Women’s Ayahuasca Healing & Integration Retreat

There is something powerful that happens when groups of women get together. For this 12-day retreat we will be working with exclusively female facilitators and female support staff in order to create a magical and profoundly healing container.

We have strived to honor the divine feminine in all of our work at the Temple through working with mainly female healers since 2009. This very special retreat is for self-identified women only. Holding a retreat specifically for women brings an added focus to that guiding principle and aims to support the embodiment and empowerment of feminine energy in our guests and on the planet.

More importantly, very few women, especially early on in their healing journeys, are fully comfortable with their own femininity, fully connected to their own feminine power, and fully supported by a community of strong women. The only way to truly heal and re-create these parts of ourselves is to face them, and what better way to do that than by creating an environment of exclusively women in which to do this healing work.

Too many women report not having close female friends, and lacking sisterhood. All too easily, feminine power gets corrupted and manifests as jealousy, competition, self-sacrifice, anger turned inward, and a disjointed relationship with our own sexuality. Western society very much reinforces these dynamics, but healing has to start with you.

The first step to effecting change in the world is to do your own inner work. While it’s impossible to separate an individual from their environment, to extract a woman from the paternalistic society she grew up in, the focus is going to be very much on you and your own process, and not on society as a whole.

Your facilitators will be helping you to increase the depth of the work you’re able to do, and maximize the healing that is possible for you. As we process our experiences in ceremonies, we will focus as much as possible on female and feminine-specific issues and ideas, paving the way for you to go back into your life in a powerful and connected way.

We deeply honor and respect indigenous healing traditions of the Amazon that have evolved over thousands of years and offer the most effective ayahuasca healing experience. We work with some of the most respected, kind-hearted, and powerful maestras and maestros (Onanya) from the Shipibo tribe who are experts in ayahuasca healing and plant spirit shamanism of the Amazon.

We provide potent and visionary ayahuasca sourced from deep in the rainforest in the Shipibo territories. Our ayahuasca is made from cielo (sky / heaven) ayahuasca and chacruna with no admixtures. The ceremonies led by our healers offer the highest levels of shamanic mastery available in the Peruvian Amazon combined with an exemplary track record in terms of safety, protection, care for, and support of our guests.

The Shipibo Onanya possess an encyclopedic knowledge of medicinal plants (rao) of the Amazon Rainforest which allows them to heal an expansive range of psycho-spiritual, emotional, and sometimes physical conditions. They do this through ancient healing practices involving incredibly beautiful ikaros (songs of the plants), intense perfumes, individually prescribed plant remedies, and powerful energetic work.

The Shipibo tradition is a system of plant spirit shamanism that facilitates healing from a vast number of different plant and tree spirits, who transmit healing energies through the ikaros sung by the healers in ceremonies. The Onanya see ayahuasca as a nexus to the plant spirit worlds, and is not the only plant spirit they work with.

The healing process is very much focused on cleansing and purifying the energy field which surrounds us (niwe), which picks up toxic energies from our environment and traumatic experiences of our past. The key to the depth and efficacy of this ancient healing system is their calling in and working with a plethora of other plant spirits in each ceremony that work alongside ayahuasca to affect deep healing. Without bringing together a team of plant spirits, the healing work of ayahuasca alone would be more limited. Although you will only drink ayahuasca during ceremony, you will receive energetic healing from many different plants spirits.

The healing you will receive from the Onanya and ayahuasca will cleanse a tremendous amount of dense energies that have accumulated in your system as well as bring up many fragmented aspects of your past that have been buried into your subconscious, both during the ceremonies, and often for days, weeks and months after a retreat. It is important to understand that ayahuasca and the plant spirits will continue to work with you after a retreat and the more self-reflection, courage, responsibility, and awareness you bring to the process post retreat, the more benefits you will gain.

Ayahuasca helps to dissolve the illusory self and significantly increase your awareness of your own self-constructed boundaries, as well as highlighting and helping you to release fear filled and self-limiting beliefs. Ayahuasca initiates a long term healing journey that supports your overall liberation from the hypnosis of your conditions; shining a light into your shadow, and helping you to become aware of negative patterns. You then need over the longer term to become intimate with your fears, embrace your shadow and consciously parent yourself back to wholeness. This is the slow path towards freedom from fear resulting in increasingly feeling lighter, brighter, more vital, more compassionate, and more in touch with yourself and the world around you.

This retreat is specifically designed to have many avenues to look into and examine our core wounding and shadow work through group processing and integration practices. The space is designed to help us realize that the ceremony is not simply what happens at night with the medicine but that life is giving us constant clues to examine our patterning and the less conscious parts of oneself.

Combining different methods and approaches from Western psychology and Eastern philosophy, Self Inquiries are designed to ground and reveal processes throughout the program. The exercises are carried out in groups, as the relational component makes them particularly potent. During the sessions, people often realize that our core wounds as women (and humans) are often very similar although our stories are different. We discover that we can serve as mirrors and teachers for one another in the process of exploring and expressing hidden aspects of ourselves.

Lead Facilitators

Debbie Rivett

After completing an donors degree with a double major in Psychology and Drama, Debbie worked in a number of fields, including education in HIV/AIDs and life-skills, investigative broadcast journalism, management of fundraising teams for international development organizations, international tour production for indigenous musical groups, and documentary-making.

Her wide-ranging skill set serves her well in her work at the Temple, where she oversees facilitator training and facilitates retreats. Passionate about healing and learning, Debbie has immersed herself in a journey with medicinal plants, apprenticing through dietas in both the Shipibo tradition and a mestizo tabaquero tradition in the Amazon, and has also been initiated in the Bwiti tradition of Gabon working with iboga.

Juliana Bizare

For the past 20 years, Juliana’s true passion has been the study and integration of the eastern practices of Yoga and mindfulness into work with sacred plant medicines and different modern psychological approaches, with a focus on renegotiating our traumas and rewriting our own life narratives.

She has supported hundreds of people before, during, and after their medicine journeys, and through her own experience with the medicine, has gained a clear understanding of the importance of the integration process. To be able to support people in a more holistic way, she also trained in the Compassionate Inquiry approach with Gabor Maté and Somatic Experiencing with Peter Levine. For the past six years she has been working at the Temple as a Retreat and Integration Facilitator.

Her goal is to empower people to feel safe in their bodies and to integrate trauma and all different parts of our human experience so people can have clarity on their path and purpose in life.

IMPORTANT APPLICATION INFO:

**All registrations must be made from a computer – we do not have mobile capability for our medical questionnaires at this time.

The Temple is open to anyone who is seriously committed to healing their body, mind, and soul, and who has the courage and willingness to fully partake in this process. However, please note that ayahuasca is not suitable for everybody. There are some instances where we are unable to accept an application due to potential psychological, medical, or pharmacological contraindications. All applicants will complete a comprehensive medical intake process to screen for any potential complications upon registration.

Please see availability below and click “Register Now” to continue through our intake process to complete your application. Once you have submitted your application, we will let you know if you are approved to attend the retreat within about one week or less. Once you are approved, your payment will be automatically charged to your credit card to confirm your space in the program.

Regarding our waiting lists: When a space becomes available in a full program, all members of the waiting list are notified simultaneously and the space will be filled by the first applicant. It is difficult for us to say whether a space will open or not – we do occasionally receive cancellations, but the timing is is unpredictable. If you join a waiting list, just keep an eye on your email for any notifications from us and be prepared to act quickly in order to secure an open space.

If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected].

NOTE: Please do not book flights or make any travel arrangements until your application and medical information have been reviewed and you have been approved into the retreat. In consideration of the changing global situation and international travel restrictions, we strongly recommend not making any travel arrangements until close to the start of the retreat and that all guests purchase travel insurance.

If we are forced to cancel any retreats as a result of the changing global situation or international travel restrictions, retreat payments will not be refunded. All payments will be either transferred to personal credit to be used for a future program at a later date (with no expiration date), or you may move to a different program at that time.