For years now Inti Wasi has been receiving pilgrims from all over the world. The center’s main guide, Juan de Dios Kucho, is the spiritual guardian of the place. He has a close relationship with the mountains and has made the journey up to Machu Picchu, Wayna Picchu, and neighboring mountains countless times, taking groups and also being alone there with his medicines in deep meditation for days on end. Macchu Picchu has recently become a tourist hot-spot, rapidly polluting the culture of this sacred place, and visitors generally have little understanding of the magnitude of spiritual energy that lives there. The mountain spoke to Kucho and told him to evolve his center into Yachay Wasi, the School of Ancestral Wisdom of the Andino World, to serve as a threshold to the mountain, where people can be guided into the preparation, understanding, and purification necessary to go to these ancient temples in reverence and unlock the journey’s spiritual potential. Kucho shares medicine, meditation, and rituals with humility and integrity, offering courses, healings, study groups, and spiritual tours.
The travel ban this year has seriously compromised Kucho’s ability to maintain the center and the livelihood of all its practitioners and their families. In his endless creativity, Kucho has committed to carrying on spiritual and cultural connections -through food.
Cusco, the historic center of the Tawantinsuyo, is in dire need of good food. Kucho has planned to open a little grocery shop that will supply organic, healthy, traditional produce, including surplus from indigenous chakras (terraced fields), which will give a much-needed boost to indigenous people, as well as providing a place where city dwellers can connect to their ancestral foods, and receive nourishment. As we all know, food is medicine and contributes to the wellbeing of the body, mind and spirit.
We have decided to support this beautiful project, as it in turn supports the Amaru and Chahuaytire communities, who will be providing products to the center's shop. These two weaving families make their living from selling traditional alpaca scarves and ponchos and have been in dire straits in the absence of tourists. This project will positively affect hundreds of people who can begin to count on one another outside of their reliance on tourism, giving them greater sovereignty and creating a network of support that centers around the ancestral ways of a very sacred part of the world.
Thank you for supporting Inti Wasi, Yachay Wasi, Amaru, and Chahuaytire.