In ancient Peru, the cosmic order was seen as organized from a quadripartite perspective. To ensure health and relationship to the external world, each person had to be in harmony with this order. According to this conception, life depends on the factors above and below, on the male and female factors; on the factors of the air and the earth, as of the hot and the cold. This concept was commonly called the four winds, or also of the four regions or of the four pachas (sources, pachas or times) of life.<\/p>\r\n
The term wind (wayra, in Quechua or runasimi) for the ancient Peruvians (Andean and Amazonian) was not intended solely to designate the physical phenomenon, by analogy it also referred to the flow of\u00a0forces or energies that make up life, which manifests as the harmony or supreme balance of\u00a0forces of the cosmos. For that same reason, even in traditional Peruvian medicine, shamans and healers talk about the upper and lower winds, the previous winds and the later winds,\u00a0as causing disease (or imbalance) as well as calling on the wayras to restore\u00a0health or vital balance. Wayras or winds are also called psychoactive plants,\u00a0fundamental in pan-Peruvian shamanic traditions: sanpedro or wachuma (Trichocereus pachanoi), ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi), misha (Datura), to\u00e9 or guarguar (Brugmansia), wilca (Anadenanthera\u00a0colubrina), tobacco, etc.<\/p>\r\n
The entire religious medical tradition of the ancient Peruvians was aimed at maintaining the balance of the\u00a0four winds (tawa wayra) of life, because only in this way each human being can ensure the order of their\u00a0interiority (as does the cosmos, and each element that created it) and can permanently dialogue with\u00a0the Noqa Kani Kani, Entelechy or Vital Energy and its manifestations in each of the worlds: in that the\u00a0above and below, the masculine and the feminine, where life flows just as the\u00a0winds.<\/p>\r\n
Disease is also conceived as an imbalance between internal and external forces.<\/p>\r\n
The World Health Organization states that health is the state of physical and mental well-being, and\u00a0satisfactory social life; and with this model official medicine has made great advances, particularly in the realm of medical specialization . However, in relation to the model itself, the conception of traditional indigenous medicine, in our opinion, is much more evolved.<\/p>\r\n
For the indigenous conception, health is a state of balance between the individual and their ecological environment and socio-cultural, including the natural and the spiritual. That is, it consists of a kind of parallelism between inner ecology and nature ecology. For the indigenous people, the man who preys on nature, on the levels it does now, has first been spiritually preyed upon.<\/p>\r\n
It is necessary to remember that the linguistic root of medicine in western languages \u200b\u200bis the Latin word\u00a0mederi that comes from the meaning \u00abmeasure\u00bb and was already sentenced by the Greek Protagoras: \u00abMan is the measure of\u00a0all things \u201d, because it has its\u201c inner measure, \u201dits own reference to life. What medicine is about then, is regaining the inner measure of our lives.<\/p>\r\n
The integration of Amazonian Shamanism and Indigenous Medicine (the wealth of its medicinal plants and\u00a0techniques of widening consciousness) with Western psychology and psychotherapy (its techniques\u00a0of interpreting, elaborative and integrating the personality), offers the possibility of establishing a\u00a0truly integrative transpersonal system, which goes beyond current concepts and is highly recommended for non-indigenous people.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In ancient Peru, the cosmic order was seen as organized from a quadripartite perspective. To ensure health and relationship to the external world, each person had to be in harmony with this order. According to this conception, life depends on the factors above and below, on the male and female factors; on the factors of …<\/p>\n