spreading throughout their body.
“Healing comes from within,” Petersen says. What the ayahuasca and the Refugio really offer guests is the ability to look at their thinking, habits and circumstances that cause stress and illness. Then “the shaman connects with spirit and works to bring the client back into harmony.”
The Refugio gets packs of six to eight people at a time coming from America, Europe, Japan, and all over the world. There’s an equal number of men and women of all ages, with a lean towards people in their thirties, forties and older. Many stressed-out professionals come to relax and reconnect with themselves and with nature.
The morning after the ceremony we take a walk around the back of the Refugio and visit the vast Botanical Garden Petersen has cultivated, with over 250 medicinal plants revered for their medicinal and healing properties. A group of indigenous Peruvians from a local village work in the fields, tending to the plants and garden in the hot, sweltering sun.
A hundred meters past the gardens we explore a magnificent two-story jungle house, built for families who stay on the property. Another hundred metres beyond that is an amazing five story tree house of Olympian proportions. It’s at least thirty metres straight up into the great green canopy overhead, a Robinson Crusoe-style bungalow with views of the river and the jungle for miles around. It’s the perfect retreat for someone wanting to literally get away from it all.
Everything about the Refugio is grand, like the size of the central building – a three-story wooden structure open to the air called ‘El Centro’. It looks like a Victorian mansion in the jungle, with a kitchen and restaurant on the ground floor