Matthew first travelled to the Amazon in January 2007, seeking healing. That March he founded the Temple of the Way of Light, joined the following year by his wife Klara. Since 2009 they have run it in partnership with Shipibo Onanyabo, who lead the healing work.

He has founded two Peruvian nonprofit organisations – Alianza Arkana (2010) and the Chaikuni Institute (2012) – working alongside Amazonian communities on agroforestry, environmental justice, and indigenous rights. Since the beginning, the Temple has channelled all of its surplus into indigenous-led initiatives, either directly or through these organisations – an expression of Matthew’s conviction that no one should profit from these traditions.

Two of the healers who worked at the Temple have gone on to found their own centres with its support: Maestra Ynes Sánchez’s Niwe Rao Xobo and her son José López Sánchez’s Shipibo Rao.

Matthew has been a student of these traditions since 2009, and remains one. Since 2017 he has trained with Shipibo Onanya José López Sánchez, his principal teacher, and since 2020 also with Arhuaco Mamo Romualdo Torres Izquierdo. What he has learned from them is that their knowledge is not a resource to be translated, but a science to be understood on its own terms.