Salka Wind Blog

Posts on the Andean Cosmovision

Tag: Americo Yabar (Page 6 of 9)

Confessing to Nature

October 31, 2013 / / 3 Comments

As I start wrapping up the book I am writing on the Andean Cosmovision I am spinning out a few topics that I haven’t addressed yet in this blog…

If you have something you need to confess, to get off your chest, go to nature and confess it out loud to a tree, or to a stream, or to a bird, or a cliff, or to Tai Tai Inti, or to Pachamama. By itself I don’t know if this would make a big difference, but as part of your changing relationship with Nature and the Cosmos it is a small but beautiful step. After many of these small steps you will begin to notice a change in yourself that arises from a change in the quality of your relationship with Nature.

By the way…when don Americo was suggesting this to us he also mentioned in passing that we are allowed to make the exact same mistake in our lives three times before we have to start feeling like an idiot. I hope you read this blog during the ‘cut yourself some slack’ week.

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Peeling the Onion

October 18, 2013 / / 2 Comments

Many, many years ago, when I first started down a spiritual path I thought it would be a path of slowly increasing bliss. When I tell that to people now we all sit back and laugh. Instead what I found is that I had a lot of encrustation to get rid off, gunk (to use a polite term) that I had picked up in my life, decisions I had made about how to approach life that led to times of pain and depression, beliefs that I had adopted from family and friends and society and then incorporated into my personal identity even though the weren’t mine, unhelpful assumptions about what I can and cannot do, should and should not do. The path for me has been one of working my way through all of that in search of the experience of the essence of who I really am and my true relationship with the Cosmos.

I don’t know any way to get beyond those issues other than going through them, and the process can be painful. The result of moving past one, however, leads to joy and a sense of liberation and a step closer to who I really am. This is what keeps me going. Then, the next one arises and the pain and/or depression returns until I move past that. Sometimes it seems that an old issue surfaces again and again and I despair that I will never get past it. But in looking back over the years I can see that when I feel like I am facing yet again an issue I’ve worked on many times before that it is more like I am in a spiral, and as I come across it again it is from a higher spot, and what I learn this time takes me closer to the center of my existence.

To paraphrase Americo: We are like onions, we keep peeling away one layer after another to finally get to the center, and that process is both painful and beautiful. And, when we get to the center, we find nothing….we find we are ‘no thing’.

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The Flower of Experience

February 16, 2013 / / 2 Comments

I have over the years created quite a collection of notes from my times with Americo; instructions for various ways of meditating and quotes that seemed particularly relevant at the time.  As I prepare to teach a salka class I often review those notes to remind myself of the many and various meditations I have learned from him.  Occasionally as I do I run across something he said that is particularly relevant to how I am right now, some quote that I’ve read dozens of times but this particular time seems especially relevant.  I pause and then it is like my energy opens up, blossoms, from within.  The next time I read through my notes the quote is again just like all the other quotes.

The particular relevance of any quote at any particular time is probably due to how I am at that moment in my life.  It might, however, also reflect what we are all facing right now.  In other words, it might be relevant to you as well, either now or in the future, so I would like to start sharing them with you.  My invitation is to occasionally look over them as I do and see if any of them are exactly what you could use at that particular moment.  They may only make sense to you at that time and at other times appear to be too cryptic.  After all these years I don’t know if the crypticness of the quotes is due to how Americo said them or how I wrote them down, and I find myself hesitant to expand them in the same way I would be hesitant to expand someone else’s poem.   I’ll post them all under the category of ‘Snippets’ to make it easier for you to gather them all together.   You can view just one category of posts by selecting it from the list of categories on the right side of this page.

By the way, I know it has been quite a while since I’ve written a post.  Nice to see you again.

Investigate life, the flower of experience.  Amplify the consciousness and the ecstasy.  Investigate the illumination that is energetic (not conceptual or religious).  Connect with the internal movement of life, life without ego, a connection with the laws of the Cosmos.  Do not be distracted by social and political things, they block the Being of yourself.

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Saiwachakuy

November 6, 2012 / / 0 Comments

While I learned this unnamed meditation from don Americo it seems to fit the definition of a saiwachakuy as described in Joan Wilcox’s excellent book Masters of the Living Energy, so I am calling it that. On the whole, the meditations I have covered in this blog help us explore the full essence of who we are, or nourish the beauty and quality of our dance with Nature and the rest of the Cosmos, or both. This meditation to me feels more like a service to the Cosmos and the Pachamama. It returned to my meditative practice after hurricane Sandy and it feels like something well worth doing both as a response to that as well as for upcoming times of change.

I usually begin with the Touching Pachamama and Releasing Hucha meditations (the latter also fits Wilcox’s description of a saiwachakuy). The meditation then proceeds as described below. I do this while sitting on the Pachamama.

With intent (sincere pretending) open the energy center at the crown of your head and let the refined energy of the Cosmos flow down through your head and into your munay. When the energy enters your munay use your intent to transform the energy into love. Open up the energy center at the bottom of your spine and let the love flow into the Pachamama. For as long as you like sit there and serve as the conduit of energy from the Cosmos to the Pachamama, transforming the energy into love as it flows through your munay.

Joan Wilcox describes a saiwachakuy as a column of energy that connects the the three worlds of the janaq pacha, kay pacha, and uju pacha.  In this meditation I frame it as being the Cosmos, our own body right here and now, and the Pachamama (which is how I learned it from Americo).  Joan describes a saiwachakuy as being an important service we can provide at this time of necessary and inevitable change.  When I do this meditation it feels like an act of love for the Pachamama and the Cosmos. I have an “I’m happy to exist just so I can do this” moment. If you play with it I would appreciate hearing your own experiences.

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