#9 — Ayahuasca: An Ancestral Art Form with Carlos Tanner

In & Through: The Onaya Podcast

Carlos Tanner has been studying the science and art of plant medicine in the Amazon Rainforest for twenty years.

He currently works as the director of the Ayahuasca Foundation, a non-profit organisation he founded in 2009 in Iquitos, Peru. They organise healing retreats and educational courses led by Indigenous Shipibo healers, to help people in need of healing or those interested in learning ancestral healing traditions of the Amazon.

Since 2017, the Ayahuasca Foundation has collaborated with Onaya Science at the Riosbo Research Centre in the Peruvian Amazon, looking at the effects of ayahuasca retreats on mental health, spiritual wellbeing, personality and nature connectedness, and biological changes.

You can see much more about this research – including our ongoing long-term study of military veterans with PTSD – via our website.

In this episode, Carlos spoke to Simon about:

• His life story through the American Dream, addiction and a near-death promise to God
• A calling to the jungle to train with Shipibo healers in the Amazon, and the establishing of the Ayahuasca Foundation
• The essence of shamanism and the preservation of Shipibo culture
• The misunderstood concepts of ‘energy’, ‘faith’ and ‘placebo’ in ancestral and Western medicine
• Healing as an art form, as well as a science
• The divergence of different ancestral spiritual traditions

... and a range of other topics.

Carlos Tanner is one of many experts on Onaya's new 6-month Psychedelic Mentorship Training programme. For more information and to find out how to enroll, visit Onaya's website and use the code 'INTHROUGH10' for a special 10% discount.