Interactive Workshop with Shipibo Maestras Laura and Edelin

Join us for an intimate workshop with Maestras Laura and Edelin, Shipibo healers born into a family of female leaders, accompanied by their non-Indigenous apprentices Jessica and Karina. These maestras will share their journeys of answering the calling required to walk the path of an onanya, a path that is learned through years of dieta, discipline and encounter with plant spirits. They'll speak to the significant transformation that began sixty years ago, when Shipibo women started doing plant dietas and working with oni (ayahuasca), learning to integrate their bodies' natural cycles with the demands of plant medicine work. Topics will include Shipibo cosmology, how icaros - songs learned directly from the plants - work to clear and organize the path of their patients by addressing the intergenerational issues, and the synergy between oni, maestro, icaro, and plant spirit doctors in healing. The maestras will adress how their medical system reaches illnesses with energetic or spiritual origins - ancestral wounds, childhood trauma, spirit loss from shock - that Western methods cannot easily approach, as well as raising children with the support of plants. They will also touch on some of the main contemporary challenges in the global expansion of ayahuasca: sexual abuse by healers, non-Indigenous apprentices, commodification, cultural appropriation and the constant evolution of "tradition".
The afternoon includes talks, Q&A, group sharing and breakout exercises, a collective preparation of agua de florida where each participant contributes a flower or plant to the communal blend, collective icaro blessings and sopladas, and an opportunity to learn about and purchase the maestras’ artisanal crafts. This is an unique offering co-designed by Chacruna, the maestras, and their team, trying to bring other forms of knowledge and relationship to teach the psychedelic movement to honor and protect sacred plants and cultural traditions, while also trying to maintain and sustain the seed of personal and collective transformation.