A few weeks ago, I returned from Peru. When I left, I was still occupied with the parts of me that played small, the parts that protected me. I went with one intention, to put down the part of me that protected me from my own light. Once I set that intention, I never thought about it again. I lived each moment as though it were the only moment there was. My intention was so sincere that when I came back, I found a new person looking out through my eyes.
While I was there, I was initiated as an Altomisayoq, a level of commitment within Andean priesthood that the Q’ero people have carried for generations, long before anyone from outside the Andes carried it. I hold this carefully. It was not something I walked into as an achievement or a title to wear. I walked into it as a student, under the guidance of my teacher, offered into a lineage that is not mine by birth, one I am still learning to live inside honestly. What I received was not authority over this tradition. It was a responsibility, to carry the work of bridging earth and spirit, to hold ayni, sacred reciprocity, in how I live and in how I show up for the people I work with. I mention it here not to claim a title, but because it is where the sincerity I described above became formal, and it asks something ongoing of me in return.
Who we are is a divine spark. Maintaining connection to that spark is the most important thing there is.
I am here for anyone who has had to fight the limiting beliefs they carry. Anyone who has had to fight themselves to feel worthy of love, acceptance, peace, safety, companionship. Anyone who has ever felt that a part of them is unacceptable. Anyone who feels unfree in the expression of their self.
I had to ask myself why I don’t feel free. Why I feel like a mistake. Why I feel so unsafe in the world.
Some of this traces back to trauma. When there has been a loss of safety, there can be a loss of soul, a disassociation. We live beside ourselves instead of inside ourselves. The body carries on, but the feeling being, the part of us that is soul, is not fully inside the body. Without that, there is no grounding. Without grounding, there is no safety. It becomes a loop that feeds itself.
There is also the existential weight of being human. I hesitate to call it trauma, but in this day and age, it can feel like one.
Out of these questions came about what I am here to share.
There is a freedom that lives within every human being. Finding how to access it, and then doing so, lets us experience our lives from a place of connection instead of constraint: freedom from low self-esteem, from fear, from withholding, from scarcity, from war, from conflict, from needing to be first, from competition.
Why do we carry these fears at all? My sense is that we carry them because we have become disconnected from the divine spark that lives inside us.
That disconnection begins at birth. Our mothers are told how to birth us, what injections we are to have, what to be taught, what colours belong to our gender, pink for girls and blue for boys. Society shows us which behaviour gets rewarded and which gets punished. We are shown a story of survival of the fittest, told by governments and institutions what we may and may not do. Out of all of this we build a constructed identity: who we are, where we are positioned, how we should behave.
None of this means the structures of the world are without use. Many of them are needed. But we are not those rules. Some part of us is shaped by them, and that part becomes mistaken for the whole of who we are.
Underneath all the rules and rewards and punishments, underneath every strategy we learned to be seen and accepted, is one simple thing: we want to be loved. We want it because love is what ignites the divine spark. It is what we are always seeking. And in the seeking, we run into every fear that conditioning and conformity have built into us.
This is not a case against the rules of the game, or against convention, or against culture. It helps to play by them. But I am not defined by them. If I removed every rule, who would I be? Who is the one underneath all the conditioning, the one who was never competitive, never afraid, never good girl or bad girl, good boy or bad boy? Who is that one? How do we find her, touch her, live from her?
This is my work and my message.
Spiritual forces feed into the physical world, because we are spiritual beings. The two cannot be separated. Through the human heart, we are instruments of evolution, not only human evolution but the evolution of the cosmos. Our role, as connected human beings, is to be the vessel that brings spirit into matter, so that matter itself becomes spiritualised. We are the only ones who can do this work.
We have become so conditioned toward disconnection that the dominant story about us has become that humans ruin everything we touch, that nature would be better off without us, that we are nothing more than cold systems of cause and effect, animals seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. That is a true expression only of the human who has identified themselves with the conditioned self. The self shaped by the rules of the worldly game. It is not true of the divinity within us. Of the true Self within. It is not true of the fullness, the beauty and the goodness of who we are as human beings. It is only true of a being who has identified with a story that keeps her cut off from her own light. Cut off from that light, we are cut off from everything around us.
There is another story.
In that story, we reconnect to the divine light within. We find the self within. We look at what triggers us on the outside and use it as a pointer to what is unfree within. We ask the questions and do the work, so that what was contracted, distorted, deformed by material identification can become instead a being that is giving, loving, abundant, self-generating, creative.
From that place we don’t just think or believe or hold faith in our connection to all things. We feel it, completely. We feel our place in the tapestry of life. We feel the safety of what holds us: the earth we stand on, the air we breathe, the sun that warms and nurtures life, the water we drink that moves through our own blood. And on a spiritual level, we know that these forces have spirit too, that their spirit is intertwined with ours, their soul with our soul. Everything living carries a spiritual dimension, and when we give that dimension the attention it deserves, it becomes the frequency we live by.
Somatically, how this is dealt with is through the nervous system, through calming it. All wisdom traditions have known this.
On this equinox, I invite you to consider the following:
1. To know we are not our conditioning.
2. To take the trigger as a gift.
3. To be in true, sacred reciprocity with ourselves, honest enough to actually receive that gift, to find the places within us that are not free, and to let spirit in, so that we may know ourselves worthy, capable, able.
If this landed somewhere in you, you can you can reach out to me at amanda@selfwithin.co or WhatsApp on +27 82 955 7360.
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About the Author
Amanda is a philosopher, humanitarian, and writer whose work sits at the intersection of anthroposophy, ancient wisdom traditions, and the lived experience of becoming human. She is the founder of Self Within and writes about the meaning of life on earth and the true nature of reality. This piece is part of a longer body of work in development.
