Sowa Ayahuasca Retreat: Sacred Valley

Brittany has felt a strong pull towards natural medicines, psychedelics, and spirituality for more than a decade. After feeling depressed, anxious, and stuck, ayahuasca changed her life when she first sat with the medicine in 2017. Since then, she’s committed herself to learning more about plant medicines, both through personal experience and at the hands of the facilitators and curanderos who guided her along her own healing journey. After being offered a job to work at one of the most respected ayahuasca centers in the world, her learning accelerated exponentially, and for several years she sat in ceremonies three nights a week, creating safe, approachable environments for others to heal themselves. She is now a seasoned facilitator, having sat in hundreds of ayahuasca ceremonies. As a certified yin yoga teacher, she offers our guests a practice of embodied integration, informed by her work with ayahuasca.

Kevin has an innate talent for staying present and centered in any situation—a trait that any psychedelic facilitator should strive for. With an extensive background in meditation practices and a deep, respectful knowledge of the traditions they come from, his calming presence has a way of helping those around him find their center with the same ease that he does. He has been working closely with ayahuasca for the past several years, both at modern retreat centers and “dieting” with Shipibo maestros deep in the jungle. A brilliant chef who crafts intentional, healthy, and (dare we say) delicious meals out of ayahuasca-diet-approved foods, he is an invaluable part of the Sowa team.

Lidia comes from a long lineage of curanderos from the Shipibo-Konibo tribe. She grew up near Pucallpa, in the Peruvian Amazon, and at a very young age started her training as an ayahuasca practitioner at the hands of her grandparents, who were highly respected curanderos in their community. It was a long and difficult process involving years spent deep in the jungle in almost total isolation: a teenage girl studying the forest around her by day and by night, fasting, listening, sensing, and singing, and through all of this cultivating a lifelong relationship with it and with the many medicinal plants it holds. This is how Lidia, like her ancestors before her, began to develop her healing talents, the first step in the lifelong journey that made her the curandera she is today. Now in her sixties, she brings the same levels of tenacious dedication, of presence and patience, of fierce determination and gentle sensitivity needed to complete her rigorous training to every single health issue she is tasked with healing. To put it simply: she is the real deal. Having spent decades traveling the Amazon, leading ayahuasca ceremonies, and dedicating her life to helping as many people as possible, Lidia eventually found work at a renowned ayahuasca healing center and has worked with groups of international guests for the past six years. Lidia is a caring and passionate healer who works closely with retreat participants both in and out of ceremony. She is highly skilled at healing massage and bone-setting, which she offers on non-ceremony days to guests experiencing long-term pain, illness, or injury. Quick to smile and even quicker to laugh, there is nothing that gives her more joy than helping others feel better. It is her life’s work. Lidia is also a talented embroiderer, sewing traditional Shipibo tapestries, clothing and accessories with designs inspired by visions she has seen in her ceremonies. Her work has won several awards in Shipibo embroidering contests held in Pucallpa and is available to purchase during retreats. She lives on the outskirts of Pucallpa with her big family of children and grandchildren, and her favorite English word is “happy.”