If you have taken the three-part Andean training with me, don Juan Nuñez del Prado or his son don Ivan, or other teachers trained by them, you will remember that as part of the Chaupi training we learn the practice of wañuy. This Quechua verb literally means “to die.” The practice is used to release any fear we have around our own physical mortality. When we release our hucha, or heavy energy, from around possible forms of our death, we can meet death as a friend. We can celebrate our return to our paqarina—our place of origin, which is with Taytanchis or God, or whatever term you choose to use for First Consciousness or Source.

The beauty and power of Andean practices are that they get to the fundamental dynamics of energy. They are not wholly dependent on form, nor are they restricted by a singular intent. So, while this is a practice used to prepare us for a conscious death, it may be used productively for other purposes. This blog post offers ways to adapt this practice to alleviate any fear, anxiety, or worry.

In the traditional practice, we start by initiating a saminchakuy, and we tune the sami to munay. We may do a general hucha-release of our wasi (poq’po and body), and take the munay through most of our mystical “eyes”—the ñawis—to release hucha from those in which it accumulates. (There is no hucha at the sonqo ñawi.) Then we choose a possible death, that is, we choose one way we think we may be likely to die. (Because there are so many possible ways we can “drop the body,” this is a practice that we do repeatedly.) We begin a visualization: a conscious, creative envisioning of the process of death. For the purposes of illustration, let’s say it is heart disease.  We move slowly from the present moment forward in time, feeling the impact of what unfolds: our initial diagnosis, our worsening state, our slow decline, our physical challenges or suffering, and such. There is no emotional avoidance. We immerse ourselves in the process. We engage our inner vision, our imagination, and, most importantly, our feelings. As we touch points of hucha, we release that heaviness into the saminchakuy stream of munay and give it to Mother Earth to transform.

In addition to releasing the hucha of our imagined physical and emotional decline, we may also become aware of the seqes—the energetic cords—that stubbornly attach us to our lives. We may struggle with letting go of our body. We may feel resistance to leaving our families and loved ones. We may face obstinate attachments to our status, achievements, money, or possessions. As we experience these resistances, we put any of that hucha into the saminchakuy flow as well. Eventually, when we feel as free of hucha as possible and we are ready to drop the body, we see ourselves do just that: our soul and spirit exit the body and we return “home.”

We are complete with the practice when we feel we have released our fears or hucha around that specific death scenario. Of course, we may have to do several sessions to achieve that level of personal freedom. Then we go on to deal with the next type of death we feel hucha around.

When I teach this practice, it is inevitable that some students feel resistance, or outright alarm. The most common questions are, “Isn’t doing this calling in that death? “Are we in danger of creating that reality?” No, we are not. I usually make two main points. First is the focus of our intent. We acknowledge that “energy follows intent” according to the Andean sacred arts. However, our intent is not to die or to die in any particular way, but to be free of fear about any possible way we may die whenever our life span is up. Our intent is hucha release—to be able to pass from this body with beauty infusing our souls whenever our death does occur and in whatever way it happens.

Second, we are giving ourselves a lot of credit if we think a half-hour visualization, despite how richly detailed and feeling-oriented it may be, will create reality. If that were the case, we would all be healthy, rich, famous, and sipping umbrella drinks on the beach of Waikiki. (Or whatever you feel the pinnacle of life looks like.) To be more realistic, we are a mess of contradictions, because our conscious and unconscious (shadow) are driving our energy moment to moment in conflicting ways, expressing our light and our darkness. We have a lot of hucha, which creates all kind of energetic filters that reduce our power. One relatively short visualization session is not going to cause us to acquire the coherence and personal power to call in any fixed version of reality. None of us (or at least no one I have heard of or know of) is free of power-reducing filters, and so none of us has mastered driving energy perfectly, such that a single visualization creates that reality.

Which is why, I like to think, the paqos in their wisdom designed a practice such as wañuy. It is a kind of hucha-filter cleaner or remover, one of many the tradition teaches. Although the paqos may have created the practice to help us deal with hucha around our mortality, I believe it can be adapted usefully to deal with many other common kinds of possible hucha, particularly fear, anxiety, and worry.

Let’s look at how we can adapt this practice to deal with those and similar kinds of issues. Let’s use one of the most common fears as our example: fear of public speaking. The way to adapt the process is to use it in a way that is similar to other forms of fear-reduction—desensitization. Wañuy does this in a purely energetic way, but I believe combining it with action out in the world is a way to supercharge its effects. Ayni, after all, is intention followed by action.

We would begin the way every wañuy session does: begin a saminchakuy, tune the sami to munay (love energy), and clear our wasi of as much hucha as possible. Then we begin the visualization. We move through it step by step, encompassing the entire process and releasing hucha related to any part of that process. We might begin by seeing ourselves accepting the invitation to deliver a speech, preparing the talk, researching and writing it, and then practicing it at home. We release any hucha into the stream of our saminchakuy. We continue by visualizing ourselves dressing to go deliver the talk, driving to the venue, being greeted by the host, seeing the audience as we walk onto the stage, being introduced, and then giving the talk. At every point where we feel hucha, we put it into the saminchakuy. The visualization process ends when we finish the talk and receive applause. We might have to do this process many times before we find our fear of even thinking about giving a public talk diminishing.

Sometimes we might not see results if we go right into visualizing the whole event. It is just too emotionally overwhelming. If that is the case, another way to use wañuy is to undertake, over time, a series of sessions that each desensitize us to portions of the process. We “chunk” the process and do as many sessions as necessary to clear hucha from one small part of the activity. Then we work on the next chunk of the process. And so on, until finally we can visualize the entire process without feeling any significant fear.

We can follow this protocol for any kind of hucha and emotional heaviness that has an unusually tight grip on us: anxiety, guilt, shame, worry, judgement, dislike of or shadow projection onto a person or group, shadow triggers . . . The paqos have provided us a way to release these kinds of emotional heaviness in a non-analytic, non-therapeutic way. Using wañuy, we are tuning ourselves purely energetically, although the effects reverberate through our emotional and physical selves.

Ideally, we will want to follow the release of our emotional heaviness with action in a way that tests the results out in the real world. While not everyone would follow up releasing their fear of public speaking by engaging in a public talk, we can easily find ways to put ourselves in similar situations and check in on whether we are indeed free of anxiety or fear. We might volunteer to give a presentation at work, or offer a toast or give a eulogy. In other, more concrete cases, such as a fear of elevators or snakes, we certainly can put our energy work to the test. We deliberately take an elevator or go to the zoo to see snakes. We might still feel nervous, but we ideally will be free of our normal anxiety or fear. If we find we are not, then we can always engage in further wañuy sessions.

We often don’t think of wañuy outside of the context for which it is used in our training. But it is a hugely adaptable practice that can be a powerful tool for helping us to stop avoiding aspects of the world and instead reengage with life in more expansive, confident ways.