Mayantuyacu Retreat June 18th to 26th 2020

Juan and Susana

Dear Friends, for fifteen years I have been accompanying committed men and women into the heart of the Peruvian rainforest to work with Asháninkan healer and teacher Juan Flores Salazar at his Mayantuyacu center. This 2020 journey is inspired by the vision of hope and renewal this beginning of a decade brings.

I am inviting a small group of men and women committed to their inner paths to an immersion in nature, with nature, and through nature; individuals willing to support the co-creation of a safe and solid container for each other; and who are ready to go deep into their own healing, blind spots, and overall growth. I will be accompanying and facilitating the process all the way through.

Please see the full invitation by clicking the link below!

Susana Bustos, Ph.D.

Mayantuyacu Retreat 2020

Assessing a Quest to Heal HIV with Ayahuasca Shamanism

During the years that Susana and I have spent studying and training in the Peruvian vegetalismo, a mixed-race healing tradition that combines indigenous shamanism with Western elements such as Catholicism, we have come to appreciate the paradoxes that indigenous medicine comes wrapped in for Westerners. Among them is the distinction between curing and healing of disease, concepts which, as in Venn diagrams, overlap yet remain experientially distinct. The thrust of modern Western medicine is to “cure,” from Latin cura “to care, concern, trouble,” by either managing disease within, or excising it from, the body, and disease is usually considered cured when symptoms abate. In indigenous styles of medicine, which give equal importance to curing as the West, healing, from Old English hælan “to make whole, sound and well,” may also involve searching out the hidden origin of the disease in the body/mind. In this healing quest, a cure may be found, and may not. The valence of the disease, however, will change. In such cases, it is the entire self that is engaged in unraveling a disease’s enigma, and the body is the laboratory wherein the cure can be found. As a consequence, such healing is often idiosyncratic, because each body’s laboratory is unique. Continue reading “Assessing a Quest to Heal HIV with Ayahuasca Shamanism”