Hi! I'm Sierra Joleen.
I am a generational folk healer, ethnobotanist, and lady of the land. My work lives in the liminal space between science and the old ways, where ancestral wisdom, plant knowledge, and everyday ritual meet. I created Sanctuary for Spirit to help us heal ourselves through tending the home, the ancestors, and the land—one ritual at a time.
My lineage and early life
I have always lived in the strange and beautiful intersection of modern and old-world living. I grew up on a homestead, yet I was also a national champion motocross racer. I graduated high school at 16 and found myself drawn deeply to the sciences, while still carrying the quiet knowledge of the land, the seasons, and the unseen.
Familial lived traditions
My work is rooted not only in study, but in lived family tradition. Both sides of my family have unbroken homesteading traditions. On my maternal side, I come from a lineage that carried folk magic, homesteading, divination, and gifts of precognition. On my paternal side, I come from folk medicine traditions shaped by herbalism, midwifery, and home-based healing. These were not abstract ideas in my family; they were part of how life was lived, how care was given, and how people stayed in relationship with land, spirit, and one another.
I honor those lineages with tenderness, because ancestry is never simple. My family story includes mixture, migration, and complexity across North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, and I do not try to flatten that into something neat or easy. Instead, I let it teach me how healing can be braided from many threads, with integrity, humility, and care.
Ritual, living with the land, and kinship are ancestral ways of knowing — old wisdom that lives across lineages and remains available to all who feel called to remember it. In my own life, that remembering looks like tending the home as a sacred place, listening to the body as part of the ecosystem, and honoring the bonds that connect us to our people, our ancestors, and the land beneath us.
This is part of why I created The Sanctuary: to help us return to what is ancient, practical, and alive in the body. Not as performance. Not as nostalgia. But as a way of healing, belonging, and making a more beautiful life one ritual at a time.
Education and path
My formal path includes:
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BS in Interdisciplinary Studies Education.
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MA in Clinical Mental Health Counseling.
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Ordination as an Interfaith Reverend.
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Ongoing PhD work in Religion, focusing on ancestral healing.
This path led me more deeply into ethnobotany and ancestral healing, where I continue to live and study at the crossroads of science and the old ways. The work I do is deeply holistic and integrative—it is about the small daily rituals that help make a sacred and magical life possible.
How I work
I support women and folks becoming and deepening into being hearth keepers, wisdom keepers, and medicine women. My approach is:
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Holistic care for mind, body, and spirit.
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Deep respect for science, alongside curiosity for what is still being remembered and discovered.
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Grounded ritual, home-and-hearth magic, and making everyday life feel more alive.
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Rebelling by healing, as a way of choosing devotion, wholeness, and right relationship over disconnection.
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I use a unique style of holistic spiritual care I call Ritual Therapy, an integrative bio-psycho-social-spiritual model. It honors the truth that we are human beings within an ecosystem, and that we cannot be separated from the living world that shaped us.
My work draws from:
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Folk Magic — healings, protections, and blessings
These are not separate services, but threads in the same web, woven together within Ritual Therapy based on your needs.
The Sanctuary
I created Sanctuary for Spirit to help us heal ourselves through tending the home, the ancestors, and the land—one ritual at a time. The foundational threads in our web of life are:
Home
Ritual Therapy, ancestral healing, folk medicine, folk magic, evolutionary biology, hearth healing.
Ancestors
The ancestors as a whole, blood ancestors, professional ancestors, and ancestors of the land.
The Land
Ancestors of the land, the beings who live here—plants, animals, fungi—spirit of place, and sustainable homestead and ecology practices.
Step into a deeper knowing of what it is to be a hearth keeper, wise person, and elder for a more beautiful future
Folk Medicine Stories podcast
I host the Folk Medicine Stories podcast, where I offer cozy, storytelling-style collective card readings to help folks stay grounded while crafting a more beautiful life. If you are drawn to this work, you may also enjoy the podcast.
Let's grow together