While the School of Guayusa is being constructed, visits are currently being offered to the Amazanga community and Llushin Reserve. Individual and group visits are available for study, cultural exchange, or to receive healing for a specific illness.
Here are some examples of types of visits and areas of focus that can be arranged:
Group Workshops
Natural Birthing Workshop: women's medicine and early childhood training as well as teachings on natural midwifery and herbology.
Mythology Workshop: storytelling as related to ancestral wisdom and personal knowing. This can include a collaboration of teachings with tribal elders from various communities.
Spiritual Games Workshop: traditional games, connecting to nature through song and dance, forest survival skills and activities, community building and partnership through forest encounters.
Dream Study and Sound Workshop: dream recall and interpretation. This involves the capturing and representation of dreams in music and visual art, cross-cultural dialogue involving bio-acoustics, deep listening and sound patterns.
Herbal Medicine
For those interested in learning more about herbs and medicines that grow naturally in this part of the rainforest, there are a plethora of plants to study. The Quichuar refer to the jungle as a "natural pharmacy," and they heal disease and pain with natural remedies that have been passed down through the generations. Plant identification, mixing and application can all be practiced and applied. Everyone is invited to learn how to take guayusa cuttings and to plant their own guayusa tree.
Numerous afflictions can be healed by the medicinal plants of the Amazon. For those seeking to visit the School of Guayusa for the healing of a particular ailment, please also visit our Natural Healing page.
Reconnection with Nature
An integral part of the School of Guayusa experience is connection with nature, which greatly helps to maintain physical and spiritual health and balance. This happens naturally through immersion in the sounds, energies and rhythms of the forest, both while staying in the Amazanga community, and while visiting the school's jungle reserves. This includes hikes to sacred waterfalls, rivers and caves, as well as learning some of the ways of survival and symbiotic communion with the forest. By being immersed in the jungle and its sounds, we automatically reconnect ourselves with the earth and all its natural healing energy. It matters not how connected to nature one currently feels; the jungle immersion and natural reconnection offered here is extremely soothing to the spirit, regardless of one's starting point.
Shamanic Healing
Shamanic healing is healing through the movement of energies and with the use of medicinal plants. Where western medicine might use surgery to remove a diseased organ, a shaman will remove the harmful energy connected to the disease, leaving the organ intact and healing it in the process.
The School of Guayusa provides the chance to heal, laugh, and journey with healers and shamans such as don Rafael Santi, donna Lucilla Vargas, Flavio Santi and others. This is also a meeting place for healers from around the Amazon and the world, where natural wisdom from all origins can be shared and communicated.
There are many powerful plant medicines at the shaman's disposal, and some of them can help the healer to reach a vision state where he or she can clearly identify the roots of an ailment and what must be done for its remedy. In this way, the shaman is also able to energetically remove any harmful aspect, often resulting in a profound change on the physical level.
These powerful plant medicines can also be shared by the shaman with those who wish to experience first-hand the healing and visioning powers contained within them. For those that are interested, the School of Guayusa offers the opportunity to experience the incredible healing powers of these plants in a peaceful, safe and natural setting, completely free of distractions and outside influences, surrounded by the forest, and under the guidance and care of experts.
Women's Group
Donna Lucilla Vargas is a shaman and master healer of the Upper Amazon, as well as president of the Samay Association, a shamanic organization dedicated to the protection of the medicines and natural plants of indigenous peoples. Matriarch of the Amazanga community, Donna Lucilla offers her teachings to everyone, and also receives groups for a women's only program that focuses on physical and spiritual healing and well-being. For years she has helped many women with a wide range of concerns of the feminine nature, from pregnancy issues to the proper functioning of the female body and balancing of soul and spirit. Donna Lucilla's expertise reaches all ages, including babies and young children.
One of donna Lucilla's great delights is to take groups of women into the forest and introduce them to the feminine qualities and powers of the green world of the jungle. She is truly an amazing teacher and healer, and this is a unique chance to experience her wisdom and laughter while bonding with the forest and feeling the healing of body and spirit.
Dream Clarity and Recall
Dream remembrance is an important aspect of the School of Guayusa. In the Amazanga community, dream lucidity and recall are commonplace, and visitors often report tremendous progress in their dreaming. Here, dreams are considered to be just as real as waking life, and important information is often gleaned from them.
Dream clarity is assisted by the natural tea, guayusa, for which the school is named. Guayusa is a sacred tree from the botanical family of the holly genus. Its leaves hold many medicinal properties, such as cleaning the intestines and urinary tract, as well as providing clarity to both waking and sleeping awareness (it is not hallucinatory). Traditionally, guayusa tea is shared communally, sitting around the fire in the early morning, and served in 'pilche' gourds. This is a time for teaching and learning, and a chance for everyone to connect, share, talk, tell stories or recount dreams from the night before.
For those wishing to further their focus on dream clarity and recall, other natural dreaming techniques and spiritual exercises are available as well.
Herbal Medicine
For those interested in learning more about herbs and medicines that grow naturally in this part of the rainforest, there are a plethora of plants to study. The Quichuar refer to the jungle as a "natural pharmacy," and they heal disease and pain with natural remedies that have been passed down through the generations. Plant identification, mixing and application can all be practiced and applied. Everyone is invited to learn how to make guayusa cuttings and to plant their own guayusa tree.
Numerous afflictions can be healed by the medicinal plants of the Amazon. For those seeking to visit the School of Guayusa for the healing of a particular ailment, please visit our natural healing page.
Survival Wisdom
Survival wisdom involves cultivating a spiritual connection with nature and the forest, becoming one with the environment, and learning to move with harmony and awareness. Some of the activities that apply here are reading the weather, plant identification, traditional games and exercises, trap setting, spear fishing, and night travel.
Crafts and Arts
The making of tools, arts and crafts is also an important part of the traditions of the jungle. These practices include work in bead and stone jewelry, spear carving, wood-carved furniture and art, basket weaving, drum making, clay mocawa design, and blowgun artistry.
Happy travels, we hope to see you soon!
