mindfulness

Exploring Rimay and Atiy

~ Q'enti Wasi ~ Leave a comment

My Andean teacher, don Juan Nuñez del Prado, has said that with rimay and atiy we can do anything. The only person who can stop us is ourselves. If this is true, these two human capacities shouldn’t just be background concepts. We need to bring them front and center into our daily lives. So, let’s take a deeper dive into what these capacities mean and how they work together to potentially transform our reality.

In Andean mysticism, communication is viewed as a sacred, transformative act known as rimay. Encompassing speech, language, and communication, rimay is an inherent capacity of the kunka ñawi (energy center at the middle of our throat). Rimay also is sound as a sacred vibration. Every word we utter is imbued with our personal energy and with our karpay, our personal power. In this context, power does not mean dominance or control; it signifies how much of the vast reservoir of human capacity we have accessed from within ourselves and so can bring out into the world and use in our lives.

To fully understand rimay, we must look to its counterpart at the kunka ñawi: yachay. Unlike theoretical intellect or second-hand knowledge, yachay represents wisdom acquired through direct personal experience. Therefore, true rimay is the voice of lived experience. It is the authentic expression of our kanay—our core identity and unique individuality. When we speak from this place of integrated wisdom, we bring a natural confidence, integrity, clarity, and authenticity to our communication. When fueled by yachay, our rimay engenders trust, because we say what we mean and mean what we say. It engenders precision, because we know ourselves and so can communicate our views, preferences, choices, and decisions without apology, ambiguity, or hesitation. Our words align with our core values, and our core values arise from the integrity of our lived experience.

If rimay is the foundation of knowing and expressing who we are, atiy is the life we build upon that foundation. Atiy literally means “to be able to” or “to have the ability.” It is the capacity energetically associated with the siki ñawi, the energy center at the tailbone. Atiy is action in time: The actions we are capable of taking moment by moment, day after day, which add up to the expression of ourselves as integral participants of the world. Through the concept of ayni, or sacred reciprocity, atiy is our ability to “drive the kawsay”—the living energy—through the integrity of who we are. By “measuring” our atiy, we know what we are capable of doing; we can assess whether or not we have the personal power to accomplish what we say we want to in our lives.

Together rimay and atiy drive the kawsay to shape our lives. One way to look at this paired dynamic is that rimay without atiy is mostly empty talk; atiy without rimay is aimless action. Rimay and atiy themselves are part of a more complex chain of development, yet without them, the links in the chain weaken or even break. Pulling together explanations from various transcripts and notes I have, don Juan explains how self-knowledge and self-expression flow together and influence our ability to act in the world: “Pukllay is play, like children at play and lover’s games; reality vanishes, you become part of the whole. Our work is cosmic games. It’s a mix of munay and rimay. Munay as love and will, and rimay as the ability to express yourself. Rimay is more than that really: It is the ability to manifest yourself. To express yourself in all forms, including expressing and living your destiny and inviting others to do the same. All of this takes you to kanay, the power to be yourself. If you discover kanay, you reach atiy.”

Describing atiy, he says, “Atiy depends on the energy you have available to channel. The siki ñawi is about impulses, but atiy is not an undirected impulse, but a directed one. It’s an impulse that is empowered. It is a measure of how you have developed yourself. Your Inka Seed is your full potential, but you have not developed this all the way yet. Atiy is the measure of your power as you contrast it with your Inka Seed. It is your power in this moment. You contrast your possible full potential with what you have the power to do right now in your life. According to that measure, your atiy is the power to change reality around you: how much or easily you can do that. It is how you can trigger action. After you manifest yourself, you can drive kawsay to influence your life and reality; you cannot control reality, but you can make energy follow more harmonious flows in more harmonious directions for you. And then you can play in the world of living energy.”

These are not only Andean concepts, because, of course, communication and action are universal to human existence. Looking outside the tradition, perhaps it was Albert Einstein and Carl Jung who best defined rimay. Einstein said, “The only source of knowledge is experience.” And Jung said, “Experience is the direct realization of a truth.” And we can turn to Theodore Roosevelt to succinctly describe what the Andeans call atiy: “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” Whatever tradition or source of inspiration we draw upon, taking rimay and atiy into account matters to the quality of our lives. We tend to focus on developing ayni and munay, and rightly so. However, to be wholly involved in the world as our most glorious selves means mastering our rimay and atiy as well.

Wañuy: An Alternative Use

~ Q'enti Wasi ~ 2 Comments

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.