The minister who could not stay
He had been a quiet politician — uncommon, friends still say — and a more-than-competent one. He held the second-largest portfolio in his government, oversaw the modernisation of two state agencies, and was, by most accounts, on a trajectory toward something larger. Then, between one Tuesday and another, he resigned without precedent and without a public reason.
"I had stopped being able to listen to anything that wasn't already an answer," he said later, in a 2024 conversation in Quito. "In politics you make a kind of armour out of your certainty, and the armour stops being separable from the body. I felt the body underneath it and decided to find out who was wearing it."
What he did with the next six months he has discussed only sparingly. He travelled. He read more poetry than briefings. He met, by an introduction he describes as "almost embarrassingly improbable," a Shipibo curandera named Olinda Pérez Mori. In June 2017, in a thatched maloca two days' boat from the nearest road, he drank ayahuasca for the first time.
The apprenticeship
What he did next was not, in his telling, a conversion. It was an apprenticeship. He returned to Pastaza four times in the following year, each time staying longer. He learned icaros — the medicine songs of the Shipibo lineage — slowly and out of order, the way a foreign student learns a language. He spent thirty-two days, in 2018, with a Wachuma keeper above 3,000 metres in the Peruvian Andes, where the medicine of San Pedro is taken in long sun-side ceremonies that work, he says, "on the body the way ayahuasca works on the unmade self."
By the autumn of 2018, he had taken the unusual step (for a non-indigenous practitioner) of being formally invited by his curandera to begin holding ceremonies on his own. He bought a small parcel of forest deep in the Ecuadorian Amazon. He paid local builders, in cash and in instalments, to put up the maloca that still stands there. He held his first retreat that December, with seven guests: three Russians, two Romanians, two Israelis. He has not closed the doors since.
The framework, called S2S
What Víctor brought to the work, and what makes it unusual, is the integration model he calls S2S — short for self-to-self. It is the framework through which the medicines and the ceremonies and the integration sessions all relate to each other. He developed it across 2019 and 2020, sitting almost daily with three psychologists and two priests, all of whom had attended his retreats and stayed to think alongside him.
S2S is not a wellness brand. It is a sequence: screening, ceremony, integration, and lineage. Its premise is that the medicine works on a relationship between two parts of the same person — the part who lives the day, and the part who already knows what the day is for — and that the work of integration is to keep that relationship from collapsing back into one part once the medicine has gone.
By the end of 2024, he had held more than nine thousand ceremonies. More than 1,200 people had completed his three-tier practitioner certification. The course is now taught in Bucharest, Tel Aviv, Berlin, and (most recently) New York.
What he is now
He is in Ecuador roughly nine months of the year, in Bucharest two, and travelling — to teach, to sit with practitioners, to visit the curanderas who continue to be his teachers — for the rest. He speaks Romanian, Russian, English, and a working Spanish. He is fifty-eight. He cooks the meals at the retreat himself, often, and is unapologetic about the fact that "the medicine has made me someone who would rather peel a yucca than write a press release."
The retreat itself has remained small by design — two cohorts of thirty per month, no more. He has refused, twice, to take outside investment, on the grounds that scale is the thing that broke the politics he left.
"I'm not in the business of changing lives," he said when asked, with mild irritation, what his thesis is. "I'm in the business of holding the room while life changes itself. Which is, it turns out, very close to what a good politician does. And what almost no politician is allowed to do."
