Everyday Life

The activities provided for resident patients are not optional as they are a part of the holistic treatment. However, spiritual or religious activities are never obligatory, with each patient free to participate or not, depending on their faith, belief or philosophy of life.

During the day residents are organized into working groups by areas to fulfill responsibilities in everyday community tasks. The work areas in the mornings are: kitchen, cleaning, gardens, fruit and vegetable farming, maintenance of the facilities, and bakery, and such works are part of a greater set of ergotherapy activities. Everything produced is exclusively for domestic consumption. Participating in these tasks works not only by ordering the environment, but also by structuring each one internally. It is also a way of contributing personally to the dynamics of the Center. So each patient learns to cook, make bread, wash their clothes... that is to take care of oneself in elementary aspects of life.

In the afternoons, patients participate in self-awareness workshops, such as the mask and tales workshop, and in occupational workshops where crafts, carpentry, artistic activities as a means of expression (painting, music etc.) are carried out. At the end of the afternoon there are psychotherapeutic or psychoeducational meetings, general culture talks and training. They serve in particular to manage interpersonal conflicts, learn tolerance to frustration, develop true communication and open the horizons of patients.

Sports and playful activities (football, games, campfires, martial arts, etc.) are also carried out and spaces of leisure and rest are left both in daily coexistence and during the weekend. Takiwasi does not enforce permanent excitement as that can distract the patient's attention from their problems. While it is considered necessary not to remain in constant mental debates, it is also necessary to ensure that the treatment is primarily a time for self-observation, reflection and meditation.

Freed from outside concerns, the patient can direct all his energy towards knowledge of himself. To do this, he can’t exit until the reintegration stage (about the sixth month). However, the therapeutic team plans day trips every 2 weeks and regular visits to the botanical reserve (an hour's walk from the Center, in the middle of the jungle) to work, take plants, participate in Ayahuasca ceremonies or perform the "diet", a 7-day retreat that breaks the normal routine.

The Centre brings together people from diverse backgrounds, social levels and cultures from local indigenous people to international students from across the world. This promotes the development of mental flexibility, adaptation to others and awareness of one’s own individual characteristics in a healing process of differentiation.

It should be emphasized that the group, of a maximum of 15 patients, has a plot of 2.5 hectares to spread, with the doors open to the outside world. This space is delimited by a simple fence of plants and trees, and on one side by the Shilcayo river where one can bathe. The context does not thus evoke an environment of forced imprisonment of prison or hospitalization. the pace of everyday life in the Center is marked by the various celebrations of life (birthdays, commitments or vows of drug abandonment, exit celebrations...), the therapeutic process (ritualized sessions of plants and the "diet") and spiritual life (meditation, masses for practitioners, rites of repair...).

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