← Ayaruna GardensGrant Development

Master Vision & Program Overview

Ayaruna Medicine Gardens — Carlos Nelson, Founder & Steward

daturaspirit.com · ayarunagardens.com ·  WhatsApp: +51 953 196 399  ·  Instagram: @gnoself

Don Francisco performing a traditional plant medicine blessing ceremony

"Who taught your grandmother the songs you are teaching us, Don Francisco?"

"The leaves taught her the songs."

"Who taught the leaves, then?" the student asks.

"The wind teaches the leaves."

The student laughs. "Who teaches the wind, then?"

Don Francisco laughs, a twinkle in his eye, and points to the sky. "Well, that would be God, wouldn't it?"

— Don Francisco Montes Shuña, Capanawa curandero, Ayaruna Medicine Gardens

Who We Are

Ayaruna Medicine Gardens is a plant medicine conservation and healing center with two complementary locations in Peru: a 28-hectare botanical sanctuary in the Peruvian Amazon outside Iquitos, and a planned year-round healing facility in the Sacred Valley of the Cusco region. Together these two locations form a complete and unprecedented integrative healing model — one that draws on over two decades of modern healing interacting with untold generations of indigenous wisdom traditions, hundreds of medicinal plant species, the direct participation of one of the Amazon's most respected curanderos, and the kind of sustained personal commitment that cannot be assembled quickly or purchased wholesale.

The Amazon center was originally established as Sachamama Botanical Gardens by Don Francisco Montes Shuña — a Capanawa curandero from the Ucayali region with over 50 years of healing experience, whose own initiation began at age six under his grandmother, herself part of an unbroken lineage of traditional healers. Don Francisco has dedicated his life to preserving the sacred plants, songs, and ceremonial knowledge of the Amazon and transmitting those traditions to a carefully chosen generation of students.

Carlos Nelson began his study of plant medicine in 2008 under the late Javier Regueiro, and completed his first shamanic dieta in 2011 with Don Francisco. He has apprenticed directly under Don Francisco since 2021, assuming stewardship of the gardens and becoming proficient in working with ayahuasca, huachuma, tobacco, and datura brugmansia, carrying forward the tradition of Perfumero Toecero within the lineage. He has maintained and developed this operation for five years on minimal resources — a fact that speaks to the depth of his commitment and to the resilience of the model itself.

The Amazon gardens are safeguarded year-round by a local Peruvian family who live on the land, protecting hundreds of sacred plant species from illegal harvest and maintaining the physical integrity of the property.

A Critical Distinction: Medicine From the Land Itself

In the rapidly expanding global plant medicine industry, one of the most significant and most frequently overlooked distinctions is the question of where the medicine comes from, who prepares it, and under whose authority and blessing the healing work is conducted.

At Ayaruna, these questions have straightforward answers.

Every medicine used in our programs is grown on our own land in the Peruvian Amazon, in the same ecosystem where these plants have evolved over millennia. Ayahuasca, tobacco, datura brugmansia, and the full spectrum of companion plants used in dieta and healing work are cultivated sustainably within the 28 hectares of the gardens — tended by people who live on this land, who know each plant individually, and who understand their preparation as a sacred responsibility rather than a logistical one. For the Sacred Valley programs, medicines are prepared by Don Francisco at the gardens and shipped to Pisac — traveling the same way traditional medicines have always traveled within Amazonian healing networks, carrying the knowledge and intention of the hands that made them.

The medicines are prepared by Carlos Nelson and Don Francisco Montes Shuña — the same practitioners who oversee their administration. There is no supply chain. There is no intermediary. There is no disconnect between the people who grow and prepare the medicine and the people who sit with participants through the hardest nights. This continuity — from soil to ceremony — is not a marketing distinction. It is the traditional model, increasingly rare in a world where plant medicine has become an international commodity.

This work is conducted with the direct participation, guidance, and blessing of Don Francisco — a living indigenous elder and master curandero who trained Carlos and remains an active collaborator in all programs. His presence, whether in person at the Amazon center or through remote consultation and medicine preparation for Sacred Valley programs, provides a level of authenticity, ethical grounding, and spiritual depth that cannot be manufactured or approximated elsewhere.

The integrity of the container — physical, spiritual, and relational — is inseparable from the quality of the healing that occurs within it.

The Living Pharmacopoeia: Hundreds of Plants, Centuries of Knowledge

What distinguishes Ayaruna from virtually every other plant medicine operation in the world is not simply the presence of ayahuasca and a skilled practitioner. It is the extraordinary scope of botanical knowledge available through this lineage and on this land.

The 28 hectares of Ayaruna Medicine Gardens contain not dozens but hundreds of distinct medicinal and ceremonial plant species — one of the most comprehensive living collections of Amazonian healing plants in existence. Many are documented in ethnobotanical literature. Many more exist entirely within the living knowledge of Don Francisco and his lineage — understood, applied, and refined across generations of practice, outside the reach of Western scientific documentation, and irreplaceable if lost.

Don Francisco carries the accumulated clinical knowledge of this lineage with a precision and depth that no published curriculum can replicate: which plants address which conditions, in what combinations and sequences, prepared in what ways, administered under what ceremonial conditions, and adjusted as a patient's condition evolves over the course of treatment. He has applied this knowledge across decades of practice with thousands of patients from both indigenous communities and the wider world, treating conditions that Western medicine has been unable to resolve.

For participants in Ayaruna's programs this means that treatment is not limited to a fixed protocol. When a case is complex, serious, or treatment-resistant, the full botanical spectrum of the gardens — available through Don Francisco's knowledge and physically accessible through the medicine preparation and shipping model — allows for a level of diagnostic and therapeutic flexibility that is genuinely without parallel in the contemporary plant medicine world.

This living pharmacopoeia is also a finite and fragile resource. Don Francisco is in his later years. The oral transmission of this knowledge — plant by plant, preparation by preparation, song by song — is ongoing between him and Carlos, and represents one of the most urgent preservation priorities in Amazonian ethnobotany. Every year of continued operation at Ayaruna is a year of irreplaceable knowledge preserved and transmitted.

The Healing Model: A Complete Integrative Arc

The Ayaruna model is structured as a coherent therapeutic arc from initial assessment through deep intervention, convalescence, and long-term integration. Each phase draws on the specific strengths of its environment and the people within it.

Phase One: Assessment and Preparation — Sacred Valley, Pisac

All participants begin in Pisac. Carlos conducts thorough intake consultations, reviews medical history and prior treatment, assesses readiness and specific needs, and designs a personalized program in coordination with Don Francisco. For many participants, the Sacred Valley work is complete in itself — meaningful, powerful, and lasting. For those whose cases point toward the need for deeper or more extended intervention, the assessment phase determines the appropriate next step.

The Sacred Valley environment — the Cusco region's clean mountain air, extraordinary natural beauty, and long spiritual history — is itself therapeutic. Pisac sits within easy reach of Cusco's modern medical facilities, allowing for any necessary baseline diagnostics, laboratory work, imaging, or specialist consultation at a fraction of the cost of equivalent services in the United States or Europe, before deeper work begins.

Phase Two: The Amazon Intervention — Ayaruna Medicine Gardens, Iquitos

For participants requiring deep, intensive work, a defined one-month residential program at the Amazon center is the heart of the therapeutic process. Here, under Don Francisco's direct guidance and with access to the full botanical resources of the gardens, individualized multi-plant treatment protocols are designed and administered. The jungle environment itself is an active participant — its isolation, biological density, and overwhelming aliveness are not incidental features but essential elements of the medicine.

The one-month timeframe is deliberate. It is long enough for serious work with complex conditions and multi-plant protocols, and appropriately bounded for participants who may be physically compromised. Carlos travels with participants to the Amazon and serves as the bridge between Don Francisco's traditional knowledge and any medical considerations — coordinating remote consultations with Peruvian medical professionals as needed, and ensuring continuity of care throughout the jungle phase. The cost of jungle-to-Lima flights and any required medical visits during this phase is factored into the program budget.

Phase Three: Convalescence and Aftercare — Sacred Valley, Pisac

Participants return to Pisac following the Amazon phase for an extended period of convalescence, integration, and ongoing treatment. This is where the slow work happens — the gradual rebuilding, the medical monitoring, the integration of profound experiences into a livable life. Carlos oversees this phase directly and continuously, coordinating with Don Francisco remotely for ongoing guidance and arranging medicine preparation and shipment from the Amazon gardens as treatment protocols require.

Cusco's medical facilities support this phase with regular check-ins, lab work, and any specialist involvement needed. The cost of these services in Peru — a fraction of equivalent US costs — makes comprehensive integrative monitoring genuinely affordable.

This phase typically spans several months and represents the most important period of the entire arc. The Amazon plants the seed. The mountains let it grow.

The Sacred Valley Facility: Heart of the Operation

The operational center of the Ayaruna model is a planned permanent facility in Pisac, in the Sacred Valley of the Cusco region. This facility is the piece that transforms a proven but resource-constrained practice into a fully realized, sustainable, and scalable healing operation.

The facility is designed to operate as an intentional healing community rather than a conventional retreat center — one where different programs and populations coexist and quietly enrich one another. The physical specification reflects this:

Ten beds total across six private rooms and one shared room. Two of the six private rooms are permanently reserved for extended residency and serious illness cases — occupied on a rolling basis by patients in multi-month treatment programs regardless of what else is happening at the facility. The remaining four private rooms and the shared accommodation serve retreat groups, apprenticeship students, and additional residency overflow as needed. Retreat groups are capped at eight participants, fitting comfortably within the available rooms while the two residency rooms remain undisturbed. A dedicated ceremony space, communal kitchen and dining, outdoor grounds appropriate to the Sacred Valley environment, and a private living space for Carlos complete the picture.

This design is intentional in ways that go beyond logistics. A person in month three of a cancer treatment protocol living alongside participants in a week-long retreat on heartbreak or meaning is not an awkward arrangement — it is a profound one. The residency patient witnesses proof of life in people reclaiming themselves. The retreat participant sits at dinner with someone genuinely fighting for theirs. Both leave changed in ways they did not anticipate. This kind of unscripted human depth is something no program design can manufacture, but the right physical and community structure can make it possible.

A property of this specification — six or more rooms, ceremony space, communal facilities, river or mountain setting — is available in the Pisac area for approximately $3,000 to $5,000 USD per month in rental. An ideal property has already been identified on the Pisac river at a purchase price of $580,000 USD, representing an extraordinary long-term investment opportunity relative to comparable properties anywhere in the Western world. Both the rental and purchase pathways are being pursued in parallel through appropriate funding channels.

We are seeking $120,000 USD to fund the first full year of Sacred Valley facility operations. This covers monthly rent at the upper end of the market range, utilities, food and household costs for residents and staff, medicine procurement and shipping from the Amazon gardens, Carlos's coordination travel between Pisac and Iquitos as programs require, medical monitoring costs in Cusco, and basic administrative and communications infrastructure. Five years of operating this work on a fraction of this budget has demonstrated that these resources will be used with discipline and genuine commitment to the mission.

Programs

Extended Residency — Serious and Terminal Illness

For individuals carrying diagnoses that conventional medicine has been unable to resolve or has declared terminal, Ayaruna offers extended residential treatment programs built around the full therapeutic arc described above. These programs are designed case-by-case following thorough assessment and may span three to six months or longer depending on the nature and severity of the condition.

Conditions that have historically been addressed through extended plant medicine protocols in this tradition include treatment-resistant depression and PTSD, chronic pain, autoimmune conditions, fibromyalgia, Lyme disease, certain cancers, neurological conditions, addiction, and a range of psychosomatic conditions for which conventional medicine has offered limited relief. Carlos serves as the continuous point of care and coordination — the human bridge between Don Francisco's traditional knowledge, the patient's lived experience, and the Peruvian medical infrastructure supporting the program.

Extended residency is offered at $4,000 to $5,000 USD per month inclusive of accommodation, meals, medicines, ceremonial work, Carlos's ongoing oversight, and medical monitoring support in Cusco. The one-month Amazon phase is budgeted separately to account for travel, jungle accommodation, and any required medical coordination during that period.

Grant funding and sponsored residencies are actively sought to make this program available to those without means. For a person who has been told there is nothing more conventional medicine can offer, $4,000 to $5,000 per month in the Sacred Valley of Peru — with access to one of the world's most sophisticated living traditions of plant-based healing, overseen by a dedicated practitioner, supported by affordable modern medical infrastructure — is not an alternative. It is a lifeline.

Heart of Darkness — Veteran Retreat Program

The Heart of Darkness program is a dedicated retreat designed specifically for veterans and active military personnel carrying combat-related trauma and PTSD. Developed from direct experience working with this community, the program is structured to give participants something familiar to respond to: excellence under pressure, and the clarity, camaraderie, and religiosity that comes from being in the trenches together.

Each ceremony is approached as a battle — the intention to heal serving as strategic briefing, the integration afterward as debrief. Within this container, something profound becomes possible: participants begin to see, perhaps for the first time, that a soldier is actually a shaman. Both are doulas of death. Both are sent to the other side and tasked with returning. Both guide enemies and sometimes their own wounded brothers across the river Styx. The medicine does not ask them to become something unfamiliar. It asks them to understand what they already are.

The program runs from the Sacred Valley facility, with the option of an Amazon phase for participants whose cases call for deeper work. Don Francisco's multi-plant diagnostic approach, channeled through Carlos's oversight and coordination, provides a therapeutic depth that goes far beyond what any single-medicine ceremony can offer. The Heart of Darkness program has produced documented results and carries the endorsement of former participants including currently serving special operations personnel.

Ayaruna is actively seeking partnerships with veteran-focused foundations, funding organizations, and advocacy groups to expand this program and make it accessible to veterans regardless of financial means.

Shamanic Apprenticeship Program — Annual Cohort

Once per year, Ayaruna accepts a small cohort of four students into a three-month shamanic apprenticeship program that represents the most direct transmission of Don Francisco's lineage available outside of a full multi-year traditional apprenticeship.

The program is structured as two months of residential immersion at Ayaruna Medicine Gardens in the Amazon — working daily with Don Francisco, undergoing traditional dieta, developing genuine relationships with the plant and elemental spirits of the tradition, learning ceremony structure and containment, and beginning the foundational work of medicine preparation — followed by one month of integration and continued study in Pisac. Carlos accompanies the cohort throughout, serving as translator of the oral tradition into a structured learning format built from his own five-year apprenticeship process.

This structure allows Carlos to spend approximately two months per year in the Amazon with the apprenticeship cohort, returning to the Sacred Valley for the remaining ten months to oversee residency patients and other retreat programs. Don Francisco remains at the gardens, in his element, doing what he has always done.

The apprenticeship program costs $25,000 USD per student for the full three months, covering accommodation at both locations, meals, medicines, ceremony participation, and direct mentorship with both Carlos and Don Francisco. One scholarship place per cohort is reserved — not as charity but as graduation — for a veteran or serious illness survivor who has already completed one of Ayaruna's other programs and demonstrated the calling and readiness to carry this work forward themselves. The cohort is capped at four paid places plus the scholarship recipient.

The Bridge to Emerging Facilitator Programs

The global expansion of plant medicine has generated significant interest in facilitator training and certification, with a number of programs emerging in the United States and Europe. Many bring genuine value — rigorous harm reduction frameworks, clinical safety protocols, and integration of peer-reviewed research. What most cannot offer, and increasingly recognize they cannot offer, is authentic grounding in living indigenous tradition.

The difference between a facilitator trained entirely within a clinical or academic framework and one who has spent months in genuine dieta and apprenticeship under a master curandero is not marginal. It is the difference between understanding the pharmacology of a medicine and being in actual relationship with it. Ayaruna's apprenticeship program is positioned as the missing piece for those programs — the living traditional grounding that clinical frameworks alone cannot provide. We are open to formal partnership discussions with training organizations, universities, and certification programs who wish to offer their students access to a genuine traditional apprenticeship as part of a broader curriculum.

General Healing Retreats — Sacred Valley

Running six to eight times per year in the windows between intensive programs, Ayaruna's general healing retreats are 10-day residential experiences for groups of up to eight participants at the Sacred Valley facility. These retreats are designed for people at significant life junctures — processing grief, heartbreak, or loss; navigating major transitions such as divorce, retirement, or career change; seeking renewed creative inspiration or sense of purpose; or simply carrying the accumulated weight of lives that have not had space for genuine reflection.

Ten days is the minimum for real results. Anything shorter barely allows the nervous system to settle before the work begins. A full ten days in the Sacred Valley — with plant medicine ceremony, integration, communal living, and the particular quality of attention that Carlos brings to every container he holds — is long enough for something genuinely lasting to occur.

These retreats serve the model in multiple ways. Financially they create a reliable baseline revenue stream that operates independently of grants and sponsorships. Therapeutically they serve as a natural feeder into deeper programs — people who arrive thinking they want inspiration sometimes discover they need genuine healing, and the assessment that happens over ten days in close community is the most accurate intake process imaginable. And humanly, the presence of people in active life transition alongside those in more serious healing programs creates the kind of community depth described above — each population giving the other something that no program curriculum can provide.

General retreats are priced at $3,500 to $4,500 USD per person for the full ten days inclusive of accommodation, meals, plant medicine ceremonies, and integration support.

The Amazon Center: Sacred Source

While the Sacred Valley facility is the operational heart of the model, the Amazon center remains its spiritual and botanical foundation. The 28 hectares of Ayaruna Medicine Gardens are where the medicines grow, where Don Francisco lives and works, and where the deepest interventions take place. The property has been under active development for five years and currently has functional ceremony space and basic accommodation infrastructure.

Approximately $30,000 USD in focused investment would bring the center to full operational capacity for eight participants — completing sleeping quarters, sanitation facilities, kitchen infrastructure, and medicine preparation areas. This is a finishing investment in something that already exists, already functions, and already has over twenty years of history behind it.

The local family who steward the land year-round are compensated through ongoing operational support. Their presence is what protects an irreplaceable botanical collection from illegal harvest. Continued funding of their stewardship is as important as any infrastructure investment.

Conservation and Knowledge Preservation

The biodiversity of Ayaruna Medicine Gardens — hundreds of medicinal and ceremonial species, many undocumented by Western science — is a resource of incalculable value to traditional medicine, ethnobotanical research, and the global plant medicine community. The ongoing transmission of Don Francisco's knowledge to Carlos, and its codification into the apprenticeship curriculum, represents a form of conservation as significant as the physical preservation of the land itself.

This knowledge — accumulated across generations, refined through decades of clinical practice, and carried in the memory and songs of a living elder — cannot be recovered once it is lost. Supporting Ayaruna is supporting its preservation.

Financial Summary

NeedAmountType
Sacred Valley facility — pilot year$120,000 USDAnnual operating grant
Amazon center completion$30,000 USDOne-time capital grant
Veteran retreat sponsorships$4,000–$6,000 per participantProgram grant
Extended residency sponsorships$4,000–$5,000 per monthProgram grant
Apprenticeship scholarship seat$25,000 per yearAnnual scholarship grant
Land stewardship supportOpenConservation grant
Property purchase — Pisac$580,000 USDImpact investment / capital grant

Projected Annual Revenue — Sacred Valley Facility at Capacity

ProgramDetailsRevenue
Extended residency — 2 permanent rooms2 patients × $4,500/month × 10 months$90,000
Extended residency — overflow1 additional patient × $4,500/month × 6 months$27,000
General healing retreats6 retreats/year × 8 participants × $4,000 avg$192,000
Heart of Darkness & specialist retreats3 retreats/year × 8 participants × $5,000$120,000
Annual apprenticeship cohort4 paid places × $25,000$100,000
Total projected annual revenue$529,000

At full capacity this revenue projection not only sustains all operations without grant dependency — it generates a surplus that funds sponsored residencies for veterans and serious illness patients who cannot self-fund, supports the stewardship of the Amazon center, and begins to build toward eventual property ownership in the Sacred Valley.

The $120,000 pilot year investment is not a recurring dependency. It is a launchpad. A single funded year builds the client base, the referral network, the documented outcomes, and the institutional relationships that make the model self-sustaining — and ultimately transforms grant-funded sponsored beds into a permanent endowment funded by the operation itself. The goal is a facility where the general retreats pay the rent, the specialist programs pay for themselves, and the serious healing work — for veterans, for the dying, for those with nowhere else to turn — is funded by the surplus and requires no outside support at all.

Why Now

The global conversation about plant medicine, psychedelic-assisted therapy, and indigenous healing traditions is accelerating rapidly. The question being asked across mental health, palliative care, and trauma treatment is no longer whether these medicines work — the evidence base is substantial and growing — but whether the healing contexts being created to deliver them are genuine, safe, ethically grounded, and connected to the living traditions from which they emerged.

Ayaruna Medicine Gardens answers that question with something most operations in this space cannot offer: deep roots. Real lineage. A living indigenous elder with fifty years of practice and knowledge of hundreds of plants. Medicines grown in the earth where they belong, prepared by the hands that oversee their administration, in a legal context that honors rather than criminalizes the tradition. A practitioner who has given five years of his life — sustained largely on commitment alone — to building something that deserves to endure.

This is not the beginning of something. It is the continuation of something that has been here for a very long time. We are asking for the resources to ensure it continues — and to make it available to the people who need it most.

Contact

Carlos Nelson

Founder & Steward, Ayaruna Medicine Gardens

daturaspirit.com | ayarunagardens.com
WhatsApp: +51 953 196 399
Instagram: @gnoself

Section II — Heart of Darkness - Veteran Support

Sacred ceremonial altar with candles, offerings, and traditional healing tools

Heart of Darkness - Veteran Support

A Plant Medicine Healing Program for Veterans & Active Military

Ayaruna Medicine Gardens  ·  Carlos Nelson, Founder & Steward
daturaspirit.com · ayarunagardens.com ·  +51 953 196 399  ·  @gnoself

Ayaruna Medicine Gardens is seeking partners and supporters
to bring this program to the veterans who need it.

"How was your first ceremony, Jake?"

"Well, I've been mortared, shot, and burned alive…that was harder." Jake says with a chuckle. "But goddamn — I feel alive again!"

Carlos, the curandero laughs and nods. "Perfect, mission accomplished then…so I'll see you day after tomorrow for the next one?"

Jake salutes with a wry grin. "Still beats dealing with the VA. Semper Fi."

— Real post-ceremony exchange, Heart of Darkness retreat, Ayaruna Medicine Gardens

The Problem

More than 20 veterans die by suicide every day in the United States. Combat-related PTSD affects an estimated 20% of veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and rates among special operations personnel are significantly higher. The VA system — underfunded, overstretched, and built around pharmaceutical and cognitive behavioral models — has produced only partial results for the majority of those most severely affected.

The veterans who need help most are often the ones least served by what is currently available: those whose trauma is complex, long-standing, and resistant to standard treatment. Those who have seen things that don't respond to a twelve-week program. Those who have learned to perform wellness rather than experience it, because survival has required them to.

They are not broken. They are not damaged goods in need of fixing. They are carrying something immense — and the system was never designed to help them understand what that something actually is and how their continued work of bearing what most would consider unbearable knowledge about the darkest aspects of human nature is an ongoing mission, and an unacknowledged yet massively important function even in modern society.

What We Offer

The Heart of Darkness program is a dedicated plant medicine healing retreat developed specifically for veterans and active military personnel, held at our Sacred Valley facility in Pisac, Cusco, with an optional immersive phase at Ayaruna Medicine Gardens — a 28-hectare botanical sanctuary in the Peruvian Amazon outside Iquitos.

The program is built around ayahuasca and related plant medicines administered in traditional Amazonian ceremonial context, under the guidance of Carlos Nelson — a practitioner with over 17 years of plant medicine experience — and his teacher, Don Francisco Montes Shuña, a Capanawa curandero with over fifty years of healing practice whose knowledge encompasses hundreds of medicinal plant species grown on the Ayaruna land itself.

What makes this program different from most every other plant medicine offering available to veterans is not the medicine alone. It is the container in which it is held — and what that container reveals about the source of true strength, peace, and wisdom which often must emerge from the mightiest of struggles.

The Heart of Darkness gives participants something familiar for servicemen and operators to respond to: clear daily direction and healthy challenges, inner and outer work to focus on alone and between participants, the opportunity for excellence under pressure, and the clarity, camaraderie, and deep sense of belonging that comes from being in the trenches together again.

Each ceremony is approached as a battle — not against anyone or anything external, but as staged war games where the inner demons, conflicts and contradictions of war and peace, light and dark, protector and aggressor are invited in to play out and be resolved in a safe way.

The refining and focus of new intentions brought to each ceremony serves as strategic briefing where the curandero plays team leader, assigning direction and providing an overview of each person's process, possible blindspots, and psychic air support when things get rough.

Within this container, something profound and often unexpected becomes possible. Participants begin to see, perhaps for the first time, that a soldier is actually a shaman. Both are doulas of death. Both are sent to the other side and tasked with returning. Both guide enemies and sometimes their own wounded brothers across the river Styx. Both carry the weight of what they have witnessed on behalf of those who will never see it, and may never appreciate their sacrifice of normality for the greater good.

Plant medicine taps into and works with primal energies and ancient archetypes, grounded in the law of the jungle: everything must kill, and die, in order for life to keep moving on its infinite march. There are no conflicts at this level, deep below the mental structures of society and morality, and sometimes even just a few hours in this state of peace is enough to discharge the static energy of psychic conflict that so many veterans carry constantly.

The medicine work does not ask them to become something unfamiliar or to set down what they are. It asks them to understand, perhaps for the first time, the true nature and sacred depth in the honor of what they already are — protectors, threshold guardians, people who have looked death in the face and come back carrying knowledge that the rest of us need to put our mundane everyday problems in perspective. The warrior and the healer are not opposites after all. They are the same archetype seen from different sides of the same fire that separates this world from the next.

This realization — not just mentally but as a lived experience — may not erase the trauma but can charge it with new meaning, pride and strength to continue to carry on and find new ways to fight for what and who we love in this life. And that change is where healing and spiritual growth can really begin.

Why Peru. Why This Lineage. Why Now.

Ayahuasca and related plant medicines are legal in Peru, where they have been used in traditional healing contexts for centuries. This is not a gray area or a loophole. It is the country of origin for these traditions, and Peru's legal framework reflects a long-standing recognition and commitment to their cultural and therapeutic significance.

Every medicine used in the Heart of Darkness program is grown on Ayaruna's own 28 hectares, prepared by the same practitioners who administer it in ceremony. There is no supply chain, no intermediary, no disconnect between the land, the medicine, and the healing work. Don Francisco's knowledge of the botanical resources of the gardens — hundreds of plant species, many undocumented by Western science — allows for a diagnostic and therapeutic depth that no fixed protocol can replicate. When a case is complex, there are multiple medicines and approaches available to unravel it.

The evidence base for plant medicine in the treatment of PTSD is substantial and accelerating. MAPS has completed Phase 3 clinical trials for MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD with landmark results. Multiple peer-reviewed studies have demonstrated significant reductions in PTSD symptoms following ayahuasca treatment. Johns Hopkins, NYU, and Imperial College London have all published research supporting the therapeutic potential of psychedelic-assisted treatment for trauma. The science is no longer speculative. The question is no longer whether — it is where, under whose guidance, and with what level of authentic grounded tradition is needed for safe experiences to be assured.

Ayaruna answers those questions clearly.

The Program

The Heart of Darkness runs as a 10–14 day residential retreat for groups of up to seven veterans, held at the Sacred Valley facility in Pisac with an optional extended Amazon phase for participants whose cases call for deeper or longer work.

The program includes:

  • ●Thorough pre-retreat intake and medical screening
  • ●Daily integration sessions and group work
  • ●Plant medicine ceremonies conducted by Carlos Nelson under the guidance and blessing of Don Francisco Montes Shuña
  • ●Access to Don Francisco's full diagnostic and multi-plant therapeutic knowledge for complex cases that may involve substance addiction, nervous system or nerve damage, or other pathogenic damage due to exposure to wartime toxins
  • ●3 months of monthly group integration calls for support and follow-up
  • ●Optional referral to extended Amazon residency for participants requiring longer treatment

The Sacred Valley setting — clean mountain air, extraordinary natural beauty, proximity to Cusco's medical facilities — provides a recovery environment that is demanding enough to feel earned and beautiful enough to begin the process of remembering what life can be outside of the struggle.

The program is designed to complement, not replace, existing mental health support. Carlos maintains relationships with medical and psychiatric professionals who can provide additional support as needed.

The People Behind the Work

Carlos Nelson has been practicing plant medicine since 2008 and has apprenticed directly under Don Francisco Montes Shuña since 2021. He has worked with veterans across multiple retreats and understands the particular nature of combat trauma — he grew up in rough and tumble situations and is no stranger to violence, its resulting traumas, its resistance to conventional treatment, its tendency to be carried silently, and its capacity for transformation when met with the right container. He has given five years of his life to building Ayaruna Gardens in the jungle on minimal resources, out of commitment to preserving the tradition and making this work available to the people who need it most — and considers this a war of its own, well worth fighting.

Don Francisco Montes Shuña is a Capanawa curandero from the Ucayali region of the Peruvian Amazon with over fifty years of healing experience. His knowledge of the medicinal and ceremonial plants of the Amazon — accumulated across generations of practice in the same ecosystem where they grow — is without parallel in the contemporary plant medicine world. He is an active participant in the Heart of Darkness program, not a symbolic figurehead.

The Heart of Darkness program has produced documented results and carries the endorsement of former participants including currently serving special operations personnel.

The Ask

We are seeking the following support to continue and expand the Heart of Darkness program in a way that is accessible for veterans who may not have access to resources:

Full Retreat Sponsorship

$30,000 USD

This funds six sponsored participant places at $5,000 USD each, covering the complete cost of a 10–14 day retreat per person including accommodation, meals, medicines, ceremony, and three months of follow-up integration support. In return, Ayaruna Medicine Gardens commits to providing one additional place — a seventh participant — fully sponsored by Carlos Nelson at no cost to the funder. This matching commitment ensures that every funded retreat serves one more veteran than the grant alone could cover, and demonstrates that the practitioner has skin in the game alongside the funder.

Program Partnership Support

Open to Discussion

We are open to formal partnerships with veteran-focused foundations, advocacy organizations, and institutional funders who wish to refer participants, co-develop the program, or support its ongoing expansion and documentation of outcomes.

Amazon Extended Residency Sponsorship

$4,000–5,000 USD / month

For veterans whose cases require longer, deeper work at the Amazon center under Don Francisco's direct guidance and Carlos's continued integration support. This option is available following assessment and is recommended for complex or treatment-resistant cases.

The cost of a full sponsored retreat for six veterans — $30,000 — is less than the annual cost of one veteran's inpatient psychiatric care in the United States. The outcomes, for the right participants, are positively incomparable.

A Note on Urgency

Don Francisco Montes Shuña is in his later years. The depth of botanical and ceremonial knowledge he carries — accumulated across half a century of practice, transmitted orally through a living tradition that has no written curriculum — is available now, in these retreats, through this program. That window is finite.

The veterans who need this work are not getting younger either. Every year that passes without access to effective treatment is another year of marriages strained, families fractured, lives diminished, and sometimes lost.

The Heart of Darkness exists because both of these things are true at once, and because it is not just a good thing to help those who have sacrificed for society — it is the only right thing to do.

Contact

Carlos Nelson

Founder & Steward, Ayaruna Medicine Gardens

daturaspirit.com | ayarunagardens.com
WhatsApp: +51 953 196 399
Instagram: @gnoself