The Mystery School Teachings at the Heart of My Work
My training as a healer is rooted in Peru, not Ireland
If the whole structure isn’t crumbling to the ground, the cracks in the foundations are surely showing.
We feel this happening at the international level, of course, as it’s abundantly clear that the arrangement of nations, territories, and peoples is far from secure. And this isn’t just in terms of Israel and Palestine; we must remember that the war in Ukraine, and so many other places, drags on too.
And, this need to examine, transform, and heal the systems and structures is just as clear closer to home - in our own governments, in our economic system, in our intimate relationships, and in our own bodies.
At our house, we’re seeing the hairline cracks split open into the width of a puppy’s tail. Bringing Nuala, our rescue golden doodle who looks like neither a retriever nor a poodle, into our lives has made it clear that so many of the old not-quite-good enough coping mechanisms were always doomed to fail.
Maybe someday it will feel important and necessary to share the details. For now, trust that I’m an artist and that if you pay attention to my stories, you’ll probably know more about my private life than I could ever share with you in a million overtly biographical sentences.
Anyway. I’ve been quiet these last couple of weeks. Maybe you have been, too.
I’ve been exhausted by my grief at the rising death toll in Gaza. The commercial onslaught that comes with Thanksgiving and the dissonance of celebrating the displacement and eventual annihilation of millions of people gets harder to deal with each year. And, of course, the dog’s middle-of-the-night walks, and the way this peri-menopausal body just refuses to return to sleep afterward.
But, oh, the conversations I had with the moon…
I have been giving La Luna my words and soaking in her silence, even as Nuala and I listen for the rustle of deer in the tiny oak grove at the top of the driveway. I’ve been so full of moonlight, I almost (almost) don’t mind the insomniac hours that follow.
But now, it is time to find the words again: KnotWork Storytelling is back!
After taking a couple of weeks off, we’re returning to KnotWork this week with a series of four conversations with authors whose work is dear to my heart.
We’ll start each episode with a story, as we always do, but rather than pulling from mythology or folklore, my guests are telling a small bit of their own story. I think you’ll find these conversations fit right into what you have come to expect from the show.
I’d like you to meet my Mystery School teacher
Our first episode in this series, Divine Embodiment with Eleanora Amendolara, has been a long time coming.
Eleanora Amendolara has been my healing teacher and my spiritual mentor since 2007. When I found myself in the circle at the Sacred Center Mystery School learning this approach to healing called Chumpi Illumination, I was in my late 20s and newly married. I was wearing the Banana Republic trousers of a young professional in academia, but I still dreamed of the flowing skirts that defined me through my time in Ireland and all my studies of mythology and poetry.
Class with Eleanora was a sort of homecoming. I had completed my Reiki master training while in college, and Chumpi Illumination took those basic energy healing techniques and expanded them at every level.
I had found the teacher who could hold open the portal for me to reach the impossible to articulate, but so clearly felt, yearning for MORE.
Eleanora calls it the Greater Reality. I knew I wanted to make my home there, and not just feel trapped in the mundane world of work and numbing, maintenance and routine.
Nearly two decades later (after the new bride shine was long faded, I became a mother and an entrepreneur, and I finally woke up to all the ways that white patriarchal capitalism had colonized my life, and not just the land I live upon) I would come to realize just how true spiritual and healing work is intended to equip us for this terrible and beautiful time to be alive, not “save” us from it.
We enter the Greater Reality in order to be with all of reality, not just the sparkly, transcendent, love and light bits.
The Sacred Center and Chumpi Illumination is at the heart of my life, work, healing, and yet, it’s complicated…
Though I am more than qualified to set up my own energy healing practice and to support clients as they navigate physical, emotional, and spiritual struggles with the Chumpi Illumination techniques I’ve learned (and even helped develop!), it has never been my true calling.
This is because I am a writer, of course. I heal with words rather than with my hands. My gift to offer this world is about story and helping others untangle their narratives and shape words on the page.
But another important reason that “energy healer” isn’t my main job description is that work that Eleanora has taught me, Chumpi Illumination, has never quite felt like mine.
You’ll hear Eleanora read an excerpt from our book Divine Embodiment: The Art & Practice of Chumpi Illumination (yes, I co-wrote it). In the conversation that follows, we explore how the Chumpi stones are found in the sacred sites of Andes, in the mountains surrounding the Peruvian city of Cusco. The origins of these sacred objects are obscure, and the story of their original power and purpose has largely been lost.
Eleanora describes her first trips to Peru in the 1990s and how she received her first set of Chumpi stones. She also talks about the early conversations had amongst the Americans and other westerners about how to enter into right relationship with the Q’ero people as they came down from their remote mountain villages for the first time.
Thirty years ago, these visiting spiritual seekers were trying to figure out how to learn from a culture that had been isolated from the world for centuries. Everyone would be changed by these interactions, but at what cost?
I’m sure that anyone you could ask, from all sides of this cross-cultural equation, would probably offer a different calculation. Who gained? Who lost? What’s immeasurable? What is irrevocably changed?
The part of me that has begun to do the work of understanding the devastation caused by patriarchy, white supremacy, and colonialism worries over these questions and who gets to control and convey the answers.
And, to be totally honest, the part of me that is afraid of being canceled on the internet worries about how this story and how the Chumpi work that’s at the heart of my life might be received.
Cultural appropriation. Spiritual tourism. White people with rattles pretending to be shamans after one weekend training. These all feature prominently on the worry roll I play in my mind when I can’t sleep after walking the dog.
Here’s what I know: I trust my teacher. I trust what I have learned from her and how we’ve been able to have these conversations over the years. I trust that our ability as white Americans to learn from indigenous cultures can be healthy and more nuanced than what can be conveyed in an Instagram post,
I trust that Eleanora has the experience of 25 years and dozens of trips to Peru. I trust that she has entered into ayni (the Quechua word for “reciprocity”) with the Q’ero culture, and that she has built deep, enduring connections with the people and the land. I trust that she knows intimately the wisdom and the desires of the people who heard such concerns about their “corruption” and replied that they felt it was their time to participate in this great and terrible modern experiment.
As Eleanora describes it, the Q’ero said they liked the taste of Coca Cola, and made a conscious choice to make the soda, and other parts of western culture, part of their lives. I trust that it’s not up to me to decide whether that was a healthy choice for them based on my own ideas about the evils of Coke and all it represents. It was (and is) the time of pachacuti, when the world is turned inside out. In the midst of great change, they made a choice with a sense of agency, not out of victimization.
It is a long moment of change for the indigenous people, and for those of us on the outside who benefit from their wisdom.
Those of us shaped by the colonial ethos must constantly ask whether our behavior is exploitative, appreciative, or beneficial to the peoples who give their timeless gifts to our ever-hungry cultural machine.
These are the questions I ask as I use the Chumpi stones in my own personal healing and spiritual practice. These are the questions I ask as I connect to my own ancestral traditions and tell stories and weave experiences drawn from Irish mythology and Celtic wisdom.
On being in right relationship with cultures that are not your own
When I struggle to find an answer, I come back to a conversation I had with Michael Newton on the podcast last season, in an episode called The Look of the Scots Gaelic Language: Stories About Race & Kinship.
In a discussion about how the white supremacist movements have appropriated Celtic and Gaelic culture and symbols, he described how “you are a meaningful member of the community when you participate and contribute, not just because of your name and ancestry.”
I know Eleanora to be someone who has cultivated a deep bond with Peru and its people. She has woven that wisdom and elements of this tradition into her own unique approach to healing and spirituality. It has been an honor to learn from her, and through her, receive the some of the magic of that place and culture.
Though I have not yet been to Peru (motherhood has a way of keeping you from taking off for South America for two weeks, especially if you don’t have a mom of your own to call on to help), the mountains and the Sacred Valley are part of my foundation.
The spiritual insights I have received by using the sacred tools of Peru have been rooted in a specific locality and way of life, but reach far beyond into the universal wisdom. That’s what happens in the true mystery school traditions. As a fundamental part of my own spiritual foundation, Chumpi Illumination inspires all of my work as a storyteller, a healer, a writing coach, and so much more.
But really, am I doing it right?
Sometimes, when I examine about my relationship to Peruvian and Irish culture, I worry that I am settling on the most comfortable answers that suit my needs.
But then, I remember what I tell my clients when they share similar concerns: if you’re worried that you’re engaged in appropriation or any other kind of unethical behavior, you are probably not the problem.
When you ask whether you’re in right relationship with a culture that is not your own and you are willing to listen, to pause, to learn, to grow, and to potentially to be wrong and course correct, then there’s a good chance you are doing the work of contributing to rather that co-opting the cultural conversation.
But still… Don’t just take my word for it.
Look closer. Dive deeper. Keep asking what it means to decolonize your spirituality, your healing, and the work you do in this world. I know it’s something I still need to do actively each day and in every way, even when (especially when) my own blindness and hypocrisy threaten to crush me to the ground.
Here’s to tearing down the structures of theft and oppression.
Here’s to growing new systems that are built on exchange and support.
Here’s to staying humble and open enough to do that ethically and radically (because, of course, radical means “from the root.”)