The Birth of EcoSophia.

We are happy to announce that we have officially created the EcoSophia Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.

This is the first milestone in birthing a new initiative to help transmit and uphold ancient and traditional medicine practices, and the lineages they come from.

Eco comes from the Greek root that means house, household, and sophia is wisdom, so Ecosofia is the wisdom of the household, which means the wisdom of the earth, a philosophy derived from our direct relationship to our natural habitat. Our nonprofit foundation creates a culture that supports native healers becoming leaders of their communities once again.

After 15+ years of travelling through the Peruvian Amazonian Basin, we have met numerous, different traditional healers, and we have acquired a clear picture and experience of what those people–still living the traditional way of life– can offer to the modern man who is now facing new forms of disease.

The EcoSophia Foundation's primary goal is to support the people who are still living the ancient, traditional way of life and the ancient, traditional way of transmitting this knowledge.

We have two clear projects we want to support:

1. Healers who come from a long lineage of traditional practitioners, and who don’t have the opportunities to share and express their medicinal art and wisdom. More specifically, we want to support a shaman whom we have been working with closely for several years, Marco Antonio Venancio, and fund the building of his traditional healing center, Korin Mea Center in Pucullpa, Peru.

   
   

2. Kumankaya Healing Center, where ancient wisdom and the traditional practices are made available by apprentices who have undergone the traditional initiation. Additionally, Kumankaya Healing Center offers a Golden Roots Scholarship that provides a free 10-day stay to 2 guests each season. The EcoSophia Foundation would allow us to increase the availability of these scholarships to people who cannot afford sacred plant medicine healing. 

At the center of every ancient traditional society lies the archetypal figure of the healer, medicine man or woman.

In Spanish, he/she is called the cuandero(a). Most of the time, (s)he is also the political and spiritual leader of the community. That is to say, for most of those traditional societies, especially the Shipibo-Konibo, the medicinal practice is the furnace that gives birth to a view of the world, social etiquette, artistic expression, a way to relate to the natural environment and a philosophy of life.

That is why by protecting those ancient medicinal practices and the keepers of that knowledge, we are preserving the modern expression of an ancient tradition. If we help the healers, who are the most emblematic and representative of their entire culture, we preserve an entire tradition’s cosmovision, mythology, culture, history and language.

We are helping a culture stay alive. It is time to listen to them, to learn from them how we can cohabitate more harmoniously.

What comes next:

• Register and receive tax-exempt donation status.

• Begin accepting donations and capitalizing EcoSophia.

• Begin supporting our first projects in Peru and Mexico.

We'll make sure to keep you updated as we move forward. We're excited to officially welcome EcoSophia into the world, and there's much more to come.