About this Retreat
Roman Hanis
Roman Hanis is an international bestselling author, healer, educator, and co-founder of Paititi Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to Indigenous cultural preservation, healing, education, and ecological stewardship.
Since arriving in the Peruvian Amazon in 2001, Roman has spent decades studying, practicing, and collaborating with Indigenous knowledge holders of the Amazon and Andes. His path has included long-term apprenticeship and relationship with Yahua, Huitoto, Ashuar, Shipibo and other Amazonian traditions, alongside ongoing study and practice within Andean lineages. In 2004, following several years of apprenticeship in the Amazon, he was formally recognized as a curandero by Yahua elders, a responsibility he continues to honor through healing work, cultural exchange, education, and community initiatives.
Roman is the author of Beyond Ayahuasca: Unlocking the Evolutionary Science of Indigenous Amazonian Wisdom to Access Your Highest Potential, published by Hay House. Drawing upon more than two decades of lived experience in the Amazon, the book brings ancestral approaches to healing into dialogue with Jungian psychology, trauma resolution, Eastern medicine, and contemplative practice. 100% of Roman’s author proceeds from the book support the development of the Yahua Ancestral School and Cultural Heritage Center in the Peruvian Amazon.
As co-founder of Paititi Institute, Roman has helped develop intercultural healing retreats, Indigenous community health and cultural exchange initiatives, educational programs, and ecological conservation projects in Peru and internationally. The Institute also stewards a 1,516-hectare biocultural reserve spanning Andean foothills and cloud rainforest near Manu National Park, protecting a landscape where biological and cultural diversity remain deeply interconnected.
Alongside his Amazonian and Andean apprenticeships, Roman has spent decades studying and practicing Jungian psychology, Tibetan Buddhist and Bön traditions, Daoist internal arts, and Traditional Chinese Medicine. His work explores the resonances between these distinct traditions without reducing their differences, bringing their practical methods into an experiential approach to healing, self-knowledge, and the realization of our intrinsic relationship with the living world.
Roman’s own recovery from a severe, life-threatening period of Crohn’s disease in 2002 became an important turning point in this path. Today, his work is centered on creating experiential bridges through which ancestral knowledge can remain a living transmission while supporting both individual transformation and the communities and ecosystems from which these traditions arise.
Details of this retreat
Seed of the Heart: A Parent - Child Journey through Nature, Emotion & Ancestral Wisdom
4:30pm – 6:30pm | About the Workshop
Seed of the Heart is an experiential parent–child workshop weaving Amazonian and Andean ancestral wisdom with Jungian psychology, breathwork, storytelling, art, movement, and our direct relationship with the living world.
Created as part of Paititi Institute’s work with the Yahua Ancestral School in the Peruvian Amazon, the workshop introduces children to eco-socio-emotional intelligence: an understanding that our inner world is not separate from nature, and that the elemental forces we encounter in the forest, mountains, rivers, plants, and animals can also help us recognize and relate to our emotions.
At the center of the journey is The Seed of the Heart, a children’s story created together with Yahua tribe elders. Through the life cycle of a seed, children encounter seven stages of development associated with Earth, Water, Fire, Air, Ether, Space, and Infinity, discovering a language for intention, emotion, courage, relationship, resilience, wisdom, and the gifts they can share with others.
Parents and children participate together throughout the workshop.
The Journey of the Seed 🌱
We begin in a circle with The Seed of the Heart, following the seed as it is planted in the Earth, germinates through Water, reaches toward the light of Fire, grows into relationship through Air, becomes a young tree, and eventually grows wise enough to benefit the entire eco-system.
From the story, we move into direct experience through a gentle and playful breathwork practice rooted in Indigenous Amazonian tradition. Children and parents breathe through the seven elemental centers while following the stages of the seed’s journey within their own bodies and imagination.
We then meet several traditional plant allies, such as ruda, chamomile, rosemary, and mint, using smell, observation, and conversation to explore how human beings have learned from plants and the natural world across generations.
Through painting, movement, and play, children give form to their inner experience by exploring colors, elements, emotions, and forest-animal archetypes. Rather than treating difficult emotions as something to suppress or get rid of, we help children develop curiosity toward what they feel and discover ways of relating to emotions as meaningful expressions of their inner life.
Parents join this exploration, creating a shared language that can continue within the family long after the workshop ends.
Flower Mandala & Andean Offering 🌸
Our journey concludes by bringing the individual creations back into community.
Parents and children gather flowers and natural materials associated with the elemental journey and create a Flower Mandala inspired by the Andean despacho tradition. Together we offer gratitude for our families, communities, ancestors, the Earth, and the Indigenous guardians whose living traditions continue to protect some of the planet’s most biologically and culturally diverse territories.
The workshop also remembers the ancient relationship between the peoples of the Amazon and Andes, bringing the journey from seed to forest, individual to community, and inner awareness to reciprocity with the living world.
Workshop Includes
• Storytelling from The Seed of the Heart
• Short Standing Amazonian-based breathwork for parents and children
• Exploration of medicinal and aromatic plant allies
• The seven elemental stages of the Seed Journey
• Painting emotions through color, nature, and animal archetypes
• Movement, embodiment, and creative play
• Parent–child co-creation
• Community Flower Mandala inspired by the Andean despacho tradition
• Closing gratitude and blessing
Ages: Geared toward families with children approximately 5–12 years old, with flexibility for younger and older siblings.
Parents or guardians participate throughout the entire workshop.
All workshop and art materials are provided.
No psychoactive plants are used in this workshop.
A Workshop That Supports the Yahua Ancestral School
This workshop is connected directly with Paititi Institute’s Yahua Ancestral School and Cultural Heritage Center in the Peruvian Amazon.
The school was created with Yahua elders as a place where their language, stories, songs, medicinal-plant knowledge, arts, ceremonies, and relationship with the rainforest can be transmitted to younger generations. The Seed of the Heart is part of this evolving educational initiative, bringing ancestral knowledge into a form through which children can explore the relationship between their emotional development, community, and the ecology that sustains them.
Workshop proceeds support the Yahua Ancestral School and the community’s emergency health and education initiatives.
About the Facilitator:
Roman Hanis is the co-founder of Paititi Institute and author of Beyond Ayahuasca: Unlocking the Evolutionary Science of Indigenous Amazonian Wisdom to Access Your Highest Potential, published by Hay House.
Since arriving in the Peruvian Amazon in 2001, Roman has spent more than two decades studying, practicing, and collaborating with Indigenous knowledge holders of the Amazon and Andes while integrating this experience with his background in Traditional Chinese Medicine, Jungian psychology, and Buddhist contemplative traditions.
In 2004, after several years of apprenticeship and community relationship, Roman was formally recognized as a curandero by Yahua elders, a responsibility that has continued through healing work, cultural exchange, community health initiatives, and, most recently, the development of the Yahua Ancestral School and Cultural Heritage Center.
Roman is also a co-founder of the Paititi Institute, which stewards a 1,516-hectare biocultural reserve in the cloud-forest and Andean foothills of Peru and develops initiatives connecting ecological conservation with the preservation and transmission of living Indigenous knowledge.
His book Beyond Ayahuasca grew from more than two decades of this intercultural work, and 100% of Roman’s author proceeds from the book are dedicated to the development of the Yahua Ancestral School.
Cultural Integrity & Acknowledgments
The Seed of the Heart curriculum has been developed through Paititi Institute’s ongoing relationship with Yahua elders of the Peruvian Amazon and dialogue with Q’ero lineage holders of the Andes.
The workshop does not attempt to reproduce Indigenous ceremonies outside their traditional context. Instead, child-appropriate practices, stories, creative exercises, and forms of gratitude are offered in acknowledgment of the living traditions from which they arise, while Jungian perspectives provide an additional framework for exploring emotion, imagination, and archetypal experience.
The intention is not simply to teach children about nature, but to help families experience a principle at the heart of these ancestral traditions: human development and the living world belong to the same ecology.
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