Dr. Quevedo earned his medical degree at Harvard Medical School and a Master of Public Health degree at Harvard's School of Public Health. His postdoctoral training included family and community medicine, internal medicine, studies in law and public policy at the Stanford Law School, and a fellowship in nephrology and medicine at Stanford University Medical Center, where he was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar. As Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Stanford Medical School, he served as Associate Chief of Nephrology and Medical Director of the Artificial Kidney Center at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, a Stanford teaching hospital. He was the founding director of the Center for Integrative Medicine at the O'Connor Hospital in San Jose and also served for 3 years as the Director of Clinical Programs at The Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at USCF, where he was Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine and held the Osher Foundation Chair in Integrative Medicine.

Deborah is a Doctoral Candidate at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology working on her dissertation that is titled, Psychospiritual Integration of the Ayahuasca Retreat Experience. She has additional training in creative expression, hypnotherapy, and leading groups. She has been a registered nurse for 30 years and is devoted to a holistic approach to health and healing.

Zilda Carvalho is both a medicine woman and anthropologist with a Masters in Bilingual Education from Northern Arizona University in the United States. For over ten years she has lived with various north american indigenous tribes studying traditional rituals and songs directly from tribal elders. She was a sundancer on the Navajo reservation for eight years. In 1994, following her studies with the Navajo in Northern Arizona she was invited to participate more deeply with the tribal ceremonies. With this came an invitation from the tribal elders to carry the sacred chanupa (peace pipe) and the great responsibility to conduct the Inipi (sweat-lodge purification ceremony) in the United States and in Brazil following her return after nearly 20 years working & studying in the United States. Zilda now resides in São José dos Campos where she continues her healing work now as a nurse practitioner while maintaining a busy schedule traveling to various parts of Brazil conducting ceremony. More information can be found at www.saunasagrada.com.

Reared among the three cultures of Brazil, Mexico and the U.S., Poranguí was steeped in various traditional forms of music, healing and ceremony since birth. Drawing from his cross-cultural background and ethnomusicology training at Duke University, Poranguí has over twelve years of international work experience as an artist, educator, filmmaker, consultant and therapist, utilizing the healing properties of sound and movement to foster our individual and collective well being.

Silvia Polivoy, a licensed clinical psychologist has been involved in investigating modified states of consciousness for over twenty years. She carried out field research in Mexico with Mazatec shamans, as well as worked extensively with ayahuasca, San Pedro, and other sacred plants, in their native habitats. For the past decade she has been hosting seminars and shamanic retreats in both the Peruvian and the Brazilian Amazon.
Self-empowerment is the core teaching of the ceremonies and retreats that she leads. She teaches the value of self-reliance and how to reclaim inner resources, instead of giving power away. Retreat participants focus on how to access and use personal and sometimes hidden abilities that stem from the true shaman that is within us all: the higher self. The plant ceremonies are facilitated using special music embedded with psychoactive frequencies. The plants we work with, together with what is taught in our intensive programs, offer the means by which we can gently and safely explore the unconscious, the doorway to the soul. Insights into who we really are and what we're here for can be gained through this process. Her participants have reported profound life-changing experiences as well as healing on many levels.

Working together as faculty for Global Medicine Education Foundation, this team of healers has been holding the vision for a unique organization dedicated to sharing sacred traditions & healing experiences with others through experiential learning.