Living In Alignment: Ayahuasca Healing Retreat

Living In Alignment: Ayahuasca Healing Retreat offers an immersion in traditional Shipibo plant-spirit healing, complemented with yoga classes and an ontological system of self-inquiry. We share unique distinctions and practices that empower you to take full responsibility for and agency over your life. The alchemy of these systems offers an opportunity for powerful healing that reaches into the roots of trauma and provides highly effective integration guidance to bring profound and lasting transformation into your life.

We have expanded upon our most effective and longest-standing program, the 12-Day Retreat, further refining its design and structure and adding powerful elements to elevate our healing work and yours. This retreat is truly the culmination of all of our work facilitating healing and integration with ayahuasca with over 10,000 guests over the past 13 years, and we are thrilled to share it with you.

Living In Alignment retreats will consist of six ceremonies with four Shipibo healers and two experienced facilitators, floral baths, a steam bath, healing massages, vomitivos, individual consultations, group processing and integration sessions, and individually prescribed plant remedies. Guests will also carry out regular periods of honoring the ancient practice of ayuno – a process of fasting ayahuasca and the ikaros after each ceremony, which enables deeper healing and stronger protections.

While the Shipibo healing traditions are the foundation and core of our work, integrating the psycho-spiritual breakthroughs and insights, both during and after healing requires personal mastery. By complementing plant-spirit shamanism with ontological inquiry, an alchemical marriage emerges that enables you to fully own and integrate your healing and realize the critical importance of integrity in all aspects of your life.

When your thoughts, speech, and actions are aligned with and inspired by your highest calling, your soul’s mission, you then live in alignment.

We constantly strive to create the optimal conditions and orientation to work with ayahuasca and are passionately dedicated to providing a genuinely caring, highly professional, and exceptionally supportive setting. Creating a safe, sacred space for our guests to heal, transform, and awaken is our priority.

We deeply honor and respect the indigenous healing traditions of the Amazon that have evolved over thousands of years to offer the most effective ayahuasca healing experience. They bring a rich cultural and medicinal legacy, time-honored rituals, intricate practices, an expansive cosmology, an encyclopedic knowledge of medicinal plants of the Amazon, and a far-reaching ancestral lineage to the healing process.

Our exceptional team of healers (called Onanya in Shipibo, meaning “those who have wisdom”) has been carefully selected over many years to work at the Temple of the Way of Light. We are blessed to work with some of the most respected, kind-hearted, and powerful Onanya from the Shipibo tribe, who are experts in ayahuasca healing and plant-spirit curanderismo of the Amazon.

Shipibo medicine is a highly sophisticated healing tradition that harnesses the healing energies of a vast number of plant and tree-spirits of the Amazon. According to the Onanya, it is the plant-spirits who direct the process, transmitting energetic medicine in the form of ikaros (the songs of the plants) that are sung through the healers in ayahuasca ceremonies.

The Onanya see ayahuasca (Oni in their language, meaning “wisdom”) as a nexus to the plant-spirit worlds, and it is not the only plant spirit with which they work. The key to the depth and efficacy of this ancient healing system is achieved by working with a plethora of other plant spirits in each ceremony who work alongside and direct ayahuasca.

Without bringing together a team of plant spirits, the healing work of ayahuasca alone would be limited, and unable to reach the energetic roots of heavy energies. While the only plant brew you will drink in ceremony is ayahuasca, you will receive energetic healing from many different plant-spirits in every ceremony.

One of the main functions of Oni for the Onanya is to enable them to perceive energetic blockages in the people that they are healing. Traditionally, in Shipibo communities, the person receiving healing would typically not drink ayahuasca. For the Onanya, Oni is a nature-based technology that enables them to scan and see where heavy energies are located and where the energetic body is not aligned.

They then focus on cleansing and clearing the energy field that surrounds us (niwe, in Shipibo) which picks up toxic energies from the environment and heavy residual energies from traumatic experiences in our past. The Shipibo healers’ encyclopedic knowledge of the medicinal plants (rao) of the Amazon Rainforest allows them to heal a huge range of psychic, psychological, emotional, and physical conditions that are typically all rooted in energetic causes.

Our experienced facilitators carry out an important role as bridges and translators between our healers and guests. Critically, they also hold space, listen, guide, and inspire guests throughout the program. We help our guests understand how to work with ayahuasca and all that this entails: how to process difficult emotions, handle projections, surrender, manage expectations, face challenges, overcome fears, embody teachings from the plants, incorporate visionary experiences, and make the journey from the head to the heart.

Our facilitators have many years of personal experience with ayahuasca and “walk their talk.” Through having faced and integrated much of their own pain and challenges and transitioned from self to service, they are able to share from a place of personal experience and guide others through the same process. We are deeply committed to our guests’ healing journeys and are passionate about our work.

During the retreat, you will receive a substantial amount of integration support to help you process your healing experience after every ceremony. We also offer instruction on how to sustain and cultivate any breakthroughs and insights received during your retreat and how to ground transformative healing experiences into day-to-day life. We ensure that every person who comes to the Temple receives individual attention and is held in a compassionate and caring environment throughout their healing process.

The healing you will receive will cleanse a significant amount of dense energies that have accumulated in your system as well as bring up many aspects of your past that have been buried in your subconscious. It is important to understand that this process not only takes place during the ceremonies but also normally for days, weeks, and months after a retreat. Ayahuasca and the plant spirits will continue to work with you after you leave the Temple and the more self-reflection, courage, responsibility, and awareness you bring to the process during this crucial phase, the more benefits you will gain.

Ayahuasca helps dissolve the illusory self and significantly increases awareness of self-constructed boundaries, highlighting and helping release fear-filled and self-limiting beliefs. Ayahuasca initiates a long-term healing journey that supports overall liberation from the hypnosis of conditioning – shining a light onto your shadow and helping you to become aware of your patterns, 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. Through regular group sharing and guidance throughout the workshop, we will support you significantly with your overall integration process, which is as important as the treatment you receive during the retreat.

An ayahuasca retreat at the Temple is an intense process that offers a powerful opportunity to experience profound healing. Due to decades of training and wisdom that is passed through many generations, the work of our Shipibo healers allows ayahuasca deeper access into the system, reaching into the roots of trauma and clearing energetic blockages that disconnect you from your true self. Through clearing the past and bringing energetic alignment to your body, mind, and soul, this transformational process initiates, or further deepens, a long-term journey of self-reflection, self-discovery, and spiritual awakening.

Since ancient times, fasting has been a discipline that supports physical rejuvenation and spiritual growth. Fasting is the oldest therapeutic method known to man. Traditionally in the Amazon, any healer training to become a curandero (plant spirit healer) learns through an apprenticeship process of plant dietas (sama, in Shipibo) – initially for cleansing themselves, and then to learn from the plant spirit teachers. When carrying out any dieta, the ayuno is one of the most important keys to the success of the process.

Traditionally in the Amazon, ayunos are considered a sacred offering to the plant spirits. When someone has deeply committed to their healing process by giving offerings to the plant during and after the healing process, the Shipibo believe the plant will appreciate and reciprocate these offerings by healing on a deeper level. It is possible to ayuno both ayahuasca (drunk physically in ceremony) and the ikaros (the energetic transmission from the plants, sung through the healers in ceremony).

Ayunos are almost always carried out in silence. The silence and lack of stimulation allow a space for internal reflection and personal process, and for the communication of the plants to trickle through into inspiring thoughts, revelations, and insights. Ayunos can be short yet incredibly intense during plant dietas and ayahuasca healing. The more one fasts in silence, then typically, the more effective their healing or learning becomes.

Many healers will say that by carrying out an ayuno for one day during a dieta is equivalent to one month in the astral realm, in terms of the depth that the ayuno brings to the healing and learning. The Temple healers have recommended that guests begin to carry out ayunos on retreats, if they are able. Ayuno will begin at 6pm before each ceremony until 1pm the following day – an 18 hour fast. Silence will be observed from the end of the ceremony until the fast is broken at 1pm the next day. Fasts will only be carried out on ceremony nights and the following mornings and are not compulsory.

By completing six fasts during the retreat, the healing process is taken to a much deeper level. This is not easy work and requires commitment, courage, and endurance, however, the healing outcomes are well and truly worth the challenge.

Note: If you feel called to do a fast before your retreat, we strongly recommend not doing this close to the start. In the weeks leading up to your retreat, we recommend taking extra good care of yourself and cultivating a strong, stable, and relaxed body, and sharp and focused mind.

Ayni is an ancient term, used for thousands of years in Peru, that essentially describes balance. Ayni is being of service and in right relationship with our self, our community, our planet, and beyond.

When our thoughts, speech/heart and actions are aligned with and inspired by our highest calling, our soul’s mission, we then “live in ayni.” Our life is in balance, guided by the rudder of profound integrity. When we are out of integrity, and out of ayni, the imbalance within us manifests as illness and emotional turmoil.

Since 2017, we have been developing a unique ontological program (an inquiry into the nature of being) that significantly supports healing with ayahuasca, and following a retreat at the Temple, offers a pathway to live in ayni. We bring modern distinctions and practices in synthesis with ancient principles to support the creation of a fully expressed, harmonious, joyful, and fulfilling life.

The intention of this aspect of the work is to offer you distinctions in the context of group sessions in a way that empowers and inspires you in both your integration process and in your life in general. We offer practices that create an opportunity to reclaim your power and greater access to be the author of your life, to consciously create and live a life that is aligned with and inspired by your soul.

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

The Temple’s ayahuasca retreats are the beginning of a much longer process of healing and self-exploration. Our retreats offer a significant intervention to address chronic emotional pain and psycho-spiritual issues that accumulate in modern life, and a profound catalyst that accelerates our overall journey back to wholeness. Our ayahuasca retreats effect substantial, measurable, and lasting change for most who attend our programs.

Healing with ayahuasca works in cycles. For most, one workshop will bring their lives back into significant alignment to continue a path of healing, expansion, and self-discovery without further treatment being necessary. We also see some guests returning to continue their healing work with the plants and with ayahuasca after their first retreat. We advise, in most cases, that it is important not to return for another program before having spent at least six months or a year after a retreat focused on integration, to allow time for the work with the medicine to continue to expand and unfold.

It is important to know that ayahuasca is not a panacea. We can never offer any guarantees regarding healing. The key to successful healing in most cases is the combination of a quality ayahuasca brew, highly skilled, and well-intentioned healers acting as conduits to a large team of plant spirits, experienced and caring facilitators, and a safe and compassionate environment. Of equal importance is your own approach to healing – coming with clear intentions, a strong will, and the courage to face your shadow will deepen your healing and transformation.

This is only an example of what the schedule might look like for this retreat.

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 choose your preferred date below and fill in the necessary information on the following pages in order to complete your application. Once you have submitted the application and we have received your payment and medical information, we will let you know if your application has been approved within about a week. 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 has been reviewed and you have been approved to attend. 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 purchasing travel insurance.

If we are forced to cancel any programs as a result of the changing global situation or international travel restrictions, all registration 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.