2027
Chavín de Huántar
A Heart Tenders pilgrimage · 21 June – 2 July
Eleven nights in the Andean highlands. Three ceremonies at the sanctuary across from the temple. By invitation.
Overview
About the Pilgrimage
There are places in this world older than memory. Places where the land and the stones listen, and transmit.
Chavín de Huántar is one of them. An ancient ceremonial center at the confluence of the Mosna and Huachesca rivers, it is among the earliest major religious sites in the Americas. It was never a city. It was a place people traveled to. For thousands of years they came seeking healing, vision, and transformation, often in relationship with the Huachuma cactus that has been woven into Andean spiritual life for millennia.
This is an invitation to enter that stream with humility, curiosity, and care. It is also the annual pilgrimage of our community. We gather at the table and around the fire at home through the year. Once a year, some of us make this journey together. What happens in Chavín comes back with us and shapes what we build here.
Basics
Pilgrimage Information
What
Twelve days in Peru with three Huachuma ceremonies held by Jack and Yngrid, and long days of rest and integration between them.
When
21 June – 2 July 2027. Arrive in Lima on the 21st, fly home on the 2nd, or stay on.
Limited space
This is a small group, held by Laura, Emily, and Sara, 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, rest, and orient together before anything else begins. From there we travel as a group by overnight bus, roughly eleven hours through desert, mountain passes, and rising elevation, into the small village of Chavín.
On non-ceremony nights we stay in a simple local hotel in the village. Modern, clean, humble, grounding, hot water. Steps away is Yngrid's café, devoted to this medicine and to the pilgrims who come for this work. Her food is organic, vegetarian, deeply nourishing, and prepared with extraordinary love.
Ceremonies take place at the sanctuary across from the temple, a chakra tended with reverence by Jack and Yngrid, surrounded by hundreds of cacti and grazing alpacas. On ceremony nights we gather at the fire and sleep in individual chosas, cozy shelters built from natural materials and layered with alpaca blankets. The nights are cold, star-filled, and spacious.
The space between ceremonies is as potent as the ceremonies themselves. Rest. Integration. Gentle exploration. Natural mineral hot springs. Journaling. Council. The mountains.
We will also spend time at the temple itself, a place of profound mystery and power. Flexibility and openness are part of the pilgrimage.
The days after the final ceremony are for integration, rest, and whatever the group needs before we travel back to Lima together.
Schedule
Our twelve days
A rhythm, not a fixed itinerary. Ceremony days move with the land, the weather, and our hosts' read on the group.
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Days 1–2
Lima
June 21–22. Arrival, rest, orientation, first meals together. Evening bus to Chavín on the 22nd.
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Day 3
Arrive Chavín
June 23. Early morning arrival. Settling in, beginning to acclimatize to altitude. Time at the temple.
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Day 4
Ceremony 1
June 24. First ceremony at the sanctuary.
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Day 5
Rest and integration
June 25.
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Day 6
Ceremony 2
June 26.
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Day 7
Rest and integration
June 27.
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Day 8
Ceremony 3
June 28.
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Days 9–10
Integration
June 29–30. Hot springs, Council, the mountains, whatever the group needs.
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Day 11
Return to Lima
July 1. Night bus back together.
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Day 12
Home
July 2. Flights home, or stay on.
We Offer
What's Included
Included
- All lodging in Peru, in Lima and in Chavín
- All meals during the pilgrimage
- Three Huachuma ceremonies
- Temple entry and temple guards
- All group ground transport, including the bus between Lima and Chavín
- Guidance, facilitation, and on-the-ground support throughout
- Preparation materials before departure
- Integration support after we return
Not included
- International flights
- Visa costs, if applicable to your passport
- Travel insurance, which we strongly recommend
- Additional excursions or treks outside the group itinerary
- Extra hotel nights if you arrive early or stay on
- Personal spending
Cost
Your Place
No one in this community should be priced out of the pilgrimage.
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Standard$3,500
The full pilgrimage, everything listed above.
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Stewardship$5,000
For those who feel called and able to give more. It supports the guides directly and makes the scholarship seat possible.
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ScholarshipOne seat
Held every year. If cost is the only thing standing between you and this journey, say so on the call. That conversation is normal here and it stays between us.
A $500 deposit reserves your place and is non-refundable. The balance is paid in ten monthly installments of $300, with the final payment due thirty days before departure. If you commit later in the year, we will build a schedule that works.
How to join
There is no button to press. Every place on this pilgrimage is decided in conversation.
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1
Reach out
Write to Sara and we will set up a call.
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2
We talk
Intentions, readiness, medical and medication history, what you are carrying, and whether this is the right year. This goes both ways.
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3
Your place is held
If it is a yes on both sides, the $500 deposit reserves your seat.
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4
Preparation begins
Monthly payments start, and so does the getting ready. A detailed briefing follows well before departure.
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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
The heart of this pilgrimage belongs to the couple whose land, hands, and devotion make this work possible. Jack is our medicine man and devoted steward of the cactus sanctuary, tending the plants with reverence and care. Yngrid is a priestess and ceremonialist, the steady and luminous presence who supports the ceremonial space, prepares the food, and tends the village end of this journey with extraordinary care. 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. 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 communications strategist 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 language 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. Her long question is about access: who gets left out, and how we build care that does not burn out the people delivering it. 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. She also feeds this community, and her attention to what nourishes people, in the literal sense and every other, is one of the reasons Heart Tenders 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.