Sumaq Kawsay The joyful and conscious life

Let me tell you a story.

I remember myself around thirty years old, intensely seeking the spiritual path. Back then, I would spend hours in Facebook comments arguing with people who thought differently from me.

It frustrated me. I needed to be right. I needed to win the argument. I needed the other person to see the truth — or at least, what I thought was the truth at that moment.

Today I laugh at that.

I also remember how I reacted when I found certain spiritual phrases on the internet. Especially those of the type:

Those phrases drove me crazy.

Back then, those phrases seemed superficial to me. Many times, they truly are. Because they can become cheap comfort for those who don’t want to act. It’s easy to talk. Harder to do.

But spiritual maturity changes things. And to live in Sumaq Kawsay, I must be at peace.

But before that, in the Andean tradition, we call Allin Kawsay what can be translated as good living, or the good life.

It is a life in which there is health. Prosperity. Good relationships with friends. Harmony in the family. Good partnership between husband and wife. Peace between parents and children. Good relationship with God. An ordered life, fertile, beautiful. A life that all of us can attain.

Many students of Andean spirituality have already learned about this principle in the communities of the Andes and have begun to speak about it in other parts of the world. That is beautiful. But what happens when problems come? With the passage of time, I felt that a larger word was still missing.

So I want to bring another term here:

Sumaq Kawsay.

Sumaq means grand or majestic.
Kawsay is life, or life energy.

For me, Sumaq Kawsay is more than living well.
It is living with full consciousness.

The great weave

Consciousness of what?

Consciousness that we are part of a great living weave. But even that image is imperfect. We are not pieces of a puzzle.

I would say the universe is more like a spider web. Can a spider web be divided into parts? Neither can the universe. It is a living, continuous totality. We are in it, but we are also it. We are a small point that is that immense weave.

So the idea of separation is a fantasy.

If we observe a human body closely, we see the skin. Getting closer, we see the pores. Closer still, the cells. Then the molecules. Then the atoms, the subatomic particles. At that level, separation no longer holds the same way it seemed to before.

At that level, there is no longer such a solid boundary between “me” and the air that surrounds me, between my body and the ground that sustains me, between the human being and the rest of creation.

To understand Sumaq Kawsay is to live with this awakened consciousness.

It is to act with love toward each person, each plant, each animal and each thing, because everything participates in the same living reality. Everything manifests, in its own way, a divine principle that is not only above us, but also within us and through us.

Today my life is not free from problems, just as no one’s life is. I continue to have challenges, losses, tensions, difficult decisions, and moments of pain. The difference is that now there is in me a more serene conviction.

• It is not about blind faith.
• It is not about positive illusion.
• It is not about crossing my arms and waiting.

It is a deeper certainty: that everything can be guided toward the best path when we are conscious, present, and in right relationship with life.

Naturally, I act every day so that a good future manifests. I work. I decide. I correct. I begin again. I sustain what needs to be sustained.

But I no longer do it with the same level of anxiety, stress, frustration, or despair as before.

That is what I am talking about.

Living with peace in the midst of life

Sumaq Kawsay is breathing with tranquility in the face of life’s great challenges.

When this consciousness settles in, we understand that everything participates in our evolution. Each challenge, each conflict, each loss, each trial, each encounter, each rupture — everything can be lived as part of the path.

The conscious person stops reacting to everything as if they were being attacked all the time. They stop moving only out of fear. They stop wasting energy fighting against their own reality.

They begin to act with more intelligence, more love, and more peace.

And this peace does not come from the absence of responsibility.
It comes from the presence of consciousness.

Loving life as it is

Living in Sumaq Kawsay is living by loving what surrounds us.

Not in a naive way. Not like someone who romanticizes everything. Not like someone who pretends there is no injustice, violence, limitation, or pain.

It is loving reality as a field of evolution.

Because when we understand that we are not separate, love ceases to be merely a beautiful feeling. It becomes an intelligent way of participating in reality.

Doing harm to others ceases to seem like a valid strategy, because consciousness already begins to perceive that all disordered aggression returns to the very weave of which we are a part.

Perhaps that is why true peace is not born from fleeing the world, but from the deep perception of belonging.

Allin Kawsay and Sumaq Kawsay

This is why I consider it a more mature step of the path.