Traditional Safe
Ayahuasca Retreat Center
Iquitos, Peru

The Hummingbird Healing Center provides a beautiful safe, and supportive environment for your personal journey with ayahuasca. Located near Iquitos, Peru, we offer ayahuasca retreats in Peru of different lengths to meet your personal needs. All of our retreats include at least one san pedro ceremony, the visionary cactus of the Andes that is very complementary with ayahuasca. Our longer stays include a master plant dieta with a plant selected by our shaman depending on what you are looking to heal, address or learn. Ayahuasca retreats at the Hummingbird is an opportunity for deep personal and spiritual growth following traditional healing methods with a curandero of exceptional skill and ability.

In the world of ayahuasca, the person leading a ceremony has an enormous impact the experience people have and the healing received. As in all areas of life, experience matters. At the Hummingbird, we have only worked with curanderos with at least 25 years of experience. Our current healer, Manain, has over 45 years of experience healing people, and has been with us over 6 years. His powerful icaros and prayers result in deep healing, and beautiful visionary and mystical experiences. Many people say they feel as if they were reborn, leaving with a greater acceptance and love for themselves.

Since its opening in 2010, the Hummingbird Center has been focused on helping people heal and transform their lives. The owner Jim has transcended his own 30 year struggle with depression, and brings a depth of wisdom and practical advice in helping people face and let go of fears, and limiting beliefs and behaviors. The Hummingbird is a center of peace and tranquility, a space for deep reflection and integration of the teachings the medicine spirits bring. We are focused on positive change in people’s lives. While we hope everyone also experiences the beauty ayahuasca can show us, what is important is that your life is better a year from now for having done this. This work is not about the experience. It is about the growth, and stepping into a more authentic expression of self.

Our retreats are limited to no more than 13 people, and there are multiple caretakers in each ayahuasca ceremony who are not partaking of the medicine. Help is always available if you need it, and we encourage people to open up and talk about challenges they may have so we can coach them on how to transcend it with the help of ayahuasca and san pedro. We help people get clear on their intentions for each ceremony and can give practical advice on how to work with specific issues they may have.

We invite you to join us on an inner journey of transformation and connection with your true self, allowing ayahuasca and san pedro to purify your body, mind and spirit, and help you to let go of limiting beliefs.

12 Day RetreatsImmersion Retreats

Our holistic approach encompasses the physical, emotional, energetic and spiritual aspects of healing, as well as understanding and changing negative patterns in our thoughts and belief systems. In the shamanic view of illness, physical and psychological problems have their source in negative thought forms, a reflection of one's spiritual state of consciousness. Illness is an effect of these distorted thoughts. Unfavorable thoughts arise in the conscious mind and are then held in the subconscious, from which they can be transferred into the physical body. Because of this, true healing always has to begin at the spiritual level.

From one’s spiritual aspect into the subconscious level of the physical, this deep level of the mind can then erase the negative thought forms and emotions it holds, such as anger and fear, replacing them with light. This is how the cause of illness is dealt with and how all true healing is accomplished, and our ayahuasca retreats reflect these beliefs on healing.

Our mission during ayahuasca retreats is to empower each guest to reconnect with their mind, body, emotions and spirit, learning to live in self awareness so they may more freely and express their authentic selves. Under the guidance maestro Don Manain, a curandero with over 45 years of experience, we combine plant medicine ceremonies and dietas with regular integration sessions and lessons on mindfulness and examining our thought patterns and belief systems. This process provides tools for each guest to apply on a daily basis so they can take charge of their own growth and healing over the long term.

In addition to ayahuasca ceremonies, retreat participants receive a variety of other treatments including plant baths, healing vapor baths, individual energetic healing, and mud baths. If the curandero sees a need, they may also receive other plant medicines and poultices to address specific issues.

An integral part of the work at our ayahuasca center are talks on our beliefs, thought patterns and the interplay between our conscious and subconscious minds. We will learn about the conditioning we received as children, and why we often have many unproductive and often harmful “programs” stored in our subconscious mind which limit our ability to live successful happy and joyful lives.

During an ayahuasca ceremony, la madre will often clearly show us these limiting beliefs and teach us how to live in a better way. You will learn how to tap into our natural creative abilities and reprogram our subconscious minds so we naturally attract events into our lives more closely aligned with our hearts desire. You will learn techniques to become the master of our mind, our emotions and destiny and gain the tools to create a rich and fulfilling life.

The ultimate goal of the Hummingbird is to empower people. To not only receive deep healing, growth and transformation, but to acquire skill in managing our own emotional and energetic state. To take charge or our lives. To realize the power, love and joy that is an inherent part of all of us.

We emphasize taking personal responsibility for our lives. To become mindful. To start paying attention to our inner world. Our thoughts, our emotions, our body, and the interplay between them. To accept ourselves exactly as we are in the moment, knowing we have the power to change our lives, if we choose to exercise that power. Choice. We have Choice.

The medicine and doctor spirits, through the magic of ayahuasca and huachuma (San Pedro Cactus), help us to realize this. They clear our bodies of energies that keep us limited, help to free us from limiting beliefs acquired in childhood, and show us a better way to walk our lives. They help us to accept ourselves as we are. Both the light and the darkness within. To know we have Choice to change our thinking, our behavior, our emotional response to events in our lives. And to realize that, ultimately, We are 100% responsible for our lives.

The majority of the discussion at the Hummingbird is around these concepts. In the integration circles the morning after each ayahuasca ceremony, talking in the common areas between activities, and focused talks on our conscious and sub-conscious minds and how to change our belief systems.

After over 14 years of working with hundreds of people with long term depression, anxiety and PTSD (15+ years), we have clearly seen that there is very little wrong with people other than that fact they BELIEVE there is something wrong with them. And once that belief changes, most of people’s troubles just fall away!

We strive to awaken people to the truth of their being, and help them let go of false and limiting beliefs of who and what they are, so they may live life authentically.

The Hummingbird Center holds the following core beliefs that shape and inform all of our work.

The Hummingbird Center also works with huachuma, the visionary and heart opening cactus of the Andes also known as san pedro. We have found ayahuasca and huachuma to be very complementary. Some individuals have a special affinity for one or the other of the medicines.

Occasionally huachuma will clear blocks in an individual that ayahuasca does not seem to touch. We have seen a number of people who were not having rich experiences with ayahuasca have significant breakthroughs with san pedro, then move on to have wonderful and productive ceremonies with ayahuasca.

The spirits of ayahuasca and San Pedro clearly know people are working with both. During the San Pedro ceremony many find their ayahuasca experiences come into focus understanding the lessons in much deeper and meaningful way. People have wanted to work on a specific area of their life during ayahuasca, and been told by the medicine that would be addressed with San Pedro, and it happened. The opposite has also occurred where people were clearly told something would be addressed in their next ayahuasca ceremony, and that also occurred. A beautiful and gentle healer and teacher, grandfather San Pedro tends to bring very clear lessons and most enjoy the experience.

After the first group San Pedro ceremony, if you prefer to work with it instead of ayahuasca you may do so. It is easy to arrange and we will work that out on a case by case basis. While the experience is very different than ayahuasca, it is a peer in its ability to heal and some people get much more from working with this medicine than with ayahuasca.

A master plant dieta is a wonderful way to enhance your ayahuasca retreat experience, to deepen your experience with the plant medicine spirits and the healing they bring. They are a traditional method of physical and mental detoxification, and of forming a connection with the spirit of a plant for the purpose of learning or healing. Dietas at the Hummingbird Center are primarily done for the purpose of healing. As such they are not as rigorous as those required to learn to work with the plant spirits. Individual guidelines may vary, but usually it is a process done in addition to the regular retreat program, and the person dieting may participate in all scheduled retreat activities.

The work of the medicine plant spirits is energetic, spiritual and subtle. Some fairly strict rules need to be followed to minimize the energy that impacts your body so the spirits may do their work. These rules are simply the necessary conditions for the dieta to be effective. It is a time of quiet, reflection and meditation, of allowing the medicine to permeate the body and mind, gently removing blocks and realigning our energetic systems so they function as nature intended. Done well, the dieta will slowly reorganize the dieter’s mind, body and spirit, bringing the system into greater harmony, health and well-being.

The Hummingbird Center offers dietas on our 12 day ayahuasca retreats, and our 3 and 4 week Immersion Retreats. Plant dietas are a fundamental part of Amazonian healing traditions. Ayahuasca by itself will bring a certain, and often profound, level of cleansing, insight and healing. Including a dieta with a master medicine plant can take this to a much deeper level resulting in growth and healing far beyond what working with ayahuasca alone can achieve. Depending on what is being addressed or sought, a dieta may be required to realize meaningful results.

With any process of growth, transformation and healing, the individual’s attitude and commitment makes a profound difference in the results received. Strict adherence to the dieta, without complaint and maintaining a positive attitude, is also a clear demonstration of their commitment to heal, to step into a new way of being. Deep commitment lends strength and energy, removing resistance and lethargy. And the Universe always responds to a true commitment!