Finding the Path

At twenty-eight, Carlos Tanner was a successful newspaper production manager with a secret: heroin addiction. He was high behind the wheel, driving weed cross-country for a dealer friend, and drowning a childhood wound he’d never named. Then one night he blacked out at the wheel and woke up submerged in a river, his car sinking around him. It was the moment he chose life, though he had no idea what that would mean.

An email from an old friend sends him to Peru chasing a memory of ayahuasca he’d read about years before. What follows is an unpredictable journey by bus, boat, and mototaxi deep into the Amazon, guided again and again by strangers who seem to appear exactly when he needs them. In the jungle, he meets Don Juan, a local curandero whose ceremonies crack Carlos open: visions of demons and healing spirits, an encounter with the childhood belief that he was a burden to his family, and a reckoning with the mother he’d stopped speaking to. What begins as one wild trip becomes a decision to apprentice with a shaman and give his life to this tradition.

Finding the Path is a raw, unflinching memoir of addiction and awakening, ego and humility, fear and the courage to face it. It’s the true story of an ordinary young man who followed a series of signs into the Amazon rainforest and came out the other side transformed — and of the healing tradition he has now devoted over two decades to preserving and sharing through the Ayahuasca Foundation.