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 nature.
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.
Shipibo Plant-Spirit Curanderismo
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. 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.
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 ayahuasca for the Onanya is to enable them to identify and clear 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 the energetic body and where heavy energies are located.
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.
Wherever the art of medicine is loved, there is also a love of humanity – Hippocrates
The Program
There will be six night-time ayahuasca ceremonies led by a team of four highly skilled Shipibo healers. Shipibo plant-spirit healing is an ancient and sophisticated healthcare system that reaches into the psychological, psychic, emotional, and energetic roots of trauma, blockages, limiting views, and self-defeating patterns.
The healers operate in ceremony as a plant-spirit guided medical team, each delivering on their particular skills and specialities, and provide individualized attention throughout the retreat to participants specific to their needs.
The day-time sessions will build on and compliment the deep healing experiences in ceremony. Through Gabor Mate’s Compassionate Inquiry approach, your facilitators will guide you as you explore how you created your world as you have.
This work offers you the possibility of bringing unexpected opportunities and powerful awareness into your life, your relationships, and your work in the world.
Experienced Facilitation
Our experienced facilitators carry out an important role as bridges and translators between our healers and guests.
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 each ceremony. We also offer guidance on how to sustain and cultivate any breakthroughs and insights you receive during your retreat, and how to ground transformative healing experiences into your 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 Journey Back to Wholeness
The Temple’s ayahuasca 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. The shamanic healing provided by our team of Shipibo healers effects substantial 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 to one 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 commitment to your process, trusting the healers, and having the courage to face your shadow will significantly deepen your healing and transformation.
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it – Rumi
Focus on Integration
The healing you will receive will cleanse 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 your process during this crucial phase, the more benefits you will gain.
Ayahuasca helps dissolve the illusory self and 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, and consciously parent yourself back to wholeness.
