10-Day Ayahuasca & Master Plant Dieta Retreat (Faro, Portugal)

Through this retreat we aim to create a safe and sacred space that allows each individual to experience profound spiritual healing and understanding. We do this with the hope to contribute to the healing and liberation of humanity and our beautiful planet.

Our world is in need of a true revolution, the kind of revolution that comes about by opening our hearts in a genuine search for truth. Ayahuasca is a sacred opportunity and we share the tradition of Amazonian shamanism and knowledge of Vedic philosophy with our greatest gratitude, purity and truth. This retreat involves the deep process of the shamanic diet (dieta chamanica), a cornerstone of Amazonian healing, along with Ayahuasca ceremonies. 

Walking the path with Ayahuasca and the Master Plants is a Yoga – a Yoga of the Plants. It is humanity’s quest to embrace her true nature of compassion, and to live it through a direct experience that recognizes itself in all that is. Yoga is to live a direct experience with the truth, beyond words, ideas and thoughts, a lived communion with the cosmos and existence. With the wisdom of the Amazonian traditions and the invaluable teachings of Vedic philosophy, we try to serve this search for truth through silence and an authentic path of awakening – a path of healing through understanding and thereby seeking to open the heart and awaken the nature of love and compassion that resides in each person. 

Sinchi Runa
The Sinchi Runa Institute was founded in the jungle of Central America in 2011, by Peruvian Master Sanango with over 25 years of experience working with ayahuasca, with an Amazonian training and structure and a variety of shamanic master plants and natural entheogens.

We specialise in Ayahuasca Sessions, Master Plant Diets (shamanic diets), short or long term treatments for addiction and depression, deep immersion processes and intensive retreats.

We are servants of Ayahuasca and Amazonian Master Plants and a home for students, seeking to help awaken the existing inner knowledge and inner master of each individual who comes to us, on their path to remembering their true nature. We merge the wisdom and direct experience that plants bring with the Vedic teachings. Respecting the Amazonian tradition we insert Vedic tools through Ayurvedic healing, astrology, lectures, mantras and spiritual practices such as pranayama, meditation and Hridaya hatha yoga. We are now based near Faro, Portugal with continuous connections with the Peruvian Amazon.

You can read more about us at https://sinchiruna.com/

Maestro Sanango
Our retreats are directed by Maestro Sanango, a Peruvian spiritual master who has spent several decades inviting Ayahuasca, as well as directing Shamanic Diets or vision quests. Sanango is a “vegetalista” with a deep knowledge of the Master Plants, their metaphysical implications and forms of healing. He has been directing the Sinchi Runa Institute, previously located in the Peruvian Amazon and now located in Portugal, for the past 10 years. Sinchi Runa is now in Portugal offering Ayahuasca Retreats and teachings in shamanism, the shamanic vision, master plants, Vedic philosophy and reconnection with the divine.

Sanango has given lectures on shamanism in Universities of Peru and Guatemala. He has also developed extensive knowledge within the Vedic philosophy, establishing connections and healing tools between the shamanic tradition of Peru and the Vedic philosophy. He works with his students who accompany him and are on a path of understanding, having spent several years learning from him and the Master Plants.

Before the creation of Sinchi Runa, Sanango spent many years learning with different maestros in the Peruvian Amazon, as well as prolonged retreats in solitude with Master Plants in what are traditionally called shamanic diets, dietas or vision quests. During this time, he created a deep bond with the spirit of Ayahuasca and other medicinal plants and divine deities that allow him to celebrate safe ceremonies and processes that lead to a deep spiritual realization and healing of the soul.

The Shamanic Diet (Dieta Chamanica) 
A shamanic diet is an opportunity to work with and learn directly from a master plant that is your teacher and “speaks” within you. A spiritual teacher that is contained in a brew or decoction of a master plant, such as the Chiric Sanango that belongs to the family of plants called Sanangos. The Chiric Sanango (healer who heals through cold) opens the heart, teaches us love and trust. Also as an example we have the Uchu Sanango (healer who burns, who cleans our limitations with fire or heat), the beautiful plant Bobinzana, healer whose archetype is the mermaid, teaches service, feminine wisdom, adaptability. Likewise we have other teachers such as Ajo Sacha, Tobacco, etc. In the diet the guide, healer or shaman acts as a mediator between the dieter or participant and the spirit or entity of the plant. 

During a period of 7 days or more, the voice of these plant masters guide the heart, to find solutions to complexes and deep-rooted suffering, emotional or physical pain. They open memories to cleanse the heart of reactions, healing deep scars to achieve healing through understanding, self-observation, and understanding. The diet is delicate work, because it demands discipline of silence and isolation. It is for many a definitive step in life towards change, to leaving afflictions that accompany our existence, and truly open the heart to life. 

Plants act at the level of each being. They are not “magic” pills or chemicals that falsely offer healing by numbing the mind or disconnecting feelings. They work at the level of the soul accompanying and healing each affliction according to the personal universe. Their work is to cleanse, burn or purge wounds, and also to support the being to strengthen it, and above all to teach us to live our direct experience by alleviating us of the burdens we carry from our experience, sealing our scars.

Everything that happens to us is calling us to understanding, to comprehension. The experience of suffering is a call to meet the Dharma, but we need to light the way to not get lost in emotion or pain, to let go of what does not belong to us and focus on the reason for the experience – the understanding for the search of a spiritual path, for which we need to reconnect with ourselves, to be guided to our inner teacher. The diet plants are ancient and wise teachers that give us the opportunity to be guided to understand what life calls us to understand, in order to heal. The plant master accompanies you on your journey, strengthening you, opening what needs to be opened, burning and purifying what needs to be cleansed, and also healing you on a physical level. 

It is an opportunity to understand life, existence and karma; an opportunity to build the resilience and strength necessary to rise beyond our suffering, and through understanding let go and free ourselves from the circumstances that bind us to suffering. 

The diet is an opportunity to listen to yourself and your heart. Everything else is silenced, including the noise of food. During the diet we eat very simple and silent food (monothematic), and we isolate ourselves from the world for a few days. It is a search for silence, so we may listen to ourselves and open our hearts. To open the heart, we must first find it and feel its voice. The master plant guides us to listen to that voice, to hear ourselves, to perceive the rhythm of the universe through nature and its essence in ourselves. To feel the wind, the sunrise and sunset, to begin to understand the meaning of existence and our real being. 

The diet is a practice to return to the essential, to silence. Therefore, we stay in tents in nature, returning to the primordial in our being. Through the diet, we begin to return to our true nature by leaving our comfort zone, leaving behind the beliefs of a culture based on sumptuary and excessive comfort. We begin to realize our body and its functions, andwe can marvel at the experience of inner perception by understanding in solitude our immensity, which is the first thing that plants show us. It is the beginning of humanising ourselves by living fully the experience of being here and now.

Plants are a medicine
The Shamanic Diet is an opportunity to go as deep as possible in healing with Master Plants, because they go to the heart of the being impregnating, impregnating it with their wisdom.  We must remember that plants, and this spiritual work, are a medicine for the body, mind and spirit. This opportunity must be treated with the care and respect that comes with the sacred and ancestral knowledge that comes to us through millennia of knowledge stored in the Amazon since the beginning of time. Healing with Master Plants is not about doing many more Ayahuasca ceremonies, to receive more healing or knowledge, but above all to bring to the heart the teachings and understanding that we are able to receive, assimilate and understand. The Diet is also a work of integration of the ceremonies, to really bring to understanding our circumstances into our lives, to fully receive the fruits of this work. 

The whole inner evolution of working with Master Plants is a deep holistic process that encompasses our whole being.

Each Ayahuasca ceremony is an invaluable opportunity if prepared and integrated correctly. Silence and nature open that inner space that allows us to settle and integrate what is opened and shown to us in the ceremonies. That is why the opportunity of the diet is incredible.

For us, a retreat with a shamanic diet in silence and isolation, is the most correct way to digest and work deeply with this medicine, that brings this immense opportunity for humanity that is Ayahuasca and other Master Plants.

Silence and Contemplation in Nature

Retreats with Sinchi Runa use the tool of silence (with the exception of sharing circles or consultations with Maestro Sanango or facilitators) to allow each person to interiorize and inward in their process. We seek to free ourselves from the need to constantly ‘do’, and instead begin to ‘be’, to feel ourselves, our hearts and the plants speaking to us. 

Silence is the most important part of the retreat and in deepening the work with the master plants, but speaking is always allowed with facilitators and the Maestro when in need of assistance.

This retreat is a precious opportunity in search of truth, understanding and healing, an opportunity to begin observing and knowing ourselves, our minds and our reactions. This requires a discipline of constant awareness and search for silence. This search is manifested outwardly in refraining from all forms of contact (verbal, written, visual eye contact, and conserving our personal space) to allow the inward search for silence to unfold.

It is important to be able to detach from the usual “day-to-day” routines, habits, personal stories and external noise, in order to be able to integrate the healing and wisdom through one’s process with the plants. Disconnection with the exterior allows us to concentrate all of our energy on the healing process and gives space to observe our lives without interference from the elements that one way or another have created the circumstance we are living in. We nurture and provide the space for self-observation, introspection, and contemplation.

The opportunity of a process with master plants is to become aware of and release what causes one harm and to understand oneself and one’s relationship to the entire movement of life and existence. This is a beautiful and challenging process of comprehension, reflection and silence that requires great willpower, dedication, honesty, sacrifice and purity of intention.

Retreat Structure

We open the retreat with an introductory talk with Maestro Sanango, followed by the purge ceremony. The days after that consist of ceremony days and rest days, where there are group sharings and lectures with Maestro Sanango, opportunities for private 1-1 consultations with Sanango, meditation, and time for reflection and nature walks.

We close the retreat together on the final day with a sacred Fire Ceremony (Agnihotra), a sacrificial fire ceremony to seal the work of the retreat and to help integrate the healing and understanding received.

About us:
About us: www.sinchiruna.com
Terms & Conditions: www.sinchiruna.com/terms-conditions/
Contraindications with plant work: www.sinchiruna.com/contraindications/