– Jessica S., Healing Intensive participant 2022

What are people saying about their transformation at  Healing Intensive?

“Through the  Healing Intensive I underwent a profound transformation. I experienced fears and panic attacks in my life. …. It was challenging at times and the support and love I received helped me move through my fears. I felt lighter and a newfound sense of peace gently settled upon me like a warm embrace.  I feel stronger and more courageous in my life after coming back from the Healing Intensive. I would encourage anyone to experience this magical place and be surrounded by Shamans and staff who are extremely supportive.  I am so happy and grateful that I listened to the calling in my Heart.”

What is the Healing Intensive?

The Healing Intensive is a six-day experience that offers support and transformation. It is particularly beneficial for those who are seeking a profound shift towards spiritual growth and integral health, but who have not found success with regular healing methods. The program helps those struggling with long-standing issues and those who could benefit from a quantum leap in their healing process.

• Healing Intensive is a ceremony that opens deep relationships, perspective-building, and spiritual practices for better living.

• The Intensive uses the wisdom of the Wixárika tradition to reestablish a person’s living link with nature, which acts as a source of restoration and guidance.

• The Healing Intensive is rigorous and the benefits are multifold.

The program provides a safe and contained space for you to experience profound shifts across physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual domains. It offers tools and experiences to live a healthier and more fulfilling life and accelerates healing in a way that might otherwise take years.

What are the benefits to you?

• Address the difficulties and accumulated negativity in your life and reconnect you with a sense of meaning and purpose.

• Overcome blockages in your personal and professional life and deepen your spiritual awareness and connection.

• Find a powerful antidote to help you in your life.

The Healing Intensive is for you if you are seeking significant shifts toward spiritual health or struggling with long-standing issues that cannot be resolved through regular healing methods.

What will you experience?

• Individual attention to your unique healing needs

• Group spiritual processes

• A round-the-clock ceremonial setting supported by a sacred fire

• Deep inner work with Wixárika (Huichol) Traditional Healing

• Teaching fires

• Sacred stories and wisdom

• Connection with the natural world

• Sharing meals with a community of fellow explorers

• The team of Mara’akate will support you throughout the Healing Intensive

Your healing sessions will take place around a special sacred fire. Depending upon your needs, prayers, and intentions, your health, relationships, and life conditions will be explored to help facilitate the changes you are seeking.

What is the Wixarika Healing Tradition?

The Wixárika shamanic medicine work may well qualify as being one of those oldest, continuously practiced medicine approaches known, extended back in time for millennia through unbroken lineages, preserved through the natural isolation of the rugged canyon-laced mountains of the Sierra Madre of northwestern Mexico.

The mara’akame (translation: “One who knows”) is selected by the gods as perceived through the time-tested view of the tradition. Through the confirmation by an elder or elders and validated by Tatewarí,  Grandfather Fire, who is considered the original shaman of the peoples, the mara’akame, gives him or herself to the community to be of service, yet ethically accountable to the council of elders, known as the kawiterutsirri, and the community. In this way, they “give themselves up”. 

As with Don David, as an apprentice, later a mara’akame, then a tsaurixika, considered an elder, there are years of rigorous fasting and pilgrimages to sacred places to gain their medicine, ceremonial participation, initiations by elders, education and working with clients in sessions such as the one you may be attending. There are yearly mandas (spiritual “demands”) that are required to maintain the proper relationship with the gods, and therefore their active participation along with the community, elders, and therefore the tradition itself.

Origin Story of Wixarika Tradition Healing Intensive

As an experienced shamanic practitioner and teacher in the Wixárika tradition (mara’akame-tsaurixika) of the remote Sierra Madres of northwestern Mexico Don David Wiley has traveled extensively in the world to offer people the miracle of this ancient and timeless way of spiritual healing and counseling. Early in his work, he realized that people of modern societies don’t have the advantages enjoyed by the Wixárika people of being supported by a deeply spiritual way of life, ceremony, and healing in their villages.

He began to experiment with bringing individuals to Mexico where he lives and having them stay for extended periods for a series of sessions disengaging them from the cultural environment they live in. This produced great results. But what about those who couldn’t take off a month or two and travel abroad? He explored how to bring this offer into a more accessible way but the setting needed to be just right.

Through his relationship with the Blue Deer Center in the Catskills Mountains of upper state New York, he found such a place that would support the restorative power of nature’s intervention produced by this profound shamanic process concentrated within a shorter period. From this, the Healing Intensive was born.