The Maestros

Taita Galo Wampiu Amaru Nanki is an indigenous Shuar curandero and Uwishin (Shuar healer), born in the province of Morona Santiago in southern Ecuador, within the Tzantza community. He comes from a long lineage of indigenous Shuar medicine men, and began el camino de Shuar at the age of six, the traditional age at which Shuar children first drink ayahuasca.

In 2003, Galo began his formal work with the master medicines: Ayahuasca, Aguakolla (San Pedro), Chacruna, Tobacco, and Kambo. Through this process, he also began to receive the art of healing and ceremony. In 2006, he was recognized as an Uwishin through rites of passage. In 2010, he was given the staff of power, honored with the responsibility of offering ceremonies, and recognized as a grandfather of medicine. It was at this time that he was baptized with his medicine name, Amaru Nanki.

With over twenty-one years of experience and hundreds of ceremonies behind him, Taita Galo has sat in five years of vision quest and participated in seven years of sun dance, receiving recognition as an ancestral leader and being entrusted with the sacred peace pipe, the Chanupa. His therapeutic specialties include addictions, trauma, PTSD, cancer, and the unknown illnesses that conventional medicine often cannot name.

He travels throughout the provinces, towns, and cities of Ecuador, offering ceremonies, limpias, energetic clearings, exorcisms, home purifications, kambo, sweat lodges, and one-on-one traditional healing. He is a legally documented curandero in Ecuador and is widely known and trusted for his work as an indigenous Shuar Taita. He carries the traditions of his lineage with integrity, humility, and care.

Taita Galo also works within rehabilitation clinics in Ecuador and collaborates with the Ministerio de Salud. His involvement reflects the slow yet meaningful progress being made toward recognizing and validating the therapeutic benefits of ayahuasca and other ancestral medicines. He is among the indigenous healers invited to speak and share their practices at official conferences alongside governing bodies, helping to bridge the gap between traditional healing and Ecuador’s formal health system.

Bob Linde is a Registered Herbalist, Acupuncture Physician, and Doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine, with foundational roots in Western clinical herbalism and decades of practice weaving both traditions together. He is the owner of Acupuncture & Herbal Therapies in St. Petersburg, Florida, and the Founder and Clinical Supervisor of Traditions School of Herbal Studies, where he designed the two-year Chinese and Western Clinical Herbalist Training Programs and oversees weekly student clinic.

Bob’s path to the plants has been anything but linear. Before herbalism, he was a commercial lobster and conch diver, a treasure hunter, a sail and canoe instructor, a wilderness youth counselor, a long-line fisherman, an infantryman in Desert Storm, and a Greenpeace worker. That breadth of lived experience is part of what makes him such a grounded and human teacher. He has stood in many worlds, and he meets his students from that fullness.

Beyond his clinical and teaching work, Bob consults as a product developer for human and animal herbal product companies, lectures regularly at colleges and conferences across the country, and serves on the board of the Florida State Oriental Medicine Association. He has presented at FSOMA, Florida Herbal, Florida Earth Skills, Good Medicine Confluence, and the American Herbalist Guild. He has traveled widely, from Europe to the Amazon, the Galapagos, the Yukon, and the Caribbean, and recently completed twelve episodes of “Sanaciones con Bob Linde” for INTI TV, a series exploring indigenous peoples’ herbal practices.