2027
Chavín de Huántar
A Heart Tenders pilgrimage · 20 June – 2 July
Thirteen days in Peru. Three ceremonies at the sanctuary across from the temple. By invitation.
The Pilgrimage
Come with us to Chavín
It was never a city. It was a sanctuary.
For thousands of years people came here from across the Andes and beyond to sit with the huachuma cactus in the corridors beneath the temple. It is one of the oldest ceremonial sites in the Americas and possibly the world. Then it went quiet for a very long time. In the last several years people have been coming back.
Once a year a few of us fly to Lima, take the night bus northeast, and spend twelve nights in one small village in the mountains.
If you are deepening your relationship with huachuma, this is an essential journey, and a rare one.
Basics
Pilgrimage Information
What
Thirteen days in Peru with three huachuma ceremonies held by our hosts, and long days of rest between them.
When
20 June – 2 July 2027. Arrive in Lima on the 20th, fly home on the 2nd. Come earlier or stay on if you like.
Limited space
This is a small group, held by Laura, Sara, and Emily, and welcomed on the land by Jack and Yngrid.
Where
Two nights in Lima, then the village of Chavín de Huántar at roughly 10,000 feet in the Callejón de Conchucos.
The Journey
Eleven hours through desert and mountain passes
We begin in Lima. Two nights to arrive, sleep off the flights, and meet each other before anything else starts. Then we travel as a group on the overnight bus, roughly eleven hours northeast through desert and mountain passes and rising elevation.
We get into the village early in the morning. The first day is for settling in and letting your body catch up to the altitude.
Ceremony
A ceremony day
We gather in the morning at the Chakra, Jack and Yngrid’s sanctuary across from the temple, surrounded by hundreds of cacti and grazing alpacas. We set intentions and drink together, usually there, sometimes at the temple itself, depending on the day.
Then we go into the temple, and we are there for hours. This is the part we do not describe.
The temple is a public archaeological site, so there are other people there. Tourists with cameras, school groups, archaeologists at work. You move through the same stone corridors they do, in an entirely different dimension. In our experience that is part of the magic of the place rather than a distraction from it.
As the sun goes down we come back to the Chakra for a fire, and we pray and sing together and eat under the mountains. We sleep in chosas, individual huts, warm under alpaca blankets. In the morning there is breakfast and time to talk about what happened before we go back to the hotel.
The Village
Where we stay
Between ceremonies we are at a small hotel in the middle of the village. Simple, clean, hot water, quiet enough to rest. A few steps away is Yngrid's café, where we eat. Her food is organic and vegetarian and cooked for people doing this work. Those meals are covered. Meals in Lima, at either end of the trip, are your own.
The days in between are unstructured on purpose. The hot springs, walking, Council, sleeping. Whatever the group needs.
Lodging is covered from 20 June through 2 July. Plenty of people come to Peru early or stay on afterwards, and we are glad to help you plan it. Those extra nights are your own.
Schedule
Our thirteen days
A rhythm, not a fixed itinerary. Ceremony days move with the land, the weather, and our hosts' read on the group.
- Days 1–3
Lima
June 20–22. Arrival, two nights to rest and sleep off the flights, and time to meet each other. Evening bus to Chavín on the 22nd.
- Day 4
Arrive Chavín
June 23. Early morning arrival. Settling in and letting your body meet the altitude. Optional time at the temple or the town’s archaeological museum, for anyone who feels up for it.
- Day 5
Ceremony 1
June 24. First ceremony at the sanctuary.
- Day 6
Rest and integration
June 25.
- Day 7
Ceremony 2
June 26.
- Day 8
Rest and integration
June 27.
- Day 9
Ceremony 3
June 28.
- Days 10–11
Integration
June 29–30. Hot springs, Council, the mountains, whatever the group needs.
- Day 12
Return to Lima
July 1. Night bus back together.
- Day 13
Home
July 2. Flights home, or stay on.
We Offer
What's Included
Included
- Preparation materials and support in the months before we leave
- All lodging in Peru between 20 June and 2 July, in Lima and in Chavín
- All meals in Chavín, at Yngrid’s café
- Three huachuma ceremonies
- Temple entry and site fees
- All group ground transport, including the bus between Lima and Chavín
- Guidance, facilitation, and on-the-ground support throughout
- Integration support after we return home
Not included
- Meals in Lima, at both ends of the trip
- Anything extra you order at the café
- International flights
- Visa costs, if applicable to your passport
- Travel insurance, which we strongly recommend
- Additional excursions or treks outside the group itinerary
- Nights outside 20 June to 2 July, if you arrive early or stay on
- Personal spending
Cost
Your Place
Standard$3,500
The full pilgrimage, everything listed above.
Stewardship$5,000
For those who feel called and able to give more. It supports the guides directly and helps make scholarships possible.
A $1,000 deposit reserves your place and is non-refundable. The rest can be paid in monthly installments on whatever schedule works for you, as long as it is paid in full before we leave. Whether you commit early or late in the year, we will build something that works.
Scholarships may be available upon request depending on enrollment.
How to join
There is no button to press. Every place on this pilgrimage is decided in conversation.
- 1
Reach out
Write to Sara and we will set up a call.
- 2
We talk
Intentions, readiness, medical and medication history, what you are carrying, and whether this is the right year. This goes both ways.
- 3
Your place is held
If it is a yes on both sides, the $1,000 deposit reserves your seat.
- 4
Preparation begins
We set a payment schedule together, and the getting ready begins. A detailed briefing follows well before departure.
- 5
We travel together
And when we come home, we keep meeting, because that is what this community is.
Guides
We are guests in their medicine
Jack and Yngrid
Jack is a guardian of the temple and of the cactus. He has grown the hundreds of plants at the sanctuary across from the temple. It is their land, and on ceremony nights it is where we sleep. He and Yngrid run the ceremonies together.
Yngrid is a priestess and ceremonialist. She feeds everyone as well. Her café in the village is a few steps from where we stay on the other nights, organic and vegetarian, cooked for people doing this work. Between the two of them, the whole village end of this journey is covered. This is their home.
Laura Lochrane
Guide
Laura was introduced to sacred medicine healing ways in 2009, on a trip to Ecuador. Across more than twenty years in leadership at The Ojai Foundation she led rites of passage retreats, nature-based ceremony, and trainings in the Way of Council, and served as President of the Board for fourteen years. She is a certified Council Trainer and is completing certification in Compassionate Inquiry™ and Holotropic Breathwork™. She holds a Master's Degree in Ethnographic Film from USC and founded The Scheerer Family Foundation in 1999. Laura works full time guiding individuals and groups on journeys for personal, collective, and planetary healing. She made her first journey to Chavín in 2025. Her enduring passion for intimate contact, with self, with others, with the natural world, and with Spirit, inspires all that she offers.
Sara Yamtich
Guide
Sara first traveled to Chavín in 2018 and returns for her sixth journey. She is a social worker and marketing consultant whose path has run through federal health policy, mental health crisis work, and more than a decade of helping practitioners, authors, and organizations in the healing field find a platform for what they do. In the years since that first pilgrimage she has supported the field around this medicine on Maui and now in Ojai. She holds an MSW, is a graduate of the Vital program with Psychedelics Today, and serves on the advisory board of Thank You Life, a nonprofit working to remove financial barriers to psychedelic-assisted care. On this pilgrimage she holds the relational container, keeping the group safe, warm, and connected from arrival to departure, and handles the logistics so that no one else has to think about them.
Emily Louise Carr
Guide
Emily is a writer, retreat chef, herbalist, and guide for individual and group therapeutic psychedelic journeys. A filmmaker and screenwriter by training, she spent years as a journalist covering business, technology, finance, and food, beginning at The Australian Financial Review. She now writes Cooking on Psychedelics, on access, reciprocity, and food as activism in the therapeutic psychedelic field, and serves on the board of Inward Dive Temple, a 501(c)(3) reducing financial and logistical barriers to state-legal plant medicine facilitation for people affected by the criminal justice system. Ayni, the Andean principle of reciprocity, sits at the center of her thinking and of why she returns to this land. Emily made her first journey to Chavín in 2026. Back home in Ojai she is the one who feeds Heart Tenders, and her attention to what nourishes people, in the literal sense and every other, is one of the reasons the community feels the way it does.
Who Is This For
This is not a soft trip
Some people arrive here having sat with this medicine for years. For others, Chavín is the first ceremony of their life. Both have thrived. What matters is not how many times you have done this, but whether you are hearty enough for what it asks.
You will be at 10,000 feet. Nights are cold. Accommodations are simple. Ceremony days are long, sometimes twelve hours or more, and the medicine asks for everything you have. Days pass without a schedule to hide behind. Some of what comes up will not be pleasant, and you will still be in the mountains with it the next morning.
It is also, for many of us, the most alive we have ever felt.
Come if you are steady enough to meet what arrives, willing to be in a group rather than alone in a group, and able to hold your own experience while making room for everyone else holding theirs. We will talk all of this through on the call, honestly and in both directions, before anyone commits.