Ayahuasca

Nihue Rao Centro Espiritual

Name: Nihue Rao Centro Espiritual
Rating: 4.7

Llanchama, Peru

4.7 (146 reviews)

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We are an ayahuasca retreat healing center, operating as a lodge in the Amazon rainforest. We are located 90 minutes outside of Iquitos, Peru near the small village of Llanchama along the Nanay River.

We provide traditional Shipibo medicine services wich includes: healing and learning diets, master plant medicine, and traditional Shipibo ayahuasca ceremonies.

Once you are here, you will meet with our shaman master healer Ricardo Amaringo, and with the asistance of a profesional translator, you can explain him your intention for the healing procces.

Your treatment will then be tailored to your personal needs, often including further treatment with a master plant. Furthermore, in traditional style, you will then adhere to a strict healing diet developed to promote the healing work of the curanderos and our medicinal plants.

Once on the diet, you will be invited to participate in ayahuasca ceremonies four times a week, for further ceremonial healing under the guidance of Ricardo and his assistants shamans. In ceremony, you will be further treated by the curanderos through the traditional healing song, called icaros.

The day after every ayahuasca ceremony, with the exception of Fridays, there is a group discussion led by Ricardo to review experiences in the ceremony and the progress of all of our participants, apprentices and visitors.

In some cases, further treatment techniques are also indicated, including healing plant preparations for bathing and vapor treatment, or cataplasm.

Traditional treatment requires time, so visitors are encouraged to visit us for one week or more. Group programs are often designed for 10 days or 2 weeks and more advanced treatment can take one/two months or longer.

For particular individuals, we also offer traditional diets for learning under the guidance of Ricardo. This level of training is best discussed in person with Ricardo himself.

We charge an all-inclusive daily fee for our services, which covers transport from the Iquitos airport, private room, modern bathrooms and showers, diet meals, laundry service, electricity, wifi internet, traditional medicine and experienced international facilitator staff support.

If you are interested in visiting, please email us to establish contact and verify availability at our center. From that point, we can plan your visit!

Reviews (146)

4.7 out of 5

Overall 4.7

Angry Lion
April 30, 2018 at 7:40 pm

I recently came back from a 10 day retreat there and had a wonderful experience. To my knowledge, everyone had a positive experience. There were people from all walks of life, and I felt at home and safe at NHCE. I believe the Maestro Ricardo is very experienced in his craft, but its best if you go, please adhere to the diet and instructions given. Sure there aren’t many activities to do other than rest, relax, reflect on yourself (go inwardly), so if your intention is go have a slew of exciting and wild amazonian activities and tours, this might not be for you. The tour I signed up was for a journey to go inwardly, and this is exactly what I got.

The support staff will go beyond and above what is required to help make things formidable at the center. The day of my departure, I lost my phone on the bumpy ride back to town, and a local found it. Two of the staff members, Serjio and David, helped me retrieve my phone back from the local founder. For this I will always be grateful. Shouting out to the beautiful staff, the Maestro and other Shamans, and the fine friends I made during this time. Salutations to the Spirit of the Amazon and the beautiful plants at NRCE. Gracias for todo!
ceturn
April 23, 2018 at 10:48 am

A few years ago I was singing ayahuasca’s praises. It seemed like a miracle that something so powerful and life-changing could exist. I did my first ayahuasca ceremonies at Nihue Rao, got some powerful icaros and went back home feeling completely transformed, energized and like life was a clean slate. Then I came back to Nihue Rao a second time because I knew I needed more work on myself. This time it was very different, and one ceremony in particular went bad. Ricardo said they had trouble dealing with some of the heavier energies that night. He said I would feel better the next day. However, I felt sad the entire rest of the week there and couldn’t shake it off. One of the staff suggested I contact a coach who charged over $200 per session. I went home feeling disconnected from life and feeling extremely suicidal for the next three months due to whatever had infected my energy field. There was no support, nobody I could get help from for this.

Sure, ayahuasca is some powerful stuff. I get why people are so enchanted by it. The visions are powerful and the icaros can lead to some powerful healing. However, ayahuasca is a double edged sword. And it’s the spiritual equivalent of playing with knives. It’s also one of the most spiritually dirty healing modalities that exists. You are in a space with up to 20 or more people, all of whom are completely opened up energetically, so any negative juju is free to come in or out.

It’s not just me who’s been affected. I know others who have also had bad and even traumatizing results, or at the very least whose healing was just temporary.

There are much more effective and safer spiritual modalities out there if you are looking for healing or spiritual growth. Fortunately I found powerful healing that helped me more in 6 months than 18 ayahuasca ceremonies did in one year. It didn’t cost nearly as much and didn’t involved terrifying, confusing and senseless visions and purges. So, this isn’t just a review for Nihue Rao but for ayahuasca in general. Just know that if you do ayahuasca there are some real risks.
billy3000
April 9, 2018 at 10:07 pm

For my 52nd birthday this year, I wanted to experience Ayahuasca, “the vine of the soul.” I felt intrigued and encouraged by the stories of so many people who have found healing through this renowned plant medicine. Making the commitment to take this journey was a process that entailed a lot of reading and reflection. I remember the moment, several months ago, when I transitioned from having mere curiosity about Ayahuasca to a deep feeling of excitement. I knew that I was finally ready to travel to the Amazon basin in Peru to experience it for myself.

I researched several healing centers and decided to book a 10-day stay at Nihue Rao Centro Espiritual. Ricardo Amaringo is the leader of Nihue Rao. As a shaman and ayahuasquero with several decades of experience, Ricardo is very well regarded. The center is located on a beautiful property surrounded by lush forest that is an hour’s drive away from Iquitos in the Peruvian Amazon. Upon my arrival, I was pleased to find that my accommodations consisted of a bungalow with three open sides – only screens separated me from the tropical forest. In the coming days, I would enjoy long naps, falling asleep at bedtime, and waking up in the morning surrounded by fresh air and the sounds of birds, insects and the occasional rainstorm.

The staff at Nihue Rao was very kind and attentive during my stay. Benoit is supervisor, and he conducted an in-depth, introductory interview with me regarding my purpose in traveling so far from home to experience Ayahuasca. Throughout my stay, Benoit monitored each visitor’s progress with the plant medicine, and he was always available to answer any questions that I might have. I also had an individual meeting with Ricardo prior to my first ceremony. This meeting was critical since it gave me the opportunity to communicate my specific intentions for healing to the shaman.

As I met the other visitors at Nihue Rao who had already been to ceremonies, I was struck by how excited they were about their experiences with Ayahuasca. Some of them spoke about elaborate visions that they had seen during ceremonies. And several described gaining newfound awareness that had a “transformative” effect upon their lives – an amazing claim given the short amount of time that they had spent at the center.

Soon, it was time for me to participate in the first of six ceremonies. I had thought long and hard about my intentions. My intentions were focused upon healing childhood trauma, finding forgiveness with family and relationship issues, overcoming addictive behavior, and gaining inspiration toward greater skill and confidence in my profession. During each ceremony, participants received an individual icaro, or medicine song, from Ricardo or one of a few other shamans that often induced a profound state of release, healing and awareness. I was truly amazed to realize new insights and make steady progress across all of my concerns as each ceremony unfolded.

Ayahuasca is truly a wondrous medicine. I felt so grateful for the expert guidance that I received at Nihue Rao from Ricardo and the other shamans and from Benoit and the other staff, which helped me to navigate this extraordinary experience. On mornings following ceremonies, participants supported each other in the process during sharing sessions with guidance from Ricardo and Benoit. And Nihue Rao provided a beautiful, serene environment for rest and reflection between ceremonies that was quite conducive to healing.

Nihue Rao is a beautiful place where I always felt safe and where my heart was truly opened. It provided me with the opportunity to not only reflect upon my deepest concerns, but to actually make substantial progress working through each of them. I returned home from Nihue Rao full of gratitude and very excited about the positive impact that staying there will surely have on my life going forward!
saara_n
April 7, 2018 at 2:43 pm

I just wrapped up one of the most transformational experiences of my life. 10 days at Nihue and I feel lighter than I ever have – finally I’ve shed baggage and pain that I was carrying for decades.

Shamans of the Shipibo tradition at Nihue Rao are focused on in-depth healing and introspection. They ensure that everything from intake to exit facilitate an experience of the heart and soul.

The staff at Nihue is unparalleled – they are accessible, compassionate, and incredibly wise. Benoit is truly exceptional. I could talk to him at any point about intentions, doubts, fears, or questions which allowed me to walk into each ceremony feeling comfortable. Then, during ceremonies themselves, there are plenty of people dedicated to ensuring that everyone has the support they need.

Moreover, the location is beautiful – waking up every morning to see beautiful trees and walking around every afternoon to enjoy the adorable animals running around further centered the experience.

When my friend and I were searching for a retreat, we ran into a few centers that effectively tried to promise everything. For example, one center stated we could do 6 ceremonies and a Master Plant in 6 days – be wary of these places. Ayahuasca can be a profitable business and some locations seem willing to compromise the safety of passengers and sanctity of the process to make a dollar. Nihue Rao has developed clear guidelines after years of experience that worked very well for us and all others in the community.

I would wholeheartedly recommend Nihue Rao to anyone looking for an ayahuasca experience.
bobbya
April 7, 2018 at 1:25 pm

A Healing Journey at Nihue Rao

Nihue Rao is a “centro espiritual”: a spiritual center. My wife and I were there for 11 days in January, 2018. We are both over 70. It has been 8 weeks since we returned. I waited this long to write our review because I wanted to be able to be sure I could separate the “magical” thrill of being on retreat in the Amazon from the ways the Healing Journey continues to be manifest in our lives.

I will begin by writing about the physical and psychological environment of Nihue Rao, because they are the same. In every way, Nihue Rao is a safe environment. This extends from the armed guards to the cleanliness of the grounds to the food to the villagers who share the space to the guiding escorts (interpreters) to the shamans themselves. There are no “head trips”, here. The power structure here is entirely natural and based on perceptual and communication skills and not on personal manipulation or charisma.

The armed guards who are always on patrol are the kindest I have ever met anywhere in the world. They are friendly and supportive. They truly are part of the healing environment, as gentle protectors: neither suspicious nor bored nor antagonistic.

The kitchen staff feeds everyone, and they, too, extend the feeling of caring to all: kittens, workers and guests. We are all treated with equal generosity.

The guides who interview us and translate for us and look after us both within the moloka (the ceremony hall) and in the whole village environment, are exceptional in knowing when to give people space, when to create individual focus, and when to intervene with extra, intensely personal support. They assume the roles of attentive, protective and nurturing psychological and spiritual escorts, or trusted nurses, in the very best sense of that word!

The pediatrician and psychoanalyst D W Winnicott developed the term “facilitating environment” to describe the combination of safety, nourishment and encouragement which a mother provides for her infant child. This trust was certainly our experience of the Healing Journey at Nihue Rao. To quote from Wikipedia: Winnicott came to consider that “Playing takes place in the potential space between the baby and the mother-figure….[T]he initiation of playing is associated with the life experience of the baby who has come to trust the mother figure”.[26] “Potential space” was Winnicott’s term for a sense of an inviting and safe interpersonal field in which one can be spontaneously playful while at the same time connected to others.”

At Nihue Rao villagers, guards, cooks, grounds-keepers, interpreter-guides and shamans all combine their skills to create a mentally and physically safe environment in which to play. Nihue Rao does not emphasize any religious view or spiritual “path”. There is no “belonging” to a specific set of beliefs or any push to accept any defined “meaning”. Nihue Rao is only concerned with the safety, clarity and healthy energy of each individual seeker.

For an example of the trust engendered in this environment, during one of my ayahuasca experiences I relived having the “croup”, an early-childhood illness that had made me unable to breathe and caused me to be hospitalized in an oxygen tent. I have always remembered the glorious feeling of being physically “born-again” when the illness broke and I “returned to life” in the middle of the night in that old hospital ward, but my memory never went back further to the terror of being unable to breathe and being so helplessly close to death.

During this part of my relationship with ayahuasca, in which I had unfortunately tried to take a breath while vomiting, I truly could not breathe, and yet I was not afraid. I trusted that the guides who came to help me knew CPR, and I experienced 3 of the shamans “astral-project” to watch over me, in case greater intervention was necessary. Knowing I was so protected both physically and psycho-spiritually allowed me to eventually regain control of my breathing on my own. This short-circuit in my breathing repeated a second night, but a quickly administered Heimlich maneuver made this a very short and completely uneventful experience. What became emphasized for me was not the base fact of my own physical survival, but my feelings of gratitude and the actual physical experience of a nurturing, supportive community.

I want to emphasize it is my perspective that ayahuasca, in combination with the extremely bland diet, the Master Plants drink, the rituals, chanting and Amazon environment, all worked together. To focus greedily on the “mystical” hallucinogenic qualities of ayahuasca is to miss the point. It was the experience of all of these in community that made this a Healing Journey.

The Nihue Rao website emphasizes “The success of the healing process depends on the length of your stay and also on the effort that you put in to your healing process: focus, intention, trust and time. Ayahuasca, the master plants and the shamans will also do their best work for your wellbeing. It is a combination of shaman work, Ayahuasca and you.”

My wife and I certainly agree with this! Now, 8 weeks after returning to our “normal” lives, we find that many of the “magical” feelings from living in the Amazon have faded, but those issues we focused on with well-defined intention have remained transformed. When we come upon an energy-block or provocative situation, we are able to simply reconnect to our healing-intention and put aside the old negative thinking. I do not mean that we meditate in any special way or repeat a chant or mantra. I mean this as a simple, straightforward act of remembering, of returning to the greater sense of possibility which the experience at Nihue Rao provides.

When I try to explain this in conversation, I always fall back on Rilke’s short poem about The Unicorn, in which he writes:

“The people fed it, not on corn, but on the Possibility of being.”

The Nihue Rao perspective is grounded in this sense of Possibility: of psychological-spiritual Play. I took ayahuasca. My wife did not. We participated in everything else equally. And we discovered that ayahuasca itself was not necessary for the intentional transformations we desired. To quote again from the Nihue Rao website:

“During our life experiences we collect a lot of energies that can block us. By cleaning these energies we can feel more connected to ourselves and our truest path. We work with the wisdom and medicine of the master plants for the purpose of your healing, learning and wellbeing. The plants [and chants, and caring, supportive presence of the guides] are our allies and helpers in your healing process.”

In my personal analogy, I describe the “self” as a tall building that has become covered in the grime of pollution. The Master Plants, shaman’s chants and the caring attention of the guides wash the windows, repair the wiring, and haul out a lifetime of accumulated trash for recycling or to turn it into life-giving compost.

Ayahuasca, however, will definitely give you “a kick in the ass”, and many of us felt we were certainly “going to die” during our 5th ceremonies. For the person next to me he felt as if his “mind is melting”. For me, it was a physical fear of “my body going into shock” from “loss of electrolytes” after days in the jungle heat. This fear of loss of control can take many forms.

Ayahuasca is a “hard reboot”. It just throws you off the roof, and like an action-hero in your own movie, you miraculously survive unharmed and stronger than before. Ayahuasca can be a powerful experience, but it is not necessary as long as you spend enough time in the village with the Master Plants, diet and ceremonies.

As for my other personal experiences with ayahuasca, I will quote from the website again: “More important than the visions is that the Ayahuasca works in the body to clean the blocks and the energies. As well, there are many types of visions: they may be old memories that come to mind or thoughts that feel different from our regular everyday ones. Whether or not you have visions trust that ayahuasca is working on helping you with what you need!”

This is certainly true. I am a musician, dancer and storyteller. I do not process experiences visually. I also worked for 11 years as a “Play Therapist” and a “Music Therapist” in a mental health center. I don’t have “visions”. I sing songs. As they came to know me, the guides were able to help me find my own ways to process ayahuasca and they learned how to translate to the shamans my physical and story-image responses. The guides definitely responded to each participant as an individual!

The best description I can come up with for the Healing Journey at Nihue Rao is to quote, again, from the Wikipedia entry on Winnicott: “He thought that people were born without a clearly developed self and had to “search” for an authentic sense of self as they grew.[33] “For Winnicott, the sense of feeling real, feeling in touch with others and with one’s own body and its processes was essential for living a life.”[34] … This experience of aliveness is what allows people to be genuinely close to others, and to be creative.”

Looking at my life within the experience of the Healing Journey at Nihue Rao, I can accept that bad things happened to me in infancy and as I lived my life, but I can also see that I continued to carry those negative experiences with me to perpetuate and re-enact the wounding on myself. (For this insight, I am grateful for the poem “I Give You Back” by Joy Harjo)

I have discovered that forgiveness comes only after letting go of self-abusing guilt and accepting one’s own responsibility for holding onto the pain with life habits of intense, self-justifying aggression or drug /alcohol abuse or self-inflicted confusion or narcissistic feelings of helplessness or isolation.

Moving along the Healing Journey at Nihue Rao, I found my perspective shift from criticism to kindness and from visions of self-abuse to visions of self-respect. I was able to see myself through clean eyes, in the way Derrick Walcott wrote in his poem “Love After Love”:

“You will love again the stranger who was yourself.”

You are free to imagine the Healing Journey as “play therapy” or as a “spiritual awakening”. The framework you apply to the experience doesn’t matter: only your honesty, self-forgiveness and compassion. You are welcomed to enjoy the ayahuasca “light show”, but the focus of intention here at Nihue Rao is self-integration, not merely intense experiences.

I urge you to take this long, uncomfortable and exciting journey into the Amazon to support your “search for an authentic sense of self”. Yes, the “Master Plants”, the extremely bland diet and the shamans’ songs, stimulated by the ayahuasca, are powerful enough push you along the road; but if you take responsibility to prepare your intentions and come ready to work, then you have the potential to become real in ways you cannot imagine, even in your best dreams.

Recommended poetry to enhance understanding of this Healing Journey:
“I Give You Back” by Joy Harjo
“Love After Love” by Derrick Walcott
“Shedding Skin” by Harryette Mullen
“I thank you God for most this amazing” by e.e.cummings
“Crying Poem” by Jimmy Santiago Baca
“Call Me By My True Names” by Thich Nhat Hahn