In many posts I have talked about being “who you really are.” That phrase sounds rather New Age, somewhat ambiguous, even a bit hokey.  I mean, how can you be anything other than who you are? Truthfully, you can’t. The key word is “really.” Who you are right now can be spot-on true to your soul and spirit. Or it can be a jigsaw puzzle creation of influences that have little to do with your soul and spirit. You can literally be the creation of what others want you to be—succumbing to the pressures of parental, social, religious, cultural, professional or other expectations, caving in to the routine of what you’ve always known or what demands the least effort of you, deferring goals to the expediency of current circumstances, sacrificing unexplored capacities because of self-delusions of inadequacies. If that is the case for you, then you are not likely living as “who you really are.”

I remember a dream I had back in 2001, while I was in the Amazon jungle for three weeks. I was barefoot pushing a shopping cart through a big-box store. I knew I had to fill my cart, but there was nothing I wanted or felt I needed. So I pushed the empty cart out to the parking lot. Suddenly, all these people showed up. They came at me from every direction, not threateningly, but certainly purposefully. They started putting things in my cart until it was filled to almost overflowing. As the pile grew, I felt more and more frustrated, because there was nothing anyone was putting in my cart that I wanted or chose but I felt helpless to prevent the deposit into my cart.

To me this dream is about identity. Who am I? After self-scrutiny, I came to admit that my life was mostly a response to my insecurities. I was someone who tried to please family, coworkers and friends, and to fulfill my expectations of what I thought I should be in response to society, media, spirituality, and so on. I was a jigsaw puzzle and I felt most of the pieces of me had been pushed into place with little self-consciousness, despite my years of spiritual and shamanic work. I was only sure of one thing—I was not “who I really am.”

It has taken me fourteen years to become more of who I really am. It has been only in the past three or four years, and especially during the past year, that I feel I have stripped away many of my delusions and illusions and had the courage to be “me.” And what a difference that has made!

I suspect that the same struggle to be your “authentic” self is true for many of you.

I acknowledge that “who I really am” is not static. Life moves, and the “I” moves along with it—and vice versa. The dramatic movement toward greater authenticity comes with the reversal in who is leading and who is following. Before, life moved and I followed, often unconsciously, or with resistance, or because I was too afraid or unsure of myself to chart my own course. Now my “I” leads, and my life responds accordingly. And that makes all the difference.

Who you really are is encoded in your Inka Seed. Don Benito said that at the moment your father’s sperm and mother’s egg joined, the animating force of the universe reached out into the cosmos and pulled a Drop of the Mystery down and into that fertilized egg. That Drop of the Mystery is you. Truly unique. One of a kind. Compete and whole, with everything you need within to be “who you really are.” You already have everything you need to express your deepest, most sacred nature and to live your one-of-a-kind life.

The question is if you are ready to believe that, and then to claim it and realize it. This alchemical process of transmuting the lead of “almost but not quite who you really are” to the gold of “who you really are” is not a science, but an art. It’s not a single formula that everyone can follow to a guaranteed result, but a personal journey of learning to know, trust, honor, and express your Drop of the Mystery. As such, your journey’s timetable is unique to you. It may take ten hours, ten months, ten years.

For most of us, our Inka Seed lies dormant within, waiting for us to fertilize it, so it can germinate, grow, and flower. Andean practices help us to nurture it to reveal the full bloom of beautiful, stupendous, amazing, incredible you. What more important or valuable “work” is there than to recover the memory of who you really are and then to live it? Like me, it might take almost sixty years for your Inka Seed to flower, but I can testify that it is worth the wait. . . .

“Gettin’ good players is easy. Gettin’ ’em to play together is the hard part.”

—Casey Stengel

The modern world is one of connectivity. Even if you are sitting alone at your computer, you are connected with others through cyberspace. Our “group”—in the Andes the ayllu—is ever expanding. But even as our social connections multiply, our social energetics may stay static. So I ask you to take some time to think about how the Andean practices can help you make the most of your connectivity in all its manifestations.

Whether you are physically present with a group or only in energetic connection, your energy affects the group bubble, just as the group bubble, and the individual members’ energies in the bubble, affect you. There are myriad levels of ayni exchange going on. Attending consciously to these group dynamics supports both your well-being (see my last post) and the group’s.

We are all familiar with the various types of group dynamics. The feeling of resistance as you join an already formed task group at work. Or, alternatively, the welcoming energetic embrace of that group. The group where one person emerges as leader, either competitively dominating the group or, alternatively, supporting communal cooperation. The various relational dynamics are almost limitless. But your tools for dealing with them are clear-cut.

First, when in a group dynamic, even if that is just with one other person, be aware of the relational dynamic as seen through Andean eyes. Upon first meeting, tinkuy occurs. This is the energetic touch, the first meeting of energy body to energy body. It happens between you and each individual in the group as well as between you and their combined energies (the ayllu poq’po).

Second, within an instant of that energetic touch, you are flooded with information, and as a consequence you segue into the next stage of the interchange: tupay. This is the sizing up, and we all do it. You consciously or unconsciously check out both the individuals in the group and the group as a whole, assessing them in relation to yourself—your knowledge, power, looks, status, and more. Usually this competitive or judgmental place is where you stop in your energy dynamics. But the Andean tradition would ask you to continue to the third step in the exchange, the taqe, or union.

If you move to the taqe stage, which is an energetic perceptual stance of the fourth level, you not only seamlessly and amicably join your energy to the group’s, but by doing so you add to its coherence. If you are superior in your abilities, you humbly and tactfully share what you know so that others can achieve your level of knowledge or skill. And you graciously learn from others. You lead or participate by example, fostering communication and cohesion. You eschew becoming competitive or combative while also not being falsely humble or passive. You are a team player, mentor, facilitator and supporter. You allow space for others to contribute and shine. Taqe is about joining energies so that everyone reaches the “top of the mountain” together.

In fact, if (or when) you reach the taqe stage, then the energy can shift again into pukllay, which means play. You and the members of the group flow with joy, lightheartedness, camaraderie. Think of a group of children engaged in play—time stops, creativity flows, effort transforms into effortlessness. Wouldn’t it be lovely to be part of a group that has reached this energetic state?

Another perceptual tool you can use to foster a group’s well-being is to discern the group’s masintin and yanantin dynamics. Remember, masintin is an energy that is similar to yours and yanantin is energy that is dissimilar. You will have multiple masintin and yanantin flows each person within the group and with the group as a whole, and they with you. By being clear-seeing about these types of energy flows, you can deal with them and so head off creating any hucha.

Remember that incompatible energy says nothing about the other person or persons. It is not a condemnation or judgment about them. It is simply a realization that your energy is not flowing in complete ayni with others’ energies. Incompatibility can create hucha, but it doesn’t have to.

To transform any incompatible energy into compatible energy, you can use hucha mikhuy, the deep form of cleansing that is actually an “eating” and “digesting” of hucha. You work through your qosqo with individuals in the group or the group as a whole, taking the energy into your qosqo, where you filter the sami from the hucha (that’s right, you can get sami from hucha!), pulling the sami up into your bubble and feeding the hucha down to Mother Earth. Feeling the split stream of energy is a marker that you are performing hucha mikhuy properly. However, one word of caution. The masters cautioned that you should learn and practice hucha mikhuy carefully and in a specific way before using it on someone or a group with which you are having difficulty. You start with someone close to you emotionally, then practice on someone emotionally neutral, then someone with whom you have a minor difficulty, and only then do you work the “hard cases” in your life. Please take this caution to heart!

Our practices as paqos are about getting along with everyone. That doesn’t mean we give up our individuality, lose our voice, squelch our opinions. . . . It means we show up in our personal power utilizing all three of the core human energetics—munay (love and will), llank’ay (action), and yachay (intellect)—while allowing everyone else the space to share their humanness as well.

The way I have described the core goal of the Andean mystical tradition is that it is a path of well-being. I have described a paqo as a person of joy. But saying that implies no Pollyanna sentiments. This is a simple but sober path whose foundational abilities are being in conscious ayni and cultivating qaway—the ability to see reality as it really is. Well-being rides on the wave of our mystical seeing and knowing.

One of the best ways to understand well-being is to make a distinction with what seems like a synonym—happiness. But they are different, and to equate the two is a mistake.

You can be in well-being and not be entirely or even mostly happy. But if you are in well-being, you accept what you feel in the moment for exactly what it is. So you maintain your well-being, even while you acknowledge your current unhappiness.

Happiness or unhappiness is a state of mind. Your state of happiness fluctuates day by day, even hour by hour or moment by moment. I’m happy when I eat a chocolate-covered doughnut, and then, inevitably,  an hour later I chastise myself for my lack of dietary discipline. But whether I indulge or not—and my transitory feelings about that decision—has nothing whatsoever to do with my state of well-being.

When you are in well-being, you are able to ride the waves of emotions, feelings, changing circumstances and such without losing your core energetic coherence. When you are in well-being, you allow kawsay—even the kawsay that expresses itself within you as unhappiness—to flow through you without allowing it to get stuck and become hucha. Your well-being is Teflon—everything slides off it.

Well-being is an indication of personal power. In the Andean tradition, personal power is your ability to see reality as it really is and to take action—to have the energy and clarity of perception to do what you want when you want  without creating hucha.

It takes effort to maintain a stable core of well-being. Think of well-being as a muscle. Just as you have to train your muscles to make them stronger and more capable of undertaking greater effort and action, you have to work to maintain your energetic coherence to solidify well-being within. The more you cleanse your energy bubble of hucha (by doing saminchakuy), the greater your ability (personal power) to maintain your well-being no matter what is going on around you or what you feel in the moment emotionally.

Well-being is rooted in your core because it reflects the state of your poq’po. You can have a weak core or a strong core. Cleansing hucha from your poq’po strengthens your core. As a result, your sense of well-being becomes more and more stable. Over time, it goes from lasting for twenty minutes to lasting two hours, then two days, then two months . . . until your natural state is one of well-being, no matter what emotions you may be feeling or circumstances you are experiencing.

As you generate less hucha, you naturally tend to be both in greater well-being and happier. You flow with life more easily, you understand yourself more deeply, you have more clarity of mind and vision.

Your ability to see through your seven ñawis—the eyes of the chunpi belts—is intimately related to well-being. When you are qawaq—can see with your seven mystical eyes—you are able to accurately perceive our entire being—all you have experienced and felt. You not only can better see who you really are, but you can own who we really are with courage and clarity. You are freed from having to repeat past heavy patterns or mistakes, and you can release their energetic imprints. You perceive less through the lens of self-illusion and enjoy heightened self-awareness.

To recap, well-being isn’t just a word or concept. It’s an energetic consequence of bringing coherence to your poq’po. Now, doesn’t knowing that motivate you to keep up with your daily saminchakuy practice?

When I was sharing the tradition recently in southern California, we talked about the misha (in Spanish, mesa) and hayway (in Spanish, despacho). How do you use the mesa? How often and for what  purposes do you offer a despacho?

I shared the traditional teachings with the group and then offered my own view and experience about these questions by saying that eventually—as you work the kawsay through ayni, as you cleanse and empower your poq’po, as you consciously evolve and refine your awareness and, by extension, your intentions—you become a living mesa. You become a living despacho.

What I mean is that you reach a stage when you are always aware of your ayni exchanges with the world and the cosmos. Your frame of reference shifts from the narrower focus of the physical and psychological to the larger focus of the purely energetic. Thus, you are more frequently acting from personal power and always in conscious ayni with the kawsay pacha.

I use the term “always” reservedly. To be in an ever-present state of conscious refined ayni is to be a sixth-level being. None of us is. But we can aspire to be “always” in conscious ayni by being in pretty darn good ayni most of the time!

Here’s why your poq’po can become (and, really, already is) a living mesa or living despacho. The mesa is not your power, but a symbol of your power. The Quechua word “misha,” the ancient name for the mesa, means symbol or sign. If the mesa is not your power but only a symbol of it, then what is and where is your power?

In your poq’po, which is the very essence of your Self.

Therefore, your personal power is commensurate with the coherence of your energy body, according to its proportion of sami to hucha.

The primary way paqos use their mesas is to honor the spirit beings by blowing through their mesa to make a connection and offer themselves energetically as brother or sister to a being of the kawsay pacha. This act is like a handshake. It’s not your hand that means anything, it’s the warmth of your touch, the energy you reveal to another according to the quality of your handshake.

The other use of the mesa is mishachakuy. Chakuy means “action.” Two ways the paqos take action with their mesa is 1) to transfer the lineage (called masichakuy), by putting the mesa on your head and energetically connecting you with their teachers, and 2) to cleanse hucha or empower another’s poq’po. They run the mesa over someone, in a downward motion, to perform saminchakuy through their mesa, moving the hucha to Mother Earth. Or they move it up over the body, in saiwachakuy, to empower the person’s poq’po by pulling up sami from Mother Earth.

But you don’t need the actual mesa to do any of these things. Your power is your energy, so you can simply use your hands, your breath, or even pure intention to transfer the lineage or to cleanse hucha or empower someone. In fact, that is exactly the skill we work toward on this path—to need nothing but our energy, our munay, our personal power and our intention to push the kawsay. Ideally, this work is invisible. No one will ever know you are doing it, because there is no outward sign that you are.

In the same way, we can become living despachos, always establishing through our purely energetic and intentional ayni exchanges our relationship to the spirits. The only requirement for a despacho is that it be authentic: authentically full of love or despair (or whatever feeling is authentic to that moment and the purpose of that offering), authentically full of the intention to attract something or release something, authentically full of honor and gratitude. Ayni, like prayer, is a purely energetic interaction with the spirits or God. Our intention doesn’t need to take an outer form, although it is always gratifying to offer our beauty through an outward form such as a despacho. We just shouldn’t confuse the outer with the inner.

There are other ways we can become living mesas and living despachos, but my point is that your goal on the Andean path is not to accumulate the trappings of a paqo but to live as one.

To live as a paqo means always being aware of how everything is ayni. Your very life is an ayni with the universe, so you are always already a living mesa and despacho. As you take that to heart, you can really make your practices count by working in ways that refine who you are, without getting trapped by or fooled about the meaning and purpose of your tools or the ceremonies you may use.

When you shift your awareness from the outer to the inner, you will know that your energy and intentions are your true tools, and your very life is a ceremony, moment by moment by moment.

Is there more than one Andean mystical tradition?

Absolutely.

As I travel around the country teaching the Andean tradition as I know it and practice it, I have had the honor of meeting wonderful “paqos in training” (of which I consider myself one, as there is always more to learn and we are always deepening our practice). However, over and over I have come across a potential stumbling block to the tradition. It’s the elephant in the room that few people seem willing to discuss openly. Not doing so, to my mind, is third-level thinking, and as paqos we are working to accumulate the personal power to evolve to the fourth level. So I would like to open a fourth-level discussion about this elephant in the room. I invite your comments and questions.

What’s the elephant? Feelings of confusion about what the “real” Andean tradition is or if there even is such a thing. Feelings of competitiveness between some organizations and individual teachers, and among their students.

Let me give you examples. I have run into or heard of situations where teachers of this tradition refused to alert their students that I or another teacher was in the area because what we teach is different and they apparently feel a need to protect their turf or their students’ ability to handle alternative perspectives of the tradition. I have run into a student or two who walked out of a training because what I was saying or doing was too different from what their primary teacher had taught them. These are only two of the many ways the undercurrent of fear, ownership, competitiveness and just plain bad juju is flowing through the community.

At one time these kinds of behaviors bothered me. They no longer do. Because I have come to know, as I hope you have or will, that this tradition is not mine or yours, it is ours.

There is a “flavor” of the tradition that tastes good to each of us, so we choose to partake of it. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a tradition that comes in 21 flavors of frosting, as long as the cupcake remains a cupcake.

In every tradition, if it is to remain a living tradition, teachers have to walk a fine line between preserving the integrity of the tradition and making it their own, expressing it through their own personalities, strengths, understandings, preferences and such. Different teachers emphasize different aspects of the tradition. There is nothing wrong with this. It is surely true of the paqos of Peru. I have worked with enough of them to know that the same concept can come across differently according to the paqo offering it. So variations are not something that are unique to non-Peruvian teachers of the tradition.

As a living tradition, the sacred work changes over time. While the fundamentals may remain the same, new practices may be created even as old ones die off. It is a fool’s view to think that a tradition can or should remain static and, thus, unchanged. Like kawsay, the living energy whose natural state is flow (and which becomes hucha when it stagnates), the Andean tradition is a living tradition.

These and other factors all come into play when you choose or assess a teacher, so I would suggest that it serves you well to remember that his or her teaching is only one presentation of a multi-faceted living tradition. All of us as paqos are striving to accumulate the personal power to evolve consciously to the fourth level. The fourth level is where we accept our experiences without having to judge them against others. We don’t believe we have “the one and only truth,” so we don’t have to defend it and we feel no need to proselytize. We can find “gold” in every vein of the tradition we mine.

That said, as paqos striving to see “reality as it really is,” we also need to make conscious choices and understand that restriction can cause hucha. For teachers, it is important to let students know of the variations, cross-cultural add-ons, and personal flourishes that are expansions beyond the core tradition. Without such an understanding, students are left confused about what is the cupcake of the tradition and what is the frosting. Fourth-level teaching means cultivating students who “graduate” and go off to new endeavors, further explorations, other teachers, and even become teachers themselves. Fourth-level teachers empower their students, they don’t enslave them. And certainly they don’t need to shield them from alternative views or hinder their personal choices.

As students, it behooves us to choose the teachers and presentations of the tradition that most resonate for us at the time, according to the condition of our energy body, without the wholesale dismissal of other offerings. As students we need to be aware that our current teacher may be perfect at the moment but may not be the best teacher for us two years from now. One teacher is not replacing the other; both are to be honored for their contribution to our personal evolution.

I speak for Juan and Ivan when I say that we love this tradition, and we believe it is the most efficient in terms of energy work and the fastest path to accumulating the personal power to live with greater joy and well-being. We believe we are in the dawning stages of the birth of a New Humanity, and the Andean tradition is front and center in helping foster this evolution. So we want you to learn the tradition, from whomever you want. We want you to share it, with whomever you want. We are honored if you learn from us, but we don’t have any judgment if you don’t. Mostly, we want you to be clear-eyed about the choices you make and why, and we urge you to aspire, as we do, to the fourth-level perception that fear, jealousy, competition, control and restriction serve none of us. Most importantly, they don’t serve the Andean mystical tradition.

So what’d’ya say? Shall we agree to kick the elephant out of the room?