forcing everyone into a one-size-fits-all evidence-based model.
- The language on the file stops deciding your next move. Attention-seeking reads as connection-seeking, and withdrawing your attention stops being the answer
- Aggression and defiance read as emotion with nowhere to go. You give it somewhere to move, and when the anger turns to tears you know it's working.
- Flatness and sarcasm read as a defended heart, and you meet them with warmth held steady over weeks.
- After a rupture, you gather again. Almost nobody was taught to do that.
- A placement move or a summer break stops undoing the relationship you built.
- In a case conference you can name what a young person needs, and say what you're doing about it in language your team can follow.
- The hardest situation you're carrying goes to a room of people who do your job, and you leave with practical steps.
- You become the adult a young person remembers years later, when someone asks them who was there.
This is for you if...
- You’re committed to making a real difference in the lives of families and children.
- You're tired of labels like attention-seeking and non-compliant, and you want language that leads somewhere different.
- You work inside a system and you want to practice in a culturally grounded way without waiting for the system to change first.
- You want to be one of the people inside a young person's circle, as a witness and a learner.
- You learn best in community with other people, working through real situations together.
- You've seen a young person change because one adult kept showing up for them, and you want to be able to do that on purpose.
- You're a parent, a kinship caregiver or a foster carer who wants to understand what's happening underneath your young person's behaviour.
This isn't for you if
- You're looking for a credential. You get a record of your live hours, but no accrediting body has certified them.
- You believe evidence-based is the only way and you’re more concerned about reducing your own liability and risk.
- You want a script to run at a young person. The framework hands you questions, but you're the one who will apply them relationally.
- You want someone to tell you what to do with your child. This will give you a way to understand what's happening and the relationship you’ll learn how to build does the rest.
- You need this to work by the end of the month. The Gathering Our Medicine practice usually runs in person over months, which is why the circle follows a twelve-month curriculum.
- You believe a young person's behaviour is something to be fixed or controlled. The whole framework is built around connection and relationship.
- You want to stay in the background. The circle runs on people bringing their own situations and speaking into each other's, so staying silent leaves you with a recording library and little else.
When a whole team learns Gathering Our Medicine together.
What happens when you join the waitlist
You'll receive a free gift as soon as you join, and it stays yours whether or not you come into the membership in January.
Decoding the Behaviour: 16 Relational Reframes
Sixteen of the phrases that end up written on files, with the relational reframe for each one. Attention-seeking, manipulative, non-compliant, and more as well as what each of them is more likely telling you. Keep it beside you for the next case note you write, and you’ll start hearing the difference in how your team talks about a young person.
After that you’ll get occasional emails from me with resources you can put to use while waiting for the official opening of the membership. You’ll also receive an invitation to every free masterclass we run between now and January.
Doors open January 2027. Before they do, you’ll get a full week to test out the W.I.S.E. Practice Relationship Resource on your own cases.
Add your name below and I'll send the 16 relational reframes right over.
Gathering Our Medicine will give you the wisdom to practice in a way that changes for the families and young people in their care.
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Questions people ask
I'm not a clinician. Is this still for me?
The circle is built for counselors, social workers, educators, early childhood educators, clinicians, peer support workers and health practitioners. If you walk alongside young people and their families in any capacity, you’ll find your work in it.
Is this only for Indigenous practitioners?
No. This is for anybody who wants to build a relational practice. It’s created by a Squamish knowledge keeper and informed by Indigenous ways of knowing, doing and being, but it’s attachment based, so if you have a limbic system, it’s for you.
I'm a parent. Can I join?
Yes. Gathering Our Medicine was built for parents first and grew from there. You’ll be in a circle alongside counselors, social workers and educators, and what gets taught is the same for all of you because it’s about learning to create better relationships through connection. That applies to everyone.
What happens if I can't make the live calls?
Every call is recorded and archived by theme. You can submit a situation for the Case Consultation without attending, and watch the decode afterwards.
Do the hours count as CEUs?
You get a record of your live hours for your professional development file. No accrediting body has certified them, so they aren’t CEUs.
My agency has a professional development budget. Can they pay?
You get a record of your live hours for your professional development file. No accrediting body has certified them, so they aren’t CEUs.
Can I bring my whole team in?
Yes. A licence puts the resource in the hands of every worker on your team, gives them live calls to bring real situations to, and gives you a record of participation hours for their files. Tell us how many seats you’re thinking about when you join the list and we’ll come back to you directly.