Visionary Hearts · A Sacred Pilgrimage

The Chavín Renaissance

A Pilgrimage to the Awakened Heart of the Andes

Communion with the master teacher plant Huachuma
at Chavín de Huántar, one of the oldest temples of the Americas.
Two Sacred Passages · February 1 to 10 & February 22 to March 3, 2027

Request to Join Enter the Vision

You Are Not Here by Chance

The Sacred Call

There is a call that comes not from the mind
from the deepest knowing of the heart.
It is a quiet knowing that you were born to offer a service to this world
far larger than the life you have been living
and that the love within you must be
channeled in service of a great vision of Love.

This is an invitation to answer that summons at its source.

For four thousand years, seekers walked mountain passes and river valleys to arrive at a single stone temple in the high Andes, a place the ancient world regarded as the beating heart of a spiritual civilization. They came to be undone and remade. They came to meet the sacred through the master teacher plant. They came to Chavín.

In early 2027, we are called to walk that ancient road again, and to begin in earnest the next stage of what we have come to call the Chavín Renaissance.

Hands lifting a ceremonial vessel above the Andean valley at sunrise, hummingbird and condor in flight

For four thousand years, seekers walked the mountain passes to arrive at a single stone temple.

Now is the Time

This Sacred Powerful Moment of Awakening

There is a particular hour known to those who have built a full life.

The house is quiet. The work has gone well. Better than well. By every measure the world keeps, you have arrived. The people you love are provided for. The mountain you were told to climb has been climbed.

And still, something in you is calling you forward.

You have sat in ceremony. You have kept a practice. You know the taste of the sacred, and that is exactly why you can no longer pretend the call isn't real. It is not the call of something missing. It is the call of something waiting: a work you were shown once, perhaps only as a feeling or in a single unforgettable night of medicine, that has not yet been done.

You are not looking for another retreat. You are looking for the threshold where your life stops being about what you have built, and starts being about what you were built for.

We are offering this Pilgrimage for this time.

A great circle of people holding hands before the temple of Chavín de Huántar at sunrise

The Ancestors Love You

A Renaissance of Awakened Heart

Long before we ever spoke these words, our first mentor in the ceremonial ways, don Howard Lawler, gave his life to a vision he called the Chavín Renaissance.

He understood what the stones remember: that for some two thousand years, from roughly 2000 BCE to the turning of the ages, a culture flowered in that high Andean valley unlike almost any the Earth has known. A people of true, embodied, awakened heart. A civilization of artisans and ceremonialists who lived for two millennia in deep creative cooperation, without walls, without weapons, without a warrior class. It was a great center of consciousness, a true Shambhala of the ancient Americas, whose influence moved through the cultures of Peru so vastly, and so subtly, that its fingerprints are on nearly everything that followed. And it was the birthplace of Huachuma Curanderismo: the medicine way that would travel down through the centuries and millennia until it came to rest in what is now known as the Mesa.

The Chavín Renaissance is the prophecy of that culture's return. It is not a return to the past. A renaissance is the past pouring its gold into the present so that something new can be born. It is a rebirth of love and the awakened heart. It is a remembering of how to listen deeply to the Earth and the cosmos. It is a call to build, together, a culture of awakened heart, here and now, in this age that needs it most.

Don Howard's role in the prophecy was clear, and he fulfilled it: to initiate hundreds of souls at the temple itself, and to release the seeds of the renaissance into the world.

We are two of those seeds.

The master teacher plant Huachuma, the sacred cactus the world now calls San Pedro, has stood at the threshold of humanity's great flowerings for millennia. It was the coevolutionary catalyst at the heart of Chavín's two thousand years of peace, and it has been, again and again, a companion to the rise of beauty, wisdom, and communion. And now It steps forward once more.

The spirits of Chavín have come to us with a clear transmission: now is the hour. The next wave of planetary medicine carriers, the light workers, healers, and visionaries who feel the ache of the world and the pull of a more beautiful one, need the activations and initiations that can only be found where the renaissance was seeded: at Chavín itself.

"Heal yourself, and empower others to do the same."Guidance Robin received from the ancestors of Chavín

Robin and Darcy, facilitators of the Chavín Renaissance pilgrimage

Robin Flynn & Darcy Kopas

A Love Story Twenty Years in the Making

Twenty years ago, at Chavín de Huántar itself, in ceremony with don Howard, we did not read about this prophecy. We were shown it, and we were written into it.

In that first ceremony, the spirits of Chavín told us plainly that we were life partners. Chavín itself had brought us together and reunited us so that we could experience the truth of the awakened heart and its potential. This is a radical love story: one that the ancestors, the temple, the medicine and our wild Visionary Hearts authored over 20 years. And in that same ceremony we were given our task: to become students of the medicine, taught first by the plant spirit, ancestors, Mesa, beautiful mentors, and from Love itself. To learn, become, grow, and evolve enough to bring forth true containers of healing, so that the awakened heart could return once again on a planetary level. A small contribution to a much larger Renaissance.

We were shown, too, that we were meant to make our home in a small mountain town in British Columbia, and to build there a center dedicated to this awakened heart energy.

Here is what we can tell you, twenty years on: everything we received in that first ceremony, individually and as a couple, has become living truth. The partnership. The path. The mountain town. The center, which today is Star River Sanctuary. Through all of it, our foremost guides have been the Chavín spirits themselves, with the blessing of the ancestors and the power of the Mesa. Huachuma has gifted us ten thousand blessings along the way, always returning us to compassion, to kindness, and to living in the Truth of Love and the Love of Truth.

In the years that followed, the road also carried us to our second great mentor in Huachuma Curanderismo: don Oscar Miro-Quesada, lineage carrier of the Pachakuti Mesa Tradition, a tradition whose taproot reaches all the way back to Chavín. Through this path we stand within the ancient golden chain of initiation of the Kamasqa Curandero lineage: a chain of light passed from heart to heart, initiate to initiate, reaching back toward the first keepers of these mysteries and forward to the ones not yet arrived.

And here is the beauty almost too perfect to have been planned: the Mesa we carry is where the medicine of Chavín came to rest after its long journey through the millennia. To walk the Mesa back to Chavín is to carry the river home to its source. The circle closes, and in closing, opens.

Now the spirits of Chavín have told us the time has come. And so, to honor this great convergence (the twentieth anniversary of our vision and of our own union, the fulfilled life's work of don Howard, and the living lineage of don Oscar and the golden chain that holds us all), we are called to open the gates and offer two sacred passages in early 2027.

A Story of 10,000 Blessings

The Hummingbird

We could tell you of ten thousand blessings.
Let us tell you the greatest one.

Robin first traveled to Peru sick. Deeply sick. Western medicine could offer no diagnosis and no hope of healing, let alone the possibility of her most sincere desire and hope: to one day be a mother.

As we journeyed through the ceremonies at Chavín, into the Amazon, and across the return pilgrimages that followed, the most beautiful girl spirit came to Robin, over and over. She came to help heal the intense intergenerational trauma imprints living in Robin's body, clearing out what was never hers and perhaps was never her parents' either. It was only untransformed trauma and pain, carried down through countless generations of a broken line, of a broken people. This radiant spirit communicated with both of us. She was not a dream.
She was on her way.

Eight years after that first journey, she was born: our daughter. We named her Chavin Kinti. Kinti is the Quechua word for hummingbird, the ancient totem animal of beloved Huachuma. Her name is our gratitude, spoken every day: for the healing of a body that medicine had given up on, for a family the temple foretold, and for the honor of being assistants to this medicine of infinite divine heart, embodied in the infinite beauty of the Earth.

When we tell you this medicine brings real blessings to real lives, we are not speaking in metaphor.

We are raising a daughter named for it.

Huachuma in full bloom above the terraces of Chavín de Huántar at sunrise

The Master Teacher Plant

Huachuma, the Ancient One

We come to Huachuma as we come to all the great Plant Beings: with reverence first, intellect second, and the knowing in our bones that the Plant is alive, intelligent, and has been speaking long before our species learned to listen.

Huachuma is a plant of the opened heart. Where some medicines take you to the edges of the cosmos, Huachuma tends to bring the cosmos home into the body: into the chest, into the eyes, into the ordinary miracle of a mountain, a river, another human face. It is gentle and it is vast. It teaches the deep listening that this age of the world so desperately needs: how to hear the Earth speak, how to feel the sky as family, all of the great web of life as holy, and how to let love reorganize the entire field within and all around you.

For some four thousand years, its image has been carved into the stones of Chavín, held in the hands of the temple's guardian beings and woven through its iconography of transformation. To drink Huachuma at Chavín is to place yourself in the oldest continuous current of this or any master teacher plant on Earth.

The Temple

Chavín de Huántar

Raised in the high Andes more than four thousand years ago, Chavín de Huántar is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the most important ceremonial and pilgrimage centers of the ancient Americas. It was the heart of a culture that endured for some two thousand years and left behind no fortress walls, no weapons of war, and no warrior class. Only temples, art, and the medicine.

I · A Place of Convergence. Across nearly two millennia, Chavín drew pilgrims from every corner of the Andean world. Scholars call it a center of ideological, cultural and religious convergence, precisely the energy we are called to renew.

II · Engineered for Vision. Its labyrinth of subterranean galleries, its unprecedented vents and water channels, and its stone acoustics were built to move sound, light, and water. This is a temple engineered to carry the initiate across the threshold of ordinary perception.

III · The Sacred Medicine. In 2025, researchers confirmed ritual paraphernalia within Chavín's private chambers: the material trace of ceremonies of altered consciousness held here for millennia. The medicine road at Chavín is older than almost any we know.

We journey not as tourists but as pilgrims: to be received by the temple, to make offerings, and to drink the medicine in the shadow of the stones where it has always been sacred.

A pilgrim walking the lamplit stone galleries of Chavín de Huántar toward the light

The Pilgrimage

The Shape of the Journey

Ten days woven through the Cordillera Blanca: arrival and acclimation in Huaraz, a Huachuma Mesada at the ancient temple of Chavín, a second in the mysterious stone forest of Bosque de Rocas, the crowning mesada at Heaven’s Gate beneath Apu Huascarán, and the tender work of rest and integration between each, all held within a small and carefully tended circle.

Day I

Arrival & Opening Circle in Huaraz

We land and gather in the mountain city of Huaraz, cradled by the Cordillera Blanca. In the evening we hold our opening circle at the hotel and share a celebratory dinner, then begin the gentle work of resting and acclimating to the mountains.

Day II

Journey to Chavín & the Museum

We travel through the Cordillera to the sacred village of Chavín de Huántar. There we visit the famous Chavín museum, sitting with the carved faces and sacred iconography that carry the temple’s four thousand year transmission.

Day III

Huachuma Mesada at the Ancient Temple

Our first communion: a Huachuma Mesada at the ancient temple itself, held with don Martín. An opening of the heart, a laying down of what we have carried, an initiation into the mystery in the very place where it was born.

Day IV

Rest, Renewal & Integration

A day of rest, renewal, and integration in Chavín, with an optional visit to the hot spring bathhouse to let the waters continue the medicine’s quiet work.

Day V

Return to Huaraz

We travel back through the Cordillera to Huaraz, with an afternoon of personal exploration and quiet.

Day VI

Huachuma Mesada at Bosque de Rocas

We journey to the Bosque de Rocas, the epically beautiful and mysterious stone forest and ancient ancestral site, for our second Huachuma Mesada among the standing stones.

Day VII

Rest & Integration in Huaraz

A day of rest and integration, letting the teachings of the stone forest settle into the body.

Day VIII

Heaven’s Gate: Apu Huascarán & Laguna Llanganuco

We journey to the most magnificent mountain of the range, Apu Huascarán, and the highland waters of Laguna Llanganuco, one of the most beautiful places on the planet. This is the place our first mentor, don Howard, called Heaven’s Gate. Here we hold our final Huachuma Mesada, the crowning communion of the pilgrimage.

Day IX

Rest, Integration & Closing the Container

We rest, we integrate, and we close the container together, naming what we have received and how we will carry it home in service to the awakening world.

Day X

Blessed Farewell

A final group breakfast, and we release one another into the world, changed, bearers now of the Chavín Renaissance.

And then, the return. Some weeks from now, you will walk back through your own front door. The house will look the same. You will not. The people who love you will notice it before you say a word: something steadier in your hands, something lit behind your eyes. You will not come home with souvenirs. You will come home with instructions: a clarity about what the rest of your life is for, and the lineage rooted ground to actually live it. That homecoming, not the photographs, is what you are truly saying yes to.

The full itinerary is refined with don Martín, our guide on the land, and shared with accepted pilgrims. The flow may shift in service to the medicine and the mountain.

A circle gathered around fire beneath the Milky Way in the Cordillera Blanca

Choose Your Passage

Two Sacred Passages, 2027

The lineage has asked us to open two journeys, so that this initiation may reach the souls it is meant for. Each circle is small and intentionally tended.

Passage One · The First Gate

February 1 to
February 10, 2027

Reserved for those who feel the earliest call.
12 to 15 pilgrims.

Passage Two · The Second Gate

February 22 to
March 3, 2027

A second circle for the widening call.
12 to 15 pilgrims.

The ceremonial arc of each passage: three Huachuma Mesadas in three temples of the living Earth. The first at the ancient temple of Chavín de Huántar, the second in the mysterious stone forest of Bosque de Rocas, and the crowning communion at Heaven’s Gate, the place don Howard named beneath Apu Huascarán at Laguna Llanganuco. Rest and integration are woven between each, because depth requires digestion.

Travel guidance: plan to arrive in Peru at least one day before your passage begins, and, if you are able, give yourself a day or two of rest after it closes before international travel. Please note that there are no flights into Huaraz on Sundays, and each passage begins on a Monday. We therefore recommend one of two graceful paths: rest Sunday night in Lima and fly to Huaraz on Monday morning, or arrive in Huaraz by Saturday and give yourself a fuller acclimation to the mountains. The medicine deserves a gentle landing, and so do you.

A word about who you will walk with. In twenty years of leading pilgrimage, we have learned that half the medicine is the circle itself. The people who answer this kind of call are rarely beginners at life: healers and physicians, builders and teachers, mothers and fathers of grown children, quiet leaders. They are men and women of substance and sincerity who have climbed the first mountain and are ready for the one that matters more. These are people you will not have to shrink around. Many arrive alone. No one leaves that way.

Request to Join

Discernment

Is This Journey Yours?

This is a lineage rooted ceremonial pilgrimage, not a wellness getaway. We hold it with care, and we ask the same care of those who join us.

This is for you if…

You have built a life that looks, from the outside, complete, and you know there is a further room in you that has never been entered.
You have sat in ceremony before. The medicine path is not a curiosity to you; it is a thread you have been following for years, and lately you feel it pulling taut.
In the quiet hours you hear it plainly: this is not all I came here to do.
You long for genuine initiation within an authentic, sanctioned lineage: the real thing, in the real place.
You are ready to stop circling your own calling, and to be made useful to something vast.
You are willing to be undone and remade in service of love.

This may not be your season if…

You are seeking recreation or escape rather than transformation.
You are currently struggling with significant mental health challenges, including acute anxiety, depression, psychosis, or unresolved psychiatric conditions. The medicine asks for steady inner ground, and we care for you too much to place you on this path when it could harm rather than heal. For some, this simply means not yet, and we will help you discern that with love.
You are living with serious physical unwellness or mobility limitations. This pilgrimage moves through high altitude, long mountain travel days, and the uneven ancient stone of the temple itself, and it asks for a body that can carry you through it.
You are unwilling to prepare, to follow ceremonial guidance, or to move at the pace of reverence.
You want certainty and comfort more than mystery and initiation.

And a word for the one standing in the doorway. Perhaps your life is not all together right now. Perhaps a great chapter of your life is closing, a marriage or a career, a home or an identity, and you cannot yet see what waits on the other side. Know this: pilgrimage has always belonged to the ones between stories. The temple has been receiving people standing exactly where you stand for four thousand years. If your ground is steady but your future is unwritten, this threshold may be precisely the place where the next chapter is meant to be given to you: not figured out, but received.

And know this: we would rather walk with twelve who are truly called than fill every seat. Each year we lovingly decline sincere, wonderful people because the timing, the health, or the readiness is not right, and we count that discernment among our most sacred duties to the circle. If we sense this journey is not yours, or not yours yet, we will tell you so directly and with love. That is our promise to you, and to everyone who walks beside you.

If you are unsure whether this is your journey, that is exactly what the application conversation is for. Reach toward us, and we will listen together.

A pilgrim wrapped in a woven manta facing the sunrise over the Cordillera Blanca

The Investment

$3,777

The ten day land pilgrimage begins at $3,777 in shared accommodation. Single occupancy and further options are shared upon acceptance. For our Plant Spirit Medicine Ceremonialist apprentices, the investment is $3,333.

Included: lodging, ground transportation within Peru, all ceremonies and guidance with Robin, Darcy, and don Martín, temple and site access, select meals, and the full arc of the container: a personal intake call with Robin and Darcy, group preparation calls before we travel, and group integration calls after you return home.

Not included: international airfare, most meals, travel insurance, and gratuities. A complete breakdown is provided with acceptance.

Payment plans are available. Simply ask.

A word about the container. This journey does not begin at the airport, and it does not end there. It begins the moment you are accepted: with a personal call, with preparation held in circle, with the slow tuning of your heart toward the temple. And when you return home carrying more than you left with, we will still be there, gathered on the integration calls, tending what the medicine has opened. You are not purchasing ten days. You are entering a held passage with a beginning, a heart, and a homecoming.

Begin Your Application

Your Guides

Held in Devotion

Robin Flynn and Darcy Kopas at a glacial lake in the mountains

For two decades, Robin Flynn and Darcy Kopas have walked the path of the sacred plant medicines and the Way of Love as apprentices, as ceremonialists, and as teachers. Theirs has not been a path of workshops and weekends. It has been twenty years of continuous, plant taught apprenticeship, guided foremost by the Chavín spirits themselves, forged in ceremony after ceremony, year after year, until the medicine itself sanctioned them to serve. Through Visionary Hearts and Star River Sanctuary, they have devoted their lives to the awakening of the heart and the rise of a more beautiful world.

They were initiated at Chavín de Huántar by don Howard Lawler, two of the seeds he released into the world in service of the Chavín Renaissance, and they carry the Kamasqa Curandero lineage of the Pachakuti Mesa Tradition through their second great mentor in Huachuma Curanderismo, lineage carrier don Oscar Miro-Quesada. They have guided nine sacred pilgrimages to Peru with groups, and they mentor apprentices through the multi year Plant Spirit Medicine Ceremonialist path.

They come to Chavín not as experts but as devoted servants of the medicine and the two great streams that formed them, holding this journey as the living fulfillment of the vision they received twenty years ago.

And at the temple itself, we walk with don Martín. Twenty years ago, in our very first ceremonies at Chavín, we met a sweet, kind, shy young man of the village, as young and as awkward as we were, truth be told. His name was Martín. Born and raised in Chavín de Huántar all his life, a master artist, he entered apprenticeship with don Howard just as we did, and over twenty five years of devoted practice he has become a true maestro of Huachuma. His relationship with the temple, the land, and the mountains of this region runs to a depth no visitor could ever reach: it is his home, his inheritance, and his life's devotion. Don Martín will be our introduction to the spirits of the land, and after twenty years we are overjoyed to be in ceremony with him once again. The shy young ones the temple brought together have grown. The friendship remains. The medicine continues.

don Martín at the temple of Chavín de Huántar

The depth holding you. A container is only as strong as the practice beneath it. This pilgrimage is not held by enthusiasm. It is held by mastery: twenty years of unbroken ceremonial practice, the sanction of a living lineage carried through two great mentors, and the wisdom of the maestro of Chavín himself, on his own land. You will be free to go as deep as the medicine calls you, because the ground beneath you will not move.

Questions of the Heart & the Road

Before You Ask, We Answer

Do I need previous experience with plant medicine?

Not necessarily, but you do need genuine readiness. Some pilgrims come as seasoned medicine carriers; others are answering a first, undeniable call. In the application and our conversation together, we will discern honestly whether this journey is right and safe for you at this time.

Do I need to be a Pachakuti Mesa carrier?

No. This pilgrimage is open to sincere seekers from many paths, and we especially welcome the global family who feels the call of Chavín. Carriers of the Pachakuti Mesa lineage will find a deep homecoming here, and those new to it will be lovingly oriented.

What about the altitude?

Chavín and Huaraz sit high in the Andes, and our itinerary is designed with acclimation and rest built in. We will share thorough preparation guidance. If you have health considerations, we will talk them through with care before you commit.

What is included in the investment?

Your lodging, ground transportation within Peru, all ceremonies and guidance with Robin, Darcy, and don Martín, temple and site access, select meals, plus the full container: a personal intake call, group preparation calls before the pilgrimage, and group integration calls after your return. International flights, most meals, travel insurance, and gratuities are separate. A complete breakdown is shared upon acceptance.

How will I be prepared, and supported afterward?

You will not arrive in Peru cold, and you will not be left alone with what you receive. Every pilgrim begins with a personal intake call with Robin and Darcy, joins the circle on group preparation calls before we travel, and gathers again on integration calls in the weeks after returning home. The medicine's deepest work often unfolds in the months that follow, and the container is built to hold you through it.

How do I secure my place?

Begin with the application. Because these are small, intentionally held circles, we accept pilgrims through a personal application and, when helpful, a heart to heart conversation, so that every soul in the circle is truly meant to be there.

When should I book my flights?

Once you are accepted. Plan to arrive in Peru at least one day before your passage begins. Passage One opens February 1, and Passage Two opens February 22. If at all possible, give yourself a day or two of rest after the closing before international travel. The medicine's landing is gentler when the body is not immediately asked to cross the world.

Hands tending a mandala of flowers, crystals and candlelight upon the mesa

The Commissioning

This Is Not an Escape from Your Life.
It Is the Commissioning of It.

Nothing you have built was an accident. Look closely at the discipline, the devotion, the resources, and the freedom you now hold, and you may find they were being gathered, all along, for something. The ancestors of Chavín are not calling you to abandon your life. They are calling you to finally place its full weight in service of the awakening world.

Twenty years passed between the night this vision was planted in us and the morning we were ready to fulfill it. That is how patient the sacred is willing to be, and how fast a life moves. You already know that the season in which a body can stand at eleven thousand feet and say yes to the far mountain does not stay open forever. We do not say this as a threat. We say it simply as the truth every heart past midlife carries.

If your heart has been quietly saying yes as you read, trust it. The lineage has opened these gates for a reason, and perhaps you are one of the souls they had in mind.

Begin your application. We will receive it with reverence, and we will be in touch personally.

Request to Join the Pilgrimage

A jaguar at rest in the golden Andean highlands

Now is the time to remember and embody a culture of Awakened Heart.

Chavin 2026