The Sacred Arts of the Andean Mystical Tradition

The promise of the Andean sacred arts is that we come to know ourselves in all our heaviness and all our glory, and that we work toward releasing our heaviness and living our grandeur. Our goal is not that we will leap beyond our humanness, but that we will live more fully, naturally and joyously as whole and healed human beings. And this promise includes not just some of us, but all of us. Andean prophecy foretells the rise of a New Humanity, where we will integrate our action, intellect and love to consciously evolve our species.

As practiced by the Q’ero and other Andean masters down through the ages—and preserved in modern times through don Juan Nuñez del Prado and his son, don Ivan—the mystical tradition is a sober and pragmatic, yet magical and joyous, retraining of the self to divest yourself of heaviness, empower your energy body, and refine your consciousness.

The Art of Being a Paqo

The tradition teaches the “art of energy.” Paqos, (those who practice the tradition) ground their practice in four primary arts.

• The art of remembering who you really are. You are a Drop of the Mystery, and your life is a gift from the living cosmos. In the span of life between the arriving and returning, your primary purpose is to live the fullness of your being. Within you lies the seed of your perfection, and all of the Andean arts are about accessing and growing the seed of the Original Self.

•  The art of being a paqo is to cultivate joy and well-being for yourself and others. The Andeans call their sacred practices pukllay, which means “play” in Quechua. A paqo is a being of joy, at play in the field of living energy.

•  The art of being a paqo is to always be in conscious ayni—energetic interchange—in the cosmos of living energy.

•  The art of being a paqo is to become an ecologist of your energy environment. The three-part training teaches you to master your energy body, working with energies outside your energy bubble, with those at the integration point between outside and inside, and with those already inside your energy body.

Your guide is Joan Parisi Wilcox, author of Masters of the Living Energy: The Mystical World of the Q’ero of Peru and two other books. She has studied the tradition for twenty-seven years, mostly under the tutelage of don Juan Nuñez del Prado, and has been interviewed in documentary films about the tradition and written many magazine articles about aspects of the tradition. Her passion is to share the teachings of the Andean paqos with as much integrity to their original form as possible while acknowledging that we must adapt their use to our modern time and culture. To learn more about training opportunities with Joan, see the “Learn the Andean Sacred Arts” tab on the Home Page and select the subtab “Upcoming Workshops.”

To contact Joan, email her at QentiWasi@gmail.com.