Summer 2011 Activities

posted by Mary on September 12th, 2011

A little update on the activities of our Institute these last few month. It has been a powerful and inspirational journey. Upon return home to the rainforest in July we were amazed to find so much plant and vegetation growth – the restoration of the rainforest seems to be moving at an incredible rate.

We started our summer with a very insightful month long Indigenous Transformation Retreat and a 17 day Shamanic Permaculture Course. After the course a number of transformation participants, patients from our healing center and permaculture students stayed after to work with us on various projects – individual physical and spiritual healing process weaving into the Permaculture work as well as our Natural Medicine Center outreach to heal the local native population.

Some of the examples of our Permaculture initiatives included the installation of a brand new traditional clay/adobe oven, water filtration, rainwater catchment and humanure systems. These projects being implemented are to be utilized by our community as models for the local Amazonian villages with the intention to improve their unsanitary and under-managed sewage and polluted drinking water which is responsible for much of the sicknesses the native people are experiencing in their lives.

In August we started the month with the installation of 6 bee hives. Apiculture can provide powerful natural medicines and enhance greatly the qualities of many Amazonian medicinal plants by acting as their delivery mechanism.

We completed our summer with a profound outreach in collaboration with Healer 2 Healer organization, where we hosted 16 healers practicing acupuncture, reiki and massage therapy. With this group we set up a healing clinic in a local village, Cahuide, where we have been treating the native population with natural medicine over the last year and a half helping us to establish a trust based relationship.