Cesar speaks of three worlds during ceremony. Hanan Pacha, the world above. Ukhu Pacha, the world within, where the ancestors are and where what stays buried lives. And Kay Pacha, this world, the world of now.
During the night with Grandfather the other two open. What was stored away rises, and something wide and luminous gets touched that most people can't find words for.
But nobody lives there. Life happens in Kay Pacha: work, your partner, your children, Tuesday at seven in the morning.
Integration is carrying what you touched in the other two worlds all the way back into Kay Pacha. That's the definition the lineage uses, and it's more precise than anything I could build from psychology.
This is the third of three articles. The first covered preparation, the second what happens during the ceremony. This one covers what decides whether any of it stays.
Two maps, each in its own place
| Map | Where it comes from | What it orders |
|---|---|---|
| The four directions | The structure of Dynamis | The full path: reconnect (North, earth), heal (East, air), transform (South, fire), integrate (West, water) |
| The three pachas | The paqo's Q'ero lineage | The ceremonial process: Hanan Pacha above, Kay Pacha this world, Ukhu Pacha within |
Two distinct lineages coexisting in one place, each with its own name and function.
Something needs explaining before we go further, because the rest of the article depends on it.
Dynamis is not a ceremony center. The structure of the house is the four directions and their four energies: reconnect, heal, transform, integrate. That is a psychological and ontological process, and it works with ceremony or without it. Integration is the West, the last of the four, the direction of water.
Andean cosmology enters from somewhere else. It comes with the paqo's lineage and contributes to the ceremonial process, which is one part of the path rather than the whole of it. The three pachas belong to that tradition, not to the structure of Dynamis.
Two distinct maps, from two distinct lineages, coexisting in one place without merging. I state it precisely because easy syncretism, the kind that blends everything into a single spiritual vocabulary, erases traditions instead of honoring them.
The first days
A wachuma ceremony often runs toward dawn, and the descent is gradual rather than abrupt. That leaves a particular kind of next day: clarity and exhaustion at the same time, and the two coexist without difficulty.
What I recommend for those first forty-eight hours is almost entirely in the negative:
- Don't drive on the day of the ceremony or the day after.
- Don't make major decisions. Quitting the job, ending the relationship, moving countries. All of it can wait two weeks, and if it's still standing in two weeks, then it was true.
- Don't announce your conclusions from the night to anyone. You don't yet know which ones will hold.
- Don't try to explain the experience. Understanding arrives later, and it arrives on its own.
Do write. What surfaced blurs quickly, and in three weeks you'll be glad you scribbled something down that morning, however disorganized.
Staying up above
There's a way of failing at integration that looks good, which is why it goes unnoticed.
The person comes back luminous. They speak differently, use new words, feel they understood something enormous. And their life doesn't change at all. The same unaddressed conflicts, the same stalled relationship, the same job that empties them. What they gained was a vocabulary, not a life.
In the lineage's terms, that person stayed in Hanan Pacha. In clinical terms it's called spiritual bypassing: using the transcendent experience to avoid the concrete and considerably less glamorous work of changing something.
The most reliable sign this is happening is simple. If a month after the ceremony you can describe in detail what you felt but can't name a single thing you do differently, you stayed up above.
Staying down below, and what surfaced from the shadow
The other way of failing is the opposite, and it hurts more.
Material came up and stayed there, circling. A memory, a scene, a part of yourself you didn't want to see. The person ruminates on it for weeks without being able to do anything with it, and sometimes ends up worse than before they sat.
Jung called the shadow that hidden, repressed personality of emotional and primitive nature, which resists moral control and sustains itself through projections onto others (Jung, 1951/1968). It's what we reject in ourselves and keep seeing outside.
I want to be careful here. Ukhu Pacha is not the Jungian shadow. The resonance is striking, because Jung describes the shadow as reaching back into the realm of our ancestors, and Ukhu Pacha is ancestral territory. But one is a complete cosmology belonging to a people and the other is a concept from twentieth-century European psychology. Saying they're the same would reduce the first to the second, and I won't do that. They're two maps illuminating partly shared ground.
What I can say from my own trade: when what emerges is shadow material, it calls for clinical work rather than another ceremony. That's the terrain of the Healing Studio, where post-experience integration is an explicit part of what we do, alongside work with the unconscious, with polarities, and with dreams. The Enneagram enters there as a map of the patterns holding that structure in place.
There's something people don't always notice. The Maloca is built with nine pillars, one for each Enneagram type. The Andean ceremony takes place inside a geometry that belongs to the house, not to the lineage. The two maps don't compete for the space: one holds up the roof and the other leads the night.
The question that turns an experience into a life
Here, for me, is the heart of integration.
A ceremony shows you material. It can show you your fear, your old rage, the exact moment you stopped trusting someone. That's information, and information alone changes nobody. Plenty of people know exactly what's wrong with them and go on living the same way.
Viktor Frankl worked with a different question. Not why you suffer, but what for. What is this situation asking of you, what response does it expect, what meaning can you build from what you were handed (Frankl, 1946/2006). Logotherapy doesn't aim to eliminate suffering. It aims to give suffering a direction.
I trained as a logotherapist and existential analyst at the Viktor Frankl Institute in Costa Rica, and it's the framework I work integration with. It's what separates having seen something from having done something with it.
Ayni: what is received gets returned
In the Andean world there's a principle that orders communal life, called ayni. Catherine Allen, in her ethnography of a Quechua community in Cusco, describes it as the mechanism that keeps energy flowing within the ayllu: a constant give-and-take that sustains the whole (Allen, 2002). Her fieldwork was in Sonqo rather than among the Q'ero, though both are Quechua-speaking communities of the same region, so I cite it as a documented Andean concept rather than as doctrine specific to the lineage.
Applied to what concerns us: you received something. The exchange doesn't end when the night ends. And what gets returned isn't a symbolic offering. It's behavior.
This is where most post-ceremony resolutions die, almost always in the third week. The person comes back with their determination intact and no structure to hold it once the determination runs out, which it will.
What the behavior-change research shows fairly clearly is that a general resolution doesn't survive, while an instruction tied to a concrete situation does. So I always ask for the same thing: leave the ceremony with two or three sentences written down, not fifteen. Three that survive are worth more than fifteen that get forgotten.
The ayllu: staying inside the prayer
There's something Cesar says that sounds at first like a courtesy, until you understand it's literal: from the ceremony onward, he keeps praying for those who sat. The person doesn't go back to being someone who passed through. They stay inside the prayer, and that prayer continues.
In the Andean world the ayllu is the community, the unit of belonging. You don't enter and exit an ayllu as convenient.
What sounds like spiritual language has a measurable correlate, and it's among the more interesting findings in the field.
What the data say is that the night wasn't the mechanism. The mechanism was the whole: the shared living, what got said out loud, the people. And it explains why those who come to Dynamis tend to stay on as friends. That isn't a pleasant side effect. It's an active part of why it works.
Our integration page names it plainly among its three elements: staying connected to a community that holds you. It carries as much weight as the other two.
Sitting again
I'll close with the question that comes up most at two or three months.
Returning is fine. But there's a difference between returning because the process asks for it and returning because integrating is hard and sitting again is easier than the conversation you're avoiding.
The second is an elegant way of not changing. Ceremonies accumulate like certificates, and the life stays the same.
The question I use in session is direct: since the last time, what do you do differently? If there's something concrete to name, the path is moving. If the answer drifts toward what you felt, what's missing is probably not another ceremony.
When the work involves problematic substance use, the conversation is longer and has its own path in the 9Seeds program.
The return
The whole process points to one place, and it isn't the Maloca.
It's your house on an ordinary Tuesday, the conversation you keep postponing, the way you speak to your child when you're tired. Kay Pacha isn't the lesser world you resign yourself to after having seen something vast. It's the only world where things actually happen.
That's why integration is the West of the path, the direction where the day closes and something becomes permanent. And it's why Cesar keeps praying afterward, and why those who sat together are still there. Returning to Kay Pacha isn't returning alone.
If you don't know what to do with what surfaced
Integration can be worked on even if your ceremony was somewhere else. Sessions in person or online, grounded in logotherapy, shadow work, and the Enneagram.
Book a sessionIntegrating is the West of the Dynamis path, the last of the four directions.
Explore the integration stageReferences
Allen, C. J. (2002). The hold life has: Coca and cultural identity in an Andean community (2nd ed.). Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press.
Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man's search for meaning. Beacon Press. (Original work published 1946)
Gollwitzer, P. M. (1999). Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans. American Psychologist, 54(7), 493-503. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.54.7.493
Jung, C. G. (1968). Aion: Researches into the phenomenology of the self (2nd ed., R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; Collected Works, Vol. 9, Part 2). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1951)
Kettner, H., Rosas, F. E., Timmermann, C., Kärtner, L., Carhart-Harris, R. L., & Roseman, L. (2021). Psychedelic communitas: Intersubjective experience during psychedelic group sessions predicts enduring changes in psychological wellbeing and social connectedness. Frontiers in Pharmacology, 12, 623985. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphar.2021.623985
