Samay Canamar

I have been lucky to be born and to be in a space where I embrace myself with its majestic landscape. This is Camuendo, a Kichwa community from Imbabura (Ecuador). There are bushes of all nameless plants, there is a lot of energy just by breathing. I am in the heart of mother earth, I live near the water, near the wet earth, the green grass, the flowering crops, the totally fresh air, a mountain at my feet and on my horizon. Within that space my senses have been very active and have detected everything that resonated with my being. I have asked myself many times, what is spirituality? What is that something that my body longs to embrace and that I feel deep inside of me? It is something that can only be read with the heart, with the being. A very peaceful truth. Just like a rain that relaxes only if you name it, a door that opens and inside there is music, calm.

Personally, I was looking for a space that heals the soul, a space that sustains fatigue, the steps. A safe space where the being can be. I always felt that there was something more than the spirituality named from the church. So I searched in my space, in our knowledge. I started looking for that something in people, stories, landscapes, the dialogue of the eyes, the tenderness of the voices, the echo of the rain, the untold stories. I began to search for that something that Jesus would call truth. That something that someone would call the skin of life and the heart of the body, spirituality.

The search has not led me to another place but to myself. At some point a mother healer told me that our spirituality is within us. It’s not that he’s asleep or that he’s been taken from us. It is in our root, in our inner self, the fairest thing now is to name it. For ancestral spiritualities, as I have lived it today, there is not something purely unique. It is syncretized with other ways of living and knowing. In the case of my Kichwa community, it is linked to Western religion, which hardly recognizes its own ancestral practices. The truth is that we need a dialogue and our position in the face of that space of power that consumes us.

Living with the community means that, from childhood, you observe and learn unique practices and ours. For our communities it is essential to recognize and name a space as part of the existing rituals. Nature, silence, moments and the language of Mother Nature have been the places that receive people when they carry out an ancestral spiritual practice.

Space is an important axis to live with our spirituality. It is what allows you to take yaypi kay —to be aware, in Kichwa—, to the awareness of your existence. Yaypi kay is cultivating intuition, a knowledge far beyond the heart and mind. A climb that allows us to recognize and inhabit our presence. The space for a ritual is sacred and it is the one that transports us and connects us to live spirituality as our grandmothers and grandfathers have taught us through practice. The body is a part of nature, therefore, we are part of it in order to exist in the present and at different times. To this space are added the rites, the rituals, the knowledge that accompany living the environment of our spirituality. For example, the knowledge of time, the classification and selection of plants, the offerings, the ways of conversing, silence, singing, dance, food, the evocation of the elementals —earth, air, fire and water— , the conversation with the personification of the energies, are their own forms of relationship that make them peculiar. It is a way of experiencing spirituality from a very personal perspective. I also want to emphasize that this way of living is not unique, there is diversity.

One of the sacred elements that accompany these rituals is water. The springs of water are considered sacred. I am around lakes and mountains, many springs with their own names and powers. Luyu Pukyu is the name of one of them, a spring that accompanies the Imbakucha lagoon. It is a place that receives most of the people in my community, both for daily sustenance and for their own ritual acts. On the Luyu slope, the older women and healers walk towards it and bathe, offering their bodies and their pains to the water to heal themselves, to feel lighter. My great-aunt has been doing this ritual of the sacred bath all her life at a specific time in the morning, with selected plants and offering a ritual to the water. Luyu’s slope has several small water holes, and at each end are its feminine and masculine energies. The healing power of her is dialogue and trust with her.

Water is the element of the yaku ayakuna, which houses the beings of the water. They are guardians of sacred spaces, who receive people at their edge. For this reason, when visiting a sacred space, permission to enter is requested. I have always heard from the elderly that you do not arrive at a place without saying hello, without saying minkachiway —asking for permission, in Kichwa. This act is the beginning of any ritual or activity that is carried out in the communities. For example, I remember my grandfather would take off his hat, look towards the hill, greet it and start his way up the hill. My grandmother speaks to the earth, greets it before starting to sow or harvest. In addition, he also thanks the Catholic god, a form of syncretism present in the communities. The seed is a grain that is cared for, not a single one should be left out of its place, watered or thrown away. “Everything is sown, everything is taken care of, collected” the grandparents always said, my mother also reminds me.

Asking for permission is done in order to inhabit a space that is not ours, but that of mother nature, of the earth. Asking for permission is knowing that each space of nature that we inhabit has its guardians, its owners, its caretakers, its spirits and energies. Ask permission to agree with your wisdom, energy. When asking permission to enter a spring of water, it means that we acknowledge its presence, that we request entry to be able to step on and touch its sacred water or Kuri yakuku, as they say in our Kichwa language, agüita de oro.

Both the land, the water, the mountains, are beings with stories that need to be named since they house feminine and masculine spirits. They are knowledge not socialized with the entire current community, knowledge that is only found in doubts and oral histories. The ritual baths in Luyu Pukyu, for example, are not only done on the solstices or most recognized dates within the Andean calendar, but also on some specific days and hours with the purpose of healing and reviving the whole body. The aim is for the body to rest and allow itself to be cared for. It is part of daily life and is not intended for a specific activity, but this ritual is connected with all the activities of the community, all are connected and interrelated from spiritual, emotional, practical wisdom. The ritual, spiritual and ancestral practice is part of a healing way of life, of resistance that is much more present in the hands of adult women, women midwives, women healers of the community. This also requires a return to ourselves, a call to the youth for their survival, a dialogue and resistance from our actions against the hegemonic power, to capitalism that sees our body as instant products and people —and that gives little place to the spiritual body that it is the heart of the matter.

Returning to our integral body and evoking and visiting our sacred spaces means a way of re-existing with our wisdom and practice of spiritual life from ancestry.

Samay Canamar

Kichwa feminist woman. She is attached to psychotherapeutic work and the protection of women and their children who are survivors of gender-based violence and child sexual abuse treatment. She writes bilingually in Kichwa and Spanish.