Ayahuasca Foundation

The Ayahuasca Foundation is unusual in this field because it is as much a school as a retreat center. Founded in 2009 by Carlos Tanner, it runs traditional healing retreats alongside multi-week educational and healer-training courses, working exclusively with a Shipibo family in the Noya Rao tradition deep in a protected reserve. Its Retreat.guru rating is high and its history is long. It is also the one center in this batch with a serious safety report on the public record, and that report shapes how we read everything else. We take it head-on below.

What the Ayahuasca Foundation offers

The center, Riosbo, sits in the Allpahuayo-Mishana reserve along the Nanay River. Getting there is a journey: guests fly into Iquitos, spend a night in a hotel, then travel about an hour by bus and another hour by boat to the site. The program menu is deeper than most. The 10-Day Renewal retreat, with a women's version, costs $2,950 and includes five ayahuasca ceremonies plus extensive plant treatments, yoga, cacao and breathwork, consultations, meals, hotel nights, transfers, and pre- and post-retreat counseling. Beyond that sit an 18-Day Retreat and Dieta at $4,250, a 4-Week Healing Empowerment Course at $5,550, and the 8-Week Ayahuasca Initiation Course at $6,850. Group size and facilitator ratio are not published. Ceremonies are led by Shipibo curanderos with English and Spanish translation.

The healers are the anchor. The Foundation works only with the Lopez family, Shipibo curanderos from the Roaboya community near Pucallpa: Don Enrique, who leads the 8-week courses with more than thirty years of practice, Doña Angela, who leads the healing retreats, and Don Ronor, who leads the longer programs. Their Noya Rao lineage is multi-generational and plant-specific.

On paper, the screening is thorough. The Foundation requires disclosure of all medical conditions and medications from the past year, and its medical guidelines page publishes a detailed contraindication list: kidney, liver and heart conditions, epilepsy, unstable diabetes, and severe psychiatric disorders are disqualifying, with specific discontinuation timelines for antidepressants, including SSRIs four to six weeks before. There is no mention of on-site medical staff, and emergency access details are not public. That documentation is a genuine strength, and it is also the backdrop against which the safety report below has to be weighed.

What people are saying

The directory picture is split in a way that matters. On Retreat.guru the Foundation holds a 4.86 across 113-plus reviews, with recent 2026 entries praising the maestros, the medicines, and the intensity of the courses. But on TripAdvisor it sits at just 2.9 across 7 reviews, a low, mixed score even allowing for the small sample. AyaAdvisors and older blog write-ups are largely positive, and the Foundation has partnered with Heroic Hearts on veteran PTSD work, the kind of collaboration that signals seriousness.

Reddit is where the sentiment divides hardest. Some threads praise the healers and the safety of the container. Others are critical, and one thread in particular, titled around serious harms and a death on an ayahuasca course, points to the report we cover in the next section. The overall live footprint is thinner than the raw Retreat.guru count implies, and the gap between a 4.86 there and a 2.9 on TripAdvisor is itself a reason to read carefully.

The honest read

This is the section that matters most, so we will be precise and fair. In July 2025, the investigative newsletter Ecstatic Integration published a detailed piece, "Serious harms and a death at the Ayahuasca Foundation," reporting concerns raised by former clients and employees and describing at least one death connected to the intensive 8-week initiation course. The reporting cites an undisclosed heart condition as a factor, and the Foundation's founder disputes the account, particularly around what was and was not disclosed. This is one investigative source plus corroborating discussion, not a court finding, and no lawsuit or criminal case turned up in our research. We are not stating as settled fact that the center caused a death. We are telling you, because you must know it before booking, that a credible outlet has reported serious harms and a fatality tied to its most intensive program, and that the account is contested.

Two things follow from that, and we want to be even-handed about both. First, the reporting centers on the 8-week initiation course, the deepest, longest, most demanding thing the Foundation runs, not primarily on the 10-day healing retreats most first-timers would consider. That distinction is real and worth holding. Second, a center that has run for fifteen years and collaborates on veteran research is not a fly-by-night operation, and its published contraindication list is more detailed than many competitors'. But when independent reporting raises a death and an alleged screening failure, the burden shifts: this is a center you should only approach after reading that article in full, asking the Foundation directly about it, and talking to your own doctor.

The Ayahuasca Foundation vs AyaSelva

We usually work hard to credit a competitor's strengths, and the Foundation has real ones: a genuine Shipibo family lineage, a unique educational and healer-training path, fifteen years of history, and screening documentation that is, on paper, stronger than most. If your goal is to study the tradition seriously rather than simply attend a retreat, the Foundation offers something AyaSelva does not, and we will say so.

But on the question a first-timer is actually asking, which center is the safer, saner place to take my first steps, the honest answer here leans clearly toward AyaSelva, and not for promotional reasons. AyaSelva caps every retreat at six guests, publishes its contraindications, and pairs the health questionnaire with a personal intake call before confirming anyone. Its record, though short, carries no incident, complaint, or safety report of any kind. It costs $1,200 for seven days against the Foundation's $2,950 for ten. Where the Foundation is carrying a contested but serious safety story around its flagship intensive, AyaSelva is carrying a clean, quiet, small-scale one. For a cautious beginner, that contrast is the whole decision.

So our steer is unusually firm on this pairing. If you are set on the Foundation's educational track, go in with eyes wide open, read the Ecstatic Integration report, and question the center directly about it. For most first-timers, we would point you to a smaller, transparent, incident-free center first. Read our full AyaSelva review to see that case in detail.

How to proceed

The Foundation is active and taking 2026 bookings. Before you commit to any of its programs, and especially the longer courses, we would genuinely urge you to do the homework this page points to and ask us the question first. We will walk you through what the safety reporting does and does not establish, help you weigh it against the center's real strengths, and tell you honestly whether it fits you or whether a smaller retreat is the wiser first step. It is free, and our only stake is you coming home well.