Building The Huachuma Project: How Experience Changed the Way We Work

When I first stood in the valley that is now home to The Huachuma Project, I did not have a detailed plan for what it would become. There were plenty of reasons not to take it on. The land needed a huge amount of work, the buildings had been neglected, and almost everything I looked at seemed to lead to another job.

Up until then, I had worked between a mixture of other people’s venues and my own retreat centre in the UK, which had given the work a more permanent home but was still, at its core, a residential building close to nature that had been adapted to welcome guests and hold ceremonies. It served us well, and many important retreats took place there, but there is only so far you can go when you are working within a space that was originally designed as a home rather than a retreat centre.

The valley felt different because it offered the possibility of building around the work itself, rather than continuing to adapt the work around whatever space was available. For the first time, I could imagine creating a proper retreat centre with a dedicated ceremony space, accommodation intended for guests, places for people to rest or be alone, and enough land around us that the retreat could exist as its own contained experience away from the distractions and interruptions of ordinary life.

Working in different venues over the years had already shown me how much the environment shapes a retreat, from the ceremony space itself to the surrounding land, where people sleep, where they can find privacy, how the group moves through the days and how easily the outside world finds its way back in. The valley gave me the freedom to think about all of those things together and to begin creating a place that was not simply capable of hosting retreats, but had been shaped specifically for them.

At the time, I could see what it might become. I had much less understanding of how much work it would take to get there.

Building a Home for the Work

The Huachuma Project developed piece by piece, usually with one job leading straight into another. There were buildings to repair, land to clear, water, power, and other basic infrastructure to sort out, accommodation to improve, and, eventually, a dedicated ceremony space to build, all while normal life and the retreats themselves continued around it.

Most things here took longer than I expected. Part of that was learning to work with the seasons, which could slow or completely pause certain jobs, and part of it was getting used to materials behaving differently in the climate or simply not being readily available when I needed them. Building here taught me fairly quickly that progress had its own pace, and that trying to force it usually did not make anything happen any faster.

There were periods when money was tight, and the amount still left to do seemed far bigger than everything we had already managed to complete. At other points, something I had been imagining for months, sometimes years, would finally take shape and suddenly make a lot of the effort feel worthwhile.

The ceremony yurt was one of those moments. I had wanted a dedicated space for Huachuma for a long time, somewhere built here on the land as part of the retreat centre itself, rather than adapting another room for ceremony or borrowing a venue for a few days. Seeing that finally become real felt like an important milestone in the project's development, as it was one of the clearest signs that this was becoming the kind of place I had originally imagined when I first arrived in the Valley.

Building the place has also been a fairly relentless exercise in having to live by some of the things I speak about in ceremony. Patience, honesty, responsibility and commitment are easy enough words to use when everything is going well. They mean something different when you are halfway through a difficult job, money is running low, something you built has not worked as planned, or you have to make a decision without knowing whether it is the right one. There have been plenty of times when I have had to admit that something needed to change, start again, or simply keep going when progress felt painfully slow. In that sense, building THP has shaped me just as much as running the retreats has.

The project has never been something I have built entirely on my own. Christina has been beside me through much of the development of the valley and the retreats themselves, helping shape the way the place feels, looking after guests, supporting the practical side of the retreats and carrying a great deal of the work that happens behind the scenes.

Maddy arrived later but became a huge part of life here almost immediately, and anyone who has stayed with us will probably have encountered her excitement, playful nature and determination to be involved in just about everything that happens.

Friends, guests and others connected to the project have also given their time, work, ideas and support along the way, often simply because they believed in what we were trying to build. I am genuinely grateful to everyone who has contributed, whether through practical help, encouragement, sharing their skills, or simply showing up when it was needed. What exists here now developed gradually through the land, the work, the people who became part of it and all the problems we had to solve as we went.

How My Approach Changed

While the physical place was taking shape, my approach to the work was changing too. In the earlier stages of THP, I worked with more than one medicine. Kambo was an important part of what I offered for a long time, and I also have experience working with and serving Ayahuasca. Those parts of my work contributed to the facilitator I became.

What changed was where I wanted to place my attention. The more time I spent working with Huachuma, the more I saw how much variation there was between people, groups and ceremonies. I became less interested in adding new elements and more interested in understanding the same body of work better.

Eventually, I stopped offering Kambo through THP. We also do not add Ayahuasca to the retreats, despite receiving regular enquiries asking whether the two could be combined. I had reached a point where I wanted my responsibility as a facilitator to be centred on a single medicine and a single body of work.

That choice affected much more than the ceremonies. It changed how I thought about screening, preparation, group size, the retreat environment and what happens after somebody goes home.

Earlier on, I probably thought development meant adding more. More practices, more options, more things in the programme to make a retreat feel fuller or more complete. Over time, I realised that more does not necessarily mean better, and I became much more selective about what actually belongs in the work. The question gradually became much simpler: does this genuinely add something useful to the retreat, or are we adding it simply because we can?

How the Retreat Changed With Us

Focusing the project on Huachuma also changed how people joined us and how I thought about the group itself. We stopped offering instant booking and began speaking with everybody before confirming a place. I wanted to know who was coming, why they were considering Huachuma, what was happening in their life and whether there were any health, medication or other concerns that needed to be discussed beforehand.

Over time, I became more comfortable saying no when I had concerns and stopped treating every enquiry as something that needed to become a booking. There are people I have spoken with whom I felt should wait, and others whose circumstances made the retreat unsuitable. I would rather be clear about that before somebody books flights and travels to Portugal than ignore something that does not feel right because there is space available.

I also became more aware of how much the people within a retreat affect one another. Everyone arrives with a different life, personality and reason for being there, but they spend several days sharing the same environment and ceremony space. Keeping the groups small allows me to get to know more about who is joining us and gives me greater capacity to be available when someone needs support.

That same attention now runs through the whole retreat. Preparation starts before people arrive. There is space around the ceremony days to rest, talk, and let things settle, and support does not suddenly end when somebody goes home. Everyone who comes through THP has access to lifetime integration support, but that does not mean I tell people what their experience meant or try to interpret it for them. I can listen, ask questions and offer perspective from my own experience, but the meaning of somebody’s ceremony ultimately belongs to them.

Those changes came through experience. Over time, I became clearer about what supported the retreat, where greater care could be brought in, and how I wanted to carry the responsibility of facilitating the work.

What The Huachuma Project Is Today

When I look at THP now, I can still see the original idea. I wanted to create a permanent home for Huachuma, and that has not changed. What has changed is my understanding of everything that supports the work around it.

Some things I once considered part of the project are no longer here. Other parts have become much more important. The groups are smaller, screening is more deliberate, and the work is now focused entirely on Huachuma.

The website has changed for the same reason. I wanted it to reflect the project as it exists now and to be clearer about the limits of what we claim. We do not promise that Huachuma will heal somebody, cure a mental health condition or produce a specific transformation. I cannot predict what somebody will experience, and I do not believe a facilitator should decide what an experience means for the person having it.

What I can take responsibility for is who I welcome here, how people are prepared before they arrive, how I hold the retreat, the environment we create, how I respond when somebody needs support and whether that support is still there once they have gone home.

The project is still evolving, and I am evolving with it, but I feel much more grounded now in the values and vision that sit underneath everything we do. There will always be things to refine, improve and learn from, but the foundation feels strong, and the direction feels clear.

When I think back to standing in the valley before any of this existed, the reason I stayed makes much more sense to me now. I wanted to build a home for this work, and that is still what I am building.