In one of my recent blog posts, “Valuing the Body,” I talked about the importance of the body to the Andean tradition. In this post, I extend that topic to discuss our humanness.

If you have taken a workshop in the Andean sacred arts with Juan and Ivan, or with me, you know that we stress that everything we are learning as paqos is for one purpose—to live fully in the human world with greater well-being.

Why is that goal so difficult to wrap your mind around?

Of course, I am assuming a lot here, so forgive me if you are not a paqo that constantly forgets that! I know I do. And I see in working with people in trainings that it is a point I have to make over and over. It’s so important that I am stressing it again here.

As paqos we are not striving to develop supernatural powers, to overcome the ties that bind us to our bodies in order to live as “spirit beings,” to drop the mind to reach nirvana, to be shamans who travel the multidimensional realms, or to be anything else except to be exactly who we are!

Who are we? Human beings.

That is definitely not a sexy metaphysical marketing statement or enticing advertising angle, but it’s the teaching of the old masters. It’s what Juan, Ivan, I and other teachers of Juan’s lineage teach. You are human being. Be that first! Fully, fully, fully human. Gloriously human.

Instead of seeing yourself as a spiritual being having a physical experience, try flipping that equation on its head and work toward being a consciously evolved physical being who naturally expresses your spiritual nature.  Making that flip makes all the difference in how you engage the practices of the Andean path, because they are all about—and I really mean all about—developing as a human being.

The focus of the Andean path, including the cosmovision, is on the material world. The kawsay pacha is the infinite field of living, animating energy. It expresses itself in the material as Pachamama. Pachamama is not just the earth. It is the entire material universe. (Mother Earth specifically is called Mama Allpa.) Ayni is what drives the evolution of the Pachamama, the material universe, and everything in it, including our own human evolution both personal and collective.

When we learn to “push the kawsay” (influence the energy of the kawsay pacha), all of our focus is on doing so in a way that matters in the material world, and especially in our human lives. We work the energies to cleanse our poq’pos to evolve to a higher level of consciousness here in the body as a human being. We perform hucha miqhuy to improve our relationships. We foster munay (love grounded in will), hampe munay (healing energy), and khuyay (passion) to improve our relationship with ourselves and with others.

Even the spirit beings are material aspects of the Pachamama, the material world. An apu (perhaps not all, but many) is a mountain, such as the Apu Manuel Pinta, into which the local people have invited a great paqo to live after his death. So when we “talk” with certain apus, we are communicating with the energy field of a human being. Likewise, when we tap into the lineage of paqos, we are tapping into the energy field they have left behind in the Pachamama. A khuya is a stone infused with the energy of human affection. Our energetic anatomy (cones, belts, mystical eyes) are integrated into our physical anatomy and impart increased perceptual abilities. The three “powers” are mind (yachay), body/action (llank’ay) and love (munay), all distinctly physical or emotional human expressions.

Our spirit incorporates energetically as the Inka Seed in our human body. According to the Andean mystical teachings, our spirit is our divinity. It is already and always perfect. So there is nothing we have to do with it—except evolve to express it fully as a human being.

All of our work is at the level of our humanness. I don’t know about you, but evolving my humanness is taking a lot of work! That’s why I love this tradition and practice its techniques. They help me evolve as a more conscious human being. They help improve my relationships with others. They help me to more fully engage my immediate environment, nature, and the cosmos on a level both material and energetic. They help me accumulate the personal energetic power to do what I am here to do, as encoded in my spirit.

I invite you to really drop into this core aspect of the teaching. I invite you to eschew the pull of the supernatural, even of the ceremonial, if it distracts you from what matters the most—discovering who you really are and learning to express the fullness of who you really are. You are a human being—and your human life is sacred from the furthest reach of your mind down to the smallest cell of your body. As a paqo, joyously expressing your humanness is your top priority.