Sowa Charana Ayahuasca Retreats

Ayahuasca At Sowa Charana, our mission is to be a bridge between Amazonian shamanic healing traditions and our modern world.
With a combined 15 years of experience working with curanderos from the Shipibio-Konibo indigenous group—as their translators, helpers, ceremony facilitators, and as their patients—our team has cultivated a deep understanding of and a profound respect for the Shipibo tradition of ayahuasca-based healing and the myriad jungle plants used therein. The indigenous healers who lead our ceremonies have been doing this work for decades. Both in and out of ceremony, they work from a place of utmost dedication, integrity, sensitivity, and love.

For centuries, if not millennia, curanderas and curanderos like those we work with have served the communities of the Amazon Basin using ayahuasca and the rich pharmacy of the jungle to heal the ailments they encountered in their communities. Today, alongside all the nice new advancements its made in technology and culture, our modern society has produced a plethora of brand new ailments specific to our time. From autoimmune diseases to mental health epidemics to the widespread soul-malaise that comes with a life lived in disconnection from nature, these contemporary health issues require treatments as diverse as the post-globalization society that gave rise to them.

If one were to try and reduce the complex Shipibo healing tradition down to one simple ethos, it could be expressed as this: within each human being lives a shining, healthy soul, ready to thrive; it is only kept from doing so by traumas, illnesses, and unhelpful energies that simply need to be cleaned off of it so its light can shine through.

“Sowa” is the Shipibo word for this sort of cleaning.

And “charana” is both a Sanskrit word that means “wanderer” and a name given to a 12th century South-Indian religious sect that wandered the land, eschewing the idea of a fixed temple or sacred home-base while welcoming worshipers of all classes and cultures into the fold. In one of his teachings, the founding saint of the Charanas referred to their deity as the “Lord of the meeting rivers.”

Thus, as Sowa Charana—a wandering ayahuasca retreat facilitated by lifelong travelers at locations around the globe—we seek to offer the most authentic experience of the Shipibo healing tradition possible, while at the same time placing it in a modern container that can best serve guests of all backgrounds. As the movable point where the river of ancient Shipibo knowledge meets the diverse cultural rivers that carry our guests to us, ours is a necessarily syncretic modality that, in our many years of experience with hundreds of guests, we’ve seen simply works.

In addition to providing a contemporary context for traditional medicine to effectively treat the illnesses of today, our goal is to help guests fall back into the kind of reciprocal relationship with nature practiced by all of our ancestors. At retreat centers all over the world, we invite guests to build their own relationships of gratitude, respect, and reverence for the natural world, a practice that in and of itself is a path to healing, as well as a powerful and, sadly, largely-forgotten pillar of indigenous wisdom.

We are an ayahuasca retreat with a fluid center. A bridge between the timeless and the timely. A place where rivers meet, and in their meeting, clean, rejuvenate, and heal.