Interactive Workshop with Shipibo Maestras Laura and Edelin: Healing, Icaros and Teachings
Date: Thursday, April 16th, 2026
Time: 2pm-6pm PT
Location: Cabaret at the Brava Theater
Speakers: Maestra Laura Lopez De Fernandez, Maestra Edelin Lopez Sanchez, Karina Turtzo and Jessica Begin
Price: $150
Limited Capacity: only 50 tickets available
Scholarships available here
Join us for an intimate workshop with Maestras Laura and Edelin, Shipibo healers born into a family of female leaders, accompanied by their non-Indigenous allies and supporters Jessica and Karina. These maestras will share their journeys of answering the calling required to walk the path of an onanya, a path that is learned through years of dieta, discipline and encounter with plant spirits. They'll speak to the significant transformation that began sixty years ago, when Shipibo women started doing plant dietas and working with oni (ayahuasca), learning to integrate their bodies' natural cycles with the demands of plant medicine work. Topics will include Shipibo cosmology, how icaros - songs learned directly from the plants - work to clear and organize the path of their patients by addressing the intergenerational issues, and the synergy between oni, maestro, icaro, and plant spirit doctors in healing. The maestras will adress how their medical system reaches illnesses with energetic or spiritual origins - ancestral wounds, childhood trauma, spirit loss from shock - that Western methods cannot easily approach, as well as raising children with the support of plants. They will also speak about contemporary challenges connected to the global expansion of ayahuasca and Shipibo plant medicine traditions, including questions of stewardship, cultural continuity, and maintaining integrity as these practices move across cultures.
The afternoon includes talks, Q&A, group sharing and breakout exercises, a collective preparation of agua de florida where each participant contributes a flower or plant to the communal blend, collective icaro blessings and sopladas, and an opportunity to learn about and purchase the maestras’ artisanal crafts. This is an unique offering co-designed by Chacruna, the maestras, and their team, trying to bring other forms of knowledge and relationship to teach the psychedelic movement to honor and protect sacred plants and cultural traditions, while also trying to maintain and sustain the seed of personal and collective transformation.
Meet Your Instructors
Laura Lopez De Fernandez
Maestra Laura Lopez De Fernandez - Chononyavi - 'Swallow bird that flies in unity' is Shipibo-Conibo, born in the Native Community of Royaboya, in the Ucayali region of the Peruvian Amazon. She is the eldest daughter of renknowned Shipibo Maestra Ynes Sanchez Gonsalez, and the inheritor of generations of ancestral plant wisdom. She has been deeply immersed in the world of plant medicine from a young age. Laura was given a small diets by her grandparents from the age of 10 years and by the age of 16 began her apprenticeship to learn about ayahuasca and learning diets. At age 20, Laura entered a more active phase in her apprenticeship, and traveled throughout Peru with her mother, sharing medicinal plants and ayahuasca ceremonies with local Peruvians. She has also worked extensively with her mother and sisters Maestra Lila and Maestra Edelin both in Peru and abroad. She brings an incredible wealth of knowledge that has been passed down for generations in her family line. Laura is known for her dedication to the path, constantly dieting and doing long spiritual fasts to increase the depth of her knowledge, as well as the refinement and skill and artistry in her embroidery of Shipibo kene (designs). Her beautiful ikaros (medicine songs) pour out her with love and devotion to each of her patients.
Edelin Lopez Sanchez
Maestra Edelin grew up with her family in the Shipibo-Conibo Native Community of Royaboa. She is one of reknowned Shipibo Matriarch Maestra Ynes’ younger daughters. Sharing the rich plant and healing knowledge of her family, she grew up learning many recipes for plant remedies and plant perfumes. She worked for 18 years as a kindergarten teacher, and 4 years supporting the training of school teachers and designing early education curriculums. She has been dieting for the past 9 years, and recently graduated to the level of maestra, working alongside her mother Ynes at Niwe Rao Xobo. Maestra Edelin has the gift of healing touch and is well-loved for her massages, her many plant remedies, and her special perfumes that attract love, abundance, good luck, and open roads. Her warm, generous, and affectionate nature put people immediately at ease. She loves to help people and support them to heal.
Karina Turtzo
Karina is accompanying Shipibo Maestras Laura Lopez de Fernandez & Maestra Edelin Lopez Sanchez to Chacruna as a cultural bridge. She is the founder and executive director of The ARC a nonprofit stewarding healing justice & educational circles through community-led, earth-based care. Through The ARC and its initiatives including organizing platform Sovereign by Nature, she supports cultural exchange and regenerative systems that restore right relationship between people, land, and lineage. A long-term student of Indigenous wisdom teachers, Karina serves as a certified holistic health, transformation, and integration guide. Her work centers Living Medicine - ancestral, somatic, and land-based practices shared through reciprocity and community leadership. She focuses on expanding access to healing for marginalized communities, movement leaders and frontline activists while supporting broader systems change.
Rooted in a rich tapestry of Taíno, Afro-Caribbean, Spanish, French, and Ecuadorian lineages, Karina embodies a living convergence of traditions and histories. Her work honors the resilience of her ancestors while tending pathways of collective healing, remembrance, and liberation for future generations. https://www.sovereignxnature.com/thearc
Jessica Begin
Jessica Begin accompanies Shipibo Maestras Laura and Maestra Edelin to Chacruna as a translator and cultural interpreter. Canadian-born and based in Latin America for over two decades, she is a multilingual cultural bridge fluent in French, English, Spanish, and Portuguese. For more than 15 years, she has supported Indigenous leaders from diverse Nations, translating not only language but cultural context.
Jessica began her relationship with Shipibo medicine in 2015, when she met the López family of Shipibo healers and began undertaking master plant dietas within their lineage. Since 2017, she has supported Maestra Ynes López Sánchez and her family in holding master plant dietas at their healing center, Niwe Rao Xobo, in Peru and abroad. In 2020, she became Program Coordinator, overseeing guest education, screening, integration, and a small team of Western support staff.
Her work centers on education, right relationship with plants and their Indigenous guardians, cultural exchange, and expanding ethical access to these healing traditions. In 2025, she became a co-steward of the ARC’s Living Wisdom Fund, a Healing Justice and Cultural Exchange initiative supporting access for BIPOC and Indigenous relatives, frontline activists, and movement leaders.