Projects

“Reimagining Indigneous Education” - Our first event, organized at UC Berkeley with Ayize Jama Everret, Marlena Robbins, and Indian gurus Smriti and Adiji from India.

Interview with Charles Halpern, the founding board chair of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, Dean Emeritus of CUNY Law School, and the former President of the Nathan Cummings Foundation.

Sunflower Sutras has interviewed elders, researchers and indigenous masters from a wide range of nationalities and cultural backgrounds. These in-depth dialogues center around the topics of consciousness, spiritual practice , the relationship with the natural world and the reasons and consequences of globalization and colonization. Through these interviews we hope to illuminate the common elements and perspectives around these matters for different cosmovisions, threading together ancestral and new ideas, feelings and intuitions which may lead us on the building of a new paradigm for our societies.

Interview with Peruvian Partera, Ruro, in the Sacred Valley on the role of women preserving ancestral knowledge, how researchers should approach collaborations with indigenous communities, the history and current state of parteras in Peru. We also dive into the process and significance of a traditional fajado ceremony for women.

Sunflower Sutras filmed and produced a short film with the Shipibo Indigenous community of Calleria in the Peruvian Amazon on the effects of climate change on their community. This short film was presented by the Confederación de Nacionalidades Amazónicas del Perú (CONAP) President, Oseas Barbaran, at COP28 in Dubai.

Presentation at the UC Berkeley Conference: "Forms of Psychedelic Life".

How are different cosmovisions taking care of Patagonia? What are the differences and similarities between their feelings and beliefs around nature? Can they join efforts, as Patagonia becomes increasingly threatened by excessive tourism, gentrification and the exploitative interests of transnational companies looking for its resources? Can the reverence that these two groups have for the land they both love, help bring their perspectives together? What healing would be required for this? 

Sunflower Sutras was given permission from curandero and Ayahuasquero Alonso Del Río, who is the Founder and Director of the Peruvian Center for Healing and Consciousness Studies, Ayahuasca Ayllu, to collaborate on filming one of his Four Altars Wachuma ceremonies. This is the first time that Alonso has allowed anyone to register any of his ceremonies, which are very special within the medicine world. They involve a very structured format of his own design which weaves his training in the Shipibo tradition with his studies on Inca and andean ancestral traditions, buddhist, hindu and other eastern traditions.