Peru · January 2027
Huachuma in the Sacred Valley
Education, preservation, and community. Ten days in the Sacred Valley with nine people: three ceremonies, four subjects taught properly, and a morning planting at the Huachuma Sanctuary. You come home understanding this plant well enough to explain it.
Nine people
One group, January 2027
Ten days
Held inside six months
Three ceremonies
Two on the mountain, one by fire
From $3,800
$500 holds your place
What this is
Three things at once
Three strands run through the ten days, and each one is built to outlast the trip.
One
Education
Three thousand years of history, what the science establishes and how to tell that from what is only repeated, how the plant grows, and how a ceremony is held and why it is held that way. Taught in sessions, with time to ask questions.
Two
Preservation
You plant at the Huachuma Sanctuary, in the ground, with your own hands, and you understand what you are planting and why it matters before you start. Wild huachuma is cut faster than it grows back, and the Sanctuary is the work that answers it.
Three
Community
Nine people and six months. Four calls together before anyone flies, ten days in the Sacred Valley, four more calls once everyone is home. Nine is the size where everybody is known by name and every question gets an answer.
The January group
Peru, January 2027
Ten days in the Sacred Valley, held inside six months. Four weekly calls before you travel, ten nights in Pisac, four integration sessions after you land.
Three ceremonies. Two full days on the mountain, and one all night around a fire in a temple. Each is guided by someone who has been holding these ceremonies for more than twenty years.
The days in between are open on purpose, so that integration has room to happen while you are still there. Teaching runs through all of it, and you come home knowing what the plant is, where it comes from, and what is happening to it now.
Nine people. From $3,800, and $500 holds a place. We will post the exact January dates here as soon as they are set.
The teaching
What you will learn
- History. Three thousand years of it. The temple at Chavin de Huantar, the Inquisition that classified the medicine as heresy, and how the practice outlived it.
- Science. What mescaline does in the body, why this plant increases sensation rather than dulling it, and how to tell an established finding from a repeated one.
- Cultivation. How huachuma grows, how it is propagated, and why a cactus that gave up its armour is now under pressure.
- Ceremonial use. How a ceremony is held and why. The altar, the tools, the direction of movement, and the silence.
What you take home.
The ability to explain this plant accurately to whoever asks, and to recognise what is happening in a ceremony while you are inside it. We teach for understanding rather than for facilitation, which is a different discipline.
Where the money goes
Your fee funds the Sanctuary
Huachuma Works LLC is wholly owned by the Huachuma Foundation, a 501(c)(3) in Arizona. Every dollar of profit returns to the Foundation and its purposes: habitat, propagation, and keeping the tradition intact.
Paying for these ten days is also paying for the plant to still be there.
Before you travel
The Foundation runs a six month online course called Huachuma Wisdom. The suggested donation is $108 and nobody is turned away for lack of funds. If you want the history and the science before you fly, start there.
Applying
How applying works
You apply, we write back, and the two of us talk on the phone. A deposit comes after that conversation and never before it, so an application costs you nothing and commits you to nothing.
What the ten days ask of you.
The stamina to walk uphill for a few hours at nine thousand feet. A willingness to sit with whatever comes up. Somebody at home to return to. And a medication list we go through together, because a few of them, antidepressants among them, do not combine safely with this medicine.
We ask about all of it on the form, and we talk it through with you personally.