There is a famous quotation from Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory that is the impetus for this post: “There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.”

Take a moment to probe into the depths of your memory. Which moment from your past stands out as the one that more definitively than any other event “let the future in”?

Consider that moment, that insight, and now ask yourself: “Was the future that arose from the energy of that event one that has uplifted and inspired me or derailed or stymied me?” In other words, did that occurrence push you on track or off track from where you hoped to go in your life?

In the Andean tradition, we might assess our answer to that question in terms of our Inka Muyu, the energetic Inka Seed that represents our Spirit. Our Inka Seed holds within it the fullness of our physical and metaphysical capacities and thus the potential to live the most authentic and unique expression of ourselves. Did the moment that opened the door to a certain kind of future bind you closer to your Inka Seed or distance you from it? Your answer is one worth spending some time both appreciating and investigating.

The word “future” comes from the Latin futurus, which is itself based on the roots fu—grow or become—and esse—to be. When we examine a past occurrence that was pivotal to letting “the future in,” what we are doing is examining who we have become and why we have become the person we are now. We cannot change the past, and we may not want to if we are accepting of who we are now. On the other hand, if that occurrence deflected us from a future we once imagined, longer for, or planned, then there may be nothing more important than acknowledging how our past has adversely influenced the conditions of our present life. Doing so is not to blame ourselves or others, or to wallow in regrets. Rather it is to understand, no matter how dimly or brightly, that the acknowledgement itself of the importance of that past moment resets the clock so that this moment, rather than that past moment, can be the door that opens to a new future. That is the beauty of the future: it unfolds from the now.

Of course, it is not easy to reframe the past, especially if the moment that derailed us from living more fully from our Inka Seed was a difficult or even a traumatic one. We drop into our feelings and call upon our willpower to marshal the intent to do our inner work. The aphorism “If not now, when?” applies. As C.S. Lewis famously said of the relationship between past and future, “You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” There are no shortages of aphorisms, inspirational quotations, and advice about how to change our lives. But, as they say, talk is cheap. To move forward, we connect with our atiy—the energy of “I can do it!”—and our khuyay, our passion for change and growth.

We also bring our attention to our qosqo ñawi, the mystical eye of our belly and the center of our power. This is the energy center from which we most attach to the world. Our attachments to the past often are anchored in our unconscious, and so we may not even be consciously aware of how and why we are attached to something or someone from our past. We might swear we are over “it.” But deep in the shadow of our psyche that event or relationship is influencing what we allow as possible for ourselves. What I know from my own experience and that of others is that if we are not happy with who we are now and what our life is like right now, we will never see a brighter future without first looking into the dim shadows of our past.

Being courageous enough to take a good long look at our wounds or regrets does not mean we revive them or relive the past. Working energetically, rather than psychoanalytically, we can “meet ourselves anew” by seeing that wound both as part of our beingness and as a being unto itself. Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona, a pioneer of narrative medicine, suggests that when we do this kind of inner work, we are encountering our wound as a being who helps us acknowledge the energy of that wound while also allows us to maintain an objective distance from it. In the following quotation, he is talking about illness. I am replacing the word “illness” with the word “wound” in square brackets. “[Our wound] can be conceptualized as one thread that runs through life, just as multiple themes may run through a novel. [A wound] wants to be recognized, for it is not just a theme. It is also a character. It has a life. It has its own story. It has its own spirit. Small miracles can occur when it is recognized. It rejoices when recognized. [A wound] is a kind of person who wants to be encountered.”

We meet our wound as an independent being and allow it to tell its story as the owner of that story. Rather than being ensnared in that story, we listen simply as a witness to and receiver of it. Rather than struggling to set ourselves free from the energy of this past event and our emotional entanglement in it, we listen and hear so that the telling of the story by someone other than us—in this case by the wound itself—might that wound/being to release its attachment to us as we release our attachment to it. In the Andean tradition, this reciprocity is called ayni. What I am suggesting is that we experience this aspect of our past not as an event that has trapped us but one that serves as a springboard to a revisioning of the now and of our future. The process may help us to unleash life-force energy instead of suppress it.

The Andean mystical tradition has practices that ask us to do just that: to light our way forward from a dark or heavy past energy imprint. For example, in the wachay practice we look back at both the light and heavy aspects of our past and release the hold the heaviness has on us through a saminchakuy. We give our heaviness to Mother Earth as a sacred offering. Don Juan has said that wachay, which is a Quechua term that means “to be born,” is the premiere practice for healing our past, for rebirthing ourselves into the now, from which we can walk forward into the future through consciousness choice and will. We become the owners of our stories instead of them owning us.

To empower us to look forward and to catalyze a more glorious future, we have a practice called mallkichakuy. In this practice, we send energy ahead of ourselves, to our potential future, and touch our sixth-level selves. A sixth-level human being is one who is enlightened, who is living fully from his or her Inka Seed. Using the energetic image of a mallki, a sacred tree, we catalyze our own growth. We touch the energy of our possible future sixth-level self, fertilizing ourselves for living one day as a more fully conscious person, one who is whole and healed.

In terms of our mystical body, in the Andean mystical tradition our primary power center for action is the qosqo, the belly or navel area. The human capacity that we develop at this energetic center is khuyay. Khuyay usually is described by my mentor, don Juan Nuñez del Prado, as “passion.” It is not passion in the erotic sense, but is instead a force that motivates us to take action in the world—in both the outer world and our own inner world. Khuyay also is the persistence and resiliency to keep trying to do what we want despite any challenges and obstacles that may arise. Khuyay is a life-force energy that helps us keep moving forward.

Don Juan extends the meaning of khuyay to include what we know about psychology, for, he says, khuyay can be thought of as emotional intelligence. The qosqo, as the power center from which we most interact with the world and our fellow human beings, is the center from which we put out all kinds of seqes—energetic cords of connection. As I indicated previously, it is from the qosqo ñawi that we most connect with the world and attach to events, people, values, beliefs, and so on. Khuyay is the quality of our attachments. We can be in relationship with another person in healthy ways, such as from love and friendship, from caring for that person’s well-being and valuing and respecting their autonomy, and so on. Or we can be attached in unhealthy—or hucha-filled (heavy)—ways. We can be controlling and domineering; we can impose our own needs and wants on others, often in the guise of caring for them, helping them, or even loving them. The same dynamic applies to our beliefs and values. We can be attached to a message imprinted in us from childhood, such as “I am not good enough,” or “I am not lovable.” Or we can be attached to the idea (or expectation) of struggle, disappointment, poverty, isolation, so that we keep acting them out or inviting them into our lives.

As we look back at an influential moment in our past that shackled our future choices, hopes, and dreams, we can bring self-inquiry to what kind of khuyay relationship we have with it. Are our khuyay attachments to that particular past inflection point healthy or unhealthy? Are we attached to that moment so strongly and stubbornly (and usually unconsciously) that it actually seems to dominate our present life and portend the quality of our future life? Are we attached to a past wound because it has become an excuse for our not even trying to realize our dreams? Have we straitjacketed ourselves through perpetual pity for ourselves? Even years or decades after the event, are we still seeking an apology, justice, or even retribution? We can benefit not from analysis so much as from energetic insight. What feelings, needs, and desires are energetic cords binding us to our past and thus preventing us from carrying the torch of new light forward to remake our current life and call in the future that we prefer? Energetically releasing these attachments by whatever means we choose can reset our personal timeline. We can reset the clock to “now” and open a new door that lets in a future more aligned with our Inka Seed.