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Heart of the Initiate offers tours to Brazil where we help people make sacred inner journeys through an intensive workshop experience. Our Brazil workshops incorporate shamanic ceremonies using the ancient plant teacher, Ayahuasca. Find out more...

Ayahuasca has been used in the Amazon for thousands of years both as a medicine and as a tool for transformation. We offer this experience to journey within; to a place beyond space and time; to a place you may have forgotten.

Ayahuasca BrewThe very serious problems that exist in the world contribute to a growing collective anxiety in the human race. For many, it is becoming increasingly difficult just to cope with life. The tenacity of the human species propels us eventually to break free of the bondage that enslaves us. Our destiny is to return to a harmony with each other and with the natural world... our survival depends on it. This gives me hope.

I am enormously grateful to have met many extraordinary people who have come to Brazil and to reconnect with a primal life force that is within them. I hope you'll come and join us!

Love,
ralph signature






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Read our eBrochure!Read our interactive eBrochure to learn more about our experiential workshops and healing retreats.  If this was the only part of the website you read you would understand our message. 

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New Ayahuasca Stories

Ayahuasca Experience by Lee V.

I had to surrender any expectations I had regarding my experience. I had allowed the plant medicine to enter me and she had begun her healing work. I felt myself going in deeper, and all of a sudden came face to face with my Goddess. I recognized her immediately, as I have known her all my life. She was beautiful. I was left feeling light, peaceful, and totally high on love.



My Journey on Ayahuasca by Anthony Brown

The journeys showed me that healing happens through presence and that consciousness is in the now, not the past or the future. It told me to feel into my body and helped me open my heart. It showed me my inner being and how I create my reality. And the biggest insight it gave me was that love of self and others is the only answer, 'nothing else BUT love'.


New Article - 2012 revisited

We thought it would be interesting to share with you Ralph's most recent article.  It is a follow up to his original piece titled The 2012 Problem.  For the first article, when we were researching the historical details on our calendaring system, we found it so interesting where it all actually came from.  Some countries only adopted our current calendar less than 100 years ago!  It causes you to begin questioning all of your own rigidity around time consciousness. 

In this new article, Ralph describes the fallacy of our desire to hang on to these comfortable concepts and arbitrary future events such as 2012.  Instead, he offers the possibility that maybe, right now, somehow that shift or transition has already begun to arrive. 

2012 Revisited

2012 RevistiedThe December 21, 2012 date is a symbol that exists as an extraordinary irony. Any particular date is a man created marker denoting the concept of a point in time. I find this ironic since the great transition or evolution we may be approaching surely has to do with complete renovation of our time consciousness or even the eradication of time itself!

Read the article


New March 2009 Brazil Ayahuasca Workshop Dates!

Eco-Lodge ResortFor thousands of years the shamans of the Amazonian rainforest have used a sacred plant brew, known as ayahuasca or yahé, for healing and spiritual awakening. This ancient medicine is a very powerful visionary tool to awaken the inner sight.

We offer one and two week workshops in an extraordinarily beautiful setting along the coast of Bahia. We will spend the week exploring and opening the subtle doorway through the heart energy and into the inner trans-dimentional worlds long forgotten by mankind. This is the path back to remembering your true divinity and awakening of the true self.

We have just announced the March 2009 dates for our Brazil Ayahuasca Workshops!

2009                Upcoming Brazil Workshop Dates                Status
MarchWeek 1: March 21-28Now Booking
Week 2: March 31 - April 07Now Booking
Multiple WeekNow Booking

Find out more about our Brazil Ayahuasca Workshops.


Episode 002

Podcast Logo

Click to play. (Right click to download.) 37:14 minutes (17.11 MB)

Welcome back!

In this podcast, we invite you to listen to a variety show with segments from various lectures from our March 2007 Brazil Ayahuasca Workshops.

Lectures by Shaman Warinei Wanare (translated by his assistant Sara Ñusta), Ralph Miller and Peter Richardson, with music by Chapman.

The final ten minutes of the podcast consists of a testimonial by Professor Bill Blake who was with us for several weeks in March of this year. Bill does a great job of relating his thoughts and feelings after an intensive Heart of the Initiate workshop experience.

The podcast closes with a few final words from Ralph.


In the Spotlight!

Please have a look at our most recent changes, articles and upcoming events.

New Articles

2012 Revisited2012 Revisited by Ralph Miller (June 21st, 2008)

The December 21, 2012 date is a symbol that exists as an extraordinary irony. Any particular date is a man created marker denoting the concept of a point in time. I find this ironic since the great transition or evolution we may be approaching surely has to do with complete renovation of our time consciousness or even the eradication of time itself!


Emanant Ego CollapseEmanant Ego Collapse by Ralph Miller (September 22nd, 2007)

When we experience a big loss of control it makes us feel insecure and vulnerable. There is a letdown and perhaps we experience ourselves as being a little more genuinely human. Our collective ideas about ourselves form an assembly of self-importance or ego. This letdown is the collapse of those ideas. We are humbled.


2012 ProblemThe 2012 Problem by Ralph Miller (September 11th, 2006)

We live according to the structures of time, but we really have little understanding of what it actually is. There is a forgotten inner landscape wherein we can perceive our connection to everything. That reconnection will bring an end to time as we have known, and will forever change who we are as human beings.

Read more articles in our Article Library.

New Media & Press

PeterNews for the Soul live radio show broadcast (February 14th, 2007)

Join us to hear more about our workshops, how we came to take people from all over the world to this sacred medicine, and ideas about how this medicine helps people to understand who they really are. They key question in approaching this sacred journey is to ask yourself "why"?


Four Corners MagazineAyahuasca: Nature's Teacher article by Ralph Miller published in Four Corners Magazine (August 1st, 2006)

Many people hope that humanity is at the very doorstep of an extraordinary shift. This 'shift' is really about the return of the feminine and healing is coming to humanity from nature; from mother-earth; from Gaia. Nature is working towards healing herself. Ayahuasca is nature's teacher.

Find more media and press info in our Media & Press Library.

New Audio

Logos: The Living WordLogos: The Living WordSpeaker ImageNew Live Lecture by Ralph Miller!

Recorded live on March 16th, 2008 during our workshops in Brazil, listen to Ralph Miller lecture about the intelligence of nature and the origins of language.

"Ayahuasca activates the language centers in human consciousness. There is an ancient mystical Greek philosophy called the Logos. The Logos was 'the word'. Through the Logos, all things that came into being were made. The Greek mystics felt that there was a language that existed beyond three dimensional, temporal human language. That it would be a four or five dimensional language that can call into existence all that is."

31:12 minutes (28.6 MB) | Play or right click to download.


Ralph MillerDestinySpeaker ImageNew Live Lecture by Ralph Miller!

Recorded live on September 2nd, 2007 during our workshops in Brazil, listen to a lecture by Ralph Miller about approaching our own individual Destiny.

Each of us look at the circumstances that brought us here and the desire to approach our own individual destiny. We agree to put one foot in front of the other towards something that we are completely ill prepared for. Our destiny is unavoidable. Our egos take great comfort in the belief that we have choice in the decisions that we make. But free will is ultimately not reconcilable with Destiny. Destiny is a place and a point where you will be without option. It is because of your own design and your own desire that you create your Destiny.


Podcast Logo Heart of the Initiate Podcast - Episode 2 Speaker Image Episode 2 of our Online Radio Show

Click to play. (Right click to download.) 37:14 minutes (17.11 MB)

In this podcast, we invite you to listen to a variety show with snippets from various lectures from our March 2007 Brazil Ayahuasca Workshops.

Find more streaming media in our Audio & Video Library.

New Video

6 New Videos from the Web! We have added a selection of videos from the web which we think are interesting and appropriate for the site.


Here is a list of what has been added:



a closer lookA Closer Look

We invite you to have 'A Closer Look' at the Heart of the Initiate ayahuasca workshops in Brazil. We'll take you on an experiential journey with the sacred plants to have a deeper understanding of who you really are. In the stunning natural beauty of our location, we'll explore the vast inner worlds of this visionary medicine.

Find more streaming media in our Audio & Video Library.

Consciousness and the Spirits of Nature

brazil workshop photoWeek-long Ayahuasca Workshops in Brazil
March 2009

For thousands of years the shamans of the Amazonian rainforest have used a sacred plant brew, known as ayahuasca or yahé, for healing and spiritual awakening. This ancient medicine, also known as "el remedio" or "the medicine", is a very powerful visionary tool to awaken the inner sight.

We offer one and two week workshops in an extraordinarily beautiful setting along the coast of Bahia, located approximately 700 miles north of Rio de Janeiro. We will spend the week exploring and opening the subtle doorway through the heart energy and into the inner trans-dimentional worlds long forgotten by mankind. This is the path back to remembering your true divinity and awakening of the true self. As we work through our old, limiting patterns, we begin to heal and reclaim our lost power.

Update! Learn about the integrative healing of superfoods, bodywork and natural environment that we have incorporated into our workshops. Read more...

Mayan Mystique: Exploring the Heart of the Ancient Maya

Mayan Mystique: Exploring the Heart of the Ancient MayaSacred Sites Workshop in Chiapas, Mexico
Coming Soon 2008

Throughout the world exists the remnants of ancient civilizations long forgotten in our modern lives. These Sacred Sites are doorways to a spiritual wisdom that these people possessed and held open for us to discover. The walls between our world and their world are thin in these locations, allowing us to walk between them and thus remember these sacred ways.

We invite you to turn back time 1500 years into Mexico's ancient past. Long before the first European set foot on this land were the indigenous cultures of the Mayan civilizations throughout the Yucatan peninsula. There existed civilizations of hundreds of thousands with entire cities lost in the rainforest until unearthed this last century. These people were masters of astronomy and cycles of the natural world, sacred geometry and had a metaphysical awareness far beyond even today's greatest understanding. Read more...

Upcoming Workshops

egypt workshop photoEgypt Winter 2008

Take a metaphysical tour of the ancient lands of Egypt. Enter the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid and see what mysteries this hidden doorway holds.

Register interest







Find out more about our workshops in the Workshops Section.