While we’ve come a long way, the psychedelic movement still has a long road ahead What was a Shipibo-guided, trauma-informed ayahuasca center doing at the largest psychedelic conference? So happy you asked.  For the first time ever, Soltara sponsored MAPS! Picture our team (11 of us strong) behind a head-turning, plant-draped booth teeming with all sorts of conversation and exchange with friends old and new. Alumns stopped by to say hi, we hugged it out with longtime advisors (heyyyy, Dennis McKenna), and opened arms to new friends curious to come on retreat and partner with us. The love ..read more

A climate-positive future depends on preserving wildlife, reforestation and the indigenous communities of the rainforest  The Amazon Rainforest is wildly misunderstood. While headlines come and go about wildfires, endangered species and indigenous land disputes, the changes needed to protect one of our planet’s most valuable resources often come up short. The Amazon Rainforest Conservancy (ARC) aims to correct this. On a mission to safeguard the threatened tropical rainforest habitat, species and ecosystems in the Peruvian Amazon, they’ve made incredible strides in their conservation effo ..read more

Befriending emotional maturity and compassionate conversations with a lawyer-and-mediator-turned author and teacher. A deep dive into integration is far from easy—but when paired with the right tools around conflict work, emotional maturity and compassionate conversation, this process can lead to even greater transformation and healing. How to navigate those friction points within and interpersonally largely shapes our ability to bring powerful lessons gained from a peak experience, like ayahuasca healing, into our daily lives. Meeting conflict as friend, not foe, is often the dreaded work tha ..read more

A Q&A with the founder of Heroic Hearts Projects expands the definition of psychedelic-assisted therapies. When veterans living with PTSD have tried everything to unburden themselves from lasting wartime trauma, where can they and their loved ones turn to for true healing? Luckily, we’ve made major inroads and have Jesse Gould, founder of the Heroic Hearts Project, among many incredible leaders in the space to thank for that. Driven by a personal mission to help military veterans struggling with mental trauma, he is best known for his own inspiring battle with PTSD and his recovery throug ..read more

How an Elected Official started an organization to heal politics as part of his ayahuasca integration process How can we all become stronger leaders in our own lives, personally, professionally, politically—even integrating the lessons of ayahuasca into our journey of self-leadership? Our recent conversation with former Soltara retreat guest, Skippy Mesirow, an Elected Official for Aspen City Council helped us bridge this conversation as he straddles the often disparate worlds of politics and healing. This convergence is also incredibly timely given the recent headlines made by US Surgeon Gen ..read more

A systems thinking lens will help us fight for the Amazon, with 5 reasons to get started We are the Amazon, and the Amazon is us. While it may just seem like a faraway rainforest that most of us will only dream or read headlines about, our dependence on the Amazon for our collective survival has never been closer to home. Why is it more timely than ever to stand in solidarity with the Amazon – its people, plants and the vital ecosystems that hang in its balance? And which institutions and governing bodies benefit from the ongoing destruction of our rainforest? The gap between this precious eco ..read more

Demystifying 4 myths about trauma and the nervous system with an Applied Neurology Practitioner Did you know that a trauma-informed approach to healing can truly make or break a safe recovery process, at the level of the nervous system?  If you’ve been following Soltara for some time, you probably already know how much we care about the integration process, which is the aftercare to any ayahuasca ceremony or retreat. All too often, integration isn’t given as much weight as the ceremony itself or the full attention it deserves within the overall arc of healing, whether that follows a plant ..read more

What we can learn from this intersectionality, including 3 ways chaplaincy can support psychedelic care. A conversation about psychedelic (or mystical) experiences is incomplete without religion, and vice versa. How these two ideas are interconnected and why their inseparability matters in the realm of healing is core to Chacruna’s latest Religion & Psychedelics Conference. Recently, Soltara’s co-founder Melissa Stangl traveled to San Francisco to attend this incredible 3-day gathering of 68 thought leaders and top experts in the field. We’re so grateful to Chacruna (a Soltara Community Pa ..read more

A Western medical doctor and trained ayahuascero shares 5 ways to integrate reciprocity into healing What role does reciprocity play on our healing journey, and why does this matter? In our recent conversation with Dr. Joe Tafur, we were honored to dive deep into this inquiry along with his powerful story as a Medical Doctor who chose the path of bridging the worlds of Western Medicine and Shipibo Curanderismo, sometimes referred to as shamanism. For those who know Soltara well, this is a topic near and dear to our hearts. Joe Tafur is a Colombian-American family physician originally from Pho ..read more

A climate-positive future depends on preserving wildlife, reforestation and the indigenous communities of the rainforest  The Amazon Rainforest is wildly misunderstood. While headlines come and go about wildfires, endangered species and indigenous land disputes, the changes needed to protect one of our planet’s most valuable resources often come up short. The Amazon Rainforest Conservancy (ARC) aims to correct this. On a mission to safeguard the threatened tropical rainforest habitat, species and ecosystems in the Peruvian Amazon, they’ve made incredible strides in their conservation effo ..read more