EPISODE ONE: Carlos Tanner is the program director of the Ayahuasca Foundation, a Peruvian non-profit organization he started in 2009. He has organized healing retreats and educational courses attended by over a thousand people from all over the world. He has witnessed the treatment of a wide variety of health issues and the healing process within the Shipibo plant medicine tradition. In this series Carlos shares some of the most important lessons he has learned from studying the Shipibo tradition of ayahuasca and plant medicine for the last fifteen years. He hopes these insights will not only contribute to a deeper understanding of how the tradition of ayahuasca and plant medicine works, but also how we can all move closer to achieving our goals of health, happiness, and satisfaction.

EPISODE TWO: If you made a list of all the things you love, would you be on it? In episode 2, Carlos Tanner describes his experiences with healing trauma using ayahuasca and plant medicine. He discusses the importance of relationships and how we can improve our health and happiness by becoming more conscious of how we react to our experiences.

EPISODE THREE: When you get a cut, do you heal it? No. It just heals. All we need to do is keep it clean. In Episode 3, Carlos discusses the universal motivating principle within all living beings towards wholeness, health, harmony, and happiness. He describes a four step process for healing outlined in Leonard Laskow’s book: Healing with Love, and explains a major difference between western and indigenous healing methods when responding to symptoms.

EPISODE FOUR: Do you love the medicine you’re taking? In Episode 4, Carlos discusses how the healing tradition that surrounds the use of plant medicine enhances the effectiveness of medicine by cultivating the inner environment. He describes his observations of the power of belief and faith in the healing process and how those aspects of consciousness can be optimized to increase the likelihood of successful outcomes.

EPISODE FIVE: Are you willing to do whatever it takes? In Episode 5, Carlos describes a fundamental aspect of training to become a curandero, the plant dieta. He discusses the purpose of the dieta and what it means to give up something to demonstrate how much we care and how important our goal is to us. He continues to relate this concept to the nourishment of our inner soil and optimization of our inner environment. He also poses some interesting questions that he gained from his observations of over one thousand retreat and course participants.

EPISODE SIX: Have you ever felt like the universe was picking on you? We’ve all had those times in our lives when we’ve wanted to shake our fist at the sky and say ‘why me?’ In Episode 6, Carlos elaborates on his experiences with plant dietas. He describes the concept of being tested while on dieta and how that concept can be helpful in all aspects of our lives. He describes how obstacles and challenges in life can be viewed positively and how changes in perspective and attitude can turn challenges into opportunities to advance, to ascend to a new level of understanding and ability. He continues to relate these changes to the concept of optimizing our inner environments, and how everything will work out.

EPISODE SEVEN: Nature Heals. Nature Guides. Nature Knows. In Episode 7, Carlos discusses how through dietas he has learned to look to the forest for answers. He describes how nature is an immense collective consciousness with an evolutionary history of hundreds of millions of years. He makes the important point that we as humans often don’t recognize ourselves as a part of nature, even though we clearly are, for we are living beings. By reconnecting with the whole that is nature, the earth, the universe, we can return to the natural guidance and healing of nature. It seems so simple, because it is, but by disconnecting ourselves from the whole, we lose our faith, our knowing that we will be ok.

EPISODE EIGHT: How do you see things? In Episode 8, Carlos talks about understanding perspective and how it relates to communication. He shares his experiences with ayahuasca that helped him remember that we are all children, and that how each person interprets and acts in the world is shaped by their influences, both positive and negative. Optimizing understanding in communication involves sharing perspectives, even when that communication is interdimensional.

EPISODE NINE: Forgiveness is a profound healing act that liberates to love again. In episode 9 Carlos discusses the importance of forgiveness to free ourselves to achieve our highest potential for love. He presents a novel understanding of forgiveness and the effect it has on our ability to realize true happiness and satisfaction in life.

EPISODE TEN: When you Trust the Process and commit to doing Whatever it Takes, you will achieve your goals. In episode 10 Carlos reviews the previous nine episodes and sums up each episode’s message more succinctly. He’ll put up another series with more helpful ideas and stories soon…