Inca Shamans and Medicine People of the Andes

Saturday, March 9th, 2013

Medicine people develop a very different understanding of their exterior world, growing up close to nature. Rather than learning to place value on personal achievement and individualism as we do in this culture, by encouraging people to “stand on their own two feet,” in shamanism everything in life begins, exists and ends in relationship with Mother Earth. Incan medicine people refer to the land as Pachamama. Because most Inca shamans grow up in small villages in the Andes Mountains, they live close to the earth and depend on Pachamama for their survival. However, besides being in a physical relationship with the land, through raising corn and herding llamas, the connection is also a spiritual relationship.

Unlike those of us raised in the modern world of Western culture, shamans serve their experience rather than trying to make meaning from it. Understanding everything through our logical mind is not necessary. Growing up in a village, or ayllu, they learn to rely on their hearts and bodies to make sense of the world rather than minds. The medicine people believe that thinking about something brings separation while a heart-centered focus brings connection. The feelings of the heart lead the individual to the truth.

Medicine people learn to source, or draw life energy, or kausay, from Pachamama because, unlike people, the land is constant and the energy is always there. Shamans live their lives by tending to kausay, or fertility in nature.  Kausay is the building block of shamanism and Incan medicine. Kausay is life force. It is the energy of creation, experienced in the body as a vibration, and in the heart as a feeling of universal love. It is often seen as an intense light, or experienced as clarity, or a vibration bringing sense of all-knowing wisdom. It is what is experienced in altered states of ecstasy when paqos enter into the spirit world of energy.

The expression of kausay occurs by being in ayni, in an open reciprocal relationship with Pachamama. What is taken from the land is returned to the land in gratitude so that it can be born again. Everything in nature, and all living things, occurs in the order of “right relationship,” or kausay pacha. Everything comes from and returns to Pachamama.

According to Inca cosmology, being in ayni (“right relationship”) comes as an expression of munay (unconditional, universal love) with the collective. In Inca shamanism, the definition of “collective” is much broader than how it is understood in modern Western culture. Besides referring to “mass culture” and society, the term collective refers to the energetic relationship existing among all living things. For paqos, this consists of Pachamama, (Mother Earth), plants, animals, and humans living in the physical realm of the natural world. The expression of the collective in the spirit world includes the Apus (the collective mountain spirits) and Santa Tierras (feminine spirits residing in the earth that are an aspect of Pachamama).

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