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.

Often, it’s not about becoming a new person, but becoming the person you were meant to be, and already are, but don’t know how to be.
—Heath L. Buckmaster, author

I am continually asked about the chunpis, especially by students of teachers other than Juan Nuñez del Prado, who learned about them differently from the teachings of this lineage. Although I’ve written about them several times before, let me do so again as clarification and review. I’ll do so as an overview for those of you who want a quick “cheat sheet” about them.

Before I begin, however, I urge you to read again, and take to heart, the quotation that leads this post. If you want a concise statement of what the chunpis are all about, this quotation says it perfectly. The chunpis energetically encompass not only who you are right now, but who you have the potential to be—a fully realized human being.

• Chunpi literally means “belt” in Quechua. There are four primary chunpis, and they are commonly referred to as the belts of power. They are not belts of protection, as there is nothing to protect yourself against. In terms of the kawsay pacha—the cosmos of living energy—energy is just energy, beyond moral overlay. It can’t hurt you. Because of our emotions, thoughts, actions and so on, we can slow kawsay down, creating hucha, which detracts from our well-being. But hucha is not bad, negative, threatening, evil or anything of the kind. People can be negative, threatening, evil, but this is different from seeing kawsay, the living energy, as such. To deal with hucha, you do saminchakuy (or hucha mikhuy) to get that slow energy moving again at its natural speed.
• The chunpis do not exist in your energy body (poq’pq) until you “weave” them in the karpay called the Chunpi Away (pronounced chun-pee ah-why). They can fade over time if you don’t work with them regularly.

• The chunpis each contain a ñawi, a mystical eye, as do others parts of the body, such as the palms, soles of the feet, and top of the head. The ñawis are in place at your birth. However, they are “awakened” in a karpay called the Ñawi K’ichay (pronounced nyow-wee key-ch-eye), which is done at the same time you weave the chunpis.

• The chunpis are belts of power because they have energetic potential. They fuel certain capacities within you. The work of the chunpis is to grow in these capacities. Growing in these capacities increases your personal power to be in more perfect ayni with the kawsay pacha and to live with greater joy, success, and integrity in the human world.

• There are four main belts: the black belt (yana chunpi) around the hips and the lower trunk of the body. This belt confers the capacity of atiy, the power to take action in the world. It has to do with measuring your personal power at a specific point in time and with ascertaining right timing for taking action, among other things. The red belt at the belly/qosqo (puka chunpi) confers the capacity of khuyay, of acting with passion and focused engagement in the world. It is the place, therefore, of your kinetic power. The heart level chunpi is the qori chunpi, the gold belt. There is no hucha in this belt, so it never needs to be cleansed. It confers the power of the feelings (as opposed to the emotions, which are at the belly), and specifically of munay (love and will). Because it is the belt within which lives the Inka Seed, this belt also confers the capacity of kanay, to be who you really are and to live that in the human world. In fact, kanay is the main capacity of the qori chunpi. The throat belt, the qolqe chunpi, or silver belt, confers the capacity of rimay, of speaking with power and of creative expression of all kinds. You don’t weave the belts just to weave the belts! You work the energies there: the primary work of the chunpis is growing in these capacities and consciously evolving as a human being.

• These four belts are the primary ones. However, we sometimes say, for convenience sake, that there is a quasi violet belt that covers the head at the level of the three eyes—your two physical eyes and the seventh eye in the middle of your forehead (what other cultures call the “third eye.”) I won’t go into why we call it the violet belt, but you need to know that violet is not the actual color of the belt. The color of the belt is the color of your physical eyes. The capacity of the three eyes is qaway, visionary or mystical seeing and knowing.

• The karpays for weavng the belts and awakening the mystical eyes is usually done with mullu chunpis, a set of five stones, like those pictured. However, they are not necessary. You can do the karpays using only your intention (which is true of all the practices of the Andes, or else we are turning objects into fetishes).

The work with the chunpis is quite extensive, as the chunpis are the focus of some of the chaupi training and are heavily involved in the lloq’e work. But the main work of the belts is individual, based on your intention. Like all the work of this tradition, intention is what moves energy. It is your intention that helps you access and work the energies of the belts, and it is your intention that allows you to begin using the capacities each confers so that you can grow and transform.

All of the practices of the Andean tradition—including the chunpis—are directed toward this goal of becoming the most consciously evolved human being you can be so that you can live your divinity while here in physical form in the very human world. The capacities of the chunpis cover major aspects of being: speaking with integrity and power, cultivating compassion and love, knowing who you are and not being afraid to live your individual power, being able not only to form clear intentions but also to carry those intentions out through action, effortlessly and successfully.

If you are not working with the chunpis in these ways, then you are missing a core part of the teaching of the Andean path.  Always remember, as a paqo you want to not waste your energy. You want to be super efficient and super effective in your ayni—your energetic engagement with the cosmos of living energy. Once they are woven, the chunpis are part of what I call the “energetic anatomy” of your poq’po. There is nothing in your physical body that doesn’t contribute to the core purpose of keeping you, as a physical organism, alive and healthy. The chunpis as part of your energetic anatomy serve fundamental and necessary purposes as well,  integrating both your physical and energetic selves to so that you can excel at both the “action” of life and the “art of being” in life.

You are no more in your body than Beethoven is inside your radio.
—Deepak Chopra

In my trainings, I often tell people, as my teacher Juan told me, that we each are at the center of the universe. We can never really know anything independently of our perception of it. A recent book, You are the Universe: Discovering Your Cosmic Self and Why It Matters, by physician and change-agent Deepak Chopra and physicist Menas Kafatos, argues as much, and then uses the latest science to go even further—beyond perception and cosmic collaboration—to argue that you and the cosmos are one.

The paqos of old understood truths about the universe that physicists and cosmologists only discovered within the last century. For instance, the Quechua word pacha means time and space, as inseparable. That’s why Pachamama is the entire material universe (where time and space reveal themselves; outside of materiality, these terms are meaningless) Pachamama is not just Mother Earth, as some people think—Mama Allpa is the name given to planet Earth—it is the entire known and unknown material universe. The kawsay pacha, in contrast, is immaterial. From it arises the material world, including space and time. Einstein’s space-time continuum, introduced in his theories of relativity in the 1920s, suggested the same fundamental truth about the complementarity of space-time. Now, because of quantum mechanics, quantum electrodynamics, and efforts to discover what the “beginning” is (before the Big Bang; at the level of the Planck constant), some scientists are grappling with what “reality” means and is. The paqos belief/teaching that we are each the center of the universe goes hand in hand with their belief that one of the goals of being a paqo is to “see reality as it really is.”

You are at the center of the universe because there are only two things you can know: yourself and your relationship with everything else. Ayni is the word used to describe this energetic and perceptual interchange and reciprocity. In quantum physics, it is called entanglement. When two particles are created together and then separated—no matter how far apart they are, two inches or two light-years—they remain in correlation, so that if you change a parameter (say the spin) of one particle, the other instantaneously changes to be in complementary relationship with the partner particle. So it is with you and the universe—you are in continual interchange with the living universe, whether you are conscious of that interchange or not. But now we must go even deeper. Since it is from the universe that you arose, you are in some very real sense not only in interchange with the living universe, but are indistinguishable from it.

Chopra and Kafatos beautifully blend science and spirituality to make the case for cosmic consciousness. One of their conclusions is that “Cosmic consciousness mirrors the observer’s state of being. There is no privileged point of view, even though in the past religion claimed to have a privileged point of view while today’s science does the same. But each story is provided with evidence to support it, because our state of being interacts so intimately  with reality that observer, observed, and the process of observation are inseparable.” As they say later in the discussion, “the whole system participates.” [Italics in original.]

But as they also point out, “We do not experience the field [of cosmic consciousness] itself but the qualia that emerge from it. We use these to become individuals with specific (i.e., local) perspectives.” Qualia refers to qualities, such a color, texture, sound, and the like. The material world consists, they say, of qualia, and since qualia are processed through our minds, each of us experiences a slightly different world. I remember sitting in a theater and noting the beauty of the deep purple color of the ceiling-to-floor velvet curtains. My husband said, “Purple? They are brown.” That’s qualia as filtered through individual human perceptual channels. We don’t inhabit the same world. Each of our world’s is in some measure, no matter how small, unique to us.

As a practitioner of the Andean mystical tradition, you learn to experience the world energetically as well as physically. A core practice is to use your energetic capacities, including the twelve ñawis (mystical eyes) to perceive the world. Although you want to develop the perceptual sensitivity of all your ñawis, the eye of the qoqso (belly) is the energetic center through which you primarily engage the material and energetic world. By sending a seqe, or cord of energy, out from this center, you “taste” the flavors of the living energy. You can think of doing this as directing your energetic gaze to one thing in particular with the intention of sensing it in all is complexity, just as you would direct your gaze at a flower and take in more detail than if you were scanning the entire garden. The words we use—“tasting” the “flavors” of energy—obviously are metaphors for discerning the different qualia of the material world.

During training, I send people outside to practice “tasting” different things, from trees and clouds to water hoses and plastic lawn chairs. Each has its own poq’po, or energy bubble. The goal is to get beyond the surface qualia (color, texture, etc.) that dominate your sensory organs and reach beyond the material world and its qualia to the energetic signature of objects. After all, there really is no color or sound “out there” in the world. There is only the interpretation via your mind as photons strike your eyes or phonons your ears and they travel to your brain. At the interface of brain and mind a translation occurs, turning frequency into color or sound. In the “tasting” exercise, the Andean masters ask you to go deeper than what even your brain/mind asks you to perceive—to translate via your poq’po (energy body) on a purely energetic level.

I suspect that many people think that “tasting”  kawsay is an awkward or even ridiculous exercise, and most don’t continue to practice after the weekend training. But “tasting” the energies of the material objects of the world is a challenging training to fine-tune your non-brain-dependent and even non-mind-dependent but still conscious energetic abilities and thereby to refine the quality of your ayni.

At this level of “reality,” there is something beyond mind and brain—there is pure consciousness. Therefore, the quality of your consciousness matters. The Andean path is both a path of conscious evolution (awareness via mind) and of the evolution of consciousness (awareness beyond the material-immaterial brain-mind interface). In this participatory universe, you prime your own personal development and, by doing so, also contribute to the evolution of the cosmos.

The paqos say that the world you experience—your ”reality”—is dependent on the state of your awareness. As Chopra and Kafatos write, “There is room for infinite creativity depending on the observer. The state of awareness that you are in alters the qualia all around you. A sunset isn’t beautiful to someone who is suicidal; a severe leg cramp is negligible if you’ve just won a marathon. Observer, observed, and process of observation are intimately linked. As they unfold, the ‘stuff’ of the universe emerges.”

But Chopra and Kafatos are not talking merely about psychological subjectivity. Neither were the master paqos of old. They are talking about ayni—about the energetic interchange with the immaterial field of living energy from which you (and everything else) emerged, and within which you are always creating yourself and, in a very real sense, the world. Ayni is the Andean version of the inseparability of “observer, observed and process of observation.” Ayni is a fundamental energetic law of the inner-outer cosmos. And your goal as a paqo is not only to become acutely consciousness of your ayni interchanges, but to refine the quality of those interchanges. That is what your training as a paqo is all about. It’s not about karpays, ceremony, magic. . . . It’s about being in active and exquisite relationship with the living universe while being right here in the human world.

The arguments and evidence for this way of understanding “reality,” of course, go much, much deeper than I am able to point out here, but there are enough correspondences between Chopra’s and Kafatok’s “human universe” and the mystical view of the paqos to make this philosophy worth exploring. If nothing else, it is interesting to see that when we follow where science (i.e., physics, mind-brain studies, etc.) is leading us, we come to a place of understanding in relation to the kawsay pacha that I think the paqos of old would feel most comfortable and familiar.

 

In my last post, I wrote about how paqos are beings of joy and service. That is true—in the ideal. But I might have left the impression that paqos are more loving, joyful, and self-aware than the rest of us. While many of them have mastered incredible energetic practices, they are human beings with failings, foibles, and personality conflicts. They are working the practices to become more self-aware and to further their own conscious evolution, just as we are. They are models for us, but, for the most part, we put them on a pedestal reluctantly. We respect and even honor them, but we would do well not to fall into a hero-worship mode.

I remember one of the first things my primary teacher, Juan Nuñez del Prado, told me when I was about to start the interviews for my book Masters of the Living Energy: The Mystical World of the Q’ero of Peru.”* He counseled, “Don’t sentimentalize the Indians.” At that time I couldn’t follow his advice. I was more or less in awe of the paqos I was interviewing. But over the years, as I got to spend time with them and know some of them a little better, I learned that they are just like the rest of us when it comes to their humanness. They can be outgoing, playful, talkative, even egoistic; they also can be shy, unsure of themselves, embarrassed, jealous, acquisitive, angry, even a bit vindictive.

Most of the paqos I worked with have passed on, and some of their teachers I only knew through reputation and stories told to me by Juan Nuñez del Prado or others. To highlight my point that the paqos are very much like all of us, I share some anecdotes about paqos from both my own experience and from reliable sources.

One of the most surprising tidbits of information I learned from Juan is that the late don Manuel Q’espi, who was once the kuraq akulleq of Q’ero, was actually booted out of paqo school when he was  a young man! High in the mountains where the Chua Chua and Totorani rivers meet, there was a paqo school that ran every year for the month of August. The year Juan attended was the same year don Manuel attended. The headmaster was the famous Q’ero master don Andres Espinosa. Apparently don Manuel and don Andres had a falling out and don Andres kicked don Manuel out of the school!

I did not meet don Manuel until years later, and whenever I was with him he was always pleasant, smiling, and happy. That is, until he began his despacho ceremonies—then he became all business. I sometimes found it trying to do a despacho with him, as more often than not the ceremony lasted for hours and, frankly, it was hard to stay focused. In fact, once, so I have been told, don Manuel, having had a bit too much pisco, actually fell asleep while leading a group despacho ceremony! No problem. The others carried on, and when don Manuel woke up, he picked up as if nothing had happened.

Most of the paqos we knew (and others I know today) are friendly and quick to offer their knowledge if asked. But don Andres Espinosa was not known as overly approachable. In fact, he had a reputation for being ornery. When Juan first met him, he was terse and dismissive. The word “taskmaster” comes to mind when I remember the stories I have heard of don Andres. Tough, exacting, even demanding are other words that come to mind. Even though the stories about him are intimidating, I wish I had had the chance to meet him. He was a master chunpi paqo, the only one I ever heard about. Thankfully, we have his teachings.

In contrast, don Benito Qoriwaman, another great master of the last generation, was as magnanimous as they come. But even he was decidedly human. Juan tells how when don Benito had had enough of dealing with the townspeople, the clients at his healing center, his wife and kids, and his apprentices, he would just leave. He literally would take off for days or longer, telling no one where he was going or when he would return.

Of all the paqos I knew personally, I spent the most time with don Mariano Apasa Marchaqa, which doesn’t mean I got to know him well, as most of the time he was simply inscrutable. It was impossible to read his face, and thus I was usually left in the dark about what he might be feeling. Overall, his demeanor was dignified but a bit stand-offish. He wasn’t someone you approached spontaneously, giving a big hug. Even though his face usually was a blank slate, every so often he would break into a smile and, to use a cliché, the room would light up. He also had an oblique sense of humor. I remember during the interviews for my book he looked up at one point and said, with seriousness and great humility, something to the effect of: “If I had known that one day I would be here talking to you, I would have listened better to my father and grandfather when I was a child. I wasn’t interested then. Their stories and teachings went in one ear and out the other.”

Many of the paqos of the last generation were very unsure of themselves when they were among mestizos in Cuzco because the norms of the culture differed so much from their everyday lives in their mountain villages. That’s entirely understandable, and it in no way detracts from them. But it was hard to witness their discomfort sometimes. I remember being at Juan Nuñez del Prado’s house one day for lunch when three Q’ero showed up. Juan’s wife, Lida, invited them to join us. They put their bundles down, came in, and sat at the table with us. If you could have seen their faces and body language! They were so unsure of themselves, exuding nervousness as Lida laid out plates and cutlery. They watched carefully as we used knives and forks, and then they, clumsily, tried to use them. My heart went out to them. I wished they had had the confidence to just eat with their fingers, so they could really enjoy the meal. None of us would have cared. (I was able to commiserate with their unease because I had felt it many times myself when with the paqos, especially the few times I was in the Q’ero villages. I didn’t know the proper way to do things or what was expected of me.) I have to laugh at something that happened when the lunch was over. One of the Q’ero, I think it was don Julian Pauqar Flores, got up, opened the screen door to the back covered patio/garage area, and stepped out to relieve himself in full view of the rest of us. He didn’t appear tentative at all when it came to that aspect of his comfort!

The most playful paqos I ever met were the youngest ones—don Juan Pauqar Espinosa and don Augustine Pauqar Qapac. Don Juan has passed on, but he was as mischievous as a six-year-old, always ready to play and quick with a joke (which, because of translation, I mostly missed at the moment and had to play catch up later). Don Augustine appeared to be shy, but what a prankster he was. I understand from people who know him today that he is much less playful. Maybe that’s what age does to you! But when he was a young man and I was interviewing him, he would slip words like “breast” and “vagina” into our mutual Quechua-English language lessons. It cracked him up as we repeated the words before the translation was given and we knew what they meant. Both don Juan and don Augustine were also game for adventure and to learn anything new. There was a foosball table in the courtyard of the place we stayed in Urubamba during the book interviews, and after a little instruction, they played game after game. And they were wildly competitive with each other!

One thing I was surprised about back then (the 1990s) was that despite their very real and well-deserved reputation as the masters of the sacred tradition, the Q’ero I interviewed had lost a lot of the practices. They did not know hucha mikhuy and there was no chunpi paqo in Q’ero (at least not one openly practicing). When they heard about hucha mikhuy, they wanted us to teach them. Despite having lost knowledge of some of the practices common to the older paqos, these young paqos followed in their teachers’ and ancestors’ footsteps in terms of their ayni. Participating in ayni ceremonies, whether a despacho or connecting with an apu, was a solemn, sacred, and deeply moving experience. Their munay infused all of their ayni practices.

While today I know only a few of the younger paqos who now travel the world teaching and sharing the tradition, I am aware that there are more than a few who have been heavily influenced by outsiders and by practices from other traditions. Some of them are less than particular about explaining what is authentically Andean and what is not. That’s all well and good depending on your preferences. I, for one, prefer to be educated about what is part of the tradition and what comes from beyond it, because as Juan has stressed (based on the teachings from his masters, especially don Benito Qoriwaman, who was not Q’ero), in order to be a fourth-level paqo, you must know your lineage, and that includes the lineage of the practices.

The point of this post is that while we respect and honor the paqos, we also are not starry-eyed. While we are open to receiving counsel and teachings, we also keep our clarity of discernment. We reserve judgment, but we trust our instincts if things don’t feel right. We aren’t afraid to ask questions—and to expect honest and clear answers. Bottom line is that most paqos are human beings walking a sacred path, not masters with infallible knowledge. Juan Pauqar Espinosa said during the interviews, ‘We are all human beings, only our clothes are different.” That is the crux of the issue, because to wear blinders when it comes to the paqos—putting them on a pedestal as if they are infallible—is to miss the teaching of the tradition, which is to “see reality as it really is.” That includes the reality of the humanness of your teachers.