As a path of human conscious development, Andean mysticism’s focus is on becoming a fully developed human being, meaning a fully enlightened person. We are already perfected because we are Drops of the Mystery of the cosmos of living energy and our enlightened self is held within each of us as a potential in the Inka Seed. However, we do not live that potential—yet!

Here is an exercise, adapted from the left-side lloq’e work of don Melchor Desa (as taught to me by my primary teacher Juan Nuñez del Prado), for nurturing this potential within. It is an exercise to energetically connect your Inka Seed and sonqo, or heart. Both are generators of munay, which is love under your will. Love has to start with the self, but how many of us genuinely and unabashedly love ourselves? Truly, deeply, wildly love ourselves? My guess is not many of us. . . This exericise can foster that process within.

In addition, one of your primary goals as a paqo is to integrate your three human powers. They are, from the highest to the lowest in the estimation of the Andean masters:

• Munay, which as I said is the choice for love. It is agape, or a love that arises from the self but from beyond the needs of the self. We might call it unconditional love. It is also involved with the ability to live from feelings (joy, kindness, compassion—the “higher” human attributes) rather than from emotions (the “lower” human attributes).
• Llank’ay, the ability to perform in the world, to take action, to make an effort, to put intention into practice
• Yachay, the ability to think, reason, and use your intellect.

We want to integrate our three human powers, even as we understand that culturally we are trained to valorize one over the others. Juan says that Westerns tend to be doers and thinkers. We are what we do. We are skilled at abstract thinking. We value knowledge, and see it as the solution to so many of our problems.

In contrast, he says, the Andeans are the masters of feelings, and so of munay. Munay, he says, is the “treasure” of the Andes. Andeans, thus, can teach us to harness our feelings rather than our emotions, which are transitory. You can feel joy in the midst of tragedy if you live from feelings, because joy is a state of being. In contrast, happiness is transitory because it is subject to the whims of fickle moods and changing circumstances. One minute you love me, the next you don’t. The training of the Andes helps us to develop our capacity for living from feelings, which are situated energetically in the heart, rather than from emotions, which are situated energetically in the qosqo, or belly. For the Andean mystics, living more fully from feelings will help us solve our problems.

The Inka Seed and heart are both about munay. But just what is the Inka Seed? It is an energetic structure that holds as a potential within our likeness to God. It encodes our unique mission in human form, our purpose and the gifts and talents that will help us fulfill our human purpose.

The qori chunpi—the belt at the heart—is free of hucha. So are the Inka Seed and heart. There is never any need to “clean” them, as they are pure sami. Still, we have to work consciously to activate our Inka Seed and to connect our Inka Seed and heart into an integrated system in order to stimulate our development and fuel our evolution. Integration is the purpose of this modified exercise. And it is a way to not only connect these two most important energetic structures within, but to generate copious amounts of munay in the process. As you feel that munay spread through the self, you receive a taste of the purity and power of self-love.

Integrating the Inka Seed and Heart

To do this exercise, you need to know where your Inka Seed is located. It is positioned within your body at the level of the sternum (where your ribs curve up and together just below the breast area) and halfway between the front and back of your body (in the middle of your body).

•  Sit quietly and touch in energetically with yourself, with your beingness, both physical and energetic.

•  Begin a saminchakuy to cleanse your poq’po, your energy bubble: Using intention, open your bubble at the area of the top of your head and intend to draw in the light living energy (sami). Feel the empowering flow of sami through you. Then bring your attention to the base of your spine and send a seqe—and energetic cord—deep down into Mother Earth. Intend to send any heavy energy (hucha) that is on the surface of your poq’po (energy body/bubble) flowing down this cord to the earth. Allow these two flows to continue for several minutes, doing a cleansing and empowerment of your bubble. After a few minutes, stop the downward flow of hucha and retract the seqe from the earth. Keep the flow of sami down through the top of your poq’po going.

•  Using your intention, direct the flow of sami like a laser down through the top of your poq’po and body until it touches your Inka Seed. Feed your Inka Seed with sami until you feel it “pop” or open. As it does, munay will flow from it. Try to perceive the feeling of munay as it wafts like perfume through you—your heart area (the qori chunpi), your poq’po, your body, your entire being. Feel the sweetness! Feel the love!

•  After a few minutes, bring your attention back to your chest area and the Inka Seed. Using your intention, allow sami to flow down and once again fill your Inka Seed. Then intend that a cord of living energy extend out from your Inka Seed and extend over to connect with your heart, flowing sami through your Inka Seed and into your heart. Your Inka Seed and heart will become connected, integrated, inextricably linked energetically. Feel the increased munay, which is now flowing from both your Inka Seed and heart. Fill the chest area of your body, and then feel the munay wafting out to fill your entire poq’po, body, and beingness. Sit in the glow of this munay.

•  Soften your focus, loosen your intention, and end the session.

You can do this exercises many times as you need to so that you can actually perceive the flow of munay within and throughout the self. When you experience this sweetness, you will finally understand the metaphor of the paqo as exuding a nectar that draws the hummingbird. The hummingbird is the totem of the upper world, the hanaqpacha, and of God. When the hummingbird feeds on your nectar, you are deeply connected with God.

Are you generating the nectar of munay? If not, use this exercise to learn.  Doing so will help you discover “who you really are.” As author Amaka Imani Nkosazana writes, “Nothing is sweeter than being unapologetically you.” That “you” is both human and divine. Munay is the bridge between the two.

 

Let us do our best whilst we live for another tomorrow is coming when whilst we are long gone, another group of people shall come to either suffer from our worst or enjoy and build upon our best.

—Ernest Agyemang Yeboah, Ghanaian writer and teacher

 

A teenager in Florida, a student at the school in which a mass shooting took place only a few days ago in which 17 students and faculty were killed, said, “We took 17 bullets to the heart.”

How many more bullets to the heart can we stand? The bullets are not only from the out-of-control gun violence in the United States. Every day we suffer the shredding of our energetic flesh from the bullets of a society that is more focused on what polarizes us rather on than what unifies us. We are put in the cross-hairs of politicians who have become marksmen of inaction and assassins of statesmanship. We are peppered with wounds as truths and facts are misrepresented as falsity and fake news. We are being mowed down by the heaviness of our leaders—and of ourselves. Our country is not something separate from us. We are its body, mind, heart and soul—and as we are, so is our country. We are responsible both for acknowledging the energetic violence that has us in its sights and for not perpetuating that heaviness ourselves.

We are paqos!

When paqos see a need and have the tools to address that need, they take action.

Let us right now commit to the energetic work of lessening the heavy energy of the United States. Our tool is saminchakuy—the primary energetic tool to transform heavy energy, to turn it back into sami.

I call upon all paqos to commit to a fifteen-minute practice every day.

• Five minutes of saminchakuy on yourself.
• Five minutes of saminchakuy on the poq’po of Congress and Washington, DC.
• Five minutes of saminchakuy on the poq’po of the United States of America.

Together we can become one energetic body that is a powerful eater of hucha. It doesn’t matter if our saminchakuy is synced in time. All that matters is that the thousands of you out there reading this who are paqos begin to put your tool of saminchakuy to use on behalf of the conscious evolution of our country.

Connect to the bubble (first to your own, then to Congress, and then of the U.S.), draw sami from the cosmos down into that bubble and release hucha from that bubble and send it to Mother Earth.

The danger is that you will be committed to this practice for a few days or a few weeks. Realistically, however, this is a long-term commitment. Do you have 15 minutes a day? If so, commit. Right now! Close down the device on which you are reading this and get to work acting like a paqo!

Darkness always gives way to light. As heaviness dissipates, we all rise.

 

If I paint a wild horse, you might not see the horse… but surely you will see the wildness!
–Pablo Picasso

We have twelve mystical eyes—the ñawis in Quechua: the primary seven are the two physical eyes and the seventh eye (called the third eye in some other cultures), the kunka ñawi (throat), sonqo ñawi (heart), qoswo ñawi (belly) and siki ñawi (root). The five secondary eyes are the two makis (palm of each hand), the two chakis (sole of each foot) and the uma (top of the head).

The primary capacity of the ñawis is qaway—mystical vision. As paqos we are qawaqs in training: we are learning to engage the world with mystical vision and knowing. We want to develop the capacity to see reality as it really is, which is about perceiving both the physical attributes of the material world (Pachamama) and the energetic attributes of the immaterial world (kawsya pacha). Although the metaphor is one of mystical vision, being qawaqs and engaging the world through our ñawis involves all of our sensory capacities. So it is inaccurate to think of this capacity only as vision or sight. In reality, the ñawis are complex perceptual organs that involve all the senses.

For example, there is another metaphor commonly used when discussing the ñawis as perceptual organs: “tasting.” It is similar to “seeing” in that we are gathering information about something using our mystical senses.

We mostly engage the world through the qoqso—our primary power center at the belly—and, thus, through the qosqo ñawi. We reach out (mostly unconsciously) through cords of energy called seqes and connect with the energy bubbles of  objects. If we are qawaqs, however, we bring consciousness to our energy dynamics. We use intention to engage our mystical perceptual abilities to “see” and “taste” the world around us. And we use more than only our qosqo ñawi. We can choose to use any of our twelve ñawis.

By developing the “eyes” that are our ñawis, we break out of the confines of our limited physical sensory experiences that reduce the world only to information about the qualia of the world—the characteristics of materiality, such as texture, density, size, and so on, and we use our mystical senses to expand our experience of reality. Engaging our mystical sensory capacities takes us beyond materiality to the essence of the thing. According to the Andean mystical tradition, everything is a being, so “seeing” and “tasting” an object relates information about its energy dynamics in relation to the self. It may be yanantin/dissimilar or masintin/similar energy, and it may be a compatible or an incompatible energy. Knowledge is power! Once we understand the energy dynamics, we can intentionally work to shift them if necessary.

An alternate way to think of this engagement is as touch. As we engage the world, we are constantly energetically touching other people and things—their poq’pos, or energy bubbles—and if we are conscious we can both discern information about those particular people or things and determine our energetic dynamics with them. Knowing the state of that dynamic interplay can help us reduce hucha and foster sami.

Tasting energy is also a practice of opening ourselves to the wild and wonderful kawsay pacha without fear. The more kinds of energy we taste, the less unfamiliar energy we will come into contact with, and thus the less isolated we will feel from the living cosmos. So explore!

Once I was in New York City with my teacher, Juan Nuñez del Prado, and we went to Central Park to taste/touch the obelisk called the Needle of Cleopatra, which is the twin of an obelisk in Egypt. We then went into the Museum of Natural History to taste/touch the Temple of Dendra, which was displayed there. We were connecting with their essence—and they with us—through seqes. You could say we were both introducing ourselves to them as beings (and vice versa), and we were learning about them as energy configurations (and vice versa). As energy beings they might have even communicated with us, through our ñawis as auditory perceptual organs. I didn’t “hear” any “conversation,” but I did experience these beings as energy fields with their own unique energy signatures and realities.

Juan has always counseled me that the world is a smorgasbord of energy, and I should never pass up the opportunity to taste the different kinds of energy. As I pointed out above, the more kinds of energy we are familiar with, the more we know the Pachamama (material world) and the kawsay pacha (immaterial world). We never have to be afraid of energy because it can’t hurt us. It is only compatible or incompatible with the state of our own energy body. But by tasting or touching as many kinds of energy as possible, we open ourselves without fear or hesitation and so can engage the world more easily with khuyay (passion).

The main point here is that our mystical eyes are more than organs of sight. They are full perceptual organs with a rich sensory capacity. If you are not using them, start now! Play with them to get to know the extent of your qawaq abilities at the current time and to practice so that you can increase your abilities. Practice engaging both the physical world and the energetic world that informs it. See, touch, listen, taste! As Juan says, the world is your smorgasbord!

Here are a few exercises that can help you work your ñawis:

• Select an item in the room you are in (a table, chair, book, etc.) and focus your attention on it. Then using intention, connect with that object through a ñawi. Start with your qosqo ñawi. Just be receptive. Can you discern the energy of that object (its poq’po)?
• Disengage from the object. Then reconnect, using your intention to connect through a different ñawi, perhaps your seventh eye, or a maki (eye in the palm of a hand), or the sonqo ñawi (eye of the heart center). Do you feel the same energy signature of that object, but perhaps are accessing different aspects (qualia) of it? By trying out different ñawis, you will be able to discern, over time, which ones you are most adept at sensing through and which ones are less developed.

• Practice sensing through different ñawis alternating between an organic/living thing and an inorganic/non-living thing, such as a dog and a lamp. Try different combinations of things. Over time, can you discern a different material and energetic qualia in living things than in non-living things?

• Have someone put a an object in a paper or plastic bag, so you can’t see it. Better yet, have them prepare several bags. Over time, practice “tasting”/”touching” the object through a ñawi and see if you can discern the qualities of that thing even though you can’t see it and don’t know what it is. If you don’t get a sense of the object through one ñawi, try using others. This practice is not about intuition (an inner knowing). It is about the mystical perception (feeling, sensing in an almost visceral way) of the qualities of the object and of it as a being in its own right.

We are the cosmos made conscious and life is the means by which the universe understands itself.
― Brian Cox, particle physicist

Those of you who have studied the Andean tradition with me know that the lens through which I teach this tradition is as a path of conscious evolution, both for the self and so as to contribute to the rise of the Runakay Mosoq, the New Humanity. To mark this New Year’s day, conscious evolution is again my subject.

If you make no other resolution this year, direct your intention to dedicating (or rededicating) yourself to your personal growth. According to the Andean tradition, your life is a gift. You did nothing to deserve it. Your mission, as held in potential in your Inka Seed, is to grow into the fullness of your personal capacities and, when your time comes, to return your life to the kawsay pacha as a grander human being.

To inspire you in this undertaking, I share some quotations that have inspired me, adding short commentary about how the information applies to your practice as a paqo.

“There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” 

The darkness Carl Jung refers to is at least partially, if not solely, the personal shadow. It is that place in the unconscious where you stuff all the beliefs about yourself and others and life in general that you find offensive, unacceptable, and threatening. Your shadow “stuff” drives your behavior more than you may know (yachay—understanding). So the obvious action (llank’ay—doing) is to probe deep within to know yourself more truly. And to love (munay) yourself more completely.

This darkness cannot hurt you, even though it may feel “heavy.” It is what we call hucha, which is slow or blocked life-force energy (kawsay). And just as you can use saminchakuy to turn hucha back into sami (actually, it is all kawsay, just kawsay flowing at different speeds), so too can you turn a practice of self-inquiry and contemplation into a light by which you can illuminate yourself more fully (kanay) and, thus, live as who you really are (as encoded in your Inka Seed).

This is not an imaginative undertaking, such as in visualization or thinking positive thoughts, although those are fine practices. It is an action (a “making,” as Jung says). The action starts with self-inquiry and self-observation. There are myriad ways to practice self-inquiry, so I won’t go into them here. The important action is that you start—that you apply your intention and energy to your own growth and self-awareness.

All change starts with the self. Author Eric Micha’el Leventhal reminds you that “the closer you come to knowing that you alone create the world of your experience, the more vital it becomes for you to discover just who is doing the creating.” So I ask you, Are you truly aware of how grand and exceptional you are and how much the world needs you?

Don’t race past that question I just asked. Spend some time contemplating it. Feeling it. Owning it. You truly are a mystery. But, more than that, you truly are a miracle.

“How can a three-pound mass of jelly that you can hold in your palm imagine angels, contemplate the meaning of infinity, and even question its own place in the cosmos? Especially awe inspiring is the fact that any single brain, including yours, is made up of atoms that were forged in the hearts of countless, far-flung stars billions of years ago. These particles drifted for eons and light-years until gravity and change brought them together here, now. These atoms now form a conglomerate—your brain—that can not only ponder the very stars that gave it birth but can also think about its own ability to think and wonder about its own ability to wonder. With the arrival of humans, it has been said, the universe has suddenly become conscious of itself. This, truly, it the greatest mystery of all.”

The above thoughts are those of V. S. Ramachandran, a neuroscientist, but they echo the stance of others, from physicists to paqos. One particle physicist, Brian Cox, puts the same idea more succinctly: “We are the cosmos made conscious, and life is the means by which the universe understands itself.” A paqo, don Benito Qoriwaman, framed the same idea this way: You are a drop of the Mystery, of the infinite kawsay pacha and the ineffable God Consciousness that underlies it. You have a unique mission to fulfill here on earth, and you provide the living universe an experience of life and of itself that is impossible for any other person to provide.

What an astonishing mission you have! The Latin root word from which our modern word “astonish” comes means “thunder,” as in leaving someone thunderstruck. That is what your life is to the living universe—something to marvel at, to be amazed by, to be joyously thunderstruck by. That doesn’t mean you have to do big things. It means you have to be big. As author and human potential coach Marianne Williamson has written: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us.”

Now here is a nugget from me: Love within the esoteric traditions reminds us that we are gods. There is no boundary. Creator is our Source, that field of energy from which we came and to which we will return. We are always already divine, innocent, perfected, accepted, loved. We can do nothing to earn God’s acceptance and love, for we are an aspect of God. There is only the One, of which each of us is a part.

 The question you must ask yourself, then, really isn’t “Do I dare to be divine?” because you already are divine. The more astute question is, “Do I dare to express my divinity consciously?”

I once heard Dr. Wayne Dyer, the late author and inspirational speaker, describe our essential self as an orange. What happens when you squeeze an orange? You get orange juice. No matter the conditions—if you squeeze the orange in the dark, in bright light, in the cold or the heat—you get orange juice from an orange. Not lemon juice or grapefruit juice.

So I ask you, What will the world get when you are squeezed by life and life’s circumstances? Will joy and compassion, enthusiasm and curiosity flow from you? Or will sadness and lethargy, judgment and pessimism flavor the flow? You are an expression of a unique mix of essential qualities, but the unfortunate truth is that you can choose to express less than your potential. The root of all wisdom traditions is “Know thyself.” To live an extraordinary life you not only have to know yourself, you also have to be willing to squeeze out all the divine juiciness of yourself.

There is no better time to begin the transformation then right now. And, there is no better way to begin than by declaring yourself to yourself and to the universe.

So get started. Rise from your chair right now and declare your existence and your divinity—out loud. Start by calling out your name, centering the energy of the moment through the vibration by which you are known, which is your name. Use the power of energetic vocalization called rimay in the Andean tradition—a vocalization that is filled with your personal power. Then speak aloud all of your wonderful qualities, strengths, and gifts. Speak everything about yourself that is cause for celebration and worthy of note. Don’t make this a laundry list of your accomplishments; focus instead on your qualities, speaking from your heart about what makes you the unique being you are, about the less obvious yet marvelous qualities that form your character.

Declare yourself to yourself and to the living universe. The Holy One already knows but will no doubt be thunderstruck at the magnificence of who you really are. My wish for you in this new year is that you, too, will be thunderstruck by your own grandeur.

During part of the Andean training (as passed down through Juan Nuñez del Prado and his lineage of don Benito Qoriwaman, don Andres Espinosa, and don Melchor Desa), students learn to speed up energy to create munay (love—it is a power that is under your will!) and then to speed energy up even more to create hampe, the healing energy. As we discuss healing Andean style, a lot of questions come up because some of these teachings are in conflict with what students may have learned about healing when studying other traditions. So let’s revisit a few of the main questions.

We need to start with reviewing the foundational teaching about intention and energy. Ayni is your intention to move energy, especially in relationship with the kawsay pacha. You are always in energetic interchange with the cosmos of living energy. The very fact that you are alive means you are interchanging energy with the cosmos. The nuance is that you can be in conscious or unconscious interchange—you can either be directing your intention with awareness or acting unconsciously. But you are always moving energy, and energy is always moving through you.

If you are attempting to do a healing, that healing is predicated upon the energy dynamic overviewed in the previous paragraph. You are by definition consciously using your intention. And energy must follow your intention. The same goes for your client.

With these basic premises established, the questions that arise are several. The ones below are the main ones that come up in training.

Is Energy Healing Affecting the Physical Body?

In the healing of the Andes as passed down through these lineages, a healer is mostly, and usually only, working on the energy body, not on the physical body.

The healing intention (whether using the practice of saminchakuy or of hucha mikhuy) is to release hucha from the poq’po (energy body), which then improves all level of being since the energy body informs the emotional body and the physical body. So as paqos in this lineage, we do not directly concern ourselves with the physical manifestation of hucha, but with the hucha itself. It’s not about healing a kidney tumor. It’s about getting slow energy moving again through the poq’po. Then the person’s body responds in the way that it can. Maybe the tumor will shrink, maybe not. But you can be sure that with less hucha the person will be empowered and his or her immune system enhanced. That is why we say in this tradition that all healing is self-healing.

Everything I just said applies to paqos of the first four levels of the path. Currently, there are no paqos known to be working at higher than the fourth level of consciousness. At this level, sometimes as healers we are successful (at helping a person activate their physical self-healing capacities) and sometimes we are not. However, this is not so at the fifth level of consciousness.

The mark a fifth-level paqos is infallible healing. They are successful every time they heal, on every type of disease and ailment. They don’t fail! There have been fifth-level healers in the past, and there may be people we don’t know about who are fifth level now. There no doubt are people who sometimes display fifth-level capacities, but can’t maintain them all the time. We really don’t know how fifth-level healers work. They may be  moving energy so efficiently that the poq’po returns to a pristine state of sami and thus physical well-being returns at all levels for the client. Or, they may actually be able to directly affect the Pachamama (the material world) and reform the body at the cellular level. We just don’t know for sure.

I bring this point up to remind you that everything we discuss in this post relates to fourth-level healers.

Do I Have to Ask Permission to Heal?

No. Because you are working only on hucha, you are working at the skin level of the poq’po. Hucha doesn’t get too deep into the poq’po, because there are actually seven layers to it, each like a filter. When hucha penetrates to each level, the filter there speeds it back up, turning it into sami. So most hucha is on the skin of the poq’po and that is where we work in healing. As such, you are not actually penetrating the privacy of the person’s poq’po, and you don’t have to ask permission.

In addition, according to Andean ethics, healing is always empowering. You empower yourself, the person you are working on, and since you are feeding hucha to Mother Earth and she loves to eat hucha, you are empowering her. The healing forces are munay and hampe, and they are gifts we give others.

That said, just as there are different philosophies about what healing is and what you are doing while attempting healing, there are different ethical systems for different healing traditions. Those ethics grow out of the tradition’s philosophy.  So, be clear about what tradition you are working within and follow that ethical system. If you are going to do Reiki, then the ethical system of that practice says you must ask permission. If you using Andean practices, such as saminchakuy to cleanse hucha, the ethics of the Andean system say that you don’t have to ask permission. In fact, the Andean ethical system says that if you have the personal power to help another person, then it is your responsibility as a paqo to do so. Whenever and wherever you see need, you use your practices to alleviate it. It is not really a choice, it is a responsibility. So the point here is that you may know more than one healing technique and you would be wise to follow the ethical system of the practice you are using.

Can Healing Override a Person’s Karma?

According to the Andean system, this question is moot. First, the Andean system does not recognize karma as it is known from the Hindu system. Second, all healing is self-healing, so you are not doing much more than helping to activate a person’s self-healing capacity. You are not doing the healing, the person is, so his or her will is involved and you are not overriding that will or, by extension, that karma.

Remember that Andean techniques for healing use intention to move energy. The energy is all the same, whether it is hucha or sami. It is all kawsay, just kawsay moving at different speeds, at different levels of refinement. So, really, you are not doing anything except affecting the speed of the energy in the person’s poq’po. If the person doesn’t want to heal (consciously or unconsciously), he or she will just accumulate more hucha and most likely return to the state he or she was in before you attempted to release hucha. In this regard, once again, you cannot trump another person’s will. The way that person engages the world of living energy (ayni) is the deciding factor in every aspect of his or her being and life. So don’t worry about being so Godlike that you are changing a person’s state of being. Just offer the gift of munay and hampe, and let the person receive it or not, use it or not.

What About Using Other Tools?

All work in the Andes is invisible, because it is based on ayni—interchanging energy via your intention. However, once you take that to heart, you are free to play and express yourself as a healing “artist.” If you want to use a crystal, feather, bell, or whatever, go ahead and do so. Healing is an art. Every paqo has a personality, a style, just as every artist does. There is nothing wrong with developing a personal style and artistry. Just don’t turn the external items into fetishes, which means you transfer your personal power to them of instead of claiming it for yourself. The misha and despachos are great eaters of hucha, so it is all well and good to use them. But they, too, can be turned into fetishes. Remember, they are really only symbols of or external physical embodiments of your inner personal power and the quality of your ayni. They have no power if your personal power is not invested in them.

Two other quick points. The first is that a healer always has to meet a client where that client is. If your client needs to believe in the healing by seeing you use a rattle, crystal, or whatever, then without judgment meet that person where they are in their belief system and use such things. Belief is crucial to healing. The placebo effect is not false, it’s just misunderstood by Western medicine to be only about belief. In the Andes we know that belief is a kind of intention that moves energy. It is a form of intention, and energy must follow intention. So engage your client’s belief system, but don’t be fooled yourself into thinking you must use a crystal or feather or whatever. That would be giving away your personal power.

The second point is that the Andean system integrates well with other systems. So as long as you are clear about each of the traditions you are using (say doing saminchakuy with Reiki), there is no conflict with the Andean cosmovision about your using anything and everything that you think will help. The Andean system is not exclusive, but inclusive.

I have one student who, after learning how to loop energy and speed it up to create munay and hampe, experimented with looping the energy through different kinds of crystals and gems. He found that those gems seemed to vibrate at a higher and more powerful frequency after “charging” them with hampe energy. He then used them on his client. However, he was clear that the flow of energy started with and ended with his own intention to move energy. He controlled the flow of energy through his “tools,” not the other way around, so there was no danger of his turning them into fetishes. Still, he discovered something interesting and useful about energy, and he can now use that to his own and his clients’ benefit.

As Dr. Silva Hartmann says, ““Energy work is priceless. It makes every day extraordinary and transforms the mundane to the holy.” That is the stance of an Andean paqo—and especially so when it comes to working the energies for healing. You are moving energy to make a person believe they can transform themselves from a mundane being to a holy one. And healing doesn’t get any more important than that.