According to the Andean tradition, you have a body, soul and spirit. Your spirit is your essence, your original self, your connection with the Mystery. As such, it is perfect. It contains no hucha, ever. Your spirit is encoded in the physical in your Inka Seed.

Your soul is aligned with your mind and human identity. It is the expression of many influences—familial, cultural, social—and is molded by these and other aspects of your human relationships and experiences. Unlike your spirit, your soul can be both heavy and light. When you cleanse your poq’po of hucha and fill it with sami, you are, in effect, getting deeper in touch with your soul and healing or developing aspects of your humanness.

As a paqo you have the energetic tools to live in well-being, but as a human being, you sometimes feel exactly the opposite. Challenges and difficulties brew feelings of  worry, anger, powerlessness, defeat and a whole host of other emotions. At such times, you, like most of us, may lose the feeling of connection with your spirit and experience your soul as awash in chaos. It is at these times that you are most likely to create hucha in your bubble because you constrict your poq’po, pulling it in and closing it off to energetic influence.

But here’s the good news. When your poq’po constricts, it can also squeeze out hucha, rather like you were squeezing dirty water from a sponge. (Although, hucha is not “dirty, ” just heavy.)

What’s more, your poq’po can also propel sami to places within you that lack it. Some Andean exercises, such as tawantin and taqe, have this effect. Energy is propelled “ahead” of you, to places and aspects of the self where you are not yet consciously working. This sami preps your poq’po and soul for cleansing, and helps energetically strengthen you, so the inner terrain is seeded for easier psychological and emotional, and perhaps even physical, healing.

Andean energetics are rarely oppositional. It’s not the case that either you create hucha or you pull in sami. Instead, through certain practices you can create both, even pulling sami directly from hucha (as is done in hucha mikhuy). Remember, hucha is kawsay/sami, just slowed down or blocked. A loss of well-being can also be an opportunity for personal evolution. Andean paqos would remind you that the very fact that you are alive makes you a survivor, and every day you live makes you a winner. The Andean perspective is almost always encouraging and supportive, uplifting and life-affirming, even as the paqos acknowledge the hardships and difficulties of human life.

The Andean view of life and its energetic system helps you to understand that even hardships and challenges are opportunities. They are windows to your inner contradictions, disconnects, ambiguities and incongruities. Energetically, when you bring awareness to your human “soul stuff”—which often is best brought into high relief by difficulties—you not only can squeeze out hucha, you also open space within yourself for more sami. Thus you can actually facilitate increasing both your lightness and your personal power by facing your challenges consciously and energetically working them.

Maybe this is the Andean equivalent of the mystical/spiritual adage to “Go into your pain.” As a paqo you have plenty of tools to help you negotiate this landscape consciously and skillfully: saminchakuy, saiwachakuy, hucha mikhuy,  despachos and misha work. You have access to the spirit beings. And you have your qawaq abilities: your clear-seeing through your seven energetic and mystical eyes (if you have been through the Ñawi K’ichay and Chunpi Away  karpay, which opens the ñawis and weaves the chunpis into a coherent system). While your physical eyes and emotional eyes may be seeing only pain, defeat and challenge, your mystical eyes are seeing the play of hucha and sami, they are witnessing the possible faster germination of your Inka Seed, and they are recording the victory that comes with greater self-revelation and self-awareness.

So as paqos, while neither you nor I may be ready to say “Hooray for this challenge!” we also are prepared to call our challenges opportunities, and to seize them as gateway energetic experiences to further our soul’s development.