I ended Part 1 of this discussion about the Inka Seed with a few lines from a Mary Oliver poem. Now, I start Part 2 with lines from another of her poems, which is called “Sometimes.” She writes: “Instructions for living a life: / Pay attention. / Be astonished. / Tell about it.”

For the purposes of our discussion of the Inka Seed, rather than just telling about our capacities and experiences as human beings, I would amend that last line to “Act on it.” For paqos, kanay means not only knowing who we are, but having the personal power to live as who we really are. That means being fully engaged in the world.

As I said in Part I, we are working toward expressing more of the fullness of the self that is held in potential in the Inka Seed. Our personal power—our karpay—is measured by how much of our capacity we have available to use and express right now. There are many Quechua mystical terms that refer to how we put our intentions and capacities into action. They define how we understand the energy dynamics related to our Inka Seed. So, let’s take a look at some of these energy dynamics.

What might first come to mind is the energy dynamic of ayni: the interchanges we make with the living universe, the natural world, other human beings, and more. Ayni often is described as reciprocity: we have a conscious or unconscious intention that we send out into the world and the living universe reciprocates energetically. But intention is only part of the interchange. Ayni is intention applied. To put it another way, ayni is intention followed by action. As don Ivan Nuñez del Prado stresses so frequently: “No action, no ayni.” We don’t just think about calling a friend, we call. We don’t just intend to improve how we engage with someone we don’t really like, we actually make the effort. We don’t just intend to strengthen a relationship with an apu or a ñust’a (or any spirit being), we actively work to cultivate mutual communication.

Once an intention has been put into action, then the energy dynamic continues in that we must be aware that the living universe, the spirit beings, or our fellow human beings will provide a response or feedback. We don’t fixate on watching for that feedback, but we do remain perceptually open so that we can consciously register any feedback. Once we receive that response, we might realize we are being asked to refine our intention and adjust our actions. Then we begin a new cycle of ayni. Ayni involves many aspects of ourselves, but at the heart of all our ayni flows is our Inka Seed.

Ayni asks us to source from our Inka Seed. The whole cycle of ayni requires that we be in dynamic relationship with our personal power, which is another way of saying with our Inka Seed. But how exactly do we get in touch with our Inka Seed?

Let me start by saying that we are always in touch with our Inka Seed. Everything we are right now, we are because we are expressing some of the potential that is available to us. Yet, it helps to be concrete, rather than conceptual, about how we engage our Inka Seed or source from it. This goal requires that we use other kinds of energy dynamics.

The Andean tradition is a path of conscious evolution, so our work always starts with self-inquiry. One concrete way to gauge how well we are relating to our Inka Seed is to bring self-inquiry to how we are using our three human powers. These are yachay, munay, and llank’ay. Here I will talk only about yachay and llank’ay, and for reasons of space limitations the discussion will be rather brief.

Yachay refers to knowing—to thought, reason, logic, intellect. More specifically, it refers to what we learn through personal experience—not just through any experience, but from first-hand experience. Our yachay is not what we learn through second-hand sources such as conversations, books, lectures, YouTube videos, blog posts (such as this one!), and the like. It is what we know because we have experienced it or perceived it directly.

As a consequence, it is obvious that yachay and llank’ay are tightly correlated. Llank’ay is action. You know because you have experienced something. Of course, we can accumulate all kinds of valuable knowledge from secondary sources, but they are not yachay. We may know all kinds of things about starting and running a successful business, but until we actually start and run a business, we won’t know if we have the capacities available to us to be a successful businessowner. Although there are all kinds of factors that affect the success or failure of a business, a major one is our access to our Inka Seed. If we succeed, then that likely means that we have accessed and learned to use the necessary capacities from the vast store of capacities held within our Inka Seed and to capitalize on other factors outside of ourselves that helped support our business. If the business fails, it would be remiss not to bring self-inquiry to ourselves by asking how our lack of ability might at least partially have contributed to the demise of the enterprise.

Both success and failure can be amazing teachers if we use each as feedback about how intention and action work together. For example, sometimes we want something so badly (the intention) that we rush to do it before we are truly capable of doing it. We misjudge our atiy, which is a capacity at the root ñawi (siki ñawi) where we “measure” our power. The Quechua word atini (or in one variation, atinim) means “I can” or “I can do it.” But the truth is that sometimes we cannot do—or are not ready to do—what we set out to do. Sometimes we passionately want to do something, but a barely conscious or completely unconscious belief prevents us from taking action. Or, if we do act, we sabotage ourselves. Perhaps we procrastinate starting a business or we unconsciously undermine our own efforts because somewhere deep down we are running the limiting belief that we are not worthy of success. Each of these dynamics tell us something about how we are in relationship with our Inka Seed. If we go within and pay attention to the flux of energies we are running, we are being shown how we have or have not yet accessed the qualities and capacities of our Inka Seed that are relevant to manifesting a specific intention.

In this context, atiy is how much of our Inka Seed we have so far realized and are capable of using. It is our karpay, our personal power. And personal power is what we are accumulating in our walk through life. We move from mostly unconscious base impulses to directed intention, and ultimately to conscious action. The journey of self-development is the unfolding process of accessing more and more of our Inka Seed’s potential and bringing it through our atiy and out into our lives and into the world.

Self-development itself is a conscious choice, and as such it takes us to the very heart of the Inka Seed, because the Inka Seed is the repository of our will. Will is an energy dynamic. Don Juan Nuñez del Prado explains self-development, especially as relates to atiy and will, this way: “Will in a certain way is the center of the other pathways, according to don Melchor. Will is something conscious. Like the saying, ‘where there is a will, there is a way.’ Will belongs to your conscious mind. Atiy is more from your unconscious, and it is very basic. It is what we call an impulse. An impulse is something very basic. . . . It’s a spark, but it is a tiny spark that comes from a very basic part of you. Yet because of that it can trigger a lot of things. When you use that spark, you can trigger anything! But to move beyond that basic spark, you need another path. This is the will, and it is related to your Inka Seed. The Inka Seed contains all your potential. The Inka Seed is your Spirit, which drives everything—your impulses and everything. It owns your being, your Spirit does. Your potential is everything you can become, everything you can realize in your life. This potential is a driving power in itself. Because this potential [as a thing in and of itself] wants to develop—it is willing to be expressed or manifested. It triggers every possible thing that can happen or be expressed through and by a human being. Through the will of the Inka Seed, you move the living energy. You learn to express what is in you, what is in your own Inka Seed, and to send that out into the world. That is the whole goal of the Andean path—to express your whole self, all that is within you.”

Don Juan and don Ivan call the Inka Seed our inner compass, which is always pointing to true north. We can think of our Inka Seed as our truth-meter, because, as don Juan also says, “Your Inka Seed will always tell you the truth.” Your true north is how you bring yourself to the world:  what you are here to express and contribute. Your true north is different from my true north, or anyone else’s. We are each unique in that way. But the process of discernment of our personal true north is the same for all of us—we perceive it through our body. Remember that our wasi—the house or temple of the self—is comprised of the poq’po (which we think of as the psyche, the mind both conscious and unconscious), the physical body, and our Inka Seed. In don Juan’s words, our Inka Seed is the owner of our wasi. To discern what the “owner of the wasi” is trying to tell us, we listen to our body. The mind informs the body. The body then records and transmits through feelings how our psyche, especially our unconscious, is either aligning us with or deflecting us from our Inka Seed.

It is almost always our psyche that causes us to create hucha. We may be running scripts in largely unconscious ways that undermine what we consciously intend. These scripts can run the gamut from “I am so talented that there is no way I can fail” to “Dad always told me I was a loser, and I probably am.” We have all kinds of limiting beliefs, and this subject is much too complex to do to justice to here. But these are the kinds of energies deep down within ourselves that are difficult or impossible to access directly. We perceive them indirectly. And the body is one of the best ways to read the inner script to reveal how our hucha can steer us away from aligning with the true north of our Inka Seed.

Knowing this, we can now turn all of these concepts and energy dynamics into a practice. By developing a perceptual sensitivity of our body, when we set an intention or are about to take action, we can drop into our body and viscerally feel whether we are in alignment with our Inka Seed. Do we feel inner resonance? That is our Inka Seed pointing to true north. Our truth-meter is pointing to “Yes.” Do we feel inner dissonance? That is a clue that we are acting contrary to how our Inka Seed is telling us to drive our energy. When we feel an inner dissonance, we would do well to bring self-inquiry to our intention and delay any action until we can achieve some measure of insight about what is causing the dissonance. Exactly how inner resonance and inner dissonance feels will vary for each of us. But if we learn to discern the difference between the two states, there will be no mistaking one for the other. So, while it takes time and practice to develop the perceptual sensitivity of how our body is revealing our alignment or not with our Inka Seed, it is well worth the effort.

In terms of the energy practices related to our Inka Seed, a related question is “How do I access and express more of my potential?” The primary answer is that every practice we learn in the Andean tradition is devoted in the most fundamental way to helping us more fully, deeply, and easily access our Inka Seed. We have more than thirty practices that are each designed to help us develop. Each one is in some way helping us open to the greater potential of our Inka Seed. If we know and understand the specific goal of each practice, then we will be able to choose and use the perfect one for a specific situation. And, practicing the entire protocol of the Andean training multiple times will help us develop a greater mastery of our inner state.

Using all of our Andean practices, we initiate the process of phutuy—the flowering of the Self. In this case, it is the flowering of our Inka Seed. The tradition tells us that our practices are enough, but I believe that coupling our energy techniques with some form of insight-related psychological work (such as Jungian shadow work) can supercharge our perceptual awareness and self-development. I have found that using both approaches—energetic and psychological— speeds up the process of increasing our karpay so that we can truly express our kanay. We can more robustly know who we really are and have the power to live as who we really are. After all, kanay—which is the expression of our Inka Seed—not only is the promise of the Andean paqo path, it is the realization of it.