Tatiana Aya Tupinambá · 20 September 2026
Ayahuasca & the Path of a Curandera
Tatiana from the Atlantic Forest, recorded at the Curandera Connect gathering. The recording is below. Under it is an outline of where she went, with the time each part starts, so you can jump to what you came for.
1 h 10 min·Watch on YouTube
“The liquid that we drink is sort of like a key that unlocks what is locked inside of us. But I like to say even that we don’t even need to drink the medicine itself. We need to become aware that we have locked it.”
What she covered
- 00:00
Remembering what lives inside us
Why a film, a forest or somebody sharing wisdom can move us so much: it reminds us of something we already carry. The medicine, Tatiana says, is not the liquid in the cup. The cup is a key.
- 01:48
Indigenous voices at the World Ayahuasca Forum
She had just flown back from the conference in Spain. This time the Indigenous speakers outnumbered the scientists, and they used the floor to say plainly that the malpractice has to stop.
- 05:38
Nobody graduates
The elders she learned from are a hundred years old and still call themselves children in front of the medicine. Drinking a few times in the jungle and going home to serve is the opposite of that.
- 07:45
How to choose a facilitator
Her test is the person's life. How do they treat the people around them, how do they sleep, do they have love to share? It takes time to know somebody. Drinking medicine leaves you as open as a newborn, so the time is worth spending.
- 09:09
It is not a party
Celebration has its place, at the end. The work of healing a sick body, or of looking at your own shadows, happens in the dark and is not pleasant. The state of the world is the state of each of us inside, and compassion starts there.
- 12:59
Coming home to Brazil
Her maestro died last October, after fourteen years of learning with him, and she felt the pull back to her own land. Since June she and Charlie have been receiving people in a preserved stretch of Atlantic Forest on the Costa Verde, between Rio and São Paulo. Retreats, dietas and stays for people on their own will run from there, with the Amazonian plants she brought and the mature trees of this forest. She talks about the Tupinambá, her mother's people, and what it is to feel at home in her body for the first time in her practice.
- 17:48
What does it take to be a curandera?
Wanting to know more about what it is to be human. Everybody has that. Listen to your own heart, take care of the animals and plants around you, and refuse to sit and cry at suffering without doing anything. That is already being a healer.
- 21:53
Tending the inner garden
Intentions are prayers. The good thoughts you wake up with deserve praying on, and the dark ones can be pulled out like weeds. War in the world is the war inside each person between the conscious and the unconscious, and nobody else can do that work for you.
- 26:12
Training in the forest
The practical side. Isolation with the medicine in stages: fifteen days, twenty, thirty, then months. Her longest was nine. On her first fifteen days she ran to her teacher and asked him to call the car. He told her she would leave when she was done. Courage, she says, is not the absence of fear.
- 32:33
Dietas at the new center
She learned in the Asháninka way and carries the Tupinambá lineage, and wants to pass on what she received the way she received it. The difference here is comfort: a room, a bed, diet food cooked for you, so your whole attention can go to what is unfolding inside instead of to the hardship. She calls it the grandmother's house.
- 36:00
Questions and dates
The first group retreat is planned for New Year's. In early December a Yawanawá teacher is visiting, and that gathering is open too. A fresh batch of plants from Peru arrives in November. Dates, prices and how to come on your own go out by email.
- 37:44
The plants and the elders
Nothing is written down. The elders are the encyclopedias, and it passes from teacher to student. She names some of the plants she works with: camerenaco for the bones, tamamuri for the blood, camalonga to open the mind, bobinsana, chuchuhuasi for strength. A serious illness can mean a year on one plant. In a healthy body the same plants raise awareness instead.
- 45:50
Do the plants teach you songs?
Yes, and it is her favorite part. Past fifteen days the first layers dissolve and you start to hear a plant's vibration. Tobacco opens the throat. It is also one of the most toxic plants in the forest, which is why you learn it from people who truly know. Jurema for dreaming, mucura for strength and, she says, for being invisible.
- 50:52
The plants around you
Do not wait for the Amazon. The plant in your house is listening. Talk to her, and if the relationship gets strong enough she will show up in your dreams.
- 52:19
Rapé
Used far more in the Brazilian Amazon than in Peru, mostly to quiet the mind before prayer. How it is made, from tobacco and the ashes of medicinal trees, and a warning about the way it is now taken every hour outside the jungle. Disrespected, it stops being medicine.
- 57:14
Women's cycles
Bleeding is a portal, and the taboos that call it dirty came from men who feared it. She dieted and drank during her cycle precisely because she was told not to. Learn the power in your womb and use it to create harmony.
- 1:01:18
What she means by Jedi training
Being so focused on the rising of your own consciousness that nothing else in life comes before it. Take the saber to everything that is not you.
- 1:05:04
Closing ícaro
A short ícaro for tobacco, for protection.
- 1:09:22
Thank you and goodbye
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A note on care
Tatiana speaks from her own experience and her tradition. None of it is medical advice. Please do not stop a prescribed treatment, or try to treat an illness with plants, because of a video. Our medical disclaimer says more.