Shamanic Permaculture
Healing our Inner and Outer Landscapes
The goal of the course and the center is to share and inspire how we can live and be in a sustainable and harmonious relationship with nature while creating a supportive, self sufficient and nurturing community around us. Weaving together the teachings of permaculture design and the indigenous shamans of the Peruvian Amazon rainforest, we will immerse ourselves into a deep exploration of nature and ways we can co-evolve and heal together.
The common thread between Shamanism and Permaculture is that nature is our teacher. During this course we encourage our participants to connect with nature from the inside out as we unravel the interconnection of our inner and outer landscapes. Entering the Amazon, we will experience deeply how we are interconnected to this magnificent organism, earth. We will study Permaculture design while learning to truly be in relationship with ourselves and our greater communities.
The course will intertwine three main areas of experience:
- Permaculture Design Certification: We will cover the full 72 Permaculture Design curriculum and participants will be awarded a permaculture design certificate upon completion.
- Nutrition & Wellness: Throughout our time together we will be incorporating yoga, meditation, chi gong, nutrition and other practices and perspectives for maintaining a healthy and balanced inner organism.
- Plant Medicine & Indigenous Shamanic healing from the Amazon & Andes: Participants will be offered introduction into the magnificent realm of Mother Nature through indigenous initiation rites and sacred healing ceremonies while establishing intercultural bridges for seeing the emergence of awakened consciousness in all beings everywhere.
Permaculture Design CertificatioN
Permaculture provides a general design approach that allows us to design resilient and productive systems using natural ecosystems as our model. In this 17 day intensive hands-on training we will work from broad design principles to the specifics of system design for
maximizing productive food systems and community infrastructure, harmonizing with the
abundant energies of nature.
In addition students will have an opportunity to play a hands-on, experiential role in the further development, design planning and implementation of our Permaculture Education Center at the Paititi Institute grounds where the course will be held. The intention of the center and our design projects is to develop systems of reforestation while simultaneously creating edible
landscapes and clean, healthy, simple, low impact infrastructure that can sustain local
communities with abundant and sustainable sources of sustenance and economic opportunities.
The Permaculture Design Certificate course is an internationally recognized course resulting in a Permaculture Design Certificate. In order to receive this certification, participants must be present for the full course.
Weaving Permaculture and Shamanism
The roots and substantial inspiration for Permaculture stems from the indigenous cultures of the planet starting with the observations by Bill Mollison of the Aboriginal Australians. Today, incredible wisdom, perspectives and techniques from indigenous cultures around the globe have been integrated into our Permaculture toolbox all of which share similar and congruent practices since all had the same teacher and guide, Mother Nature.
Most, if not all cultures on the earth are rooted in Shamanism and earth based spirituality. There is the same essential humanity uniting all these cultures and religions since we are all human beings upon this earth, independent from race, religion, sex or a way of life. Therefore we all share the same universal qualities such as love, compassion, sincerity and the willingness to seek the truth.
Today our modern mindset comes from a much different perspective than our indigenous ancestors who had a deep intuitive understanding of their interconnection to each other and nature. We have been conditioned to be one thing or another from the moment of our birth. For most people we experience ourselves as separate from everything and everyone else. It is this separation that is the root of all of today’s problems.
Yet, even with all the conditioning we have accumulated today, we live in very fortunate times. Today we have the opportunity to access the collective wisdom of humanity at our finger tips and utilize it to benefit our global society and eco-systems around the world.
The shamanic traditions of the Amazon and Andes have found powerful tools to support us in coming back to our interwoven synergistic being. These cultures, who lived in deep connection with nature both internally and externally, realized deep states of awareness of their interconnection with all life. They understood how life energy flows and how to work harmoniously within these flows.
These ancient traditions and practices can seem obscure and ritualistic from our modern perspective, but with a closer look we can see that they actually deal with practical aspects of our life, our behavior and ways of transforming humanity beyond external circumstances. They provide us practical tools that unravel our inborn qualities of observation and deeper receptivity to all life forms and providing objective means that allow us to see the world without excessive conceptualization, cultivating discerning wisdom in that process.
The healing traditions from the Amazon and Andes are considered to be an uninterrupted live transmission lineage going back to times immemorial carrying illuminated reminders from the period of humanity when the ancestors were fully immersed in the primordial enlightened essence of humanity’s true nature. In this tradition, plants are teachers and the spirit of these plants can support us in connecting to deep subtle energies of our body and the interwoven reality surrounding us.
The ceremonies associated with many sacred plants in the Amazon and Andes such as Ayahuasca and San Pedro have been known to reconnect people with Mother Nature, heal from all ailments and clear all confusions, doubts and obscurations of consciousness, allowing us to connect with nature inside out as well as form vibrant communities based on profound human values. This is a very beneficial way to tap into the creative source of life in the universe as we know it.
The Amazonian traditions along with other ancestral cultures are powerful reminders of human capacity to transcend personal expectations and limitations. The ego in that way is made to step beyond its comfort zone and the illusory sense of control, often with great unease. The spiritual practice is specifically designed by the ancestors to transform the ego from a capricious master to a humble servant of the inherent true nature in all of us. Instead of distorting the natural quality of the human organism to individual quirks of likes and dislikes, the ego is humbled enough to begin expressing the inherent universal qualities of a human organism and begins serving the divine intelligence (nature) that has created that very organism.
In the indigenous Amazonian traditions they refer to shamanism as a Sacred Science. It was called a sacred science because it integrates all aspects of life instead of dividing them into separate disconnected compartments as our modern science does today. In addition it was considered sacred because those who lived by this science had deep reverence, respect, humility and gratitude towards all life and their opportunity to interact in this beautiful life tapestry consciously.
The original shamans were those who have been curious about the working of nature and humanity. Shamans naturally became healers because they transmitted to people how to come back into their innate harmony through their deep connection to nature and in this way were able to resolve many sicknesses which are born out of disconnection and disharmony. In addition they had deep relationships with plants and learned how to utilize these plants in a symbiotic partnership. This knowledge did not come through a modern laboratory but through profound levels of openness and intuition. Today modern science is beginning to prove what this culture understood for 1000s of years and modern science has only studied about 1% of what these healers know.
Permaculture practitioners should also be curious to learn from nature and always be a student willing to give up old rigid concept in order to become more conscious in the work we are doing. In this way we unlock our healing potential for the earth and each other. How will we ever be able to truly observe — a core practice in being a good permaculture practitioner, if we can’t learn how to work with our obsessive internal dialogue, repressed emotions and judgments, stale concepts and ideas in order to really see things as they are, not clouded by our own conditioned obscurations of consciousness?
True earth stewardship is not a process of doing but a process of being. Being present, being an observer, being open and receptive to nature and other beings, being responsible, being accepting, being at peace, and being the change we wish to see in the world