Adela Pimintel Chocano

Adela comes from the Shipibo community of Flor de Ucayali. She is the mother of eight children and the grandmother of three. Adela comes from a lineage of respected Shipibo healers. As a young girl, she loved participating in ayahuasca ceremonies with her grandfather, a respected and renowned healer in their region.

She was inspired by the way he worked with the plants, awe-struck by his icaros and the deep healing she witnessed, and decided she, too, wanted to learn to heal and help people. At twenty-five, she was ready to commit to the path of apprenticeship. Motivated by a strong desire to care for her children’s health and help others, she reached out to her grandfather to teach her.

She remembers her grandfather asking her if she was committed. He said that learning from the plants was not a game but something sacred, challenging, and to be taken very seriously. She confirmed she was fully committed, understood the implications of her decision to train, and sincerely wanted to help her family and others like she had seen him do.

A whole year of dieta followed, during which she stayed isolated entirely in her house. At the end of that year, her grandfather said that her path with the plants was now open and that they would support her for the rest of her life. He started to serve her ayahuasca, and from there, she learned with him in ceremony how to work with the energies of the plants she had dieted to heal people.

Her reputation as a powerful healer grew and many people sought her help with physical, emotional and energetic problems. She worked as a respected Onanya in her community for seven years, before being recommended by a fellow healer to work in a centre with Westerners.

Since then, she has worked all over Peru and takes great joy in sharing her medicine. She really enjoys her work, especially seeing the results when her patients are liberated from pain and sadness. She sees her path with the plants as her life’s work and is dedicated to continuing to diet and learn from them in order to better help her family and other people and to continue to improve herself.