Journal

High in the Andes of northern Peru, at an elevation of over 3,000 metres, stands one of the most extraordinary ceremonial complexes ever built by human hands. Chavín de Huántar is not merely an archaeological site — it is a living ceremonial landscape that has shaped the spiritual traditions of an entire continent.

The Big Island of Hawaii is one of the most geologically active places on Earth. Lava still flows from Kīlauea into the ocean, creating new land in real time. This quality of constant creation and dissolution — of the old being consumed and the new being born — makes the Big Island an extraordinarily powerful setting for ceremonial work with plant medicine.

The ceremony ends. You return to your room, or to the fire, or to the stars. The medicine is receding. Something has shifted — you can feel it, even if you cannot yet name it. What happens next is as important as everything that came before.

Something is shifting in how the most effective leaders and entrepreneurs understand the relationship between inner work and outer performance. The conversation has moved well beyond stress management and mindfulness apps into territory that would have seemed fringe even five years ago.

Don Howard Lawler — known to those who worked with him as the White Wizard of the Andes — spent over fifty years in direct relationship with the Huachuma medicine and the sacred traditions of northern Peru. He passed in October 2019, but the tradition he carried and transmitted continues, alive in the facilitators he trained and the thousands of lives he touched.