Ep. 4 — Carlos Tanner: Director of the Ayahuasca Foundation

My guest this week is Carlos Tanner, the director of the Ayahuasca Foundation!

In 2003, after hitting a rock bottom moment involving heroin addiction, Carlos visited the Amazon to drink ayahuasca.  The experience was so transformative that he 1. never did heroin ever again and 2. moved to Peru to study with a curandero for four years, sleeping on a dirt floor with no running water.

Eighteen years later, Carlos runs the non-profit Ayahuasca Foundation, a school which teaches the Shipibo plant healing traditions.  Carlos and the foundation were recently featured on Zac Efron's Down To Earth on Netflix, and the foundation is also the site of the FIRST western government funded research into ayahuasca to cure anxiety and depression, where they have already managed to prove that ayahuasca produces LONG LASTING relief from depression (continued efficacy after 6+ months) and also causes epigenetic changes in saliva markers (ayahuasca literally alters your genome expression).

We talk about how  'trauma' is misunderstood and relative to each person,  how negative beliefs shape our health, the problems with the western medical paradigm,  viewing medicine as a relationship, and more! Of particular note is Carlos' very articulate, lucid explanation of how ayahuasca can improve your relationship to your self and benefit your life.

Since it's rare I get to talk to someone this knowledgeable, during the second half of the conversation,  we get into weirder, more psychedelic territory.  We discuss the Earth as one interconnected organism, the possibility that all of human history thus far is the gestation period of the Earth's reproductive cycle which will fling us into space like mushroom spores,  how Ayahuasca is a spirit and contrary to what most westerners adopt as their belief  --  ayahuasca is not actually gendered -- the 'Mother Ayahuasca' mythos is a cultural projection depending on the tradition you drink in (In Columbia, ayahuasca is padrecito, the divine father)... and so much more.

If you want to learn more about Carlos, you can connect with him on all the social medias, or visit https://www.ayahuascafoundation.org/