andean

Hucha Mikhuy: Digesting Heavy Energy

~ Q'enti Wasi ~ 1 Comment

During a recent ice storm, I spent my time housebound revisiting old transcripts of private conversations, small group discussions, and early classes with don Juan Nuñez del Prado. Within these folders was a trove of insights into hucha mikhuy (also spelled hucha miqhuy), which inspired me to compile and share these teachings with you. (You might also want to revisit last month’s blog post in which I discuss the basics of hucha mikhuy.)

Hucha mikhuy is an advanced technique used to transform or release hucha, or heavy energy. It is applied in three ways:

  • Self-Refinement: Transforming our own accumulated heavy energy.
  • Service to Others: Clearing hucha for the benefit of another person.
  • Relational Empowerment: Refining the energetic flow between ourselves and others to reduce any hucha within a relationship.

Regardless of how we apply this energy “tool”—as don Juan calls it—the core process remains the same. We draw the hucha into the qosqo ñawi (the mystical eye or energy center at the navel/belly), intending for our spiritual stomach to “digest” the heaviness. The key to successful digestion lies in perceiving how the incoming stream of hucha transforms as it enters the qosqo and the digestion process begins: The single stream of hucha splits into two distinct flows. A portion of the hucha is accelerated back to its natural state of sami (light living energy). This refined energy diverges from the main stream of hucha and flows upward through the body, empowering us. The remaining hucha, which is not digested, flows down into Mother Earth, who graciously receives and expertly transforms it.

Through this practice, we truly come to understand that hucha is a kind of “food” for us and for Mother Earth. Don Juan beautifully explains this reciprocal relationship: “Mother Earth is a co-creator with the cosmos. She propels our evolution. Everything is sami, and only human beings create hucha. She recycles our hucha, which propels us forward. She feeds us sami as a kind of food and we feed her hucha, which is food for her. This is ayni, sacred reciprocity. When we do hucha mikhuy, we are following her example. She is the master at recycling things, and with hucha mikhuy we learn to recycle energy as Mother Earth does. Hucha mikhuy increases our sami: with the self, our relations to others, and the world. We become Mother Earth’s ally, helping her to digest human beings’ heavy energy. When we are digesting heavy energy in a relationship or for another person, we are doing three things: first we are giving food to Mother Earth. She is the best at hucha mikhuy, and she loves hucha! Second, we are clearing some of the other person’s hucha, helping that person. Third, we are empowering ourselves. There is a big impact because we are doing three things at the same time as we digest heavy energy.”

Don Juan further explained the ayni dynamic this way: “We don’t have Ten Commandments in this tradition. We have only one commandment, and it is ayni. If you receive something, you must give something. It is the moral rule to share. You have the right to increase your personal power, but if you do, you also must share your power with other people. We are not looking just to accumulate power; we are looking to share it. You know, there is nothing heavy about money, about accumulating a lot of money, if you share it with others who need it. In our Westernized cultures, we sometimes want money just to have money, and the more, the better! But in the Andes, we share what we accumulate. This is the law of ayni.”

Hucha mikhuy, don Juan says, is a “spiritual tool, and so it is a matter of training.” It is considered an advanced energy practice, and so there is a protocol for learning it. When don Benito Qoriwaman taught hucha mikhuy to don Juan, he explained this step-by-step sequence, and we would all do well to follow it. First, we work on ourselves, and to do that we must hone our ability to perceive energy. Energy is always coming toward us and through us, and we want to learn to perceive energy as it touches the “skin” of our poq’po, or energy bubble. Our poq’po, according to don Juan, “is sensitive, just like the skin of our body is. If you touch the skin on your arm, you will feel that touch. The poq’po has an outer boundary, which we can think of as its own kind of skin. When energy flows meet it, they are like fingers touching the skin of our body. We are sensitive to that energy having touched us. It might take practice to develop that level of sensitivity to energy, but like anything else, with practice we will develop the ability to do just that.”

Once we are adept at perceiving energy flows, we move to the next step in learning hucha mikhuy: mastering control of the mystical eye (qosqo ñawi) at our belly (qosqo). Don Juan explains, “You must learn to work with your qosqo, which is your spiritual stomach. You will feel how you can open and close your qosqo ñawi, the ‘eye’ or energy center there. You must learn to use this ñawi like the diaphragm of a camera. You don’t start with your qosqo ñawi wide open. You open it only a little. And then as the energy flows in you will feel something like a finger touching you. In the beginning, you may only feel a little flow of hucha into the qosqo. Then you use intention to open the qosqo ñawi more, and you will feel the periphery of the ñawi enlarging. Once you learn to control your qosqo ñawi, then you learn how to digest, to use your spiritual stomach. You just command it to digest, and it will do it! You will feel the flow of hucha coming into the qosqo and split into two streams: one of sami flowing up and one of undigested hucha flowing down. That’s it! Don’t overthink it. Just trust that your spiritual stomach knows what to do.”

To understand the energy dynamic, we must remember that hucha is simply slow sami (light living energy). As the hucha is digested in our spiritual stomach, some of the hucha is sped back up to its natural state and some it will resist transformation. Hence, the split flow of sami moving up and into us and hucha moving down to Mother Earth. That double flow is a key characteristic of “digesting” hucha. Don Juan says, “If you do not feel the split stream, then you are not digesting. So, you just stop, and you can try again another time.”

As an aside: If you are like me, sometimes you will not feel the split stream. When that happens, I don’t stop the hucha mikhuy session, because I trust my spiritual stomach more than my own perceptual sensitivity! Some days I simply am more perceptual than others. As don Juan said, our qosqo knows what to do, and I take that literally.

Once we know how to do hucha mikhuy, the learning protocol continues by working with varying degrees of hucha. “Don’t rush,” don Juan says. “Follow the teaching. Practice. Learn step by step. First learn to perceive your bubble and energy flows, and then your qosqo ñawi. Learn how to open and close that ñawi. Then learn to digest your own heavy energy, the hucha on the surface of your poq’po. When you know how to do that for yourself, you will know how to do it for another person. Start by processing the hucha of a person close to you, someone who is neutral in your relations with them or who you feel you have only a little hucha with. Then move to a person who is heavier, where your relationship is a bit uglier. Once you master the technique, it is a tool to use with a person who is ugly, who is heavy or heavy in their dealings with you. But do not go there first! You take it a step at a time.”

When learning hucha mikhuy, students commonly ask if there is any danger of taking in too much hucha, and, if so, if that can be harmful. The answer to both concerns is “No.” The worst that can happen is that we will not be able to digest the energy, and so we simply stop the practice. Don Juan reminds us that “when dealing with hucha, you are not touching something dark or negative. You are dealing with something heavy. Think of trying to lift a heavy stone in your yard and you cannot, and that is all that will happen—you cannot! So you stop trying, and come back to it later.”

As counterintuitive as it seems, any discomfort we might experience during hucha mikhuy is not from taking in hucha (even the heaviest of hucha), but from accumulating too much sami in our body and poq’po. “When you are digesting a lot of hucha,” don Juan explains, “you will be taking a lot of sami up and into yourself. So, sometimes you might feel a little too full, a little dizzy or something, like when you drink too much alcohol! You don’t have to stop digesting the hucha. Just send some of that sami up out of the top of your head and to someone who can use more sami. Share it! Then you will feel better, and through ayni you are putting some sami in the bank. If you send sami to someone who needs it, it doesn’t stop there. Maybe one day you will find yourself in a situation where you need more energy and you don’t have it. Then you can ask for it, and you will receive it. The living universe will know how you shared and it will send some extra sami to you. You can ask for it and receive it!”

 

A Review of Core Andean Energy Dynamics

~ Q'enti Wasi ~ 2 Comments

As we begin a new year, it might be useful to review some of the main teachings of Andean mystical practice. I am focusing on core principles that most of us learn early in our training but are easily overlooked, forgotten, or misunderstood. These principles may be less well known to those of you who have studied with teachers other than Don Juan Nuñez del Prado or teachers trained by him.

Ours Is a Path of Practice, Not of Philosophy

Don Juan has stressed how the Andean mystical tradition is not a training in “why” but in “how.” It is not a path of intellect, but of experience. The paqos do not prompt us ahead of time to understand the meaning of a practice; we are told how to do the practice, and by doing it we come to learn what we can accomplish. Through the repetitive experience of the way the energy moves, we come to understand the consequences of that energy dynamic. As Don Juan says, each practice “provides a specific experience; not just anything can happen. Certain experiences contribute to our growth, and the paqos planned it that way.”

The training is a sequence, a protocol for accumulating personal power: for having the will, flexibility, and resiliency to meet life with well-being despite all its vagaries. It also is a protocol for stepping up the qanchispatañan: the stairway or pathway of the development of human consciousness. We make the choice for developing ourselves, and the qanchispatañan shows us what is possible: that we can become enlightened human beings.

Similar Names, Different Practices

Do you know that saminchakuy refers to two different practices? And that mikhuy and hucha mikhuy are not the same? A lot of students and even practitioners of the tradition either do not understand these distinctions or forget them.

Let’s break the word saminchakuy down and look at the context for its use. Chakuy literally means to hunt, or to chase down and capture. Figuratively, it refers to taking intentional action to achieve an objective. Don Juan defines it as “to take action with” or simply “to make.” So, saminchakuy is the act of “doing something with sami.” And it is the name of two different sami practices.

As a quick review: Sami is the light living energy, the animating energy; we are always absorbing and radiating sami. When, for various reasons, we slow or block sami from flowing through us, we call that slow sami “hucha,” which literally means “heavy” energy. It detracts from our well-being over time. So, we want to transform it back to its natural state. Saminchakuy is our primary practice for transforming hucha. We direct a flow of concentrated sami over our poq’po (energy bubble) and through our physical body to clear our hucha.

However, saminchakuy also can be practiced independently of hucha transformation. In its second sense, it is the simple act of receiving sami. When we connect energetically with a source, we may feel its sami flowing freely toward us or we may intentionally pull that sami into our energy field. So, the mere reception and intake of sami is also called a saminchakuy.

An example of this kind of saminchakuy is when I and a small group of others arrived at dusk at the Q’ero village of Chua Chua. We had been on horseback all day, riding through rough mountain terrain. We were exhausted. Don Juan told us that when we met later with Don Manuel Quispe, who was the top Q’ero paqo at that time, we should pull sami from him to rejuvenate ourselves. When I asked him about the ethics of doing that, he explained that anyone who is or claims to be more energetically developed than us (and therefore more powerful, more sami-filled) automatically is a source of sami for others. This dynamic operates outside the principle of ayni (reciprocity or an interaction of mutual giving and receiving); instead, it is a one-way flow of sami from a source to us for empowerment, strengthening, rejuvenation, and similar benefits. (I should note that we do not have the right to draw sami from anyone who is at our same developmental level or a lower level, although we are free to take their hucha, as explained later in this post.)

Now let’s turn to the distinction between hucha mikhuy and mikhuy. Mikhuy means to eat or consume. Our advanced practice for transforming heavy energy is called hucha mikhuy: the act of “eating” or, as Don Juan defines it, “digesting” hucha. During this practice, we draw another person’s hucha—or even our own—into our qosqo ñawi, the energy center at our belly, where it is transformed. The qosqo area of our body is our mystical or spiritual stomach. Just as the physical stomach processes food, the qosqo digests heavy energy. Through hucha mikhuy, the qosqo metabolizes the hucha, returning a portion of it back into its natural sami state. Any hucha that cannot be processed is released to Mother Earth, who effortlessly digests and transforms it. 

We also can practice mikhuy in a way that has nothing to do with transforming heavy energy; instead, it serves as a method of deepening our experience of sami, whether from a tree, cloud, spirit being, or sanctuary. We draw the source’s light living energy into our qosqo, for a restorative empowerment and a more profound, even visceral experience of the quality of the source energy. Sometimes we call this kind of mikhuy “tasting” energy. It is similar to the second meaning of saminchakuy (the taking in of sami), only it is a more robust way to sense and experience the quality of that sami. Don Juan once said that using mikhuy to “taste” energy is the difference between being told what an apple tastes like and actually taking a bite.

Hucha Is Public Domain; Sami Is Not

As the light living energy, sami animates and revitalizes us. We are always flowing sami through us, absorbing it and radiating it. However, we humans are the only creatures who can slow or block the life-force energy; when we do, we create hucha for ourselves. Fortunately, we have practices to transform, and thus reduce, our hucha. And we can help each other do that. As Don Juan points out, “Hucha is in the public domain,” meaning we are free to use our hucha-transforming practices, such as saminchakuy or hucha  mikhuy, on others to enhance their well-being. When working on someone’s poq’po, we clear hucha from its outer surface. Because we are not entering into their energy field, we do not have to ask permission to work on their behalf. However, to work on transforming hucha within a person’s poq’po, we do have to ask permission.

We have a different set of ethical rules for working with sami. With the one exception as mentioned above (the Don Manuel Quispe example), sami is not public domain. A fundamental principle of the tradition is that no can access or take our sami without our conscious or unconscious permission. So, what do we do if we believe someone is draining our sami?

To answer that question, we first need a bit of context. The qanchispatañan is comprised of seven stages of human consciousness. From the fourth-level perspective, we are seeking to be masters of our energy environment and our own wasi. We take total responsibility for ourselves. If we believe someone is trying to take our sami, we first question our own belief, entertaining the possibility that the problem is with us: at some psychological unconscious level we are allowing that spirit or person into our field or we are projecting our own denied fears outward onto someone or something else, such as a malevolent spirit. So, we do our personal work to regain our psychological equilibrium and energetic integrity.

The situation looks different from the view of the third level. At this stage of development, the belief is literal that there are powerful malicious spirits or people who can trap us and violate the integrity of our poq’po by stealing our sami. If that is our belief, it is true for us. And we will want to do something about it. So, what’s the solution?

Radical generosity: Give them exactly what they want—some of our sami.

As counterintuitive as that action may seem based on our third-level beliefs and self-interest, it makes perfect energetic sense. The energetically greedy spirit or person wants or needs sami and is attracted to ours. Since we continuously absorb sami, as all living beings do, and the supply of sami from the living universe is inexhaustible, we can share ours freely. We can never be depleted, so we have plenty of sami to share. And if we feel a need for more sami, we simply absorb more from an available source, such as the earth or the living universe at large.

However, Don Juan counsels that we should share our own sami only if we feel comfortable doing so. If we do not, then we can still give that spirit or person the sami they want by pulling it from an outside source (a tree, the earth, and so on) and streaming it to them. When we know ourselves and our capacities well, we can make the choice that is within our comfort zone and act with confidence and generosity.

The Paqo Way of Power

The way of the paqo is to practice ayni, reciprocity. However, ayni is not just intention; it is intention put into action. So, the paqo path is a path of action. However, our ability to act in the world is not dependent only on our will, passion, stamina, and such. It also is dependent on our atiy, our ability to measure our power. We must determine if we have sufficient power to fulfill an objective or not. We do this at the siki ñawi, the mystical eye at the tailbone, although the way we measure our atiy is beyond the scope of this post. The point here is that we might want to do something, but not have the personal power to succeed. Knowing that in advance prevents us from needlessly wasting our energy or feeling frustrated. If we determine that we have insufficient power to fulfill our intention, then we redirect our intention and action to our practices to hone our power, until we know we are not only ready to act, but are able to.

Using our power wisely is another aspect of the paqo path. Before we take on too much, such as attempting to use our personal power to act on behalf of others or address a problem out in the world, we deal with our own issues. Doing so is essential, because accumulating personal power requires the transformation of our own hucha. Heavy energy acts like a screen, obscuring our clarity and limiting access to our full potential and aptitude. So, Don Juan advises that before we “stick our noses in other people’s business,” we must use our power to attend to our own inner and outer affairs. Once we have cleared our own field and put our own house in order, we can share our energy and power freely to act on behalf of the well-being of others.

Not having sufficient power in the moment to fulfill an objective does not mean we cannot work toward that objective at all. We simply need to moderate our ambition or enthusiasm, extend our time line, and take small steps toward that goal. No matter what our capacity, we have some measure of power, and we can use it wisely to work toward the fulfillment of our goals or in helping support others’ interests and well-being. Although the following quotation is not about the Andean tradition, it certainly applies to how we use our personal power, “If you do not have the opportunity to do great things, do small things in a great way.” (From Brian Weiss’s Messages from the Masters: Tapping into the Power of Love.)

Honoring Mama Allpa

~ Q'enti Wasi ~ 3 Comments

Note: In this post, I refrain from interrupting the flow of ideas with definitions of the Andean practices that are mentioned. If you have been studying the tradition through the two lineages I write about, you will know them. If you are new to the tradition, there are nearly ten years of posts in the archives that you can search for explanations and additional information.earth- Pixabay 5486511_1280

I am closing out this year by writing about hucha, “heavy” energy, and how our practice is to transform our own hucha back into sami, the light living energy that empowers us. Let us end a year that has felt heavy in so many respects—from climate disasters to war and conflict to a spreading politics of cynicism and even violence—by shifting our perspective from feelings to action. Because the good news is that we do not have to deal with our hucha alone. As we close out the year, let us honor Mother Earth, who is always available to assist us.

Of course, we always start by taking personal responsibility for the state of our own energy. We all have hucha, and if we have studied the Andean sacred arts, we have tools to deal with it. When we block or slow down sami—the life-force energy—and so create hucha, we have our core daily practice of saminchakuy. To undertake a deeper clearing of hucha or to reduce hucha we feel between ourselves and others, we have hucha miqhuy. If we are carrying hucha from our personal past, we have wachay. If we have restructured our mystical body by weaving the chunpis (energetic “belts”), we have heightened our capacity to move energy upward through our ñawis, our mystical eyes. As our hucha moves up, it becomes more refined, dissipating its heaviness and regaining more of its lightness. This refinement improves the energetic quality of our wasi: our body and poq’po.

There is one constant in all these practices: Mother Earth. She is called both Pachamama and Mama Allpa. However, I prefer to make a distinction: Pachamama is the Mother of the Cosmos, of the entire created world, whereas Mama Allpa is the sacred being that is the planet Earth. There is a reason Andeans call the Earth by both names, but in the interest of brevity, I will not explain these nuances and will simply state my preference for calling her Mama Allpa.  

Mama Allpa has no hucha. Nor do any of the creatures of the natural world. Only human beings block or reduce the flow of the life-force energy and so create hucha. But Mama Allpa is our greatest ally in dealing with our hucha. She is known as the Great Eater of Hucha. Although ayni—reciprocity, giving and receiving—is the natural law of the universe, Mama Allpa is always ready to receive our hucha without asking anything of us in return. We do not have to earn or deserve her help. Our relationship with Mama Allpa is not one of chhalay, meaning it is not transactional. She does not require a bargain. She gives without condition. She is part of a tawantin that freely sustains all life: the universal spirit beings of the Earth (Mama Allpa), Sun (Tayta Inti), Wind/Air (Tayta Wayra), and Water (Mama Unu). From this tawantin of life-force power we are given our hanchi, our physical body, and they freely sustain us physically and energetically throughout the span of our lives. Of course, if we are sensitive and generous, we always honor these spirit beings and choose to be in ayni with them. But as the foundations of life, they do not require anything of us.

Although I said that only human beings create hucha, it is useful to take a moment to understand that hucha also can be seen as the natural cycle of life. As don Juan Nuñez del Prado explains, the life cycle begins with sami and continues in a long arc of increasingly more robust expressions of sami until a peak pear-Pixabay 3519397_1280is reached. Then the arc curves downward, with a continuing reduction of sami, which we can see as hucha in that it is the slowing of life-force energy. Finally, the physical life force is extinguished. A seed geminates, a seedling grows, a plant flourishes until it reaches the apex of its growth, perhaps flowering and fruiting, and then slowly, over time, it begins to lose life force, until it collapses to the ground and its physical constituents are reabsorbed into the earth. We are in relationship with Mother Earth in the same way. She is one of the tawantin of powers that support and sustain the body in which we exist. When our life force is extinguished, our body returns to her. She asks nothing of us during this cycle of life.

In our hucha-transformation energy practices, however, we understand that we are in a kind of ayni with her. Mama Allpa’s core specialties are life, growth, evolution, change, transformation, support, and empowerment. When we give her our hucha, we are giving her an energy that she welcomes. Don Juan and some of the paqos have said that our hucha is “food” for her—one of her favorite foods! When we give her our hucha through such practices as saminchakuy and hucha miqhuy, she takes that slow life-force energy and performs her magic, returning it to its natural vibrant state. This may seem an unusual or unfair exchange to us with our Western mindset. We think of the things we “excrete” as dirty or negative. But Mother Earth is the great composter—one of her most robust powers is transformation through recycling and redistribution. Dung becomes fertilizer. The decaying wood of a tree revitalizes her soil with nutrients. The dead husk of a beetle becomes components for new life. From this perspective, our hucha is another form of life-force energy. It is only when we forget that hucha is sami (simply slow sami) that we misrepresent Mother Earth’s largesse to us by thinking we are hurting or burdening her by giving her our hucha to transform when we cannot fully do that for ourselves.

As don Juan has said, “Mother Earth is a co-creator with the cosmos. She fuels our evolution. She recycles our hucha, helps propel us forward. She feeds us [through the food she helps us grow, the animals whose lives she supports] and we feed her hucha.” In hucha miqhuy, a similar dynamic is in play. Don Juan says of hucha miqhuy, “We take control [of our hucha] following her example. We learn to recycle energy as Mother Earth recycles things. We become Mother Earth’s ally, helping her to digest human beings’ heavy energy.” In both practices—saminchakuy and hucha miqhuy—our hucha is a form of ayni that we engage in with Mother Earth.

Just about everything in our practice involves Mother Earth coming to our aid and enabling our greater well-being. For example, the energetic belts we weave into our mystical and physical body—the chunpis—are earth energy. It is not the chunpi paqo alone who creates the belts. Neither are the mullu khuyas the chunpi paqo uses to weave the belts responsible for their creation. The chunpis are created through the power of Mother Earth’s sami. Before the chunpi paqo begins the karpay to weave the belts, he or she connects with and pulls up Mother Earth’s energy, and that is what is used to create the belts. As don Juan has said, “The belts are not ‘natural’ [meaning, naturally a part of us], but are an energetic addition that improves us.” That addition is Mother Earth’s energy, the sami of the one who lovingly and without condition sustains us and supports us in cultivating ourselves.

In the left-side work—the lloq’e aspect of the tradition—we even plant our Inka Muyu (Inka Seed) in the earth. Our Inka Seed is an energetic structure and information field that holds within it our full potential. ItEye in Leaves or Earth - Pixabay ai-generated-7783062_1280 is the Self, the core “I” that is both our humanity and our divinity. To use the Hindu terms, it is both Atman (God Within) and Brahman (God Without). We literally use intention to move our Inka Muyu outside of our body and plant it in the earth. Once in the ground, Mother Earth helps fuel our Inka Muyu’s development. We could say she is fertilizing it with her sami. What she is really fertilizing is our capacity for self-inquiry, self-awareness, clarity of intention, and efficiency of action—all the aspects of the self that help us climb the qanchispatañan, the stairway of the seven levels of human consciousness. According to the tradition as passed on by don Benito Qoriwaman, we are under no obligation to develop ourselves. However, if we choose to, we can refine our consciousness and energy until we reach the sixth level of human consciousness—that of the enlightened human being—and even the seventh level—that of a human with godlike capacities. We do not undertake the process of our expansion alone. Mother Earth lovingly helps us.

As we close out this year, I invite you to join me in appreciating—in celebrating—Mother Earth and all she does for us. We honor her. As we go into the new year, no matter what is going on in the world and how much hucha we feel around us—we know that we are free to consciously condition our own inner state and that we have help. Mother Earth is always assisting us, feeding us, even energetically fertilizing us to be the most glorious human beings we can be.

Postscript: This discussion would not be complete without mentioning ecology, so I am addressing it briefly here. We are in an environmental crisis because of our lack of ayni in caring for the natural world. We have polluted the land, oceans, and air. We have damaged or obliterated vast swaths of the habitats of animals, birds, and insects. We are creating conditions that threaten our own well-being. The Andean tradition teaches that we must see reality as it really is, and the reality is that we are degrading and even destroying much of the natural world as we know it. We can make no excuses for ourselves.

The reality also is that Mother Earth will be just fine. The rallying cry of “Save the Earth” misstates the problem. What we are seeking is to save ourselves. Our lack of ayni with Mother Earth may hasten our own demise and that of other species as we create environmental conditions less conducive to human life and other forms of life. Our lack of ayni, to be brutally realistic, is both potentially suicidal and murderous. However, Mother Earth will survive whatever we do. She has persisted through countless environmental stresses and ecosystem collapses from Ice Ages to massive asteroid strikes. She absorbs death, and she fuels life. Gone are the velociraptors and the wooly mammoths, and here are the birds and elephants. A thousand years ago there was a desert, and today there is a verdant forest. Mama Allpa— wondrous Creatrix that she is—adjusts, survives, and thrives.