Ewa Franus

Catch Ewa Franus on Do Radio: Where To Next? with Dan Kieran 5th - 11th October 2026.

Ewa Franus is a Polish-born former pharmacist, now based near Winchester in Hampshire, whose work asks what happens when Western science, naturopathy and ancestral healing stop working in separate rooms and start working together. Growing up behind the Iron Curtain in 1980s Poland, in a family marked by war, silence and trauma passed down the generations, she found her lifelines early on: postcards from a distant father, the mountains and caves she explored with her university climbing club, and an archaic singing group whose weekly rehearsals first drew her towards breath and the deeper workings of the psyche. After a Master's in pharmacy and years in her grandmother's tightly controlled family pharmacy, she left for the UK at twenty-seven. There she learned salsa, married, and trained in Naturopathic Nutrition at the College of Naturopathic Medicine in London while still working as a pharmacist.

When her marriage ended in betrayal, Ewa went into therapy and asked herself a question that changed everything: why did I choose this? Ayahuasca, which her mother introduced her to and which she first resisted, showed her how deeply she had been repeating the patterns of her childhood, and that no one was coming to rescue her. A two-year shamanic training in shadow work followed. It ended with a Toltec "recapitulation," revisiting every significant memory of her life inside a wooden box she built herself. It was during that training that she met Kambo, the secretion of the Amazonian giant monkey frog, and found that it eased long-standing health problems, including her autoimmune thyroid condition. She wanted to understand the medicine at its source, so she travelled to the Peruvian Amazon to live with the Matsés people, who have worked with the frog for centuries and harvest it with songs that coax it willingly into their hands.

What she brought home was a conviction that the jungle's way of living, in constant ceremony and connection with nature, can't simply be transplanted into disconnected, traumatised Western lives. It has to be held differently. Through Pink Griffin, Ewa now offers Kambo, conscious connected breathwork, naturopathic nutrition and ceremony, surrounded by careful screening, trauma-informed safety and shadow work: "ancient practices, held with the safety and care Western life calls for." She isn't promising to take life's difficulties away. What she offers is a safe space for guided self-inquiry, where old triggers and patterns can finally be met consciously rather than lived out as fate.

In conversation with Dan, Ewa traces the long road from a secretive pharmacy in Poland to a rainforest in Peru, taking in inherited trauma and Jung's shadow, plant medicine and pharmaceuticals, singing, breathing and salsa, and why real healing starts when we stop waiting to be rescued.