peru

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.)

On Being a Chakaruna

~ Q'enti Wasi ~ 3 Comments

Chakaruna means “bridge person,” and its meaning is self-evident: one who discerns connections and brings together or harmonizes two things, groups, traditions, ideas, and the like. We tend to think of this as an energy dynamic that occurs out in the world, and it certainly is that; however, the core energy dynamic starts inside of us.

The first bridge we build is within ourselves. The core energy dynamic of the Andean tradition is ayni: reciprocity. Bridge-building is a reciprocal endeavor. It does little good to establish a connection if the party with whom you have connected has no desire or ability to reach back to you and form a relationship. Reciprocity, therefore, is at the core of all kinds of chakaruna endeavors.

Anyi operates on many levels: socially among people and communities; ethically between ourselves and other people; and energetically between ourselves, other people, nature, the spirit beings, and, ultimately, the living universe. We are always in energetic interchange, although the bulk of our energy exchanges are driven by our unconscious needs, desires, beliefs, and such. Bringing consciousness to our ayni is essential personal work, and we cannot even begin to do that until we understand that ayni is a tawantin (comprised of four factors): intention, intention acted upon, awareness that there will be a reciprocal return (feedback) from the other party or the living universe, and then seeing and understanding that feedback when it comes so that we know whether to continue with our intentional action or whether we have to make some adjustments to it.

In addition, we understand ayni as an exchange in which both parties seek and receive fulfillment. The shared concern always is that each party in the interchange receives benefit. So, ayni is not any kind of interchange, but an interchange of mutual well-being. Many people new to the Andean tradition talk about ayni is generalized ways, thinking it is any kind of energy interchange. But it is not—it is special, and it is not so easy to achieve true ayni. In fact, there are plenty of other kinds of interchanges we can make that do not rise to the level of ayni. An example is chhalay. Chhalay is a transaction. It is an exchange devoid of much feeling (munay), and so tends to be based mostly on self-interest. If you see a sweater in the window of a store, you might go in and purchase it. There is a tacit agreement that you will pay whatever price the seller has determined. You pay that price, take the sweater home, and the storeowner pockets your money. That is chhalay.

I will use myself as an example of a more nuanced difference between chhalay and ayni. I teach online, and I set a price for a course. Students who sign up are agreeing to pay that course fee. That is a chhalay transaction between us. The ayni comes into play when I begin offering my service. My ayni is how I teach that course. It is expressed in the ways I devote myself to my students and their needs, in how prepared and engaged I am when I am teaching, in how committed I am to providing a stellar learning experience for my students. The other half of the ayni exchange comes from each student: they either reciprocate in ayni or not (their enthusiasm for learning, their engagement with me and fellow students, and so on). In contrast, if I am robotic because I have been doing this a long time, if I keep my emotional distance from my students, if I rarely interact with them except in class, and so on—that is not ayni on my part. It is chhalay.

I am focusing so heavily on ayni because it is widely misunderstood and too often not practiced. Yet it is at the heart of the Andean tradition and certainly at the heart of being a chakaruna. Ayni is how we bring the quality of ourselves out into the world. It is dependent on many things, not the least of which are our personal values and the acuity of our self-awareness. When we know ourselves and accept ourselves (with compassion even for our flaws and character deficits), we have the ability to see others for who they are and accept them exactly as they are. The inner chakaruna bridge helps us to not stand above others, but eye to eye with them. It is how we overcome the stubborn psychological dynamics of perceiving differences and begin cultivating the recognition of similitude and fellowship. Chakarunas see themselves in others and others in themselves. As the saying goes: as within, so without.

Ayni also is at the heart of being a chakaruna because it involves our will but not our willfulness. We must apply will to put our intention into action, yet we must not willfully impose our own intentions, beliefs, desires, opinions, judgements, and aversions onto others. Too often bridge-building is imposition or, more rarely but not unheard of, it is a disguise for coercion. We tell ourselves we are doing good works, when in reality we may be seeking (consciously or unconsciously) to impress our will upon others. It is a rare person who has no preference for one party or the other, who is not projecting onto one party or the other, or who is not judging one party more worthy, right, good, deserving (whatever) than the other.

Don Juan Nuñez del Prado has advised me and others over the years that our work as “paqos” is to assist those we discern might need our help (usually energetic assistance, if we have the personal power to extend such help), but we do not go around sticking our noses into other people’s business. It is not our business to try to build a bridge without the explicit or implicit consent of both parties. It is not our business to build a bridge because we deem it “for the best” for two parties.

So, what is our business as a chakaruna? It is about our own state of energy first and foremost: building a bridge within from which we can see both shores (both parties) without favor or prejudice. It means getting past any drive to fix or heal one or both parties. A chakaruna doesn’t do anything to others, but acts on behalf of others. In this view, the chakaruna is not the one who builds the outer bridge; the chakaruna holds the space within so that the two parties are able to imagine a bridge between them and begin to build it themselves: one toward the other until they meet in the middle and stand together upon it. 

My friend, former student, and now colleague Katy O’Leary Bagai shared the translation of a discussion she had with paqo don Claudio Quispe Samata that beautifully explains this approach to being a chakaruna. Her gathering of the clusters of translations into cohesive notes includes the following perspective, which provides the perfect conclusion to this discussion: a chakaruna chooses to live within the intersection between spirit and matter, quietly holding coherence between the tension that is often created by humans within that intersection. A chakaruna listens for the alignments and watches for the invitation to bring cohesion into any perceived tension. A chakaruna does not reject action, but understands that wisdom lies in knowing when to act and when to hold. The chakaruna at heart is a vessel of potential. He or she becomes a conduit for the world remembering how to change itself.

Musing about K’ara

~ Q'enti Wasi ~ 1 Comment

When I was conducting the interviews with Q’ero paqos back in 1996, they spoke about k’ara, which Quechua translator Riccardo Valderrama, don Juan Pauqar Espinosa and Joan - book interviews - 1996excited the anthropologists who were there. They had not heard this term before, and so they probed the Q’ero for more information. What we learned is that they make a distinction between two energies in a person’s or spirit being’s energy body: k’ara and sami. In this post, we take a deep dive into k’ara and its significance.

The distinction the Q’ero paqos made is that sami (the light living energy, the life-force energy) is the essence of a person, and k’ara is the visible manifestation of their sami and thus of their essence. For example, k’ara is what we see when we say that a sixth-level person literally glows. The Andean qanchispatañan is an upward progression of development of human consciousness. A sixth-level human being is one who is enlightened. The meaning of “enlightened” is two-fold: the quality of the person’s consciousness is such that they create no hucha (heavy energy) and the characteristic that identifies an enlightened person is that they visibly glow. With k’ara, we now have an explanation for that characteristic: the glow is the visible sami essence—the k’ara—of the person.

Not everything has k’ara. The paqos insisted that we “ordinary” people do not have k’ara. Of course we have a sami essence: we are light living energy and we all have an Inka Seed (which is our Spirit, a drop of God/the Mystery). But, according to these Q’ero paqos, we don’t have k’ara. Our essence not of sufficient quality or power to become visible. The extrapolation from this information is that we don’t have what is commonly called an aura. Some nature spirits do, as I will discuss below, but more of us do not.

Simply from this minimal amount of information, we can determine that k’ara can be thought of in two ways: 1) as the inherent high-quality power of a person and 2) as the visible manifestation of that quality and power. The paqos told us that as a power, k’ara can be invoked and utilized. Juan Pauqar Flores explained that a paqo or spirit being who has k’ara can share it with us. By using their k’ara, we can dofull-moon ring glow Pixabay cropped -2055469_1920 things, such as heal. (To understand the following quotation, you need to know a bit about the paqo he uses as an example: don Andres Espinosa. He was deceased by the time of our interview, but had been one of the top Q’ero paqos. In fact, he was a rare kind of paqo—a chunpi paqo, which is a specialized kind of paqo known for having especially powerful healing skills.) Don Juan Pauqar Flores said, “The moon has k’ara. The apus have k’ara, and by calling the k’ara of an apu you can heal a person. Don Andres Espinosa healed diseases by invoking the k’ara of the apu. The apu has more k’ara than a paqo. My master, Andres Espinosa, healed by invoking the k’ara of the condor and the apu. But I do not believe that ordinary men have k’ara.” The other Q’ero paqos concurred: “Only great men [or women] have k’ara.”

The larger discussion was difficult to understand for many reasons, but don Juan Nuñez del Prado came to feel that an accurate interpretation of what the Q’ero were saying overall is that all beings have k’ara, but most of us have too much hucha (energetic heaviness) for that light to shine through our field and become visible. Great men [and women], however, are those who have mastered their personal energy and stepped up the qanchispatañan of conscious development. The quality of their essence is such that they have visible k’ara and can share their power with others.

According to the Q’ero, the same dynamic holds true for nature beings and spirit beings: some have k’ara and some do not. For example, although there was confusion and even disagreement among the Q’ero, the ultimate consensus was that only the lead condor, the condor apuchin, has k’ara, while the rest of the Condorcondors in the group do not. There was further disagreement about whether the k’ara of the condor apuchin glowed red or white (with white being the likely color). The k’ara as the visible energy of the apus comes in different colors, according to that apu’s “quality,” which we took to mean power. The highest quality energy is white, followed in descending order by red, yellow, and black. The k’ara of an apu alsorelates to its dominant capacity. One apu’s essence might be to confer healing, whereas a different apu’s specialty might be to help resolve family problems.

What I took all of this to mean for those of us practicing the tradition is that our ayni connection (reciprocal energy exchange) is not to a spirit being itself as an outer form but to its inherent power. That might seem obvious, but it is a good reminder, for I have seen plenty of students mistake form for function. As an example, we are not so much connecting to an apu itself as a mountain or whatever form it takes (not all apus are mountains). Our connection is to the apu’s quality and power: its k’ara is what we call to us and the apu shares with us. We invoke, receive, and use its k’ara, and when it shares that with us, we can do things we might not otherwise be able to do. We get beyond form to function. The apu (or whatever spirit we are connecting with) is first and foremost a source of power. To “carry the k’ara” of something, as the Q’ero paqos characterized this kind of ayni, means to be with it, to be connected with or resonating with it its essence, so that its power is accessible to us and can be used. Therefore, we can refine the two meanings of k’ara: it refers both to the quality of a human being’s or spirit being’s power and the availability of that power to be shared.

If that interpretation is even halfway correct, it has a few significant ramifications. One that I will call out here is that it means we should never hesitate to reinforce our own personal power with that of a more developed paqo or spirit being, both of whom presumably have k’ara. This view is supported by something don Juan Nuñez del Prado said once: if a paqo (an Andean or non-Andean who practices the tradition) has more power than us or even claims to have more power than us, we can take some of his or her sami to empower ourselves (if we feel we need empowerment). We don’t have to ask permission. That person is a source of power for others. But if a person is the same level as us or lower, no! We cannot partake of his or her power.

A final musing is about ayni dynamics. When we are in ayni with a paqo, nature being, or spirit being with k’ara, what is happening? From what the Q’ero paqos said, we are touching their core essence and they are sharing that essence (quality and power) with us. Is something different happening in our ayni with a being who does not have k’ara? My guess is that it is: we are simply sharing a resonant field we have set up between our poq’pos (energy bodies). Although we may not be accessing their essence directly, we can be empowered just by being resonant with their poq’po—with their karpay, which is the power they have available to share at the moment. Of course, this is all speculation. Yet perhaps these are musings that help us understand at a deeper level what we are doing as practitioners of “driving the kawsay” (the life-force energy) and being in ayni with human beings, and nature and other kinds of spirit beings. Q’ero paqos, and other paqos of the Andes, acquire knowledge and understanding through yachay—personal, firsthand experience. Maybe our knowing about k’ara can motivate us to refine our perceptual abilities so that we can begin to detect it and have our own firsthand experience of it. For, as don Juan says, don’t believe a word I say. That is willay, which is secondhand knowledge. Instead, we must find out for ourselves. We must practice and become the masters of ourselves through our own experiences. Then we can decide for ourselves how we can best honor the quality and level of power that is k’ara, and we can learn how to use it for what we most need or want to do when it is shared with us. And, of course, we might even realize, despite what the Q’ero paqos say, that we have k’ara ourselves.