Jessica Bertram de Sasari

Healer

Born and raised in Germany, Jessica came to Peru for the first time in 1991. She has been married to the son of an Andean highland farmer community for the last 14 years, and now lives in Cusco with her two daughters.

After having made Peru her home country in 1994, she started a dental laboratory and worked as a German teacher at the German Peruvian Cultural Association in Cusco and on occasions as an interpreter for German tourist groups in the rainforests near Puerto Maldonado.

Since 1997 she has been working as a freelance naturalist guide in the rainforests of Manu National Park in the Madre de Dios department in Southern Peru.
During this time she has also served as an ad honorem consultant for Manu`s indigenous Harakmbut and Matsiguenka people on issues related to ecotourism and native communities. Her ever deepening friendships with inhabitants of the native communities that surround Manu National Park have allowed her to submerge herself deeply in their cultures and everyday lives. Her anthropological focus has been on the Harakmbut people and their history and has consisted mainly of collecting the scarce ethnographic material and making it available to the remaining families of individuals depicted on photos and described in texts.

For the last six years, after a life threatening health condition that was healed with the help of traditional medicine, she has been following a strictly traditional Shipibo apprenticeship for becoming an Ayahuasca healer by dieting teacher plants and learning healing songs. Her personal commitment, passionate research and subsequent empiric studies in anthropology, ethnobotany, Amazonian shamanism, ethnopsychology, transpersonal psychology and quantum physics have made of her an expert practitioner who now uses indigenous Amazonian tools for integral healing and personal transformation.

Currently she provides socially and culturally adapted health treatments and advice to individuals from very different social and cultural backgrounds at her home, putting to practice her knowledge and abilities which are constantly and increasingly being requested by Manu`s indigenous people and the Native Federation of the department of Madre de Dios (FENAMAD). She calls her work “trans- and interculturally applied transpersonal ethnopsychology”.

Until today she still is actively engaged in the development of an ecotourism initiative developed by native Harakmbut people on the Alto Madre de Dios river, adjacent to Manu National Park.
Her unpublished works include an ethnobotanical dictionary for the Manu area, the translation of an English novel containing unique historical information on the Harakmbut people.