Self-Regulation Processes for Ayahuasca

Melissa Stangl is a co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Soltara Healing Center, a Shipibo-led ayahuasca healing center. After a career in engineering, science, and cancer research, she left corporate life in 2015 to live and work in the Peruvian Amazon, where she managed operations at an ayahuasca retreat center before helping found Soltara. She is the author of 'The Roots of Consciousness' and has spoken widely on plant medicine, the ethics of ayahuasca tourism, and bridging Western and Indigenous approaches to healing.

Taita Luciano Mutumbajoy Buesaquillo is a traditional healer and spiritual leader of the Inga people of the Colombian Andean-Amazonian foothills, born in Mocoa, Putumayo. With more than sixty years of experience in traditional yagé medicine and the use of medicinal plants, he has dedicated his life to preserving ancestral knowledge, protecting Indigenous territories, and strengthening the cultural continuity of Indigenous peoples.

As an authority of the Inga Kamëntsá Indigenous Council of Mocoa, he promoted the first gatherings and exchanges among traditional healers of Alto Putumayo beginning in 1987. This process culminated in 1999 with the creation of the Union of Indigenous Yagé Healers of the Colombian Amazon (UMIYAC), of which he is a founding member. Throughout his career, he has supported organizational strengthening and traditional medicine initiatives with Indigenous organizations across Colombia and has shared his experience with Indigenous peoples in Brazil, Costa Rica, Canada, the United States, and Suriname.

He currently serves on the Council of Elders of UMIYAC and continues to lead community health brigades and intercultural education initiatives. His work promotes harmony between Mother Earth and humanity, contributing to the preservation of ancestral medicine as a foundation for collective well-being and the cultural continuity of Indigenous peoples.

Eva Césarová studied marketing communications and film production; she earned her master’s degree in addiction studies. She worked for five years at the international organization Youth RISE where represented the voices of young people who use psychoactive substances at the United Nations.

She is a co-founder of the Czech Psychedelic Society and the Sarava foundation, which supports indigenous tribes and the Amazon rainforest. She organizes psychedelic-themed events, serves as the media spokesperson for psychedelic research at the Center for Psychedelic Research at the National Institute of Mental Health, and works as a researcher on a study supported by the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs (MPSV) and conducted under the auspices of the Psyon psychedelic clinic situated in Prague.

She was the editor of the book Psychedelics in Czech and Slovakia. Her articles had been published in a number of mediums.

Manuel Villaescusa is a clinical psychologist based in Madrid, Spain, with a long-standing commitment to the safe and responsible use of traditional plant medicines, particularly ayahuasca. His work draws on both clinical training and a deep, sustained engagement with syncretic and indigenous Amazonian traditions connected to plant medicine practice.

Manuel is a cofounder of the Plataforma para la Defensa de la Ayahuasca (plantaforma.org), established in 2010 in Spain to advocate for the legal and cultural recognition of ayahuasca use. He is also a cofounder of FERM Red Micelio (redmicelio.org), a federation of entities dedicated to the study and work with entheogens.

Floris Moerkamp has spent over sixteen years at the intersection of psychedelics, community building, entrepreneurship, and advocacy. He built multiple successful for- and non-profits in and outside of the field of psychedelics.

Since 2014, Floris has been deeply involved in building scientific and community organizations in this space. He worked for the OPEN Foundation, Europe's leading nonprofit for psychedelic research, served on the board of the Dutch Smartshop Union, VLOS, and in 2019 co-founded Stichting Liaan.

The purpose of Stichting Liaan is to help people in all their diversity to work safely with ayahuasca in the Netherlands. They do this by uniting ayahuasca facilitators, scientists, therapists, lawmakers, and other professionals to improve the quality and safety of ceremonial practices. Through Liaan, over ninety percent of ayahuasca facilitators in the country have participated in multi-day trainings focused on ethics, safety, and accountability, helping the field self-regulate from within.

This emphasis on self-regulation reflects a deeper conviction: Floris believes that meaningful standards are best developed by the communities closest to the work, rather than imposed through top-down policies that risk creating harmful barriers to entry.

He brings experience from the scientific, ceremonial, and commercial sides of the field, which leaves him wary of easy answers in any direction. His interest now is in how a diverse ceremonial field can set its own standards before someone else does.