The goal of spiritual life is not altered states,
but altered traits.
— Huston Smith

I have written many times about hucha—heavy living energy, which only human beings create. Today, I want to look behind the term to tease out nuances of its meaning. I believe this can help us appreciate what hucha is, how we create it, and why our main energy practices address it. I offer a deep-dive class on Quechua mystical terminology and concepts, and one of the terms we examine is hucha. In this blog post I expand on what is discussed in that class.

When the paqos explained to don Juan Nuñez del Prado, who is my primary teacher, what hucha is, they described it as llasaq kawsay, which means “heavy living energy.” Of course, it is not literally heavy. It just feels that way to us, primarily because we are reducing the efficiency and effectiveness of our ayni (which is explained below). To really understand hucha, we must parse several other terms. We start with kawsay, which comes from the root Quechua word ka, which means “to be.” Kawsay refers to existence, to being alive. Thus, kawsay is referred to as “living energy.” The paqos tells us that everything in the created, physical world is comprised of kawsay. In its most refined form as “light living energy,” it is called sami (variously spelled samiy). Kawsay’s and sami’s natures are to flow unimpeded. But we humans can slow down this life-giving and life-empowering energy. That slow sami is called hucha. So hucha literally is sami, just slowed, filtered somehow, or even blocked from flowing through us. We take in less life-force enegy than we could.

The reasons for how and why we block sami, and so create hucha, are varied and beyond the scope of this post. However, core reasons are that we are evolved mammals and we still can be driven by our impulses and survival needs. We may engage in the world and with our fellow human beings in ways that are based in fear, competition, selfishness, and other kinds of unconscious or barely conscious (instinctive) behaviors and emotions. Even when we are engaging from our highest sense of self, this coherent state of being can be upended by all kinds of conscious and unconscious needs, desires, beliefs, and the like, such that we fall out of ayni. Ayni is reciprocity. For our purposes here, we can think of it as the Golden Rule that takes us beyond self-interest to mutuality: instead of attitudes such as “for me to win, you must lose,” we seek ways for everyone to benefit. Ayni is much more complex than that. However, the easiest way to understand why we slow sami down and create “heaviness” for ourselves and others is that we are not acting from ayni.

Ok, so far so good, even though this discussion is by necessity skimming the surface of why we create hucha. But let’s look at the word itself from the perspective of the mundane, by which I mean the common, everyday world. Trying to understand a mystical concept from the viewpoint of a non-paqo can easily can get us off track. But I like to probe into the more mundane definitions of the Quechua terms we use in our mystical practice to get a sense of the fullness of meaning. We must be aware that those mundane definitions usually are analogous and not literally in one-to-one correspondence with the word’s mystical meanings. Hucha is a concept that I think is particularly illuminated by examining its non-mystical, mundane meanings.

Let me say that I have discussed the value of making such correspondences between the mundane and mystical with don Juan. He cautions that I cannot go to Quechua dictionaries and the anthropological literature to find definitions for our mystical terms because the paqos were using many of these terms to mean something different from their more common meanings. This is a caution we must always take to heart. Still, I cannot help but wonder: if the paqos could choose any term they wanted for various aspects of the mystical work, why did they choose a term that is commonly used and that has an already accepted meaning that is different from what they meant by it? I find—and I speak only for myself—that looking at those common meanings does, in fact, help me understand the contexts and even nuances of the mystical use of the term. I often find that the common definition, or what I am calling the “mundane” meaning, of a mystical term provides a world of associations that can be useful and even enlightening to my practice. They help me peek behind the curtain of a language that is not mine, of a mystical cosmovision that originally was foreign to me, and of possible nuances that can help me understand conceptually what it is I am doing when I use many of the practices of the Andean sacred arts in my daily life.

Ok, that is a lot of explanation and more than a few caveats. Let’s get to examining sami and hucha, for we cannot understand one term without looking at the other.

What are the common dictionary meanings of sami/samiy? Sami is defined as good luck, good fortune, happiness, benefit, favor, dignity, contentment, success, and other terms that relate to having well-being. Samiy means benefit, favor, good luck, dignity, and blessing. For me, those definitions reverberate wonderfully through the more abstract meaning of sami as “light living energy.” Kawsay is life, and the goal of life as described by many Andeans is allin kawsay, living a “good life.” Another common term is sumaq kawsay, which in its various meanings describes living a “beautiful,” or “good,” or “amazing” life. So that is our aspiration: to be the owners of sami and live in ayni, and thus to cultivate the most amazing life we can.

Now let’s look at the word hucha. What are its common definitions? Sin, offense, crime, infraction, guilt/guilty, error, fault, transgression. Reducing the flow of sami—creating hucha—reduces our well-being. These terms bring some clarity to the consequences of our creating hucha: We have made some kind of energetic mistake or caused some measure of energetic offense such that we have transgressed the codes of human moral conduct and the universal energetics of ayni. We have reduced our own, and perhaps someone else’s, well-being. It is interesting that the word “hucha” is part of all kinds of Quechua terms relating to justice, law, and even the criminal justice system. As examples, the term hucha churaq means “prosecutor” and hucha hatarichiy means “lawsuit.” From the mystical point of view, I think it is not too much to say that when we create hucha we are at fault or guilty of violating personal, societal, universal, and even energetic “laws.” Hucha (as filtered or reduced sami) weakens our inner equilibrium, lessens our sense of contentment and happiness, and diminshes our dignity and generosity of spirit.

I don’t know about you, but for me, knowing the common “backstory” to the terms sami and hucha brings a lot of “flavor” to their mystical meanings. We all create hucha for our own reasons, most of which relate to our personal shadow wounds, limiting beliefs, emotional proclivities, and such. When we create hucha, we, and not anyone else, have transgressed the law of ayni. That is why we say the Andean mystical tradition is a path of personal responsibility. However, it does us no good to blame ourselves; instead we must be self-aware enough to notice our lack of ayni and the reasons we are creating hucha. Then we can take responsibility for ourselves, and we can use our practices to transform the state of our energy. While there is no moral overlay on energy, we can see how there might be moral overlay on how and why we create hucha—we are all developing human beings and have work to do on ourselves. As don Ivan Nuñez del Prado explains [slightly edited for clarity], “I think hucha is like a [inner] filter. Your personal background, family background, all of that is a filter, [which gets] in the way of the light of your Inka Seed. So, you have a source of light within you and then what comes out will go through the filter, what comes out is a projection of the filter [rather than of your] light.” Our filters are mostly all the unconscious ways we are holding limiting beliefs, living from judgment about ourselves and others, deflecting our pain, projecting out onto others what we refuse to see in ourselves, and running the energy of many other kinds of largely unconscious psychological and emotional dynamics.

As we relate to the world, the state of our own poq’po (think of this as our psyche) is of the utmost importance. We bring self-inquiry to our own state of being, for we can only know the world through our own perceptions. That is why the paqos tell us that what is heavy for you, may not be for me, and vice versa. It is why don Juan says, “If something is heavy for you, you need to trust yourself. It’s heavy for you! Even if your teacher comes to you and says, it feels light. No, it’s heavy for you.”

Reducing our hucha means increasing our karpay: our personal power. Our personal power relates to how easily we can access our human capacities (all of which are held as potentials within our Inka Seed) and how well we use our capacities. Sami and hucha are ways we display and use our personal power. Remember, hucha is sami—life-force energy—although it is slowed, filtered, or blocked. But make no mistake, hucha is a “power” to the same degree that sami is a “power.” Don Ivan provides a good explanation about this: “Power is the capacity to do something. You can use hucha or sami. When you grow, it is good to [reduce] your hucha because you release the [blocking energy of] past mistakes and everything and raise the level of sami in you. Then your actions will be more elevated. But you can do things with hucha. It’s not a moral judgment.”

It’s all energy. What partially, although impactfully, determines the quality of our lives is the proportion of hucha to sami in our poq’po and how we are “driving” either or both of those energies. Our core energy practices are designed to reduce the amount of hucha we have and that we create, and how skilled we are at using our energy in the world. Don Juan reminds us: “You always have the capacity. You can release all the hucha you have. Remember hucha sapa? If you are a hucha sapa, you have a lot of hucha. You focus on your Inka Seed, and you have the power to release it. Your capacity is determined by your Inka Seed, which has no hucha. Your Inka Seed is the place in which you have the potential and capacity to drive the energy.” And this is why so many of our practices—saminchakuy, hucha miqhuy, wachay, wañuy, and others—are focused on reducing our hucha (and thus increasing our sami). By using these practices, we have the means to redistribute our energy by transforming hucha back into its natural state of sami or releasing stubborn hucha to Mother Earth, as she will help us by digesting our hucha and returning it to its sami state. We have spirit assistance and our many energy practices to help us drive energy from our Inka Seed (our highest self), increase our sami, and improve our ability to live a good and happy life—at both the worldy/mundane and spiritual/mystical levels.