About the author

Barbara is a scientist and wildlife biologist, but her true passion is to garden and teach the peasant wisdom of the earth. Brought up on a coastal homestead surrounded by the good, the true and the beautiful––gardens, fruit trees, animals, conscious compost and the wilds to explore––she thought the whole world was a garden! Realizing now that this is not actually so, she holds the faith that indeed it can and will be. The Joy of Biodynamic Agriculture…is the story of the hidden forces behind that faith.

In her late twenties she did fieldwork on the Vancouver Island wolf as partial requirements for a Master of Science in wildlife biology. Transmissions is the intuitive wisdom and real story of that adventure that could not be written down in the thesis as it wouldn’t pass for science. Those were the facts and figures while this Transmission is the real story and the truth —my truth.

In her early thirties, Barbara discovered Rudolf Steiner’s legacy of biodynamic agriculture. She taught herself to heal the earth while individualizing Aurora farm, knowing that this spiritual work was also growing her consciousness soul. Aurora was home to the first biodynamic heirloom seed company in North America, and later it hosted an apprenticeship program in biodynamic agriculture. It was here that sons Wi-Li and Nathan were raised on food as medicine, and Barbara co-created herbal remedies and homeopathic flower essences from the farm and surrounding wilds.

As a spiritual pioneer, Barbara has taken these teachings to the world since the late 1990s at conscious composting festivals, land stewardship consultations and the business of heirloom seeds in the United States, Canada and Africa. She is also perma-culture savvy and teaches the Usui method of Reiki. She and her late husband, Woody Wodraska, traveled, taught and worked at numerous initiatives in the U.S. and overseas for several years. They sought kindred spirits with common ideals for an economy of the land within the context of Steiner’s threefold social order.

Barbara’s focus is on right livelihood and the co-creation of a sane and healthy legacy for the children. By planting seeds of faith and hope in the collective mission of love for the earth, she joins others in serving through direct experience as it evolves in the moment. She currently lives on and stewards land in British Columbia and is writing about the experiences that came as gifts while studying timber wolves for a Master’s degree during the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.

She received a National Science and Engineering Research Council Grant, Canada in the late ‘70s and completed two years of a doctoral program at the University of Victoria where she taught undergraduate courses as a teaching assistant.

Barbara may be contacted at barbara at soulmedicinejourney dot com