Carlos Tanner

Carlos Tanner lives between two places that have shaped him: Massachusetts, where he grew up, and the Peruvian Amazon, where he has studied plant medicine for more than twenty years.

He graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1997 with degrees in art and philosophy, then worked as a graphic designer and production manager for weekly newspapers in the Northeast. From the outside the life looked like success. Inside it was depression, then drinking, then heroin. In 2003 he blacked out behind the wheel and woke in his car, underwater.

A few weeks later he went to Peru. In the jungle he drank ayahuasca in ceremonies led by a local curandero, don Juan. The work did not make him special. It made him honest about the wound underneath the addiction, and it asked him to stay. In January 2004 he moved to Iquitos and began living with don Juan and his family, apprenticing in the science of plant medicine as it is actually practiced — slowly, with dietas, songs, and accountability to the people who hold the tradition.

After four years he founded the Ayahuasca Foundation, registered as a nonprofit in 2009. The Foundation hosts educational healing retreats and courses with Shipibo curanderos, and later opened the Riosbo retreat and research center. The work is collaborative: research published in journals such as Frontiers in Psychiatry, veteran PTSD studies with groups including Heroic Hearts, and ongoing support for indigenous communities and forest protection. Carlos’s role is director, translator, and student — not guru.

He writes and speaks about apprenticeship, ethics, and what it means to honor ancestral medicine without stripping it for parts. Finding the Path is the first book: the accident, the journey, and the decision to give a life to this tradition.