Our dramas are an indestructible part of who we are. No matter what we do or how hard we try, we cannot get rid of them. The only choice we have to make is whether we are going to use them or they are going to use us.
—Debbie Ford, The Secret of the Shadow

If you view the spiritual realms through rose-colored glasses, then a life still plagued with disappointments, difficulties and challenges must mean you are doing something wrong. You are not deserving enough, evolved enough, energetically coherent enough, or sufficiently clear enough in your intention to create a life of love, passion, fulfillment, joy, abundance, or whatever a “perfected” life looks like to you.

Well, no, not really. . .

As a paqo, you certainly know that the kawsay pacha is overly abundant and you can manifest what you want according to your capacity for personal power and the clarity of your ayni exchanges. But like all of us, you are still human—and not a sixth-level human yet. As a third- or fourth-level human being, you are far from perfected. As a paqo, you have energy practices to reduce your heaviness—including emotional dramas and life’s challenges—to a minimum, but you still have them. As a qawaq, you can use your physical and mystical vision and perceptions to learn to see reality as it really is, and that means owning the disappointments, difficulties, strife, and even traumas that you experience. After all, if you don’t see them, you can’t put your practices to work to shift them (or rather, to shift your own energy).

Being a dedicated paqo means using what you know. Once you “see” (qaway), then you can understand (yachay) and act (llank’ay). You can do saminchakuy, saiwachakuy, hucha miqhuy, call on the assistance of a helper spirit, and use many other practices to improve your inner and outer reality. But “seeing” is the foundation stone upon which all your practices rest.

What is there to “see” about the difficulties in your life? Certainly not personal failure. Rather, personal opportunity.

Debbie Ford, in her book The Secret of the Shadow, likens each of us to a recipe. You have different ingredients—traits and life experiences—in your recipe than I do. My ingredients are perfect for me, as yours are for you. From a spiritual viewpoint, each and every ingredient is necessary to your living your life mission and fulfilling your promise in this life. Therefore, if you can see everything as necessary to your being who you really are and growing to the fullness of being, then you will reject nothing. You will shift your perspective and embrace life’s challenges (inner and outer) as opportunities to more deeply understand yourself and evolve your consciousness.

Author and human potential guru Napoleon Hill concurs with Ford. He wrote, “Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.” Finding the benefit is what escapes most people. They just can’t see what good can come from pain or trauma. But from a spiritual perspective, there is always a compensatory benefit or gift.

In your work as a paqo, what Ford and Hill are talking about is the energy dynamic of yanantin. Yanantin energies are dissimilar energies. Good-bad, male-female, friend-enemy, boss-employee, conservative-liberal, and so on. While many people see only opposition, as a paqo you learn to see complementarity. Yanantin does not mean “either-or” but “both-and.” By examining the yanantin energy of your difficulties and challenges (admittedly, this often is easier from hindsight), you can follow Ford’s and Hill’s advice to see the drama or trauma for what it is—something hurtful or challenging or painful—but also to seek the compensatory gifts—the hidden opportunities—in the difficulty. Let’s look at a few examples.

As a young boy, your father drilled into you that boys can’t be sissies. You had to be tough, take your lumps like a man, not back down from a challenge, always push ahead. As a result, you learned to be bold, outgoing, even a risk taker. The yanantin dynamic may play out in myriad ways. We’ll look at one possibility. The downside is that your father’s programming may have caused you to incorporate untrue, unrealistic, and unhealthy beliefs about manliness into your unconscious that hamper your emotional growth and take a lot of self-work to transform. The compensatory gift is that as an extrovert and a risk taker, when you chose sales as a profession, you persisted, met every challenge, and used your competitive edge to be among the top salespeople in your company. In this context, your emotional trauma as a child translated into professional gifts as an adult.

Here’s another example. You are a busy, passionate person involved in all kinds of activities, from family to volunteering. You are outward directed and don’t want to waste a moment. Then you come down with an autoimmune disease and are in pain, can no longer work, and must rely on others in a way you never did before. One aspect of the yanantin energy is that you suddenly lose your health and even your sense of a vibrant, independent self. Life as you knew it (and your sense of self as you knew it) is over. The other aspects of the yanantin are the compensatory gifts that your new situation bestows: You pay more attention to your body and to what you eat and how you move; you learn to be humble and not only to give but to receive; your capacity for empathy for others deepens; and you learn to be still and go inward, to appreciate the small, quiet moments.

As is true for each of us, you create hucha for yourself when you see only one side of the yanantin energy dynamic—usually the loss, pain, failure, hurt, etc. Your challenge, as is true for most of us, is to enlarge your vision and understanding to see that a yanantin always involves twoness: the bad and the good, the loss and the gain, the “punishment” and the “reward.” If you can work both sides of the yanantin, you can reach a place of wholeness. This harmonization of yanantin energy is called a japu, wherein no hucha is created.

By working the whole yanantin, you can even be the generator of your own transformation. You can move closer to achieving not only a restoration of harmony, but also of wholeness—no matter what is happening. Without that bullying father, you may have never developed your gift of perseverance and persistence. Without that disease, you might never have learned greater empathy and humility, appreciation for simplicity and inner stillness. In the yanantin dynamic, if you can achieve japu, you are holding a scale of justice, with the two scales equally balanced.

Do you have to learn your lessons and gather your gifts through strife or sickness? No. But, seeing things as they actually are, as a human being you are not yet a perfected being and none of us is living in a perfected world. At the level of your eternal spirit, you are a perfected, divine being. But in this third-dimensional, material world in the body of flesh and blood, you are an imperfect human being. The core spiritual yanantin of the sixth level or seventh level of consciousness is: god in the human, human as god. However, here in the Pachamama—in the material realm—we must deal with the level of consciousness we are actually at, which is third or fourth level.

But we don’t have to be victims. We can be victors! Whatever feelings and experiences you need in your “recipe” will come to you in a way that allows you—if you choose—to continue developing toward the completeness and wholeness that is encoded in your Inka Seed. As Ford writes, when you understand each “painful event as the perfect ingredient to make your recipe complete, you will witness the magic of transformation. You will bless what you formerly saw as a curse. You will watch as the horrid becomes holy.”

As we work to evolving our consciousness to the fourth level, we can’t help but reframe our views about what it means to be a human being, revise our beliefs and values, and generally act in the world in more efficient, practical, and impactful ways. And if we strive to achieve the level of a teqse paqo—a universal paqo—we refine our capacity for yachay (knowledge), llank’ay (ways of acting) and munay (expressions of love and of our highest feelings). It’s not too hyperbolic to say that we seek to live our godliness. So, in this post I would like to explore what we can learn from how Andeans named God and understood certain characteristics of godliness.

The Andeans had many names for God, among them were:

• Runa Camac: Runa means people/humanity, and camac means “to make.” Therefore, this name for God means Creator of the People or Creator of Humanity.
• Pachacamac: Pacha means many things, but in this context it means cosmos; camac as defined above means “to make.” So this name for God would translate to Maker of the Cosmos. Another translation is Invisible Ordering Creator.
• Hatun Taqe Wraqocha: Wiraqocha is used by itself as a name for God. It’s translation is disputed by scholars and is not important for our purposes here. Hatun means “high” or “great.” Taqe means “to join.” So translated this is the Great Joiner God. This is the translation of the name for God that I want to focus on for our benefit as paqos.

Holding the thought that the Andeans, through this name for God, saw God as the “one who joins,” let’s take a look at the other great being of the cosmic world: Satan. Under the influence of Christianity, many Andeans now believe in and talk about the devil and sin. However, in the past, they may not have. See my blog post “Evil and Andean Mysticism” (April 24, 2017) for a discussion of the closest figure I could find in the Andean pantheon of spirit beings to the Christian devil. His name is Supay. He actually was the guardian god of miners and of minerals and was associated with the underworld (ukhupacha) and so came to be associated with mortality and thus death. But he was not a personification of evil. However, it appears this is the figure the Spanish Chroniclers morphed into an Andean devil, wrongly as far as I can tell.

Most religions teach some form of opposition in these two energies: Good versus Evil. The energy of God is expressed as creator, ultimate authority, righteousness, benevolence, and so on; and Satan, as the fallen angel Lucifer, is the Evil One, whose expends his energy to draw us away from God, tempt us to sin (create hucha for ourselves), and so on.

If we trace the origins of certain words—such as Satan and the Devil—we will discover that those root meanings provide us insight into this being’s energetic influence on us and in the world. In Hebrew ha–satan means “the adversary.” The Hebrew Bible was first translated into Koine Greek, and the Koine Greek word for what came to be translated as “Satan” was kategoro, which means to “categorize” or to create a “division.” The Greek word for “Devil” was diabolos, which means “accuser” or “slanderer.” I think you can immediately see that the meanings of these words are a far cry from “evil.” Mostly, if we rely on these root meanings, the devil is our adversary because he is the one who seeks to cause us to divide or separate ourselves from our true nature—our godliness.

Here is the question that all of this information is leading you toward: As a human being and as a paqo, are you expressing the energy of “joining” (God energy) or of “dividing” (Satan energy)?

This is a profound question to answer, for your answer can shift your view of everything: from seeing people and events as “good or evil” to “that which brings us together or that which drives us apart.” What a shift this creates in how you see your responsibilities as a human being—as a parent, sibling, friend, boss, coworker, citizen. What a shift in how you view your work as a paqo. What a shift in how you think about the sami and hucha within you, and within other people. What a shift in how you decide which leaders, spiritual and political, to support or not. What a shift in understanding what is going on in our world today.

When we view people and situations according to this view of “joining” or “dividing” we can release the too-rigid judgments of good and evil and instead see people and their words and actions as either furthering our cooperation or fostering our separation. What a kinder—and less accusatory—way to view the world. Most important, as paqos we can examine our own thoughts, words, and deeds to ask: “Is this a joining energy or a dividing one?” As Kahlil Gibran counsels: “Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.” Imagine the possibilities if we all adopted the attitude of being Great Joiner Gods.

Lord, when I feel that what I’m doing is insignificant and unimportant, help me to remember that everything I do is significant and important in your eyes, because you love me and you put me here, and no one else can do what I am doing in exactly the way I do it.
― Brennan Manning, writer and speaker

I’ve written about your Inka Seed many times. Now, here I am writing about it again, only this time in terms of living your purpose. It’s worth remembering that within your Inka Seed is not only your life mission but the whole of you.

• Your Inka Seed is your birth certificate. It’s your paqarina, your place of dawning. It encodes your origin in the Great Mystery. Your lineage goes straight back to God.
• At the level of your human self, your Inka Seed encodes what you—and you alone from among the more than seven and a half billion people on Earth—are designed to do in this human life. Maybe that is still a secret you are keeping from yourself. But it is not a secret to God, from whom you received this assignment.
• Your Inka Seed also is the treasure chest of gifts, skills, and capacities that you need to fulfill your life mission. You possess so many more qualities than you may yet know or use.

If you choose to ascribe to these beliefs, how do you feel? (Answer truthfully!) Intimidated or inspired? Fearful or blissful? Panicked or peaceful?

Like most of us when thinking about what we are really here to do, you probably feel a bit of both extremes. Being frightened or intimated can motivate you to change, discovering and then living your life purpose. Feeling inspired yet peaceful can foster trust in yourself and God that you are indeed on a journey of personal fulfillment. We humans tend to be motivated both by “fleeing from” and “being drawn toward.” Movement is still movement, even if it is one small step instead of a giant leap. And if you are not yet embracing and living your purpose, then move you must.

Two of the feelings that can prevent or block you from being who you really are and living the life God inspired within you are indifference and complacency. Indifference keeps you static and uninterested in self-engagement and self-realization. Complacency breeds low standards toward the self, causing you to settle for a “good enough” self and life instead of reaching toward grandeur. Both indifference and complacency dampen your imagination about what it means to be alive and to be you.

Also consider that your purpose might be outwardly modest but inwardly momentous. Maybe it’s being a fantastic parent. Really, is there anything more precious than guiding the growth of a child’s mind, heart, and spirit? Your purpose might not be about getting your name in lights, but about bringing light to others. Maybe it’s playing music—not in a concert hall but in a retirement home or at a winery. Your music might be the means for you to live a mission of bringing pleasure to others. If you know what your mission is, you can be living it no matter what the outer circumstances, as the following story illustrates.

I remember reading once that Marianne Williamson, writer and inspirational teacher of human potential, worried that she might be wasting her time serving drinks as a waitress instead of living her mission, which she envisioned to be helping people discover love for themselves and others, and embrace their inner greatness. But there she was—a cocktail waitress. Then she had her ah-ha moment, which totally shifted her perspective. She thought something along the lines of, “I get it! This bar is my church and serving the spirits of these patrons is my mission.” So she began to “serve her flock,” practicing kindness, fostering happiness, inspiring others—right where she was, right at that moment.

Maybe you, like so many of us, don’t know what your mission in life is. Usually that lack of clarity arises because you think your  mission is a way to “do” rather than a way to “be.” You can go back and read my November 29, 2018, post about calling your future to you and cleaning the energetic cords to your future. As I point out there, it’s the qualities of yourself that you want to express and that you want to manifest in your life mission that you call to you, not a specific profession, job, or career.

The process of discovering what you are here for is at least threefold. First, you start by appreciating where you are and what you are doing and how you are “being” right now, at this very moment in time. Part of this first step is realizing that (or at least allowing for the possibility that) there are no mistakes. Nothing in your life—the triumphs and the tragedies—is extraneous or wasted. Everything has served to make you who you are right now and to prepare you for realizing your life mission.

The second step is to decide to bring your best self to whatever you are doing, no matter what currently occupies your time. Bring your humor, your generosity, your understanding, your will, your focused intention, and your love to those around you and to yourself. Be the finest self you can be at every moment and seek to encourage others to be their finest selves. If you feel you have not yet realized your life mission, there is no better preparation for discovering it than acting as if you are living it right now.

Finally, make a choice to experiment. Boot yourself (even gently) out of your comfort zone. Explore the world, starting in your own community. Go new places, meet new people, learn new things, think different thoughts, cultivate different feelings, shift your beliefs. Sweep the dust of sameness from your mind, heart, and actions. Life is made up of life experiences (both inner and outer), and even within the scope of your own community there are no doubt amazing things happening and inspiring people to meet. One of my favorite quotations about remembering to drink with gusto from the fountain of life is from Henry de Montherland: “There is only one way to be prepared for death: to be sated. In the soul, in the heart, in the spirit, in the flesh. To the brim.” So don’t wait! Start savoring life now.

None of what I have suggested is specific to our work as paqos. It is universally human. But as a paqo, you have at the ready additional tools to help prepare you to live your grandest self and realize your life’s purpose. Your go-to tool is always saminchakuy. Bring in the life-force energy of sami and release any hucha that is reducing both your clarity and the impact of your intentions on the kawsay pacha. You also can undertake practices to pop your Inka Seed, fertilize it, and nutrure its growth. You can work energetically to connect to your future self, especially your sixth-level self.

But your future self can only emerge from one place—the ground of the self you are right now. Your mission in life is rooted in the present, in the spiritual realization expressed by Manning in the quotation at the start of this article: “no one else can do what I am doing in exactly the way I do it.” Your mission is found in the singular combination of skills, attitudes, feelings, and experiences that come together only in you. As writer Val Uchendu states so simply: “When you apply that gift you possess that comes so easily to you and can be used anywhere, anytime to help someone else; maybe your family, your community, your city, state, country or the world in general . . . that is your PURPOSE.”

As we prepare for a new year, I have decided to focus this post on providing inspiration for you in your work as a paqo by using quotations to highlight universal truths about self-transformation and to align these truths with the Andean concept of the three human powers.

The ultimate goal of our work as paqos is to evolve our state of consciousness so that we can discover who we truly are and live as who we truly are. Our divinity is encoded in our Inka Seed, as is our life mission and all the capacities we need to carry out this mission. Our practices—especially the foundational practice of saminchakuy—are energetic techniques to achieve this goal, and they are aligned with one or more of the three primary human powers. By distilling the ambitious, and perhaps overwhelming, goal of self-realization down to working your three human powers, you will be better able to manage your inner work.

I wish you a magical holiday season and new year of glorious growth.

Yachay

Yachay is both intellectual knowledge and mystical perception. Your work starts here—with knowing (perhaps even discovering for the first time) the state of your being. As you learn to be ruthlessly realistic about who you are right now, you also hold an inner vision of the self that is encoded in your Inka Seed: your already perfected self. So yachay is a yanantin: a complement of the differences. At this very moment you are both an imperfect human being and a perfected divine spirit. As you take the necessary steps toward greater growth by doing a clear-eyed (qaway) self-inventory, allow yourself to be inspired by the advice and insight of these eloquent teachers.

Bruce Lee warns you that you must start with a deep dive into the self, mining the veins of both the coal and the gold of the current self. “To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.”

You can be ruthlessly clear-eyed without being judgmental about yourself. As Carl R. Rogers points out: “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”

The number-one challenge of “doing spiritual work” is that you start and then lose focus, until eventually other things take over your time and energy. Your practices and self-inquiries fall by the wayside. Confucius provides the crucial counsel that change takes time and requires perseverance: “It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.”

While you keep your eyes of the prize of personal evolution, Publilius Syrus reminds you to honor the value of each step forward, no matter how small. “Do not despise the bottom rungs in the ascent to greatness.”

Hecato enlightens us with a definition of progress, especially at the beginning stages of transformation. “What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself.”

As Josei Toda explains, and as our Andeans masters also tell us, our goal is not to rise above our humanness, but to fulfill it. “Enlightenment, or true happiness, is not a transcendental state. It is a condition of broad wisdom, boundless energy, and good fortune wherein we each shape our own destiny, find fulfillment in daily activities, and come to understand our ultimate purpose in life.”

Llank’ay

While we value “beingness,” we also know that here on the human plane, we also value “doingness.” Llanka’y is action, and khuyay is passionate engagement. The key to transformation is to realize that it is not only what you do, but also how you are “being” as you do whatever you are doing. You take responsibility for your thoughts, words and deeds; you seek to be cooperative instead of competitive; you give thanks for your bounty and share it; and on and on. You also learn not to stuff your days with mindless doing, but to take rest so that you can restore yourself. Sitting and admiring the flowers in the field is “doing” something. The counsel of the following wisdom-speakers may prompt you to consider all the ways that you can practice llank’ay.

William Arthur Ward reminds you about the importance of becoming conscious of how you overlay objective reality with your personal judgments and emotional tones, which then direct how you act in the world: “The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.”

Herbert Otto counsels that growth means change, and all change involves creativity. “Change and growth take place when a person has risked himself and dares to become involved with experimenting with his own life.”

What does it mean to “experiment” with your life? It means having the courage and fortitude to leave the known and head out into the unknown. As Billy Cox advises, “Life will only change when you become more committed to your dreams than you are to your comfort zone.”

But dreaming, hoping, affirming—while necessary to fuel action—are not enough, because, as Arnold Glasow wisely points out, “An idea not coupled with action will never get any bigger than the brain cell it occupied.”

According to Andean cosmovision, the kawsay pacha is overly abundant and you can manifest anything you want in proportion to your personal power and the clarity of your ayni/intention. If you are like most of us, you keep yourself—and your thoughts and actions—small. It’s time to enlarge your notion of yourself! As Thomas Edison proclaimed, “If we all did the things we are capable of, we would astound ourselves.”

Munay

Of all the three human powers, munay is the most transformative. Munay is love under your will. Not the emotion of love, but the choice for love: To think lovingly, to act lovingly, to be love. That doesn’t mean you wear rose-colored glasses or cloak yourself in sentiment. It means you are conscious of your thoughts, words, and deeds and purposefully choose a response that produces the least amount of hucha. Munay is not about moving from your head to your heart, as some New Age philosophy advises. It means integrating them. Or, more accurately, it means integrating your three human powers, allowing each to flower within and to guide you through life. To put it another way, it means that your yachay (thoughts) and llank’ay (actions) are fully alive within you and fully expressed through you, but that they are always illuminated by your munay (love). Let these inspirational thoughts guide you toward that integration.

We start at the foundation of love. You can only love others in proportion to how you love yourself. As Rumi says, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

As you focus on cultivating munay, an early step is to begin retraining your thoughts and behaviors to see lightness instead of darkness or the upside instead of the downside. Queen Catherine 1 has identified a good starting place for shifting your perspective of others and what is happening in your relationships: “I praise loudly; I blame softly.”

Many people confuse munay (sacred love, which is given freely) with chall’ay (an agreement to make an exchange, as in a mercantile purchase). As Sri Sri Ravi Shankar reminds you, love is not an emotional bargain: “In love, you don’t expect anything. If you want something in return, don’t call it love.”

If you undertake the path toward love, be prepared for challenges. Gloria Karpinski offers these wise words: “Once we start paying attention to what’s happening in our own environment, we begin to see that the universe is giving us all sorts of clues about our path. If we believe in love and we are making a commitment to being love, there’s a good chance the universe will send us thirty people in a row whom we don’t love. Our assignment: Love those thirty people.”

Finally, as you learn to be a grander, more gracious and loving human being, don’t forget to take a reality check. Ram Dass has a surefire way to gauge your progress in your quest to “be love”: “If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family.”

As a paqo, you can think of your past and your future as pachas, as realms within the space-time continuum. They have their own bubbles. The Andeans position time differently in space than we do. They say the past is in front of you because it is known. You have six ñawis (mystical or energetic eyes) facing forward: the qosqo, sonqo, kunka, paña, lloq’e and qanchis ñawis. These are, respectively, the eyes of the belly, heart, and throat; the left and right physical eyes; and the seventh eye (what some traditions call the third eye) in the forehead. Therefore, you have full view of your past. It is known. That’s why following the seqes, or energetic cords, that stream out from you through your personal past is called following the Path of Knowledge. By following these seqes through your past, using qaway (mystical seeing, which means seeing reality as it really is, without projection or illusion), you can learn from your past, extracting its wisdom. You may not be able to change your past, but you can change your relationship to it, including healing past trauma.

The future is situated behind you. You have only one ñawi facing it, the eye of the root (siki ñawi) at the black belt (yana chunpi). So while it is possible, using qaway, to know something about what “the time to come” is streaming toward you, it is difficult because you have such limited vision of it. The future is not fixed, but is a pacha of potentiality. Thus, following the seqes of the energies flowing to you from your possible futures is called the Path of Potential.

You can think of each of the seqes streaming toward you from your future as encoding a different possibility for what your life will be: what aspects of yourself you will express, which gifts and skills you will use, what you will do with your time, who you will interact with, and the like. Even though the future is the pacha of potential, the reality is that for most us, our future will look similar to our present. We are creatures of habit. We remain fairly fixed in our personalities, needs, desires, and so on. We wear the same types of clothes, eat the same limited variety of foods, follow the same paths to the places we frequent, socialize with the same people, maintain the same beliefs, cling to the same expectations, follow the same career path for decades, etc. Writer Steve Almond says, we “choose the stories by which we construct reality.”  Since our stories remain fairly fixed, so does the future we pull toward us from that creative flux of potentialities.

Our work as paqos, when it comes to manifesting a different future, is to become conscious of our stories, examine them, and then clear the energy that has us stuck in a story that may not be expressing our grandest self. Almond writes, “I’ve placed my faith in stories because I believe this to be the basic unit of human consciousness. The stories we tell, and the ones we absorb, are what allows us to pluck meaning from the rush of experience. Only through patient interrogation of these stories can we begin to understand where we are and how we got here.” And, I would add, understand where we are going.

I faced this dilemma in 2015. It was a deeply challenging year. The flesh of my life was stripped to the bone. Laid off from work and not finding anything in my field despite sending out more than a hundred résumés and making countless inquiries, I was blowing through my savings and at risk of losing my house. It was a time for both action and contemplation.

I decided early on in the challenge of figuring out “where do I go from here” that I was going to put all my knowledge into practice, especially my knowledge of and experience with the energetics of the Andean path. I was intent on manifesting the future of my dreams, at least as regards to how I earned a living. I wasn’t going to wear rose-colored glasses, but was going to be both practical and visionary in my approach. I sent out résumés, networked, and took on small freelance jobs. But I spent most of my time working the energetics.

To summarize some of how I worked the energetics: I did saminchakuy to keep my poq’po (energy body) as clear of hucha (heavy energy) as possible. Part of that work was psychological and emotional: I examined my stories, desires, beliefs, needs. I owned my heaviness in terms of doubt, worry, insecurity, and such, and then I worked my heaviness with saminchakuy. When I felt down, I did saiwachakuy to empower myself. While I had the support of family and friends, I wanted a closer sense of support from Spirit, so I called upon my sixth-level helper—Christ—to help me learn trust. (I didn’t fully trust that any of this would actually work.) Perhaps the most important task I undertook energetically was to clear or “clean” the chaupi point of a future potential.

A chaupi is a meeting point, a place of connection or integration. Imagine two rivers flowing parallel and then merging together to become one river. That point of intersection is the chaupi point. For me in this situation, there were many chaupi points: one for all the possible futures streaming toward me and connecting with my poq’po. I needed to be clear about what the future of my dreams looked like so that I could energetically work the single seqe that encoded that particular future.

I decided to keep my intentions manageable and focus on the immediate and pressing situation of how I would earn the currency of this third-dimensional life—money. Since I am primarily a writer, and have worked as an editor for publishing companies and done other types of professional creative work in the field, I at first imagined my future as a writer. (I told you! We are creatures of habit! That’s why our future looks so much like our present and past.) While mulling over the possibilities of what this future might look like, I realized—from past experience—that my most creative imagining would be far less glorious than what the creative mind of God could conjure up for me. So I changed my intention. Instead of identifying a concrete kind of job (writer), I focus on the qualities of the job I wanted. I’d let God figure out which job fulfilled all those qualities.

As I started to do that, however, I had to stop and revamp my energetics again. I threw “keeping my intentions manageable” completely out the window! I decided that if I was going to trust God and let something much larger than myself use the energy of my intention to return an amazing ayni result, I might as well go really big with that intention. So I gave up even thinking about a “job” and earning money working in a specific profession and declared to myself and the universe that I intended there be no distinction whatsoever between “my life” and “my work.” As far as I was concerned, for each of us, our lives are our work. I didn’t want to work to live. I just wanted to live—and be well-compensated for it! So that became my first quality: I wasn’t going to expend any energy intending how I would “make a living.” My life would be my living.

I then became clear about the foundational qualities I most wanted in making my life a living. I kept my list short. I wanted to spend my “living” time being creative, not answering to anyone other than myself, not having to be on any fixed time schedule, connecting with all kinds of people from all walks of life and from all over the globe, contributing to my own soul growth and to that of others, and having fun. I kept these intentions clear and active in my consciousness, even as I continued calling on my sixth-level helper to help me trust that this could become my reality. And I kept perceiving a single seqe—just one from the infinite field of potentiality—streaming to me from the future that encoded all of the qualities I sought. I kept cleaning the chaupi point of this seqe where it entered my poq’po at the siki ñawi. (The future is behind you so the seqe could come in anywhere on your bubble, but I felt it coming into the mystical eye at the base of my spine, since this is the only ñawi we have in the back and it looks toward the future.) I tried to be as conscious as possible of all the ways I was stuck in self-defeating stories and so creating hucha and obscuring the energy of this seqe from flowing freely through me and empowering me. I dealt with doubt, fear, low self-esteem, worry, and many other hucha-inducing emotions and stories. I cleaned and cleaned this connection point to my poq’po using saminchakuy.

The results took some time. In fact, I was taken to the very edge of both financial solvency and emotional comfort.

And the answer was an indirect one, so much so that I did not even recognize it as an answer!

One day, while I was talking to my mentor and primary teacher Juan Nuñez del Prado (who didn’t know about the grand experiment I was engaged in) he said, out of the blue, “You know, after me and Ivan [his son], you know the Andean tradition better than anyone in the world. I would like you to open a US school.” My reactions, in a fraction of a second, were several, but my most powerful reaction was, “I couldn’t possibly!” I immediately thought of all the reasons this couldn’t be: I didn’t have a place to teach, no building or grounds, no organization, and so on. Opening a school immediately felt overwhelming.

I finally pulled it together and just told Juan I would think about it. And I did. I had taught a few workshops about the tradition many years before, and I had not found it satisfying (mostly because I never thought I knew enough). It had been more than ten years since I had taught, and I didn’t feel drawn to doing so again. Still, I realized that although I had never been “out there” as a teacher of the tradition, I had written about it in the past and I could start writing about it again. So I decided to do that. (Drum roll . . . creature of old habits. . . keeping myself in the writer box. . .sound familiar?)

A young tech-savvy friend of mine taught me how to create a WordPress blog. After the first few posts, I spent five days answering the slew of emails that came in. Most of those emails were requests to teach. Go figure!

So reluctantly I started teaching again. And this time it was a completely different experience. I had really dedicated myself to my Andean practice in the previous six or seven years—I had been living it like never before—and it totally changed how I approached teaching. I felt a huge passion for sharing the tradition. The requests kept coming and I kept showing up to teach, accruing more than 94,000 air miles over the next two years. When that kind of travel became exhausting, I started teaching online. And the rest, as they say, is history.

I had no idea that “teaching” was how God would package the qualities I had intended, but it certainly satisfied them all: I am my own boss, I don’t watch the clock, I work from home but can travel to amazing places should I decide to go on the road, I meet fantastic like-minded people, I am growing and changing and helping others to as well, I am honoring this beautiful tradition and having fun doing so. . . . All the qualities I sought to pull from the field of the potentiality of the future have become my present—my life, not my job. And I couldn’t be happier.

There’s nothing special about me. What I did, you can do. The Andean mystical tradition teaches you to work the energies of manifestation of any kind. As Juan says, rephrasing what his teacher don Benito Qoriwaman said: The kawsay pacha is overly abundant. Everything is just energy. You can have whatever you want and as much as you want in proportion to your having the “personal power” to make interchanges with the living universe (your ayni). The only thing that can stop us is ourselves.

I don’t promise that if you use your paqo practices in this way the journey to fulfilling your intentions will be easy or the results quick. But I do promise you that by owning your stories (through qaway) and clearing your hucha (through saminchakuy)—and working the seqes of your future—you too can manifest your heart’s desire.