The theater was dark in that particular way it gets during Sundance—packed, hushed, expectant. On screen, the first frames of The Biggest Little Farm opened onto soil and struggle and devotion: the kind of story that looks simple from a distance and is anything but up close.
Babbie and Lessing Stern watched from their seats as the film unfolded. Lessing had invested in the documentary through Impact Partners, a group that supports films intended to catalyze positive social change. Until that night, it had been an investment in a possibility—something meaningful, something hopeful. But as the farmers on screen kept returning to the land, season after season, it started to feel like more than a film.
For Babbie, it landed as a kind of recognition.
She was moved by its steadiness. By the stick-with-it devotion. By the idea that a living system, tended over time, could restore land and feed the community in more ways than one. She would later describe it as a hinge moment—the kind that turns “someday” into “now.”
That night didn’t give rise to the vision of Healing Seeds. It gave it courage.
Because in truth, the story began long before the screen flickered on.
A Child Who Knew
“I knew by the time I was four in this lifetime that I wanted to be a doctor,” Babbie Stern said.
For years, the path was clear: pre-med, the steady forward march, the sense of being pulled toward a calling. But in her junior year of college, she started shadowing physicians, and the reality of the system hit hard.
More than one doctor offered the same warning: If there is anything else you would rather do, do it.
They told her why.
“Between the AMA and the health insurance and the HMOs and the pharmaceutical companies, our visits are limited to six minutes,” she recalled. “And the only thing we can do in six minutes is either prescribe a drug or order more imaging.”
For someone who wanted to practice medicine as root work—as listening, as relationship—it was destabilizing. Stern describes that season as a dark night of the soul. But it also opened a different door.
After college, found herself studying Neuro-Linguistic Programming, and through that, a course in the Shamanic medicine wheel with Alberto Villoldo at The Four Winds Society. She traveled with Alberto to a Shamanic Medicine Conference in Peru where she met Dr. Theo Paredes, an anthropologist and shaman steeped in the medicine ways of the Q’ero shaman and began what was to become an enduring and deep study of Shamanic Medicine. It was also in Peru with Alberto that someone suggested she look into Naturopathic Medicine—something she hadn’t heard of before. Back in the U.S., she began reading about the principles of naturopathic care and felt an immediate sense of recognition. She enrolled at the National College of Natural Medicine (now National University of Natural Medicine), completing a six-year program that included a master’s degree in Classical Chinese Medicine with Heiner Freuhauf and a doctorate in Naturopathic Medicine.
During her studies, she fell in love with botanical medicine—not as a product category, but as a living relationship between plant and person, land and body.
Classical Chinese medicine deepened it further. “It really is about deep connection with the earth and the natural rhythms,” Dr. Babbie said. “The understanding that our role as humans is very literally, to connect heaven with Earth—that the human being is meant to be a conduit, a channel between earth and heaven.”
Fifteen Years in Practice—and a Pattern Beneath Symptoms
Dr. Babbie moved back to Park City with her family, raised her children, and built a practice, Mountain Sage Natural Health and Acupuncture, that became a steady presence in the community.
For fifteen years, she worked in the intimate terrain of people’s lives. She described being embraced by the community and poured her energy outward—volunteering at Peoples Health Clinic and serving as president of the Park City Rotary Club.
And over time, she noticed a pattern that kept repeating: physical symptoms often arrived braided with deeper layers—stress, grief, trauma, disconnection, the places where something essential couldn’t be felt or metabolized.
“Many of my patients came to me with physical issues that had roots in the spiritual realm,” she said. “So I began exploring alchemical healing—a way to help people get embodied, to move into the areas where they’re holding trauma or emotions that haven’t been properly transmuted.”
Sometimes the simplest prescriptions were the most revealing. People came with anxiety or depression, she said, and her instruction could be elegantly simple: go sit next to a tree by a river and notice what shifts. Not as a metaphor. As an experiment. As nervous-system medicine.
As remembering.
This is one of the ways the land entered her work long before there was a farm.
“I’ve always believed that nature is the best medicine,” she said. “If we can identify and treat the cause, which often resides in the mental, emotional, or spiritual realms, the body will do what it needs to restore itself to health.”
From a Film to a Question That Wouldn’t Let Go
Back in the theater, as the credits rolled and the lights rose, something stayed in the air—more than inspiration, more than admiration. A question.
What would it look like to build something like this here?
Not a replica. Not a brand. A local response—rooted in this landscape, these seasons, this community. A place where food and medicine weren’t separate conversations, and where health wasn’t something you reached for after life fell apart.
Then the world shifted.
When COVID arrived, it changed daily life—especially in health care. It also exposed how fragile certain systems, including supply chains, are. Many herbs used in clinical practice are imported.
“A lot of Chinese herbs are imported from overseas,” Stern said. “When COVID disrupted supply chains, we realized we needed to grow our own. So we asked, ‘What if we create the medicine here, with the land and climate we love?’”
That question became the foundation of Healing Seeds.
The Land in Peoa
The Sterns began looking for land that could hold an integrated vision—still close to family, still connected to the mountains that shaped them, but with enough space to grow food, medicine, and education together.
They found it in Peoa: a ranch property with a barn and an equipment shed, room for garden beds and perennials, and long-view learning. In the earliest phase, they built the bones—fencing, hoop houses, growing beds, processing capacity—understanding that farms mature in years, not in seasons.
And then they began the real work: learning what the land would allow.
Healing Seeds is built around a premise that is simple to say and demanding to live: The health of people and the health of the Earth are not separate.
A Moment That Became a Key
There is a story Dr. Babbie tells that feels like a key in the lock.
She was in the greenhouse, preparing a soil bed for planting—hands in earth, loosening what needed loosening.
“I remember once massaging a soil bed in the greenhouse,” she said, “preparing it for planting. And suddenly, I could feel the Earth responding, like a human body would—as if saying, ‘Yes, right there.’”
It wasn’t an intellectual moment. It was felt.
It turned the idea of Earth as living consciousness into something immediate—something undeniable. And in a way, Healing Seeds grows out of that kind of moment: the ones that change what a person can no longer pretend not to know.
Winter at Healing Seeds
In winter, that truth looks like quiet work.
Beds resting under cover. Trays of herbs drying in the shed. Jars catching light in the barn. The farm’s rhythm continues even when the fields look still—because the work is not only what can be seen.
Healing Seeds is a farm. It is also a clinic. It is a botanical medicine project. It is a living experiment in what it means to build health from the ground up.
And this series will tell that story over time—season by season, chapter by chapter. Some posts will be practical: what’s growing, what’s being made, what the land is teaching. Some will be quieter: plant stories, winter work, the long view. Some will be about the people behind Healing Seeds and what it takes to build something that lasts.
For now, this is simply an introduction—a doorway.
Because if there is one thread that runs from that dark theater to this quiet winter farm, it is the same thread running through Babbie’s work as a doctor:
Medicine doesn’t begin in a bottle.
It begins in relationship.