Elders from Poland

Darius Ślusarczyk is a cultural bridge-builder, a Medicine Man and founder of OneRiver.pl - a long-standing initiative, created over fifteen years ago, dedicated to supporting Indigenous cultures and communities while cultivating respectful relationships between ancestral wisdom and contemporary life.

 

His path began in the 1990s with deep immersion in Afro-Cuban musical and spiritual traditions in Cuba, where sound, ritual, and community became his first teachers. What began as a study of music gradually revealed itself as a spiritual apprenticeship, shaping his understanding of rhythm as medicine and gatherings as a living social fabric. Years of travel and work across multiple continents followed, culminating in an independent journey through Latin America in 2008 that marked a decisive turning point and full commitment to the shamanic path.

 

A formative period of several years in Colombia, beginning in 2009, gave rise to the vision that would later become OneRiver.pl. From this foundation, Darius has patiently cultivated a strong, multi-generational community spanning Europe and the Americas as a living network rooted in practice, relationship, and continuity.

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For over fifteen years, Darius has worked in close apprenticeship with his teacher, Taita Florentino Agreda, supporting the growth of a dedicated community in Poland. He has also collaborated intimately with the Piaroa Indigenous community of Venezuela under the guidance of Abuelo Juan Bolívar, sharing extended time in ceremonial, communal, and everyday life since 2018. These relationships were build through long-term presence, service, and trust.

 

His work is grounded in responsibility to the lineages he walks with, and in the understanding that ceremonial knowledge is not owned, but carried through relationship, discipline, and accountability. Darius has received blessings to carry and facilitate ceremonial work in service to a wider community. He holds this responsibility with humility, ongoing supervision, and fidelity to the traditions and elders who entrusted him with this role.

 

Rooted in a European cultural perspective and deeply aware of the complexities and fragmentation of modern Western life, Darius serves as a bridge between the Indigenous cultures of the Americas and contemporary Western society. His approach is further informed by Buddhist and Taoist traditions, which he integrates as complementary paths for understanding mind, nature, impermanence, and ethical presence.

 

He regularly facilitates retreats, gatherings, and workshops in South America, the United States, England, France, Portugal, and Poland, creating ceremonial spaces devoted to embodied learning, intercultural dialogue, and profound inner transformation. His connection with indigenous communieties led him to organising annual journeys through indigenous territories that are open for those who want to learn and experience culture at their roots. Fluent in English, Polish, and Spanish, and an experienced international facilitator, music remains a central thread of his work as a diagnostic tool that supports listening, regulation, and healing.

 

What distinguishes Darius’s work is his capacity to hold ritual depth without mystification, discipline without dogma, and tradition without cultural appropriation - offering a grounded, ethical, and relational approach to ceremonial practice in a globalized world.

 

Darius is also a member of the Church of the Sun Worshippers, a modern pantheistic spiritual community rooted in the understanding that the Divine and the Universe are one. Within this worldview, Nature is experienced as a living expression of sacred presence, and the Sun is honored as both symbol and guide of the life-giving force that connects land, people, and spirit.