Way of the Shaman - Plant Teachers from the Amazonian Jungle
Nila Raja & William Llerena Murayari
DON WILLIAM & NILA RAJA (PE)
Curandero / Shamanic healer / Medicine Musician / Artist / Visionary Painter
Don William is a Peruvian Curandero from the Cocama lineage, with a heritage deeply rooted in the healing traditions of the Amazon jungle. He learned the secrets of medicinal plants from his father and grandfather, both revered Curanderos. With over 30 years of experience working with plants, he has become a highly respected Curandero, fostering communities and bringing healing to people worldwide.
Don William possesses a unique style, serving as a clear channel for medicine, always guided by integrity, humility, and compassion. He is joined by his wife, Nila, who embodies the Divine Mother in all her forms. Nila possesses the heart of an Abuelita, radiating kindness and compassion. She is a conduit for the wisdom of celestial beings, and her heavenly voice summons their guidance.
In their presentation, they explore the journey of connecting with source, divinity, and the mysteries of Ayahuasca, where we discover our role as guardians and wisdom keepers. Don William & Nila emphasize the importance of preserving, reforesting, and uniting as a global network to protect the Amazon, the lungs of our planet.
William Llerena Murayari, a Kokama healer from Peru, shares
We don't want more war. We want love. We want peace to be at the forefront. This is our home, and it needs protection. It is only us who live here who can protect this earth. We are together in this.
Summary
- Traditional Amazonian healing is rooted in the Kokama lineage, where curanderos use plant medicine, sacred songs, and energy cleaning to treat physical and spiritual illnesses. - Curanderos traditionally drink Ayahuasca to diagnose patients, allowing them to sense energy and determine the specific medicinal plants required for healing individuals who are physically weak. - In the absence of pharmacies and hospitals, jungle communities relied on "vegetalistas" who utilized a natural pharmacy of plants sourced from deep within the mountains and jungle. - Icaros are specific chants used to call upon plant spirits and direct ceremony energy, while medicine songs are later additions that honor Mother Earth, the elements, and the Great Spirit. - The medicine path encourages a global awakening focused on personal responsibility, peace, and the collective mission to protect the earth’s mountains, trees, and waters from destruction.
Article
The Path Of The Curandero: Kokama Wisdom, Plant Medicine & Icaros
At Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam, An Amazonian Healing Tradition Was Framed As Both Medicine And Mandate
On 14 October 2023, at Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam, the speakers Nila Raja and William Llerena Murayari brought the room into contact with a tradition that did not present healing as a product, a trend or a wellness accessory. In their presentation, *Way of the Shaman - Plant Teachers from the Amazonian Jungle*, they described the Kokama curandero path as something older, sterner and more communal: a living lineage in which plants, prayer, diagnosis, song and responsibility to the Earth remain inseparable.
Their account moved between personal memory and ceremonial explanation. It was grounded not in abstraction but in place: Pucallpa, the jungle, the monte, the communal healing house, the songs that summon force, the plants that must be found, cooked and given correctly. What emerged was not simply a portrait of Amazonian medicine, but a moral vocabulary for how to live with it.
A Lineage Rooted In Pucallpa And The Kokama World
William Llerena Murayari, introduced by Nila Raja, traced his formation to the Kokama healing lineage of Peru. He spoke of grandparents who were curanderos, of being left as a child with his grandfather, and of watching people arrive from different towns seeking relief from suffering. In that world, healing was not compartmentalised. It happened in shared space, before witnesses, through repetition, devotion and skill.
His grandfather’s house, he recalled, was large and open, without separate bedrooms, a place where the sick would lie beneath mosquito nets while treatment unfolded around them. Children were brought when they were believed to be afflicted by harmful spirits. Adults came with severe illnesses, including yellow fever and typhoid. The work of healing was physical, energetic and spiritual at once.
This was medicine before institutions, or medicine beyond them. “In the jungle towns, there weren’t pharmacies and hospitals,” the presentation explained. “So they relied very much on natural medicine, the natural pharmacy.”
Ayahuasca As Diagnosis, Not Commodity
One of the most striking clarifications offered during the talk concerned the role of ayahuasca. In the Kokama vegetalista tradition described by Murayari, ayahuasca was not necessarily consumed by the patient. It was drunk by the healer in order to diagnose.
“Ayahuasca shows what each person has,” Murayari said, “allowing the healer to know better what each person needs and which plants to give them to heal.”
That distinction mattered. The patients he described were often too physically weak to drink ayahuasca themselves. Instead, the curandero used it to perceive energetic imbalance, discern the nature of the illness, and identify the specific medicinal plants required for recovery. His grandmother then helped prepare those medicines, cooking the plants and assisting in the practical work of care.
The effect of this explanation was to return ayahuasca to a ritual ecology in which it served discernment, not spectacle. It functioned as a diagnostic intelligence inside a wider pharmacopoeia of jungle plants, not as a standalone miracle.
The Jungle As Pharmacy And The Curandero As Reader Of It
Murayari’s recollections offered a vivid image of a healer as both spiritual practitioner and botanical expert. His grandfather, he said, would go deep into the monte to find the necessary remedies. In the absence of modern infrastructure, curanderos acted as what the presentation called “herbal doctors”, people whose knowledge of terrain, species and preparation could mean the difference between life and death.
This natural pharmacy was neither romantic nor casual. It demanded memory, discernment and endurance. To fetch medicine from the jungle was not only to identify a plant, but to understand what kind of person needed it, in what condition, and under what ceremonial protection it should be administered.
The healing methods described included soplo, the ritual blowing used for energetic clearing, as well as songs and instrumental accompaniment. What Murayari conveyed was a system in which medicine was never merely ingested. It was directed.
The Precise Power Of Icaros
If ayahuasca was presented as a diagnostic aid, the icaros were described as instruments of invocation and control. Murayari was careful on this point, and Nila Raja helped translate its importance for the audience. Not every song sung in or around ceremony, he said, was an icaro.
“The Icaros call directly to the spirits of the plants and animals in the jungle, bringing on the force of the medicine and cleaning the energy body,” he said.
That sentence, simple as it sounded, drew a boundary around authenticity. Icaros, in Murayari’s telling, were specific ceremonial technologies. Some called in force. Some softened the field. Some cleaned the energetic body. Some protected the ceremonial container itself. They were used to direct medicine, regulate space and maintain safety.
Medicine songs, by contrast, served a different role. “Medicine songs call on the Great Spirit, bringing that presence into the space and singing to Mother Earth and the waters,” he said.
The distinction was not pedantic. It was theological, practical and cultural. In a global climate where sacred vocabularies are often borrowed loosely, Murayari insisted on precision. An icaro was not simply a beautiful spiritual song. It was a ceremonial act with a particular lineage and purpose.
The Medicine As Teacher
Murayari also spoke of music and painting, explaining that he had taught himself guitar and other instruments, and had also become a painter without formal schooling. The source of that learning, he said, was the medicine itself.
“My teacher is the medicine. Everything came through the Ayahuasca.”
It was one of the defining lines of the session, not because it invited mystification, but because it located creativity within revelation and discipline rather than self-branding. In his account, art was not adjacent to healing. It was part of the same channel, another form through which vision became service.
That position was reinforced by the presence of Nila Raja, whose role in the session was not ornamental but relational. She translated, contextualised and held the emotional bridge between speaker and audience, allowing Murayari’s account to remain rooted in his own cadence while still reaching a European conference setting.
From Sacred Practice To Planetary Responsibility
The presentation widened in its final movement. What began as family lineage and ceremonial explanation became an appeal for ecological consciousness. Murayari and Raja linked the medicine path to responsibility, insisting that awakening was hollow if it did not extend to how people treated the world around them.
“There are many people now on this medicine path, taking more responsibility and becoming more conscious about their lives and their actions,” Murayari said.
That growing consciousness, in his telling, should lead somewhere concrete: to the protection of mountains, forests, rivers and waters. He spoke against war and conflict, and for peace, love and stewardship. The Earth was not scenery, nor an abstract cause. It was home. And home, he suggested, survives only if those living within it accept their duty to defend it.
At Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam, where the language of optimisation could easily have overwhelmed older understandings of wellbeing, *Way of the Shaman - Plant Teachers from the Amazonian Jungle* offered something more demanding. It proposed that healing was not just about feeling better. It was about becoming answerable: to lineage, to song, to plants, to truth, and to the living world that makes any healing possible.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam