In this episode of the Ayahuasca Podcast, the host connects with Carlos Tanner. Carlos is the founder and director of the Ayahuasca Foundation, an organization he established in 2009 after moving to the Peruvian Amazon in 2004. Transitioning from his own personal healing journey to becoming a dedicated apprentice of indigenous curanderos, Carlos now bridges ancestral wisdom with modern scientific research. He is also a founding member of the Psychedelic Medicine Association, dedicating his life to helping individuals navigate trauma, healing, and deep personal transformation.

Carlos opens up about how his early life and philosophical studies uniquely prepared him for shamanism, how a severe opiate addiction catalyzed a life-saving leap of faith into the Amazon, and how his work bridging clinical science with the Shipibo tradition is sparking a global revival of ancestral plant relationships.

Key Discussion Points

  • 01:22 – Seeds of Shamanism & Overcoming Addiction: Carlos explains how playing with an Ewok shaman toy, experimenting with psychedelics in high school, and studying the philosophy of religion laid his spiritual groundwork. This foundation ultimately aligned with a life-saving synchronicity that brought him to Peru in 2003 to break free from a downward spiral of opiate addiction.

  • 05:26 – Shifting Western Paradigms: Exploring the dramatic evolution of the ayahuasca space over the last two decades, moving away from a purely materialist, chemical-to-biology framework toward a deep respect for shamanic ritual, intention, and complex traditional practices like plant dietas.

  • 09:23 – From Rugged Adventure to Modern Comfort: How the demographic of people seeking ayahuasca expanded exponentially as retreat environments evolved from rustic, off-grid jungle camps requiring multi-hour treks to fully accessible modern research and retreat centers powered by solar energy.

  • 13:56 – Synchronistic Infrastructure & The Foundation’s Birth: Carlos shares the wild logistical journey of committing to study under Shipibo healer Don Enrique Lopez, inheriting an unfinished community infrastructure project in the remote Mishana reserve, and using an inheritance from his late mother to launch the Ayahuasca Foundation in 2009.

  • 21:34 – Bridging Science and Spirit: Highlighting the “field of dreams” creation of their dedicated research facility, partnering with Onaya Science to publish academic papers on personality changes, anxiety, and depression, and collaborating with the Heroic Hearts Project to study veterans suffering from treatment-resistant PTSD.

  • 26:26 – Cellular Agency and the Earth’s Agenda: A deep philosophical look at human willpower, proposing that humans operate much like individual cells within the grander physical body and consciousness of the Earth, carrying out a vital cellular role dictated by a higher planetary intelligence.

  • 31:15 – Healing as an Art Form & Expanding Awareness: Breaking down the neurobiology of ayahuasca, explaining how it temporarily deactivates the brain’s sensory gating filters to expand conscious awareness, and how true healing occurs when a person uses that heightened sensitivity to correct false beliefs and traumatic misinterpretations.

  • 37:41 – The Challenge of Scientific Language: Discussing his role as a philosopher of healing and navigating the complex linguistic tightrope of translating deeply spiritual, non-material indigenous phenomena to a rigid Western scientific community without being seen as having “gone off the deep end”.

  • 45:59 – Noya Rao and Global Shamanic Revival: An exploration of Noya Rao, an enlightened tree consciousness central to their Shipibo lineage, and a profound story of a student who successfully utilized traditional Shipibo dieta protocols on the Blue Lotus plant to demonstrate how intact traditions can revive ancestral relationships with native flora globally.

  • 55:24 – The Future of the Psychedelic Space: Delving into the conflict between process-based plant medicine traditions and substance-focused Western psychedelic therapy, while proposing how modern medical protocols—like chemotherapy—could be radically improved if administered within an intentional, sacred retreat setting.

Connect with Carlos Tanner:

  • Website: ayahuascafoundation.org

  • Note: Messages sent via the website’s “Contact Us” form go directly to Carlos.

Experience Safe, Guided Consciousness Work:

To explore heart-opening, traditional plant medicine retreats in a deeply restorative setting designed for integration and profound clarity, explore our programs at: ayahuascaincolombia.com

Transcript

Carlos Tanner: I think that we’ve tried to homogenize healing in the Western world as if all doctors are the same, or even all scientists are the same, and that’s just not true. And even pharmaceutical medication would be more beneficial if consciousness and process was involved. I do think that healing belongs in its rightful context as an art form, and when understood in the realm of an art form, it begins to make a lot more sense.

And by that, very simply, my preference for art is different than yours, but I rely on what moves me, and that particular music moves me. It touches my soul. And I think it’s important for us to recognize that each healer is an artist, and they are performing according to their own soul and their own connections and their own energies, and they may touch or may not touch people in the same way.

We will eventually shatter some of our limitations of the current modern paradigm just happen just naturally, and it’ll be uncontrollable. Almost if we can just let this conscious expander out of the cage, then it’ll run wild and repopulate and regenerate the elements of our consciousness that might have been suppressed.

And my faith in the intelligence of the Earth is such that I’m not worried about what’s going to happen to the Earth. I don’t think a cell should get worried about what’s gonna happen to me, and I trust the wisdom of the Earth.

Sam Believ: Hi, my name is Sam Belyev, and you’re listening to the Ayahuasca Podcast.

Hi, guys, and welcome to Ayahuasca Podcast. As always, with you the host, Sam Beliaf, and today I’m having a conversation with Carlos Tanner. Carlos is the founder and director of the Ayahuasca Foundation. He started working with the medicine in 2003 and he started the Ayahuasca Foundation in 2009.

Carlos has lived and worked in Peruvian Amazon, where he transitioned from a personal healing journey to becoming an apprentice of indigenous curanderos. Today, he bridges ancestral wisdom with modern research to help people navigate healing, trauma, and personal transformation. He’s also a founding member of the Psychedelic Medicine Association.

This episode is sponsored by LaWayra Ayahuasca Retreat. Carlos, welcome to the show.

Carlos Tanner: Thanks. Great to be here. Good to see you.

Sam Believ: So Carlos I’m very impressed by you and people like you because you’ve been 2000… You started Ayahuasca Foundation in 2009. In 2009 I was still learning how to be a marine mechanical engineer.

So you’ve been on this path for a really long time. Let’s start in the beginning. What what put you on this path? How did you end up running Ayahuasca Foundation and helping other people have ayahuasca experience?

Carlos Tanner: Yeah. It’s always, it’s so complex to try to trace back your, the, how you came to the path that you are on.

I guess everything probably contributed to it. I definitely remember loving the Ewok shaman in my toys that I played with when I was a little kid. So that was my introduction to shamanism, I would say, was The Return of the Jedi and how the Ewoks had a shaman, and you could get that little character and play with them.

So that probably did plant a seed, I would say. But it was really, in high school when I started experimenting with mushrooms and LSD and reading Carlos Castaneda, eventually Michael Harner, Terence McKenna, Richard Evan Schultes. I became fascinated by the use of psychoactive substances and especially these traditions of use that seemed to bring out a whole nother level of understanding and possibilities within that use.

As a student of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, I studied philosophy of religion, and that was something that certainly brought me to a deeper understanding or appreciation for shamanism, where people that were at the low bottom of the pyramid, so to speak, were still capable of connecting to God.

Whereas other religions, you seem, seemingly had to trust someone at the higher end of the pyramid that, to tell you what God said. And that really, I think, obviously made shamanism attractive to me, and… But what really did it, was, I filled my head with information and that inspired me to wanna try Ayahuasca specifically.

But it was my own opiate addiction and struggles that led me to feel like I needed to make a big change in my life, to really save my life. And then coincidentally or synchronistically, I got an email from a friend who was in Iquitos, Peru just traveling, and when she was invited to drink Ayahuasca, she thought of me because I had told her about these books and about what I had read in articles and researched on my own.

And so that was really the invitation that literally got me to the Amazon back in 2003. But it coincided with a, an intense desire to save my life from opiate addiction, which was really spiraling me downward into my own demise.

Sam Believ: Yeah. Thank you for sharing Carlos. It’s, You mentioned synchronicities, and I find that almost everyone on this path had some kinds of synchronicities and ended up working with the medicine and then even, helping other people with the medicine.

And you mentioned, Jedis and, I like to think about it, Jedis, they do magic, right? And Force and stuff like that, and it’s it’s a pretty useful analogy in the medicine space because this is a- as close as it comes to actual magic in, in real life, but, you started organizing retreats or ceremonies back before when it was mainstream.

Not that it is mainstream still yet. Less than 1% of people actually had ayahuasca, but it’s kinda more known now. How has the space changed since then?

Carlos Tanner: Oh man, it has changed in so many ways. But yeah, I in 2004, when I started living in the Amazon rainforest, I would say that very few people knew about Ayahuasca and that’s, like you mentioned, still probably true, but far more know now than they used to.

But I think that So obviously the awareness of Ayahuasca has grown, the respect for the indigenous wisdom of it, the understanding of the necessity for tradition. So I do feel like there’s been like a gradual paradigm shift away from looking at from a modern medical perspective, this is a chemical interacting with biology that we would, naturally assume with pharmaceutical medication, to now recognizing the importance of tradition and the shamanic practice and the ceremony and the practices within consciousness and the phil- philosophical belief system and their impact.

Leading to discoveries of epigenetics in Western science. So I think there’s been this natural progression of increased awareness of Westerners understanding that the tradition itself is as if not more important than the chemistry. And that’s been, a- awesome to see. That’s also part of my own journey.

Within that then is the very interesting and complex practice of plant dietas, at least within the Peruvian sha- shamanic traditions. And, dieta back in 2005 or 2004, that was unheard of. If you said dieta, people thought you meant, “Oh, I’m not gonna eat sugar or salt.” And now plant dieta has become much better known.

There’s a lot of people now. In fact, when Zac Efron came to visit our center for the filming of that Netflix show, Down to Earth with Zac Efron, he asked me, “So do you do plant dietas here?” And I was like, “Okay, Zac Efron. Yeah, we do plant dietas, but like, how did you know that?” “How did you know about plant dietas?”

So that’s like a, a good example of the raising of awareness of not just like the chemical perspective, but really the, the, the, the whole paradigm of healing is shifting, I’d say, to one that understands process a lot more than substance, and that’s been fascinating to witness. But there’s also been a lot of commercialization, that, that has certainly come along with it.

And a lot of people are dressing the part and, I guess you probably would s- have seen that early on with with the prolific proliferation or the globalization of yoga, where there’s, whole stores dedicated to just yoga now and, you can buy like a $500 pair of yoga pants or some stuff.

Something like that. And so I wouldn’t say it’s gone to that degree, but there is some elements of commercialization. There are certainly shops in Iquitos now that are dedicated to sh- shamanism, or shamanic tools and substances like that. So I guess there, you’ll always see the two edges of the same, two sides of the same coin kind of thing

Sam Believ: And I believe you say you have noticed that, in the past, very few people knew about Ayahuasca and the people that would do that journey, they would be like a- adventurers, explorers and and the, the, the type of people that come to an Ayahuasca retreat has changed as well.

Carlos Tanner: Definitely. I think that I probably tried to do that as well. Our first center, you had to hike two hours to get to. And that’s in the Amazon rainforest. Like a two-hour Amazon rainforest hike is definitely not for everyone. And you were carrying your pack, it was an, a true adventure.

And that led obviously to building a center that you could get to by boat and it wasn’t a very big… A, a very far walk, but that was still very rustic and, didn’t have electricity and didn’t have running water. And then, of course, then we added solar panels, and then we had running water, and then we, we tried to, like keep making things more and more comfortable to eventually building our current center, the Rio Spo Research and Retreat Center, and that has 63 solar panels on the roof, thermal panels that actually heat water for the showers, and full electricity, running water, filtered water, our own well.

We’ve had- we’ve got a washing machine and, we’ve got like amenities that really make the experience far more comfortable, and I think that just naturally resulted in expanding the market so that people that would have never, imagined going into our early centers are now, saying, “Oh, this might be something good for me.”

And then couple that with people like Michael Pollan who’s not, a, a necessarily a young adventurer, but writing about plant medicines and, publishing books and having Netflix specials that are certainly w- in his market, like an older generation and, all of that, combined to have this market, if you wanna call it that.

This like group of people interested in experiencing Ayahuasca in its native setting expand outward in almost like an exponential way.

Sam Believ: Yeah. Yeah, we went even farther where we left the Amazon and came to the mountain, so you can even drive here and take an Uber here, which is, different style.

But I- I like that, we spoke before that for people that- Want a very accessible experience and it may be like first few times you’re doing Ayahuasca when you’re in a very fragile state and you may be, might be afraid of jungle and afraid of, mosquitoes and they, the, the LaWayra would be an easy choice.

But then for some people they wanna go deeper and they wanna go and have the experience in the jungle. My shaman is from the jungle and they have a space there, but we don’t really offer that right now. So I think that’s that’s where it could be good time for them to travel to the jungle and take the boat and experience that.

And I’ve never been to your center, but I do wanna come and we, we have a lot of friends in common, but it seems it seems reputable enough. So I’ll definitely come one day, try it myself as well, and hopefully you come here and taste our kind of Ayahuasca. I think all, I think it’s great that different kinds of places exist, different kinds of envi- environments for different kinds of people, and I think there, there is space for that, that people can choose and maybe, it’s you have Italian food and you have also Chinese food and you don’t have to be like, “Oh, I can I’m only gonna eat Italian food till the day I die.” But let’s let’s talk about… So I’ve built a retreat myself, right? And obviously I have a road, so you can bring a dump truck with the material and you have a river, which is like a road in the jungle.

But tell me about this process of building in the jungle. How do you hire people in the jungle? What about, mosquitoes and all that stuff? Like I wanna know because I’ve been to the jungle, but only briefly, and like what is that experience and like what drove you to actually do it?

Carlos Tanner: We already both mentioned synchronicities and that’s a huge part of it. I think that it feels like you’re just following what’s being shown, like that there, you make a commitment to follow a path but you don’t know what’s around the next bend and then you walk around the next bend and you see what’s there and it just makes sense that you put one foot in front of the other and that’s really what it’s felt like for me.

I can tell you like a part of that synchronicity was I decided to have an event called the Curandero Seminar in 2007 and then again in 2008 and I invited my first teacher and my second teacher and my third teacher to participate and then in the next year I invited my second teacher and my third teacher and this fourth teacher who was Don Enrique Lopez and when I drank with Don Enrique Lopez in that event, it was my first ceremony.

I had a lot of interactions with him and I could tell that he was a wonderful teacher. He really had a passion for teaching and that was the topic, like the, the theme of the event was to learn from different traditions by being taught by different curanderos but you would also have a ceremony with them And he was an amazing teacher, and so I was really attracted to that.

But then his ceremony just blew me away. It was, like, the most mind-boggling experience that I’d had, and that was, six years in to studying. And so I knew “I wanna study with this guy.” And we had held that … We had rented a lodge in the Alpa Huayhuash Mishana National Reserve to hold the event, and I had worked with them the year before, so we had a relationship.

And after that, I said, I, “I wanna work with you. Like, how do we do this?” And he said great, but I don’t have a center. I don’t have a camp. I don’t… I basically live in this little hut in town.” And I said we’ll get one. We’ll find one. We’ll build one if we have to.

Let’s do this.” And I felt so passionate about working with him, and so I asked the reserve “Hey, do you happen to know of a center that might be for rent?” It was literally 20 minutes after my conversation with him. And they said, “Oh yeah, in the Mishana community inside the reserve.” And so the next day, I was on a boat out to the Mishana community, which is a, not a well-known community.

It’s a very remote location. But there was that, just enough connection for me to know enough about it to go seek it. And sure enough, they had been building a center. It wasn’t finished, and they didn’t have the money to finish it, but there was enough of an infrastructure there. So I was like, “Oh, this place is amazing, and let me put the money in to, to finish it.”

My mother had passed away, unfortunately and had left me some money, and so I was able to use that money to finish that camp, which really became the Ayahuasca Foundation. That was the beginning of the Ayahuasca Foundation. So I found this community, the Mishana community, and they had already done so much of the work to build the majority of the center.

I just had to complete it. And it didn’t have a maloca, for example, or ceremony space. It didn’t … there were pieces that needed to be completed. But That began a relationship with them, and that started in 2009 and would continue all the way up until COVID. But in 2013, when I was offered the opportunity, which also was another crazy synchronicity, to build this research center by a charity organization called the Grant Town Foundation in the United States, I had already built that relationship with the Mishana community, and coincidentally or synchronistically, there was a piece of land that was now for sale in the Mishana community.

So when I had that offer and accepted it and agreed to undertake this massive project to build a research center, I knew I can buy that piece of land right there, and I already know this community, so I could employ members of this community to work to build the center. And I had developed relationships at that point just over the years of operating that I knew an architect and I knew people with logistics, and I knew the solar panel.

I knew all of these people just from living there for, at that point, whatever that was, 10 years or something. And so I was able to use all of those resources and relationships and hire those people from the community and, make it work. But that all sounded like it’s happened smoothly.

It did not happen smoothly. I made a ton of mistakes. I learned a lot. It took a long time, and there were, like, logistical headaches across the board. My wife got pregnant, so I also had a newborn while trying to build that center. It was a crazy time for me. It was incredibly stressful, but we managed to do it.

And so I look back sometimes and think it was almost like a miracle that we actually did do it.

Sam Believ: I see a lot of parallels in your story and my story as well as in something puts you on that path, and then it feels like there’s this external support where right people come, and money comes, and opportunities comes, and ideas come, and you just kinda it’s like you’re rolling in that wave and you… There’s not- there’s really not much you’re doing. It’s kinda you’re doing all the work, but something is guiding you somewhere. And yeah, I had I had three kids in the last five years of us starting the retreat center. So I know the feeling and it’s, people ask me like, “How did you do it?” And I’m like, “I don’t really know.” If I look back at it, I’m like, that’s like impossible amount of work and but back then I just had this inspiration that it was just like, whatever it is and I hear tho- those stories very often, it’s just I believe there’s something externally, God or universe, whatever, just putting us on that path and helping us go through it because I guess it’s, it needs to happen to help the world or whatever it is.

I definitely sound very spiritual now and I wasn’t that spiritual before. But you mentioned b- also building a research center and we just had Onnia Science here, the research team you work with, and we did the retreat for the MMA fighters and traumatic brain injury. And I know together with you they did some research on veterans and PTSD.

Tell us about this, bridging science with Indigenous traditions and also yeah, what have you found and how do you like that, that part of it?

Carlos Tanner: Yeah, that’s that’s like a kind of field of dream story for me because this charity organization reached out to me offering me the funding to build that research center, but I didn’t have a research team.

I’m not a scientist or a doctor, I’m… So I’m– I was building a research center, and it was “If you build it, they will come,” scenario, where I just really did feel faith that the people would show up, like you said, and that did happen. So while building that research center, Simon Rafael came and did a retreat with us, and he was blown away.

He was a psychiatrist from the NHS in the UK, and he said, “I wish we could do research.” And I was like, “Hey, I’m building a research center.” And I remember we walked around the construction of the research center, and he he did it on his own. He teamed up with Nige Natspan and eventually Wai Fung Tsang, and they formed, they created what is now Onaya Science.

But it was really Simon and Nige put like that pilot study together on their credit cards and, set it all up just out of a real passion to, to do something. They felt like that was the path that they were supposed to follow. And so we began that collaboration and then they dove in.

Simon especially really dove into the Shipibo tradition and experienced that shift that I mentioned in, in, in seeing what’s happened in the culture over the past two decades within Ayahuasca tourism. They– I witnessed that happen perhaps you could say like a, a shift within the scientific community, where Simon started doing plant dietas and really started learning the Shipibo tradition, and Nige as well and Wai Fung Tsang especially when he came and joined as well.

And so they published 13 articles so far, Onaya Science. That first one I believe was on personality changes due to Ayahuasca, then they looked at depression and anxiety metrics, and then three years ago, or a little over three years ago, we partnered with Heroic Arts Project to look at veterans suffering from treatment-resistant PTSD, and that research will get published this year.

And that showed tremendous benefit. And so I, I- hosted the, I host those programs and made it possible for that research to be conducted. But they, Onaya Science really took it to a whole ‘nother level, and their creativity, their imagination, and obviously their expertise and I think they’ve really established themselves as unique in that sense.

But yeah, working with Heroic Hearts Project has been awesome. We’re about to host a athlete’s journey home retreat just like you had at your center. And then later this year, I think we’re gonna begin partnering with a a addiction recovery center. And so we’ll be expanding that research, or rather Onaya Science will be expanding that research out from anxiety and depression into PTSD, looking at chronic pain as well in the gut biome, and now into traumatic brain injury and beyond by the end of this year looking at substance use disorders.

Sam Believ: Yeah. The research, it’s kinda hard to really see the effect of it in the short term, but in the long term it creates those waves and more and more people find out about it, and Ayahuasca keeps getting more and more understood by society and our society science is very important.

It’s like unle- unless you have a study, then it’s like it’s almost, it do- it’s not real. And yeah, all the people you’re mentioning, Simon, I interviewed him episode 105. Wei Fang, episode 110, and I’m actually scheduled to interview Nige. So I only met Nige in person. He was here with with the MMA retreat, but his story is also very interesting, and it’s also synchronicities on top of synchronicities, same as you describe.

That MMA retreat was one big synchronicity as well. It’s yeah, it’s sometimes it’s almost, like, discouraging. Am I … Do we even have any agency? What is-

Carlos Tanner: Well-

Sam Believ: Am I just a- … I guess I don’t know. Yeah. Do you have any thoughts about that?

Carlos Tanner: I do feel of course, we do have agency.

You could have said no. But the, the … Could you have said no, right? And, or the feeling sometimes in our lives can be so strong that we feel like if we don’t say yes to it, then we may regret it for the rest of our lives. And, I think that we can always ask those questions, and as a philosopher of healing, I often do ask questions like that, and they go beyond, just the, the realm of healing.

You have a partner, obviously had three kids and, did you make the decision to love that person or to fall in love with them? Or, did it fall into you and you became aware of it? And, and I think that’s where we’re always at, do thoughts come, just show up, and then we give them our attention and choose what to act on?

Where do they come from? Where does an idea come from? And in this tradition, especially because of the nature of relationship to spirit, there’s a lot of consideration that perhaps ideas are being seeded in us, if you will. Like they’re being planted in us by a higher intelligent or a being that has an agenda that we don’t know the totality of.

And I guess for me I believe that. I do feel that I’m like a cell in the body of the Earth as a cell that I have in my body of which I have trillions of cells. I feel like I am similarly like a cell in the body of the Earth and the Earth … Like I have my consciousness and my cell, can’t understand my agenda, my life goals and

But it has that enough consciousness to fulfill its role in my being. I feel like I, I also have a cellular level consciousness when in, in, in relation to the consciousness of the Earth. And so I do think that the Earth has an agenda, and I do think that we’re all like fulfilling our own particular tiny little roles in whatever that might be, and I’m okay with that.

In fact I feel like that’s really a, a big relief to know that I’m part of something incredibly powerful and far more wise than I could possibly imagine. And my faith in the intelligence of the Earth is such that I’m not worried I’m not worried about what’s going to happen to the Earth.

Like I, I don’t think a cell should get worried about what’s gonna happen to me, and I trust the wisdom of the Earth to be so incredibly powerful and far beyond any attempt at my comprehension that I know she’s got it, and all I need to do is just focus on my tiny little role that I was gifted i-in my little cellular, existence.

And I’m content with that. I’m not conflicted by that. But I do feel like I have the agency to say no or not, and- Yeah … it just feels like it would be a terrible mistake to say no

Sam Believ: This episode is sponsored by LaWayra Ayahuasca Retreat. Most of LaWayra if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while.

Some of you might have already been to LaWayra before. For those who don’t know us yet, we started LaWayra four years ago. At LaWayra, we combine authenticity, accessibility, and affordability. LaWayra is currently highest-rated Ayahuasca retreat in South America with more than 700 five-star reviews and an average rating of five stars.

If you come to LaWayra, you’ll experience powerful, authentic ceremonies led by our indigenous shaman, Fernando, in a very beautiful venue just one hour south of Medellín, Colombia. We’re surrounded by nature and have comforts like hot water, Wi-Fi. At LaWayra, our team has guided more than 2,500 people through this life-changing transformation of Ayahuasca experience.

At the same time, we keep it very affordable. So whether you’re coming for healing, clarity, or a deeper connection to yourself, LaWayra is the best choice. If it is your first time drinking Ayahuasca, you will love our three and a half hour preparation course and integration support. All of that is included in price as well as pickup from Medellín, accommodation, and Ayahuasca.

Visit lawayra.com to book your retreat or learn more. LaWayra, connect, heal, grow. L-A-W-A-Y-R-A.com. It’s an interesting analogy with the cells. It’s I guess if you’re lucky, you’re like a brain cell or an eye cell, and if you’re not lucky, you’re cell on the bottom of the foot or a scrotum or something like that.

And I guess we don’t have much of a choice. But that kind of puts like, start … makes you think, is it okay for a cell from the bottom of the feet want to become a heart cell one day? Or it’s, … So I guess it’s … I understand that it’s not an exact analogy, but it’s like I like that notion of if if the tree is God, then we are a leaf on the tree, and we’re still God, but we’re not the entirety of God.

So it’s, as a philosopher and arts person, because you’re … you had a life before Ayahuasca as well how does that inform your understanding of it? And le- let’s just go deeper into the spirituality of it and how does it all work? How does Ayahuasca heal people? What do you wanna tell us about this?

Carlos Tanner: Yeah. Thank you for asking that. I think it’s very obvious that my previous education has a big influence, and I think that would be true of all of us, right? Because it formed my perspectives and my beliefs. And I do think that healing belongs in its rightful context as an art form, and when understood in the realm of an art form, it begins to make a lot more sense.

And by that, very simply, like- My preference for art is different than yours, but I rely on what moves me and that particular music moves me. It touches my soul, or particular paintings or whatever the art form is, my evaluation is always in that kind of ethereal realm of the soul. And all of us experience art in that way, and likewise healing.

You brought up like your center and my center are in different locations or environments and that’s an example of that. Someone might feel more comfortable in your center or someone might wanna have the experience of being in the depths of the jungle because it’s important to them.

Similarly, someone might want to listen to a particular piece of music or hang a particular painting on their wall because their complex nature is touched by whatever that is, and I think it’s important for us to recognize that. Each healer is an artist and they are performing according to their own soul and their own connections and their own energies, and they may touch or may not touch people in the same way.

I think that we’ve- Tried to homogenize healing in the Western world as if all doctors are the same, or even all scientists are the same and that’s just not true. And, I would say even the scientific process could be looked at as an art form and perhaps better understood or more accurately understood.

Now, how does Ayahuasca heal? I think that Ayahuasca, from a chemical perspective, that dimethyltryptamine, enters into the, what is it, the 5-HT2A receptor, which is like a serotonin receptor that’s typically involved in sensory gating. So the filtering within the hippocampus the amygdala, and the thalamus of the sensory information that our eyes and ears and all of our sense organs are providing to our consciousness, but would be far more overwhelming if we had all of that access.

So it’s filtered to this kind of manageable amount, which results in what we know to be the visible spectrum. Our eyes see far more spectrum or far more frequency of light outside the spectrum, but we access that spectrum and audible spectrums as well. So we have these frequency limitations that are really the result of brain filtering rather than sensory filtering.

And so Ayahuasca increases access to the sensory information. It expands sensory access, and that’s another way of saying it expands awareness. And then the tradition also contributes to the increase of awareness in the plant dieta, for example, where you’re intentionally reducing stimulation to increase sensitivity.

That’s another element of expanding awareness so that you’re working together, and obviously the ceremony being held in the dark, you’re decreasing light sense stimulation to increase light sensitivity. And then when you take a substance that increases access to light sensitivity, now you’re able to see beyond the visible spectrum into light frequencies that are normally invisible, and the same for the audible spectrum.

So ultimately, Ayahuasca is a substance that increases up awareness provides the opportunity for expanded awareness, and the ceremony and the ritual and the traditions all complement that and coordinate with that in a way that, one, keeps you safe from the overwhelm that is the risk of increasing that awareness, but two, contributes to expanding further that awareness.

Now, what you do with the awareness is actually what contributes to the healing processes as I see it. And so if you increase your awareness and then bring into that awareness the presence or the recognition that there are false beliefs or misinterpretations in how you’ve perceived and interpreted your experiences and your current identity as a human being, then you would s- seek to change them, to correct those misinterpretations, and to remove those false beliefs or replace them with accurate ones.

And by doing so, you would literally transform the reality and the energy through which you perceive and interpret your current experiences. So I guess I, I do think it all comes down to the energy, and I think that our belief system strives to have accurate perceptions and interpretations, but along the way, we sometimes get caught believing something that’s not true, and that affects our energy in a way that can impede an accurate perception and interpretation of our experiences.

And so by having a ceremony that provides that opportunity for expanded awareness, we can use that to correct misinterpretations and remove false beliefs, and by doing so, improve our overall energy by which we’ll then improve the accuracy of our perceptions and interpretations of future and current experiences.

Sam Believ: Thank you, Carlos. That’s a pretty, pretty deep explanation. On the topic of healing obviously you became the apprentice of the shaman or curandero more than 20 years ago. So how has your own shamanic journey has been going? Are you are you somewhat of a shaman by now? Are you still getting there?

Carlos Tanner: No. Who knows? It’s so- someone might say that it, that yes, but but no, by comparison to some of the other students that I know, I certainly wouldn’t put me in that category. I do… I would say that I’m a philosopher of healing. And I think that’s really become a pathway that I’ve taken.

I don’t lead ceremonies. I do know Icaros in the, in the last few ceremonies I sang Icaros in Shipibo. But, But no, the people that I know, like our facilitators and people from my past students and I know some really unbelievable healers, and I certainly don’t feel comfortable being in a category with them, nor would I put myself in a category with the Shipibo healers that we work with.

So in a sense, I guess it would be if you were friends with LeBron James and Michael Jordan or something, you might play basketball, but you’re not a basketball player essentially. You know what I mean? Yeah … but I do feel like my understanding of healing, or at least my theories on it, have developed immensely to the point where now I r- I feel like I know, I feel like I have a handle on it, although probably if you asked me 20 years ago, I would’ve said the same thing, that I felt like I knew. So ask me in another 10 years, and who knows what I’ll say. But I do feel like coming into the awareness of energy and looking at it through the context of energy and also understanding it through the lens of the art form, those have been really valuable in shifting my perspective to what I feel is a more accurate understanding.

And, I think that probably goes a, a long way, but it goes for everyone that gets involved in this tradition. There is an adaptation and an evolution and a growth, and I would assume that most people do come into a recognition of energy at the heart of it more than they might have started with because if we are a Westerner, you’re probably coming from a materialist paradigm and that’s the starting point, and then as you learn more, you shift out of the material into the non-material, which brings you more into those realms of energy.

But getting back to that research element, that has been super challenging, and I know that, the ONIYA science team has… is constantly facing that challenge of- Reporting in a language to a culture that doesn’t recognize spirit. The scientific community is not known for its spiritual awareness or recognition, and yet you’re studying something that has its core in spirit, and yet trying to report it back to a, a culture that doesn’t recognize that and that’s a huge challenge.

I think there’s like a phenomenon in anthropology that might even have a name, but, an anthropologist will go and study a, a, indigenous community, and at first they’re reporting back to their supervisors and everything is “Yeah, and they believe this and that. Is

These are parts of their, cosmology and belief system.” But eventually, with enough time, the anthropologist actually sees the world that way and adopts those philosophies and perspectives and cosmologies, and then they start reporting back in a language that gets really difficult to understand to their supervisors, where they’re saying, “Last night I pr- you know, connected with the god of this tree,” and they’re like, “Okay, that person’s gone off the deep end.” And so I think that Oneida Science has managed to ride the edge of not being considered going off the deep end, but maintaining a scientific reputation as well as a spiritual reputation and kudos to them for doing that.

But I think that’s also a sign of where science is coming now, and maybe quantum mechanics helped to push that along where the non-material has been seen as perhaps the most important aspect of reality. So hopefully that will continue, and Oneida Science will certainly lead the way in many aspects.

Sam Believ: Yeah, if you look at the more of a sort of cutting edge science it becomes more and more spiritually sounding, really I think science and spirituality were connected and then they disconnected and then they– I think they’re coming back to get connected again, and who knows, maybe they’ll disconnect again later.

It kinda starts to look like a genome helix in a way.

Carlos Tanner: Yeah. Nice.

Sam Believ: I don’t know why it is this way, but I guess we– it’s like having different perspective at the same thing. It’s same thing with spirituality, right? There’s so many different versions of it and religions and it’s like map is not the territory.

It’s like everyone’s looking at the same thing from a different angle, and they describe it with a different words. But I try to focus largely on healing. “Here, come drink Ayahuasca. Don’t be depressed anymore. Have a better life.” But then spirituality is inevitable in a way that- The being born is a spiritual process, and dying is a spiritual process, and everything in between is a spiritual process, whether we like to see it or not.

And when you drink that medicine, it re- that side reveals itself to you. But I think it’s, for anyone that works with the medicine, it will come in- inevitably. And we had some scientists apart from Anaya that came and one of them she didn’t want to… She was afraid to drink Ayahuasca.

I met her because I was going to interview her for the podcast, and she didn’t wanna drink Ayahuasca because she was afraid it’s gonna skew her rationality. And obviously, she ended up doing it several times, and now she’s I actually understand it now.” So it’s so we have more and more scientists who drink Ayahuasca, and they kinda become allies.

And now with their knowledge, I think they’ll be able to translate in the right words to the scientific world about what this thing is. Because it is largely ineffable. It’s no matter how many podcast episodes I record, it might pass some understanding of what we’re talking about. But till you have a lived experience, you will never be…

You will never really get it. And it’s funny sometimes we have people coming to the retreat, and they don’t connect immediately. Maybe few fir- first few ceremonies they’re, they have some experience but not what they expected. And then eventually they come to me, and they’re like, “I get it now.”

“I had an experience yesterday.” It’s like, I don’t really know how to explain it, but I get it. What what you were talking about, now I get it now.” So it’s like we can understand with each other. It’s yeah I know what you’re talking about. But yeah, what are your, Speaking about plants and spirits, what are your favorite plants outside of Ayahuasca?

Because I know you live in a jungle. You’re surrounded by them. So what are the… what is the other plant out there that’s like, is almost as impressive but is, let’s say, overlooked?

Carlos Tanner: Whether or not it’s overlooked, I’m not sure. But at the heart of the familial lineage that we work with the Lopez family, the Shipibo tradition within that fam- family lineage is the tree Noyarao. And Noyarao is the most incredible … for us, it’s almost like why we’re all here. And I, and by that I mean, like, all of the people from outside of the Amazon who have traveled to study this tradition and specifically at our center, like Noyarao is an enlightened being.

It’s in line with Buddha and the consciousness is on such an incredibly high level. It, its teaching is that we all have the capacity for enlightenment. Essentially it’s very much in line with a Buddhist practice or teaching and I think there’s a lot of synchronicities or connections and correlations to the enlightenment practices of other religions or philosophies.

That’s at the heart of this tradition. So in January I just did another dieta with Noyarao and without a doubt, like that’s the most incredibly special plant for me. And then there are four other plants that kind of support Noya Rao in the familial lineage, which are Marusa and Bobinsana.

Bobinsana I think has become pretty popular or well-known now, and Chuya Chaki and Chirik Sanango which Insha people would be called Mocompari. And all four of those plants are also like in the realm of enlightenment. Ma- so many, but maybe not to the same degree as Noya Rao. And then the…

there are… there are just so many plants. Mukura is like a very underknown, like underappreciated plant that has a really high medicinal value. Sangre de Grado, which is probably the most famous medicinal plant where we use it as a purgative. And Tanti Rao, which would be called the sensitive plant we use that regularly.

Pinon Colorado is the core of our cleansing system cleansing medicines used to cleanse the blood and oxygenate the blood, and then has that effect. I think that will play a big part in the traumatic brain injury study actually is that plant, Pinon Colorado. There’s so many plants essentially.

But without a doubt, Noya Rao stands above them all. I think in our tradition, Noya Rao would be like above Ayahuasca if you were to try to measure, some crazy imaginary measurement of consciousness,

Sam Believ: very interesting. Thank you for sharing. Yeah, there’s, I think there’s 60,000 plants in Amazon.

It’s it’s got 60,000 species, right? It’s it would be curious to know how many more that exist that maybe are even more amazing and maybe even more profound and we just don’t know. And how many more psychedelic compounds that exist that has not been discovered yet. And even Ayahuasca alone, no matter how much you have, there’s more and more information.

So it’s like it is truly a, horizon of things to be discovered.

Carlos Tanner: There’s a really awesome story which I guess encapsulates the whole vision for the Ayahuasca Foundation, to be honest. But we had a student named Kayo. He did the course in 2010. He sat next to me. We became really good friends.

He came back and worked as a facilitator. He was my first assistant and eventually a facilitator. He was from South Africa, and he learn the tradition and to such a depth. He was one of the people that I mentioned that I would never try to put myself in the same category as him. The work that he’s doing and the depth of knowledge and understanding he has.

But after many years, he did go back to South Africa and he, on his own, chose to do a plant dieta according to the tradition and the way that he’d learned how to do a plant dieta with a plant that’s not from the Amazon, and a plant called blue lotus. A blue lotus was at the heart of ancient traditions in Africa or in Egypt, and in India as well.

And he connected with the spirit of the blue lotus plant through this same ritualistic practice of plant dieta from the Shipibo tradition. And it was such a profound connection that he brought blue lotus to the Amazon to demonstrate or give to his teacher, Don Enrique. And then Don Enrique did a plant dieta with blue lotus and found the same thing.

And so now blue lotus has become part of the familial lineage as it has expanded and developed. And it’s a plant that doesn’t exist in the Amazon rainforest, but yet the spirit of that plant is also comparable to the spirit of that Noieraul spirit and that, that level of consciousness. And so that to me is like an example of how an intact shamanic tradition or healing tradition can then teach the principles by which we can use in other places to perhaps revive other traditions or other practices.

And so people are using the Shipibo ritualistic practice of plant dieta to then diet with birch or to diet with oak or to diet with redwood or to diet with the plants that are in their areas to develop those relationships that were most likely part of a shamanic tradition of our own ancestry. No matter where we’re from, our ancestors were practicing a form of plant medicine that was most likely countless generations old and incredibly well-developed, but unfortunately was lost due to Westernization or colonization or for whatever influential reasons.

And perhaps there was a purpose for that, but now seemingly is the time to revive those relationships with nature again. And it seems that a tradition that thankfully was kept intact, like the Shipibo tradition, can be instrumental in reminding us of the ways that we can reconnect with our own ancestral traditions.

And I think that’s probably like a summation of the vision for the Ayahuasca Foundation, is the revival of ancestral wisdom by a respectful study of a currently intact indigenous tradition.

Sam Believ: Yeah I think about it, and sometimes, somebody found Ayahuasca and tried it for the first time and they created the tradition.

But how difficult would be- would it be for us even if we would just find Ayahuasca out of the blue, how many hundreds if not thousands of years it would take us to recreate that. And to have I’m very grateful that we had traditions that survived not only Peru, but in Colombia and and Brazil and Ecuador that we can get inspired from, and now they can help us re- resurrect other plants.

And it’s interesting because we have a lot of beautiful decorative plants here and once a lady came and she’s like this plant is a psychedelic plant as well, and you can also diet it.” And it’s just a beautiful sort of colorful leaf kind of plant. And then another person told me that if you put couple leaves in your tea and you drink it every day your dreams start to get more profound.

So it’s basically more a form of a dieta plant. I don’t know if you know this plant. I don’t know its name, but once you’re here I’ll show it to you. Maybe you can diet it. I don’t know much about diet. It’s, In Colombian tradition they do mostly pur- purges as opposed to diets which is another interesting modality.

But I would love to explore as well that a little more in the future. What do you think about generally the s- the psychedelic space or the Ayahuasca space? Where do you think it’s heading? Do you like where it’s heading or, what are your… You feeling optimistic or share to us your thoughts.

Carlos Tanner: I am an optimist, so I do feel optimistic almost always. But I have noticed that, which, makes total sense. I was at a, a dinner that was attended by psychedelic-assisted therapists, and none of whom worked with plant medicine. They worked with, synthetic psychedelics, and their perspective to me was a very materialist perspective.

An example was just when I see someone going off the off track in their process, then I know that I should give them more MDMA. It was like this kind of modern medical perspective which was strange to me. There was, like, less process-based conversation and much more substance-based conversation.

But I would say that’s like the nature of Western medicine. We don’t really have a process when it comes to taking medicine unfortunately. I think there would be tremendous benefit if we were to learn process and incorporate it into the use of Western medicine. Even pharmaceutical medication would be more beneficial if consciousness and process was involved I would say.

People that take modern medicine, oftentimes if they’re taking it daily, for example, they don’t want to. They wish that they didn’t have to. They kinda hate their medicine, and so they’re, like, taking it in this energy of hatred and yet at the same time, wanting it to produce positive results, and it’s like almost like calling your enemy to help you.

And- And I think that just that little shift would be probably profound. Like I’ve l- I’ve wanted to do a study, which I think would be amazing, to look at if you administered chemotherapy in a ceremony. So it’s the same exact like chemicals and same process, but the setting of it, instead of going to a clinic or a hospital or a place that automatically generates a negative response and people don’t want to be there, instead you like go out to a beautiful retreat center in nature and you get your chemotherapy there.

But instead of reading a magazine or watching TV or distracting yourself from the process because you think that it’s just gonna happen regardless, instead there’s a ceremony that actually invites you to go inward in your awareness and your perspective and communicate with the chemotherapy process and looking at it a- with gratitude and the benefit and then see what the results are.

But I feel pretty strongly that the people that receive chemotherapy in the ceremony setting would have better results than the ones that were in the clinic. But all of that is to say that in the psychedelic space, from my perspective, I think there’s still a long way to go and– but I understand why that is, and I think that if we were to look at some of the early studies like Johns Hopkins studies on psilocybin, in the beginning they were just giving them psilocybin, or even Rick Strassman’s studies with DMT, they were like, in a hospital bed essentially. And very quickly they realized This is a, this isn’t a good influence.

We should control the lighting in this space. We should control the sound in this space. We should be more mindful of how the person is taking this substance, because clearly that has a big influence. And though that to me is like planting the seeds of what would eventually become ritualistic practices or traditional ceremonies.

And so that’s happening, and I’m happy about that, but I do feel that the speed at which that happens, will have an influence. Like I, I think there’s already ketamine inhalers. And so that’s definitely like a purely substance-based approach. And maybe there’s a place for that too.

If someone is like on the verge of suicide and they can like s- inhale something that could bring them out of that, that could be really beneficial. It might not r- you know, result in a transformation or a healing of the root causes for why they were suicidal at that time, but if it prevents them at that moment.

I think that we’re probably in a crazy mix of Profit-oriented commercialization and the pharmaceutical industry’s influence coupled with the challenges of coming from a materialist paradigm that’s more substance-focused than process-focused. But yet there’s also just the nature of what happens when you take a psychedelic, and I think that’s probably where my optimism lies, is like if more and more people just take psychedelics, then we will eventually shatter some of our limitations of the current modern paradigm just happen just naturally, and it’ll be uncontrollable. It’s almost if we can just let this conscious expander out of the cage, then it’ll run wild and repopulate, and regenerate the elements of our consciousness that might have been suppressed.

Sam Believ: Yeah. Yeah, I’m sure if if chemotherapy is done in a beautiful place and with some music and maybe even the shaman and maybe even some ayahuasca before and after, or some other plant medicine-

It would be much better. And then, the intention, the power of intention, power of the mind definitely changes a lot. But I’m looking forward to seeing more chemotherapy retreats popping up,

Carlos Tanner: Nice …

Sam Believ: not a bad idea, somebody has to try it. Carlos our interview’s coming to the close.

Thank you so much for the conversation. I- if you have any last parting words to the audience or where they can find you and your retreats now is the

Carlos Tanner: time. Yeah, sure. Thank you so much for inviting me on and for having this conversation. Yeah, you can find the Ayahuasca Foundation online, of course, at our website, ayahuascafoundation.org.

We’re on most of the social networks with a easy search or just a click on an icon on our website as well. If you do use the Contact Us form of the website, it goes straight to me. So if you wanna contact me, you can just go to our website and click on the Contact Us form, and that will go straight to me, and I’ll do my best to respond to everyone that reaches out.

Sam Believ: Thank you, Carlos. Thank you for the conversation. Guys, you’ve been listening to Ayahuasca Podcast. As always, we do the whole Sam believe, and I’ll see you in the next episode. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you’d like to support us in psychedelic renaissance at large, please follow us and leave us a wherever it is you’re listening.

Share this episode with someone who will benefit from this information. Nothing in this podcast is intended as medical advice, and it is for educational and entertainment purposes only. This episode is sponsored by LaWayra Ayahuasca Retreat. At LaWayra, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity.

LaWayra, connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you