Juan Nuñez and his son, Ivan, teach that the Inka Seed and heart (the qori chunpi and sonqo ñawi) have no hucha. Therefore, there is no need to ever “clean” these areas. They are pure sami, and so while you can bring more sami to them for additional empowerment, you never have to clean them.

As paqos we have no problem understanding that the Inka Seed is pure sami. After all, it is our connection with Wiraqocha, or God, or whatever you call the metaphysical first cause of the universe. It is our link with our divinity and encodes our fullest potential, and as such it  always has been and always will be pure, no matter what we do as human beings in the course of our lives.

But the teaching that the heart center has no hucha has met with resistance by some of the students learning the tradition in my classes. After all, who has not experienced heartache or heartbreak? Who does not carry the hucha from failed relationships and emotional hurts of all kinds? This teaching also has caused quite a bit of confusion among those who are healers or work in healing capacities with clients. They know, as do most of us, that a lot of what ails us physically finds its roots in our emotions. How can we not have hucha in our heart center when we are so burdened, consciously or unconsciously, by our emotional baggage?

When Juan and Ivan recently visited me here at my home for a few days, I took the opportunity to clarify this issue with them.

The confusion arises because we all have our emotional scars—some wounds healed and some not—and we are used to associating these emotions with the heart center. In so many Western and Eastern traditions, the heart is the repository for our emotions: love, hate, admiration, jealousy, joy, disappointment, and on and on.

But this is not true for the Andean mystical tradition. In this tradition:

• The heart center is the repository of our feelings.
• The qoqso is the repository of our emotions.

What’s the difference between feelings and emotions?

Feelings are those high-level states of consciousness that are beyond the circumstances of the purely human. They are states of being that include love as agape, joy, generosity, justice, compassion, empathy and so on. Emotions, in contrast, are our individual responses to life circumstances and relational interactions: love as eros, happiness, satisfaction, contentment, worry, rejection, envy, approval, disgust, and so on. I think you can easily see the difference—and that makes all the difference to understanding your poq’po.

The feelings are generated at the level of the Inka Seed and sonqo (heart). Emotions are responses from our gut level, our qosqo. This is the center from which we engage the everyday world, from which we send out seqes that connect us to places and people, and through which we exchange energy with them. It is the place of kinetic action, which includes that often volatile flux of our emotions. Emotions arise in reaction to circumstances and behaviors and are our reaction to and interpretation of them. They tend to be easily influenced by what we are experiencing and they change over time. Emotions, thus, are a major generator of hucha.

Emotions as hucha can affect many of our centers. When our words create hucha, we may accumulate that hucha at our throat (kunka chunpi). When our emotions deplete us of personal power, we may accumulate hucha in both our qosqo and siki (qori chunpi and yana chunpi). But we never accumulate hucha at the heart center or Inka Seed. They are generators only of munay. And while we may not be living fully from munay, we nonetheless have these energetically pure centers by which to generate it.

So when we seek to cleanse ourselves—realizing that hucha is not bad or dirty but only kawsay that is slowed down—we must go to the centers where hucha accumulates, which in the case of emotions generally means the qosqo, although it may be any of the other centers (excluding the qori chunpi and sonqo).

It will be interesting to see how this insight between feelings and emotions might change your approach to cleansing your poq’po. Perhaps you will see progress with emotional hucha that has until now been intractable. When you work on the centers that really matter—especially the qosqo—perhaps you will find your well-being radically increased. As interesting will be the effect in clients for those who work in the healing fields. If you are working at the level of the heart with clients, perhaps your effectiveness at helping them activate their self-healing capacities might be enormously increased through this shift of awareness and focus to the qosqo as their emotional energetic center. I would love to hear from you about this!