Selima Iwilla Harleston Lust

This workshop series focuses on three of the most common reproductive health challenges disproportionately affecting Black women—PCOS, Endometriosis, and Fibroids. Each session provides education, self-advocacy tools, and holistic wellness strategies to help students better understand their bodies, navigate healthcare with confidence, and explore natural approaches to reproductive health.

Ancestral Recipes & Why They Worked Drawing from historical sources, including the WPA Slave Narratives, this talk explores everyday healing practices used by enslaved African Americans and the knowledge embedded within them. We’ll examine how ancestral observation, experience, and necessity shaped these remedies, then connect those practices to what modern science now supports, complicates, or corrects. Participants will leave with a broader understanding of what counts as medicine and how familiar culinary herbs can still serve as meaningful tools for everyday wellness.

True healing happens when we tend to the mind, body, and spirit together. In this uplifting and practical workshop, you'll learn how plants can be powerful partners in your healing journey through three core areas: stress, gut health, and inflammation that when supported, radiate benefits to your entire body.

 Chronic stress can disrupt hormones, nervous system regulation, libido, and arousal, leaving us exhausted and disconnected from pleasure. This talk explores how stress, food, medications, and environmental exposures can affect sexual well-being, along with herbs that support libido, hormonal health, and resilience. We’ll also look at simple self-care practices and partner rituals that cultivate relaxation, intimacy, and connection—inside and outside the bedroom.

Herbs, Autonomy, and the Right to Heal Herbal medicine has never been just about plants. For enslaved African Americans, it was one of the few tools available for caring for the body, the spirit, and one another — practiced in stolen hours, in the dark, and in the margins of a system that refused to recognize their full humanity. Drawing from slave narratives, ethnobotanical research, and the enduring practices of African American healing traditions this talk explores what it means to tend to yourself and each other when no one else recognizes the needs or wants of your inner life. You'll encounter stories of everyday decisions, small, yet deeply meaningful acts of nurturing that reveal a deeper framework of healing for modern times: one rooted in skill, relationship, and a refusal to surrender.

Reclaiming the Forethought of African American Healing Traditions African American healing traditions have long used herbs not only to treat illness, but to protect health, build resilience, and mitigate harm within systems that did not center Black well-being. This talk explores the proactive wisdom embedded in those traditions and the role herbal medicine has historically played in sustaining Black communities. By reclaiming that forethought today, we can expand the ways we care for ourselves and strengthen community health while broader systems continue to change.

How Plants Can Guide Us From Trauma to Joy . Trauma can shape the way we experience our bodies, our relationships, and even our sense of what is possible for our lives. In this deeply personal talk, Selima explores how working with herbal medicine can support a journey from pain to relief, safety, connection, and ultimately, remembrance of the self beneath the wounds. Through story, plant wisdom, and nervous system support, participants are invited to consider healing not simply as the absence of symptoms, but as a return to joy, belonging, possibility, and home within ourselves.

A guide to ancestral wellness, health equity, and self-agency through plant medicine