One of the challenges of being an esotericist, mystic, sorcerer or whatever, in a modern Western context is the landscape of magic we apparently have no rights to access as post-colonial imperialists. If you're not interested in the derivatives of Abrahamic based spirituality or Hermeticism or Wicca, then you're only left with a minefield of potentially appropriate practices that may earn you condemnation among the leftist witchy crowd. This may be undeserved, but still, there it is. Of course, there is the other extreme as well, where people adopt a cultural heritage that is clearly not their own and give themselves titles and privileges they have no claim to. This is of course, inappropriate and in very poor taste. But it begs the question where is the line? how do Western magicians engage in magic in a non imperialist fashion if the only magic they're supposed to do is derived from imperialists? These days it's popular to pay lip service to Indigenous wisdom. But any actual attempt to integrate that wisdom into your practice is typically considered appropriative. This presents nontraditional mystics, those who aren't drawn to Kabbalah, grimoires, Buddhism, etc.(the popular currents) with something of a sticky situation. Indigenous lifeways are inspirational and adopting practices from indigenous traditions could help Westerners move away from the self-destructive paradigm that defines Western culture. this would be an objectively positive change. But first, bridges have to be built to allow Westerners to encounter indigenous wisdom in a way that they can appreciate and integrate into their own lives and their spiritual practices. Guilt Free author, healer and spiritual educator. Alberto Villoldo of the Four Winds Institute has spent over 30 years working with the medicine men and women of the Q’ero Indians of the Andes in the Amazon, serving as a bridge between their indigenous wisdom and Western society. As part of his journey, he created a system of spiritual development and energy medicine inspired by their traditions and teaches it to Westerners who want to embrace ancient wisdom authentically, but without appropriating the culture of the original wisdom keepers themselves. One part of the old school is dedicated to teaching energy healers how to work with their intention, how to locate and remove negative energy from the body, how to heal trauma and restore soul fragments, extract energetic parasites, and so on. This is the training that I received a couple of years ago, before opening my practice as a shamanic energy healer. The other part of Villoldo's legacy is a series of shamanic initiations designed to bring recipients into a greater awareness of themselves as beings connected to the earth, to the cosmos, to life in the universe, and to the divine. Through ten energetic transmissions from practitioner to protege, These ten initiations invite universal archetypal energy into your field to empower you with greater energetic sensitivity, deepened faith, extrasensory perception, and the power to heal yourself and others, among various other new responsibilities. The first four transmissions are focused on enhancing your personal capabilities and healing protection, syncing energy, and receiving messages from your spirit guides. The next five transmissions upgrade your energy field and your awareness with progressively expanding spheres of influence, inviting us to play roles as wisdom keepers and cosmic dreamers ourselves, just as the Q’ero have for hundreds of years, as they preserve this wisdom through the cultural genocide brought on by imperialism. the Munay-Ki Rites as these energetic transmissions are called, are available to everyone equally and they were designed specifically as a bridge to help bring the Western world gradually into right relationship with the world that we're currently so very out of alignment with. They serve as a form of magical initiation, and though simple in comparison to other initiatory experiences, they are nonetheless powerful and cause long lasting changes in the psyche and the spirit when nurtured with regular practice. The neoshamanic origin of the Munay-Ki Rites is part of their charm and power, because the cosmology is simple and universally compatible with other spiritual currents. Its simplicity is an advantage because it makes the rites accessible to magical new age, woo, etc. audiences equally and without any discomfort or threat of appropriation. In this episode, I'm going to introduce the Munay-Ki Rites of the Andean Q’ero people, explain their history and origins, how they came to be passed on to the people of the West and give an overview of each of the ten individual rites, plus share our own experiences, (my wife and I) as both recipients and practitioners of the Munay-Ki Rites. Stay tuned for Episode 23 in just a Welcome to Episode 23 of the Postmugglism podcast. I'm your host, Nate. Thanks for tuning in to the podcast that talks about magic in the post-modern age-that is praxis for surviving and thriving in interesting times. In this episode, I'm going to introduce a series of initiatory experiences called The Munay-Ki Rites, which were given as a gift from the wisdom keepers of the Andes in the Amazon to early neoshamanic pioneers like Alberto Villoldo as part of a plan to bring the people of the West back into right relationship with Mother Nature and the living cosmos. If you're new to this podcast, please consider subscribing wherever you listen. Apple, Spotify, Google, YouTube, etc. so that you get notified every two weeks when a new episode like this one comes out. And if you enjoy this content and find it valuable, know that I produce a lot more besides this show and you can get it all delivered conveniently to your inbox, articles, videos and more by visiting www.postmugglism.com and signing up for my email newsletter in the sidebar. Subscribers get access to special private content and paid subscribers get even more content like deep dives, personal updates, and sneak peeks into my practice for just $5 a month. And if you're already a paying member, thank you for making it possible for me to continue doing this work. I really, really appreciate your support. Now let's get into the Munay-Ki Rites, what they are, where they came from, how they work, what they're for and what you can expect to happen after you receive them. Munay is the Q’ero word for love. And Ki is a word that means life force energy, which has been borrowed from Chinese medicine and philosophy. Munay-Ki translates literally to love energy. And this is something of a coined phrase which describes the rights purpose, unlocking the energy of the heart. In Q’ero cosmology, there are three primary energy centers in the body associated with the three brains of the body, head, heart and guts. A different type of energy and a different focus is associated with each of these energy centers. In the head, we are encouraged to embody right thinking or Yachay, meaning clear vision and calm thinking. Munay or right feeling in the heart, meaning acting in love or from the heart and Yankay or right doing meaning acting authentically and for the good of others from the stomach and guts. These energy centers roughly correspond to a combination of the belly, heart and third eye chakras, and this framework for operating at each level of our being from a place of love puts the heart at the center of all thoughts, feelings, and actions and shows us that operating from the heart, so to speak, is how we keep ourselves in good health and right relationship as we move through life. The initiations of the Munay-Ki Rites are energetic updates that upgrade our field and reprogram our psyche to increase our capacity for love and or awareness of the Divine Universe to prepare us to usher in a golden age. Alberto Villoldo, head of the Four Winds Institute, frequently tells the story of the return of the Q’ero, who had been living in the Andes at elevations above 15,000 feet, where the Spanish invaders and other later imperialists never found them. For 500 years, the Q’ero preserved a sacred prophecy of a great change or Patchacuti, which would right our upside down world, restore harmony and order, and bring an end to chaos and disorder. In 1949, anthropologist Oscar Nunez del Prado met two Quechua speakers, the once dead language of the vanished Q’ero people, and in 1955, he conducted the first Western expedition into the Andes to find them. Four years later, in 1959, at the annual Feast of the Return of the Pleiades in the Andes, a gathering of over 70,000 pilgrims from all over South America, the Q’ero arrived unannounced and wearing the Incan emblem of the sun, a symbol of authority, and made their way to the center of the assembly to announce the prophesied Patchacuti had begun. They were welcomed by the assembly. Who told them, We've been waiting for you for 500 years. Since that time, the Q’ero have been building bridges to Western society through individuals like Alberto Villoldo and others under the tutelage of Pacos, or medicine men and women like Alberto's mentor, Don Manuel Quispe. In the foreword to his wife Marcella’s new book about the Munay-Ki titled “The Sacred Andean Codes” Alberto relates a story with Don Manuel after they had been working together for a number of years, where Don Manuel asked Alberto to bring his top students to join a pilgrimage to Mt. Ausangate, where they journied together with 100 Q’ero men, women and children who had already walked three days from their homes to attend this ritual. In the ceremony, they summoned, in their words, lightning from the upper world to bring a new initiation rite, the Mosoq Karpay into the world. With this ceremony, the Munay-Ki Rites were born and Alberto was given his indian nickname, Chaka Runa, “the man bridge,” and old karmic wounds were healed. As Don Manuel explained, “After the ritual, I invited you because we needed someone to represent the conquistador. The white men. Our people need to heal the wound of the conquest, the raping of our mothers, and the kidnaping of our children. We need to bury the sword of conquest.” But, he continued,“This Rite is also for your people. You and I [speaking to Alberto], are bringing it forth into the world. But neither of us is special. We are simply an instrument of our times. In the months that followed, Alberto received all the Karpays or initiations of the Q’ero people from Don Manuel, and they worked together to adapt them to be palatable for Western minds. The final result some time later were the first nine initiations of the Munay-Ki Rites. The 10th initiation, the Rite of the Womb, was received later by Marcella Lobos, Alberto's wife. The Munay-Ki Rites are an extension of this bridge building process inspired by Q’ero cosmology and spirituality, but adapted so that their gifts are easily received and understood by a Western audience. Alberto and his wife have spent decades now performing these initiations and teaching this slightly modernized version of ancient Andean wisdom. And a few years ago, they began passing the torch to other practitioners in an effort to reach more people with the Munay-Ki Rites. Through an intensive training program with the Four Winds Institute, my wife Sarah, went through this training and is a certified movement practitioner that has been practicing for almost two years now, performing the initiations and devoting much of her personal practice to cultivating a heart centered approach to healing magic and life in general. I received the rites as part of my shamanic training and have used the various techniques such as protection and stimulating extrasensory perceptions to great effect in my energy healing practice. We know from personal experience how effective and impactful these simple initiative experiences can be when approached with intention. And we're proud to be able to extend this bridge even further by making these rites available through the Sacred Serpent. Experiencing a Munay-Ki is similar to other initiations, and that there is symbolism and a few ritual actions. But it's quite different in that there is no real performance, no wines to recite, nor wisdom embedded in the words. Aside from some simple motions, the entire ritual takes place in the mind, heart and intention. The Q’ero describe this less like downloading an update, which is a metaphor that works fairly well with modern mystics, and more like planting a seed that is watered, nurtured and grows over time. The energy in the transmission is the seed. They mean, which is implanted by the intention of the practitioner into the energy body of the protege or the recipient. Energy is sent transmitted from practitioner to protege via the same method that energy healers use to direct energy intention. The practitioner visualizes the ritual they are performing in their mind's eye and applies their willpower and focus to manifest that intent in the proteges energy field. The result is that seeds are planted into the appropriate chakras of the protege, and when given love, attention and energy to feed on, these seeds will sprout and grow and various new faculties and increased depth of perception will emerge as a result. As I mentioned, the individual rites of the Munay-Ki were reconstituted from their original carried form to better integrate with their Western framework of mind and were then taught by the Four Winds Institute and passed on to wider and wider circles of spiritual seekers and healers. Over the years, this evolved from a practice that was adjacent to the energy, healing and shamanic practices taught by the four winds into its own corpus of courses and experiences in a worldwide community of practitioners, many of whom are now able to pass on the rights on their own. The energy is transmitted from practitioner to protege, and sometimes the protege feels drawn to learn how to pass on the rites themselves. In this manner, the Munay-Ki has grown over the last 30 years from the energetic seed planted in the 1990s by Alberto and Don Manuel. And it has also expanded during that time with the introduction of the 10th rite, The Rite of the Womb. That is to say the rites have grown experientially and rhizomatically through connections and the network of relationships that describes the informal movements of people seeking spiritual and physical reconnection with the earth and each other. Fom person to person It travels like the antithesis to Weitiko (a First Nations’ concept that describes a mind virus) inoculating us against the dangers of our short sighted and self-destructive ways. In this way, Sarah and I have benefited from the Munay-Ki Rites ourselves, and we share it with others, like passing a flame from candle to candle. Each of the rites is an individual initiation and in some cases a technique as well. But they all work together to cause a holistic shift in perception and awareness that adds up to a larger meta initiation, if you will. To make this a little clearer. I'll go over each of the ten monarchy rites to explain a little bit about each of their individual purposes and how they fit together as a whole. I'll start by listing all ten with quick descriptions of their intended effects and then talk about how proteges are prepared, how the rights are delivered, and what types of meditations and activities would ideally follow each right to integrate the experience and start to grow the energetic seed within you.

The Healers Rite, Designed to activate your healing hands or the power to send healing energy to yourself and others. The Bands of Power; wards against energetic attacks, with five bands of elemental energy earth, water, fire, air and spirit, the Harmony Rite, plants the seeds of the four archetypes of the directions and the guardians of the underworld, the middle world and the upper world in your energy body to aid you with intuition and understanding and working with energy. The Seer’s Rite, installs and activates energetic paths from the third eye to the visual cortex and then down to the heart and back to stimulate extrasensory perception. The Daykeeper Rite, recognizes the daily cycles of life that keep harmony and balance in the land and its inhabitants, and brings you into an awareness of your role in this scheme. The wisdom keeper, right extends the day keeper role by connecting to the spirit of the UPU, the mountains, which are sacred to the Indian people and represent the heights of earthly wisdom. The earth keeper, right, recognizes the earth as one big organism with many composite systems and connect you with the spirit of Gaia or Pachamama, etc. To understand her evolving nature. The Star Keeper Rite, prepares your energy body to evolve in the Great Awakening, This Patchacuti, into what Alberto calls the homo luminous or luminous human; meaning a person whose energetic body has been fully activated. The Creator Rite, introduces us to our infinite nature, is part of the cosmos, the universe, God, etc., and instills in us the responsibility to steward creation and participate in its co-creation. And the Rite of the Womb connects you to the mysteries of the sacred Feminine, which is a different experience for women and men. Women born with female reproductive characteristics receive a significant energetic cleansing of the womb and a purging of psychic trauma related to sexuality, reproduction, motherhood, and so on. Others receive this right in support of female recipients and benefit from the recognition of the woman's role in the cycle of life. The rites are delivered, as I mentioned, with deceptively little feedback informing the recipient or protege and all the rites magic takes place in the mind and the intention of the practitioner performing the Rite prior to the physical ceremony. However, the protegé receives a detailed attunement such as a guided meditation or something similar to prepare their psyche and energy for this transmission. Then the rite is performed, which usually only takes a few minutes at most with some simple motions touching you, or at least placing hands in your field on specific energy centers and sending focused intentions as the recipient or protege. You simply sit quietly in a receptive state and allow the transmission to take place. After the rite is complete, the practitioner guides the protege through a variety of activities designed to help them process and integrate the experience. This may involve a discussion, another guided meditation or a creative activity to get them out of their thoughts and into their feelings. Then there is homework, meaning activities, meditations, thoughts to chew on and so forth, designed to keep feeding the energetic seeds within you from each ritual and continuing to support your ongoing spiritual evolution. The homework usually consists of particular visualizations, meditations and so on. They increase your awareness of these energies in your life and enable you to focus on them feeding the seeds with your attention. Practicing with the techniques provided by the first four rights such as healing boarding enhance perception and channeling messages from spirits of the directions is also an important part of realizing the full nature of this initiation and putting it to work in your life. Even if you're not formally an energy healer or shamanic practitioner, you can engage in healing yourself and the people in your life with any basic form of energy work like Reiki, for example, and you will find it easier and more effective because of this initiation. But after the rites, the integration and the homework, what do you left with? What is it that happens to you physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually that makes these rites so meaningful? At first? Very little. Receiving the rites is calming and pleasant. And likewise, the meditations and other activities that follow are similarly light and pleasant but incomprehensible at first. This lasts for a while until you become eventually vaguely aware that something has changed, but you're not sure what. This is typically where people get bored of the homework and don't stick with it to receive the rites for potential. That and it's easy to forget what's happening to you is primarily energetic and therefore invisible and let it slip from your mind and your routine. However, looking back on the experience after six months or more often yields surprising realizations about how far your perceptions and your priorities have shifted. This is a subtle effect that may go unrecognized at first, but it gradually builds to more remarkable changes after as little as a few months. If the process is embraced with dogged persistence, with less investment, the process can take longer, maybe months or years. And without attention and nurturing the seeds, they can simply languish like any seeds cast in fertile soil. Thus, your mileage varies based on the way that you engage with the process. But a wholehearted engagement yields the kind of results after six months or so that will have you looking back in surprise at how much your worldview has changed without you realizing it. The first of these rites is called The Healer’s Rite? Or the Hampe Karpay in the language of the Q’ero, and it opens the door to the initiative process by first explaining during the attunement that we are all healers by virtue of self-healing, and that healing means something different than curing. Healing is a journey where a cure is perceived as a destination, and we usually want that to mean back to the way that things were before. Unrealistic is that usually is. It's a misconception that when we get sick, we're supposed to take a pill and have everything go back to the way that it was before. And this framework prevents us from taking cues from our body which would move us towards better health, which is a journey metaphor. Seeing life as a journey and health as a part of that process, we are actively, every moment of every day, exercising our right to choose how we collaborate. Are we healing ourselves or contributing to disease and our bodies, minds and spirits? Humans have the power to direct the flow of healing energy with our consciousness by sending loving attention to the body, boosting its ability to heal itself in miraculous ways. And as with the body, so goes the mind and so on. Preparing for The Healer’s Rite is about removing the preconceptions around health and healing that have been programed into you by the rationalist capitalist framework of mind. Mainstream society is so obsessed with expertism, particularly when it comes to health, that it continues to overlook any solutions which don't come from those same experts. All while we’ve watched the quality of their results decline steadily and alarmingly over the last 50 or so years, Imposter syndrome around not being an expert limits people from feeling like they can help at all. When everyone has the power of positive intention at their disposal. Regardless of whatever the experts say, your body heals itself, constantly, regenerates itself constantly, and you are constantly sending your intentions into the world. And at the people around you. So you are always either healing or cursing in a manner of speaking. Becoming aware of this power means that you can exercise control over it and send it always in the direction of greater well-being for all creatures. In many traditions, this loving energy is transmitted through the hands, such as the biblical laying on of hands and so on. And so in this rite, the practitioner takes a part of their energy, their wisdom and experience as a healer, and places it into the hands of their protege, empowering them with greater ability to heal energetically. Marcella describes this ritual in this way. First, the person offering the initiation touches the head, heart and belly of the initiate with a prayer to align those three centers with the wisdom of the heavens, mountains and land, respectively. The hands are activated next with the givers intention to connect the protege with the lineage after receiving the rite, we begin our paths as healers, which, as Marcella points out, doesn't necessarily mean that we do healing as much as we are healing and contributing to the healing of others. It's about taking responsibility for the healing or destructive energies we're sending out into the world and maintaining a practice of constantly adjusting ourselves so that we are contributing positively to the field to integrate this new enhanced ability to heal with your hands. I cannot recommend a better activity than getting the Reiki one attunement so that you have a straightforward method for sending healing energy to practice. Doing so will grow the seed of the healers, right. Also participating in intention groups like the ones organized by Lynne McTaggart is another excellent way to nurture the energy of this initiation. The key in either case is regularly contributing energy to acts of healing. Once you begin working with energy regularly, it is very important to have a regular, rewarding practice that protects you from energy transfer and from negative energies in the world at large, which you will gradually become more sensitive to. Through this process, healing isn't always pretty, and that's true with physical healing, but it's also true with emotional healing. Emotional trauma is messy business and it can cause people to lash out or to be codependent, or to attempt to drag you down with their negativity or appear as many other negative manifestations. Even processing your own emotional baggage can leave you wiped, drag you down, and trigger those less than ideal aspects of your personality. The second Munay-Ki Rite, The Bands of Power, or Chumpi Karpay protects you from external energies and helps you clear the internal ones by surrounding you with five bands of light associated with the five elements Earth, Water, Fire, Air and Spirit. The bands connect with five energy centers in the body root, belly, heart, throat and crown, and they reflect and transmute the energy that you encounter. Elementally, fire consumes negative energy. Water washes away fears and soothes anxiety. The earth stabilizes us and leaches away heavy energy and so on. To prepare for this rite. You were led through a simple visualization of a seed being planted in the earth and protected by it until it is nourished by water and receives the life giving energy of the sun. And it starts to grow. It grows up reaching its branches into the air. Its leaves always listening to the wind, reacting to its currents and its crown, touching the heavens, connecting it with the realm of spirit. This demonstrates the roles that the elements play in our growth and wellness. From a practical standpoint, daily, or at least very regular upkeep of the bands is required. Once installed, you should send them energy by expanding them and contracting them and visualizing them orbiting you rapidly. This focus helps to empower them for your daily protection. The installation of the bands of power is probably the most complicated ceremony of all. The Munay-Ki Rites, involving a practitioner weaving strands of light around you like a harness, attaching them in the front and back of your body. At each of these five energy centers and then affixing them to your crown, it's customary to walk the recipient of the right through their first visualization, where they expand, rotate and contract the bands one by one to activate them and then impress upon them the importance of keeping up these energetic words with regular attention. I have also devised a simple prayer to the elements that can be recited while activating the bands, which serves as a nice focusing element to the ritual as well. Personally, I will not do energy work without having first performed my protective rite very early in my career as a healer. I got laid out by a session with a client because some of the toxic energy I was removing from him penetrated my field and it took a couple of very unpleasant days to clear. Now I make sure my bands are always juiced up and working so that I can transmute whatever energy come my way. In the harmony Rite, or Anyi Karpay, the energetic seeds of the seven archetypes are implanted into you. One in each of your chakras. Snake, Jaguar, Hummingbird and Eagle, the sacred animals of the crow in the lower fourth chakras, and then the guardians of the lower world, middle world and upper world in the three chakras above the neck. The purpose of this rite is to provide us with spiritual guides that can help us focus our intuition and use it more fully to experience the levels of perception that are beyond personal perception and experience. These levels align with the archetypes and the seven chakras. To prepare, we discuss the different layers of our awareness physical, emotional, mental and spiritual, and the three levels of reality that which lies under the surface, the firmament of the current moment and the future, or our destiny, if you like; how intuition can have a different flavor at each level of our perception and how we can learn to sense truth beyond our physical senses and receive messages from spirit. The root chakra is implanted with the serpent, an ancient representation of the sacred feminine and connected here to the element of Earth. This is our connection to Mother Earth and our source of stability and nourishment. It connects us with physical intuition. Eat this. Not that. This is safe, that is dangerous. And so on. The jaguar is implanted into the belly chakra and rules the element of water as it hunts along the river. It's a big cat which walks between realms and is a keen tracker of things both seen and unseen. It connects us with emotional intuition. Call it emotional intelligence and empathy. The solar plexus chakra is given the hummingbird and connects us with the element of fire. The great annual migration of the tiny birds and their preference for the sweetest nectar gives us insight into divine purpose, a mythic intuition to understand the story that's unfolding. The heart chakra receives the eagle, which is of the air element, and connects us to a higher perspective, to rise above our petty realities and see our stories playing out in the greater context of spirit. From here, the archetypes switch to the guardians of the lower middle and upper worlds Huascar, Quetzalcoatl and Patchacuti. Each of these characters are both ancient historical figures and mythological demigods and represent different aspects of the psyche here as well. The underworld, ruled by Huascar, is the seed of our shadow. Our fears, our karma and our subconscious. But also a great deal of our faded power is revealed here. Huascar’s seed is implanted in the throat chakra. The middle world ruled by Quetzalcoatl. Is the current moment in the flow of time. It is when we are in flow with the universe and can feel our way to just the right places at just the right times. Quetzalcoatl's seed is placed in the third eye chakra. The upper world ruled by Patchacuti and it is our ability to discern and influence the future and negotiate the right path forward. Patchacuti’s seed is placed in our crown chakra to complete the rite. This is probably the most useful of the rites in a practical sense because it helps you establish direct contact with powerful spirit guides, which you can then communicate with to understand your body, emotions, psyche, and so on. The integration work is spending months meditating on each of the archetypes within you, walking with them in the world through your body and assessing the energies of others. Through this, you can cultivate an awareness of yourself at these different levels, which is a much healthier way to think of yourself as a constituency of different persons within your personhood, all with gifts for you and requirements of you as well. This Seer's Rite or Kawaw Karpay, finishes off the lower rites, which enhance your natural abilities and provide tools for working with energy before moving on to a different sort of initiation for the last six rites. It's designed to activate your extrasensory perception, or rather to teach your five senses how to interpret data that doesn't come from the physical world. When you work with energy giving or receiving it, it is often accompanied by inexplicable sensations and awareness that requires practice to turn into usable information. The Seer’s Rite facilitates this by implanting new energetic pathways from your third eye to your visual cortex and into your heart chakra. There's much of the world that we don't perceive directly and much of reality that we can't perceive with our senses or even with the aid of scientific instruments. There are parts of the human experience which cannot be adequately measured, like love, for example, which are nonetheless real. Feelings have power. Thoughts and ideas have power, too. They are real because they cause real changes to occur in physical reality when they are experienced strongly enough. This right teaches you to see as much with your heart as with your eyes. To listen with your feelings and sense, with your intuition in ways you've most likely never allowed yourself to do before. Our beliefs in the material nature of reality, for example, can limit it from experiencing all that life has to offer. And we've all had an internal sensor installed by the modern scientific regime that denies the reality of any experience which can't be rationally explained. So it's necessary to free ourselves of the expectation of proof before belief. In order to unlock the full potential of our intuition and the right itself, practitioner traces these new energetic paths in three sets of lines from the third eye, first over the crown to the observable bone, then about a third down the skull on the left and right sides, and then again horizontally over the temples and around to the same spot behind the visual cortex. Then a set of lines is traced from the upper several bone around to the heart, like a necklace, like the bands of protection. The Sears right needs to be reinforced regularly by tracing the new energetic pathways and tapping as you go. This is performed in ceremony and with focused intention to open your awareness little by little, day by day. In addition to this ritual practice using your intuition is the best way to activate the gifts of the Seer’s Rite. And remember, this right unlocks new powers of interpretation in all the senses, not just sight. Pay attention to the subtle tug of intuition wherever it appears. Feel what you see with your physical eyes or your mind's eye, or hear with your ears, or in that little voice in the back of your mind, or by touch or by sense. Messages from spirit can flow through any of our perceptions. It just takes some getting used to. Past these first four rites the dynamic of the initiations changes considerably in each of the next five rites repeats the same ritual steps but with a different intention, visualization, etc. a different energy that's being transmitted. Think of these rites as a ladder, or progression, that starts with the scope at a local level, bigger than you, but smaller than the universe. Then, as you progress with each of the subsequent rites, that scope widens a bit more and your awareness expands with it until at the highest level, you've been given the seeds for divine awareness. The first step in this process is the fifth rite of the Munay-Ki the Daykeeper rite, which is called the Pampa Mesayok Karpay. Pampa refers to the plains or the lowlands, the belly of the earth where food could be easily grown. It aligns with the sacred feminine, the source of nourishment and fertility, and is about maintaining balance to ensure for the nourishment of all. The day keeper keeps an altar for the community and puts their energy into the benefit of the collective. They take on the responsibility for making offerings to the land to keep natural cycles and just generally to live closer to the natural terrestrial world. To prepare for this write, we share stories of the natural world, its mysteries and wonders, and how to observe them with understanding, listening to its rhythms and sensing the subtle connections between things. As I said, the ritual steps are the same for each of the next five rites, including this one, which are only simple gestures, touching the right and left sides of the body, representing the masculine and feminine aspects of duality, and to create balance and then tapping the recipient's forehead, heart and belly to activate right thinking, right feeling and right action respectively. And then finally delivers the actual transmission by touching forehead to forehead while sending the energetic seed by intention. Following this right, it's recommended to spend more time in nature to watch the movements of the heavens closely, observing the rising and setting sun, the phases of the moon and their eclipses and movements around the zodiac throughout the year. Celebrating full of new moon, solstices, equinoxes and so on, keeping plants, caring for living things and stewarding the earth as well as making offerings to the land, spirits and so on, are all habits that they keepers should cultivate or the day keep it right connected to the energy of the lowlands and of the earth. The Wisdom Keeper Rite Known as the Alot(or high) Mesayok Karpay, connects with the energy of the apus or the spirits of the Andean mountains,. Apus hold great wisdom in the cosmology of the Q’ero. The mountains represent air energy, which is a masculine mental kind of energy. Their shape is generally masculine. They are solid and immovable, formed of an immense inner strength that has formed through their endurance. And they are wise because they are ancient and reach the heavens. To prepare to receive this right. It's necessary to take account of your own masculine nature. Is it healthy or does it harbor and channeled aggression? Do you have unhealed trauma in the patrilineal line? After taking stock, we connect to the energy of a mountain in your memory. If you have one or call upon the abuse of the Andean mountains, if you don't and visualize sitting at the top of a mountain with the panorama laid out below, you savoring that sense of clarity that comes with perspective. In the rite, the practitioner calls upon the spirits of the mountains that they know and of the Andes, and follows the same ceremony as the doorkeeper right afterwards. The best ways to integrate this energy are healing patrilineal trauma, finding a mountain shaped stone for your altar, and connecting with it regularly and tackling physical challenges to become more resilient. In the Earth Keeper’s Rite, known as the Kuray Akuyek Karpay, you come to see the earth as one big organism, as Gaia, a living, evolving, being with personhood and spirit and ourselves as part of that whole. It is the same feminine energy as the Day Keeper Rite now at the global scale. As an Earth Keeper, you are working directly with Pachamama to care for the collective, embodying the proverb I am because we are, and not just on a human level, but as a collective planetary organism. This ride is about stepping out of the individual perspective and into responsibility for the collective, including the invisible world, to. So tuning for this right includes contemplating the earth as the big blue ball from space and the many miraculous global systems that maintain her health. After the rite, it's important to stay connected to your mama through prayers and offerings and to spend time contemplating what makes Earth so special and what special role she might play in the cosmos. The Star Keeper Rite, or Mosoq Karpay, is the ritual I mentioned at the beginning of this episode where Alberto's team represented the conquistadors in the ceremony to heal 500 year old trauma between the indigenous people and their colonizers. It's a rite of cleansing, the cultural karma of Western history. Not to say that it removes that stain, but that it plant a seed of awareness. It brings you into awareness, vaguely at first and more over time that you're participating in a Patchacuti a time of great change and renewal, fated by the stars. In times as turbulent as these, it becomes more important, more vital to the human species that as many of us as possible put our attention and our focus are intention on the future and our cosmic destiny, and on how to rise above our petty squabbles and evolve to meet the challenges before us. We come from the stars and look to the stars to understand our destiny. The Star Keeper Rite plants a seed of understanding that time is different than we've been taught to think, and we can step outside of time and make changes to the field of the moment that echo into the future. Entanglement happens on a quantum nonlinear basis and what is happening now has happened before and will happen again. Patchacutis are just part of the cycles that power the cosmos and that awareness helps put our role in this time into perspective. We are made of stardust forged in the fires of stellar vision engines from the same fires that birthed the gods. We are of the same stuff. Preparation for this rite is a meditation on our cosmic origin and how the gods might think of time. You imagine yourself 10,000 years in the future and 10,000 years in the past, not as you are now, but as whatever incarnation you were experiencing at the time. And you learn how to create a bubble of energy around yourself and to step out of time so that you can perform effective ritual to integrate the experience after the right. You need to spend time contemplating cosmic time and the possibilities, even probability, that you've lived many thousands of lives playing roles in cosmic dramas that are far too grand to comprehend. And you're encouraged to spend time looking at the stars and connecting to their energy, particularly with the Pleiades, which are sacred to the Q’ero. The last of the original nine rites, is The Creator rite, or the Tianchis Ratis Karpay, And it represents the highest perspective that we can attain. Divine perspective that is recognizing ourselves as an aspect of the creator. This is a recognition of your infinite nature and it in parts of responsibility for everything and the nearly limitless potential of your role as co-creator of reality. But it also helps us to stay humble and remember that it's not. I am the creator, but I am one with the Creator, so that the immensity of this truth doesn't inspire delusion. In preparation, you're instructed to contemplate your sacred purpose. That is what is trying to come into the world through you. And it's okay not to have an answer yet. The thought exercise is the point. After the ritual, it's useful to give yourself opportunities, to be creative, to paint, right, etc. To create. Also to make a list of things, experiences, outcomes and so on that you want to bring into your life to manifest and to spend 10 minutes a day intending for dreaming of the future that you want to create. The final moonwalk, you write, was added years after the rest received directly by Marcella rather than taught to Alberto by the Q’ero and it balances the masculine energy of the Creator. Rite. Creating is a generative or masculine energy with one that is ultimately feminine, sacred and essential to making the act of creation possible. For something to be born, a womb is necessary. So the 10th Munay-Ki Rite is the Rite of the Womb, or the Kisma Karpay. By which recognizes the cosmological role of women and mothers and clears physical, sexual and reproductive trauma to help elevate the sacred feminine and bring the world back into balance. The rite works differently for men and women. For women, it focuses on healing trauma and for men. It focuses on expanding awareness of the sacred feminine and teaching men how to balance their energies and provide support for the feminine aspect of life. Contemplating your experience with your mother, your matrilineal line at work, Karma and trauma there is for you to process is the first step in preparing for this rite. Followed by a recognition of the connection between the reproductive cycle and the lunar cycle. The stages of womanhood. Maiden mother and crone. And how nature follows similar patterns. You are led to call upon your womb if you have one or once did, to connect with it before the ritual, to send it love and appreciation and respect as part of the great cycle of life. Symbolically, if not physically, in the ritual, the woman who is performing the right places, both of her hands on her belly and says the womb is not a place to store fear and pain. The womb is to create and give birth to life. Then, while leaving one hand on her own belly, she places her free hand over on the womb of the person receiving the rite and repeats the same words when performed in a group setting with multiple women receiving the rite, the recipient then repeats the same gesture for the next woman, and so on down the line. Men simply hold space in support of the women receiving the rite. The effects of this right can be quite profound and may take some time to manifest. There have been examples of women balancing hormones, relieving chronically bad period discomfort and even healing tumors. But not all experiences need be this dramatic to be miraculous. In Sarah's case, the rite brought on months of working through issues with her mother and her views on motherhood, which were affecting her creative potential and other personal concerns. Since this is a rite designed to dislodge old stuck energy and to detoxify the womb, regular energetic hygiene is strongly recommended after receiving the right sort of salt baths, ocean swims and so on. In Mexico, there is a sweat lodge style ritual called a Thomas call, which is perfect for sweating out these toxins and getting more in touch with your feminine side, whether you're a man or a woman. And for women learning how to listen and how to dialog with your womb, to anticipate and understand the biological changes that take place in the woman's body. Due to the miracle of her reproductive system that provides you with some understanding the individual rights themselves and how the monarchy initiations work together to bring on subtle but significant changes over time. As I said before, our personal experiences with the Munay-Ki vary in duration, depth and intensity, but I believe this is mostly the result of how you engage with it in the first place and potentially where you are in your journey of awakening. Still, there are some common themes which appear fairly consistently in the reports of people who receive the full set of initiations. Since Sarah and I have spent the most time around each other during our initiative experiences and the subsequent months of integration, I thought it might be interesting if Sarah describes how I've changed and then I describe how I have noticed her change in the time since we received the rights. There is a way on a trip to see her folks in the U.S., so I wasn't able to record her voice for this, but I'll just read her words here describing the Munay-Ki's effects on me since taking the rites a little over a year ago. Now, since Nathan's initiations of the Munay-Ki coincided with his shamanic training. It's hard to distinguish between the two experiences. Fortunately, they're meant to work together and support each other. One of the most significant changes I have noticed is a sense of experiencing this life as a co-creator versus life happening to him. This can show up like planning a full day of outside chores only to change due to weather constraints and realizing that, oh, my body must need rest today. Or asking Spirit for guidance versus assuming that he must have all of the answers on its own. Former ways of looking at things might have been This is happening to me and it has evolved to this is happening for me. I have also noticed a greater sense of grace under pressure, and this is demonstrated frequently by his allowing of circumstances to unfold. Right, Love. Evaluating a given situation. Right perception. And then working with solution energy to move forward. Right. Action. What's been most remarkable about Sarah's experience with Munay-Ki has to be broken into two equally relevant categories. Her experiences as a recipient and her experiences as a practitioner as a recipient. The shift in her perceptions and priorities is extremely noticeable. When I started gardening again in 2020, Sarah was amused, if anything, and didn't have any desire to participate beyond eating the fruits of my labors at mealtime. Not to say that she was against it, or even uninterested in what I was doing, but it was my thing and she was not the least bit motivated to participate. After a while, she warmed to spending time in the garden as it was quite beautiful, but still had no particular desire to plant or to learn about plant life, ways to stick her hands in the dirt, etc.. After receiving the Munay-Ki Rites during her practitioner training course with the four wins, this changed dramatically, and though it felt gradual, a strong attachment to nature, a craving for time spent in natural settings and new habits of going barefoot in the grass and talking to plants manifested after only a few short months. She even shed a tear the other day over my description of composting as symbolic of death and the key to soil reclamation and restoring biodiversity. A life. A few years ago, this would have elicited a mild hmm at best. Now she's moved to tears at the beauty of the cycles of nature. She also mentions getting gardens started out on her property in the jungle, at least as often as I do, and gets all misty eyed at the idea of living under trees. The difference on a personal level is remarkable as far as I'm concerned, and as a practitioner, she's maintained a weekly practice session with her classmates and this has become a kind of woman circle with supportive and community aspects as well as, of course, her relationships with various proteges who allowed her to practice providing the rites, Attunement and integration work have been learning experiences from which it's very obvious that Sarah feels called to provide this to people. Together, we're on integrating various monarchy rights into our events and hope to eventually provide the full set of initiations is part of a Munay-Ki dedicated retreat. Dreaming on those possibilities continues to give this project life for Sarah as she works on giving it shape as a curriculum. As you can probably tell, the experience is not identical for the two of us because we came into the initiation from very different places. And so we experienced the shift in very different ways. What's consistent between our experiences, though, is a greater sense of the importance of approaching life from a heart centered place, which means choosing to lead with the heart, to listen with the heart, and to put heart into everything that we do unreservedly. It also means being gentle and understanding, tolerant, forgiving and putting collective healing above individual satisfaction. These rights will awaken the parts of you which are currently dormant to bring balance to energy and therefore also our thoughts, emotions and the physical experience of living. Feeling peace in the body makes it so much easier to dispel anxiety in the mind and so on for a little over a year. Sarah has been practicing and delivering the rites to people in her area in a small online group she's a part of and working on herself, nurturing those energetic seeds and so on, doing her own homework. Now, though, she's starting to offer those rights to groups as part of the series of events that we will be making announcements about in the near future. You can also reach out to her directly if you have any questions or interest at sarah@sacredserpent.co. To learn more about the Munay-Ki Rites, you can read Marcella’s new book, The Sacred Andean Codes, which goes into the history of the rites, their origins and evolution, and each of the rites themselves in great detail. You can, of course, also take the Four Winds Institute's course for Munay-Ki practitioners that Sarah went through a few years ago. You can learn more about The Four Winds Institute at www.thefourwinds.com. There aren't very many initiative experiences that don't involve membership in an order of some kind or the adoption of a particular praxis or theosophy or worse by too close to the proverbial sun and cross into actual appropriation and cultural theft. The neoshamanic orientation of the Munay-Ki sidesteps many of the potential pitfalls. The traditionally go with this territory because it is a system which was deliberately adapted for Western audiences as a gift, a proverbial olive branch to heal the rift and the trauma between the indigenous peoples of South America and their colonizers. Bringing the descendants of colonizers into right relationship with the land is the only way to move forward in peace and harmony with nature. And that's exactly what these initiations do. They gradually make you aware of the connections you share to the world around you and the greater cosmos IT and how to fit into this scheme in a way that is meaningful and sacred. Thank you for tuning in to the 23rd episode of The Postmugglism Podcast. I hope you feel now both curious about the Munay-Ki Rites and also informed about what they are and what kinds of effects they can bring into your life. If you enjoyed this show, please consider subscribing to this podcast so you get notified whenever I publish new episodes. And if you're looking for more good quality content about magic like this, you should check out my website at www.postmugglism.com. For a lot of other articles, videos and other episodes of this podcast. In the next episode, I'm going to compare different schools of thought when it comes to clearing away negative energy from yourself or a space to see if we can spot in a universal practices that we should incorporate into our own routines. I hope you tune in for that show as well. Until then, thanks for listening and may the gods be with you.