EP 013 | CARLOS TANNER OF THE AYAHUASCA FOUNDATION

This week on The Psychedelic Integration Podcast, we have the pleasure of having our very first guest on the show – Carlos Tanner, co-founder and Director of the Ayahuasca Foundation in Peru. Carlos was born and raised in the United States and has degrees in both art and philosophy. He moved to Iquitos, Peru in 2004 and lived with his first teacher for four years before creating the Ayahuasca Foundation in 2008. He led every retreat and course at the original retreat center until 2012, when he hired the first two assistant healers and opened the Inkan Kena Plant Medicine School. 

In 2013, he stepped back from leading programs to dedicate more time to the administration of the Foundation and to raise his daughter. In 2017, he opened the Riosbo Retreat and Research Center and began hosting medical research in 2018. The phase I study completed at the end of 2019 and the next phase began in 2020. Carlos appeared in the Netflix series Down to Earth with Zac Efron in 2020 and continues to offer unique educational courses and healing retreats, as well as host important research into the traditional use of ayahuasca and plant medicine.

In this episode, Carlos shares about …

• Finding his way to Ayahuasca through a deep interest in shamanism, philosophy, religion, and plant medicine as a college student and young adult
• Substance abuse and opiate addiction as a trauma response and catalyst for change
• His first few ceremonies with ayahuasca, and what the healing experience was like
• Self-reflection, remembering repressed traumatic experiences, and how those traumas shaped his relationships
• The Ayahuasca Foundation and the education and healing programs they offer at their center
• The beneficial healing power of ceremony and ancestral tradition, ritual, methodology, and ideology that comes through with plant medicines, and how these practices could inform and improve the experience and efficacy of Western medicine
• Including consciousness and intention in the healing process
• Integration, memory, and the practice of changing our truths to be more beneficial to us 
• Creating a work of art based on your healing process that you continue to add details to 
• Storytelling as the magic that connects people
• The magical legend of the Nihue Rao trees, and the mystical realm
• Jesus showing up in ayahuasca visions, and his work as a plant healer
• Being disconnected from our intuition and instinctual knowledge, and being overwhelmed by science and logic to our detriment
• Plant medicine as the true science
• Decriminalization
• Moms and psychedelics
• And so much more!

RESOURCES:
Ayahuasca Foundation Website
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