About Kibi Kaya
Our work is deep and comprehensive: our primary goal is for you to apply the new perspectives and healing you receive from ceremony directly to your life.
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OUR PRAYER:
Through this work, we are continually confronted with our own imperfections and humbled by the awareness of our own divinity.
This medicine is a powerful & sacred tool: it illuminates our inner being and gives us perspective into the many layers of our subconscious. This, in turn, can have positive, life-changing effects on our habitual patterns and beliefs. Beyond the reorientation of these outdated patterns, is the gift of building connections that support the continuous unfolding and deepening of our inner knowing.
We are learning that there is no limit to the growth that any one soul can experience in a lifetime. Yet it takes digging deep and a willingness to recognize our conditioned patterns to step into that liminal space of infinite growth.
We have found that the profound nature of this work is most effective in an environment where everyone feels comfortable enough to be truly vulnerable with one another.
For this reason, we do a thorough screening process to ensure a safe container for all participants.
We strive for our maloca to remain open to anyone looking for a safe, non-judgemental place to face themselves and bring their best self forward.
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We are direct apprentices and serve with the blessings of our Maestro, Papa Gilberto Mahua, of the Mahua family, - widely considered to be one of the oldest, most well respected Shipibo lineages of the Ucayali region of Amazonian Peru.
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Below is a short documentary by our friend, Jurriën Van der Waals, about our teacher, Papa Gilberto Mahua
Video by Jurriën Van der Waals
Robin York (Mananxawe Joni)
Robin, (Mananxawe Joni), has been studying plant medicine since 2008 when he first went to the Peruvian Amazon to work with renowned maestro, Don Jose Campos. Since then, Robin has been fortunate to study with numerous accomplished teachers from many different traditions. In 2015, Robin began his formal apprenticeship in the Shipibo healing tradition.
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Robin grew up in Germany before moving to California in his early twenties. His love for literature earned him two Master’s degrees from Cambridge University and UC Santa Barbara, respectively. He taught Literature and Philosophy at both the college and elite high school level for fifteen years.
In 2015, he quit his teaching job and moved to the Amazon to begin his apprenticeship in the Shipibo plant medicine technology. His first Maestra was Justina Cerrano, a respected healer from the Upper Ucayali region of Peru. In 2016 he was introduced to his teacher Papa Gilberto Mahua, and began working with the Mahua family lineage of healers. Since then, Robin has completed numerous plant dietas with Maestra Manuela Mahua as well as his primary teacher, Papa Gilberto. These dietas have honed his healing abilities and sharpened his inner vision. During his time in the jungle Robin also built a traditional tambo on Papa Gilberto's land so that he and his wife Alicia could spend longer periods of time immersed in the traditional study of Shipibo plant medicine.
Through his many dietas and the instruction of his teachers, Robin was blessed to learn the Shipibo icaros, the chants that contain the vibrational healing codes of this ancient shamanic technology.
With the blessings and encouragement of Maestra Manuela and Papa Gilberto, Robin began offering traditional Shipibo ceremonies in 2018. He has become well known for his humble, compassionate approach that supports his patients’ healing from the ground up. Robin combines his deep understanding of the Western psyche with a keen awareness that he cultivated through his time in the jungle, and the guidance he receives from Spirit.
Together with his wife, Alicia, Robin offers Shipibo style ceremonies that support individuals in their return to wholeness, authenticity, and creative purpose.
Alicia Marie York (Ani Kaya)
Alicia Marie (Ani Kaya) is a potent healer and intuitive guide. She has trained extensively in Pathwork, Depth Hypnosis and Amazonian Shamanism.
In her youth, Alicia took her Bodhisattva vows with the Dalai Lama in 1998 and went on to attend Naropa University in 2004. She then became a pioneering aerialist performer and toured the world for a decade. In 2010 she met her spiritual teacher Prem Baba, and in 2016 she began her shamanic apprenticeship in the Shipibo plant medicine tradition under Maestro Papa Gilberto Mahua. She has spent many months at a time in isolation in the Peruvian jungle learning from the master plants and trees.
Through her multidisciplinary training, Alicia has developed a special skill for hearing the unspoken dialogue of the subconscious and bringing it into conscious awareness. Her intuitive guidance allows her to enter into direct contact with higher realms and spirit guides. Her gift of sight enables her to see things that limit and hold you back in life.
In her private sessions, she uses a technique she developed called the Compass. The Compass explores the terrain of our unconscious (and conscious) desires, beliefs and habits. The goal of this approach is not to drive these aspects into further exile, but to understand what they have to teach us: to discover the virtue hidden beneath the armor. For when we remember our true North we can reconnect with our higher selves and our own deeper knowing.
Through her work (with the Compass and the many other modalities she has studied), Alicia teaches us to recognize how within the shadow is a gift waiting to become a Purpose that can bring greater meaning to our lives. In time, this process of reconciliation with the past creates greater coherence and a return to wholeness and well-being.
Learn more about Alicia's work at:
Our Lineage
PAPA GILBERTO MAHUA
Papa Gilberto Mahua is a seventy-five year old maestro and a living legend of Shipibo plant medicine.
He hails from the Mahua family, widely considered to be one of the most ancient and respected Shipibo lineages of Amazonian Peru.
In the Shipibo tradition, apprentices learn how to heal by completing a series of master plant “dietas,” a process whereby the apprentice enters a period of abstinence and rigorous spiritual education that forges a deep connection between the student and the plant spirit.
Papa Gilberto Mahua was born into a family of renowned healers. His grandfather, father and earliest ancestors were all respected curanderos, who, like Gilberto, were initiated into the plant medicine tradition at a very young age. Gilberto completed his first master plant dieta in 1959 at the tender age of 11. For eighteen months he lived in complete isolation in the remote jungle and only saw his father and uncle who guided him and his older brothers through the dieta process. His first diet consisted of ingesting the“mariri,” the tobacco spit of his maestro that contained all his teacher’s knowledge. This diet was followed by other rigorous isolation dietas with the master shamanic tree Ayahuma, as well as with Bobinsana, Huayra Caspi and Chiric Sanango.
Together with his older brothers, he was also one of the first Shipibo maestros to diet the “nihue,” the wind of Noyarao, the famous tree of light.
Since those early days, Papa Gilberto has continued to diet plants for over sixty years and become a “palo” or “tree” maestro, a master curandero who works with the spirits of all the big healing trees.
In his home community, along the banks of the Ucayali River, as well as in the West, Papa Gilberto is revered as a healer of great skill, wisdom and integrity. He is admired not only for the vast depth of his knowledge and experience, but also for his commitment to maintain the Shipibo healing tradition at a time when their culture faces ever-increasing geo-political and environmental threats.
Beloved by his apprentices, Papa Gilberto is, at times, a stern yet ever compassionate teacher.
His ceremonies are marked by his incredible perceptivity, his rigorously thorough chants as well as his caring presence.
As a healer of great integrity, he is respected by his students and patients alike for the safety of his medicine container that allows for true surrender and healing to occur.
To diet with Papa Gilberto Mahua is to study with one of the last great healers of our time.