How Markawasi retreat will be like
HOW YOUR STAY IN PERU WITH ME WILL GO:
I can meet you at the airport when you come. I will help you to find your accommodation or I can suggest you your hotel. You can come even a few days before, if you want to get to know Lima (capital of Peru) or other places. But the tour with me will start on the day when we decide to leave Lima. I can take your bags and stuff that you do not need for Markawasi and I can guard it for you until the retreat/tour is over. In this way you don’t need to pay to your hotel for guarding your things.
I will take you out of Lima to a place called “Chosica” and there we will get into a big bus that goes to village San Pedro de Casta, a place 6 hours away, high in the Andean mountain.
Here’s a video from the bus that we will be going with:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAaGS8ByLIU
We will pass the rest of the day in the village. You will get to know it, it had well preserved its culture and people there are very simple mountain people. Even though it’s necessary to pass San Pedro de casta, happily the village is not yet so touristic. It’s a calm place and it will be good to stay there for us because that will help you to acclimatize. In the village there are a few local shops but they have very few things. We will eat what we have brought with us and I will arrange so that local woman from the village prepares us something to eat.
There’s no real hotel in this village. They don’t even have warm water. Beds are very simple. It is for us to decide if we want to pass the night in the hostel or camp ourselves (there is one nice place to camp close to the village that I know) outside in the tents. The later could be a better choice because in doing this we will check our tents. You need to have them good before reaching Markawasi. You don’t want to pass the night outside your tent in Markawasi, its cold can be freezing!
So, after having acclimatized in the village we will set ourselves to the summit plateau of Markawasi. We will leave early in the morning because we want to reach the place before the sun is too strong. I will hire some horses so we can go up riding but I think a good idea is to both walk and ride so I suggest taking a few horses and shifting among ourselves who’s riding and who’s walking. It depends of what you want.
I will hire donkeys to bring your backpacks and our food and provisions, I will pay your entry to Markawasi national park and we will go.
It will be around 3 hours ride/walk up and up the mountain. We will rise dramatically in elevation, we will rise about 1000 meters up! You will experience an interesting sensation of higher altitude – it is harder to move because there is less oxygen and you have to breathe more. It is not something unpleasant or bad, it is, rather, an interesting new sensation that you probably hadn’t have before.
After 3 long hours we will reach the plateau. Even though, during your journey up the mountain you may curse me many times for the hard, steep and rocky way, it will all change when you enter Markawasi. At least, for me it happens that every time I enter it I enter into deep inner silence. There are no thoughts in me, no emotions. Just being. Just feeling as if you are in a sacred place and time does not exist. You just feel like being home. This is my experience but many claim to have the same and this is the most important part of Markawasi for me – its spirit.
We will find a good place to camp there and we will set our tents and accommodate. 10 day retreat had just started!
You will feel like at home. It is a strange but, at the same time, so known feeling. Despite of the burning rays of the sun during the day (if you are not in the shadow), despite the freezing cold of the night you feel at home. And you hear silence. In Markawasi silence can be heard and you will have this experience.
You will enter into another frequency of being, you will feel as if meditating, as if dreaming yet awake, you will feel as if in some other world where there’s no time. Your natural inner transformations and healing will begin.
Indeed, there may be many strange things happening in you and in your body as a result of this “going back to the equilibrium”. You may have some physical pains or illnesses that you may experience but, in the end, that would heal you. You may have emotional explodes where you would just start crying – crying from joy, crying from sorrow, crying from everything and nothing at the same time. In these experiences you can come into a very close experience with God, or universe.
Well, such and many more were my experiences and those experiences of my friends who had stayed there.
The place is huge and one of the dangers I have to inform you is that it’s very easy to get lost there. Especially, in the rainy season when in less than in one minute you can find yourself in a fog, in a cloud and you cannot virtually see what is 2 meters in front of you. Villagers say that many people had never come back from Markawasi. People say that they either fell from the high cliffs (which are many) or were taken by Extraterrestrials. This is why I would prefer you not go far away from our site without me.
I will provide you food and it will be a good, nutritious food. Quinoa, maca, oats, Tibetan tsampa/Andean machika, real natural chocolate and cacao beans, peanut butter, honey, bread, cheese other things. In the cold nights I will prepare you hot soups and coca tea that will help you feel warm and strong.
If you want to have something extra to eat you can bring something yourself but I will try to give you everything I can and these 10 days will find you with good and nutritious food that will make you stronger. Usually, in the mountains you loose some weight because you do not eat as much as you normally do. My personal experience was that I decided to water-fast and I didn’t eat anything for 6 days. Fasting felt spontaneous and was easy, I didn’t want to eat. On the 7th day I decided to eat, though, because I was very weak physically and fasting more was getting very dangerous for my life.
The spirit of Markawasi will take you in and your process of healing and psychic opening will starts. In the afternoons, when there will be no clouds we will be observing the sunsets that are completely not of this world! It was such a profound spiritual experience to me, it was not seeing a sunset but a meeting with God that is love. You will experience those sunsets for yourself.
During the nights with hot tea that I would prepare and your warm clothes we would get out of the tents and observe the starry sky. Stars seem to be so close that you feel you can touch them, you can see thousands or millions of them. It is very possible to see UFOs in the sky if you are lucky.
We will pass a few days like this and then, if you want, we can change the site and move to another place to get to know it. Depends on you, if you want to move. The site is big, as I said.
I will give you two shamanic ceremonies with master plants. It will either be the coca leaves and tobacco mapacho.
Mapacho ceremony would mean we have to drink a tobacco tea. It’s very strong in taste but you will manage drinking a cup of it. You will have to fight nausea because you may want to vomit. Just after drinking it you may feel some pain in your stomach because mapacho tea is something really new and strong for your stomach. But quickly the pain will go away and you will start feeling very very weak. You will lie down on your mat and you will feel as if there’s something happening within you. For both physical and spiritual healing takes place. You feel very weak but you feel good, you may feel a lot of peace and you may feel as partly outside of your physical body. That could be an opportunity to practice OBE, if you like. This way we will stay for a few hours, neither dead nor alive, lying on our mats or seated in a meditation position. I will be playing Tibetan singing bowl and chanting. You may also want to try of inhaling the tobacco tea through your nose. It’s an ancient shamanic rite and purification too.
Then, after a few hours, you will suddently “wake up” with an urge to vomit. You will vomit easily and without any pain and after that you will realize you feel good. You don’t feel as weak as before, you don’t feel any nausea anymore. You feel clear in your soul and in your body, you feel lighter, you feel happier.
In the ceremony of coca leaves we will have to chew them, many of them, as I will be playing my Tibetan singing bowl. After about 30 min of chewing you can already feel a different feeling in you – you feel more awake, more aware, you feel you have a lot of energy and strength but yet you remain concentrated and centered. You don’t feel less cold and you don’t feel hunger. If you continue chewing you start having an even deeper experience of peace and silence, of awareness. It’s more an inner sensation of tranquility and serenity and it feels like a connection with the universe and mother earth, whom Andean people call “Pacha Mama”. Coca experience centers you even more within yourself, it teaches you many things and it feels like a connection with nature.
So, in short, ceremony of tobacco mapacho heals and purifies you and ceremony of coca will give you strength and nutrients. Neither of the plants is hallucinogenic or considered drug (at least here, in other countries coca leaves will be considered drug because of cocaine). Let me remind you that coca leaves have nothing to do with cocaine. Coca leaves is a natural plant and it is highly used by native people and it is unseparable part of Andean culture and shamanism.
Tabacco Mapacho is a natural tobacco and it is tobacco that I grew and harvested myself. I will be smoking Mapacho with the shaman pipe of Abuelo and I will be healing you using the Mapacho smoke, as Abuelo (the master shaman) instructed and taught me to do.
This way days will be passing. I will be working on you giving you energy transmittions through looking into your eyes, putting my hands on you, sending you energy and other ways. I will be meditating and you will join me, I will play the Tibetan singing bowl and show you the place. I will teach you whatever you want to learn from me and you will have some good time to just be by yourself, relax, heal and understand many things. Many people had seen UFOs there or had contacts. I cannot promise neither to you but, as for my personal experience, I had experienced very strange and intense things there where I really felt presence of energies that are not of this world.
After those 10 days you will feel different. You will be different. I am sure there will be many new things you understood and you will feel strong and ready to continue your daily lives. You will feel charged-up spiritually and, even when you leave, you will carry the spirit of Markawasi with you that I don’t think will ever leave you. It is a sacred place and you will have its blessing.
On the 11th day in the morning we will pack our stuff and go down the mountain, this time walking (but if you want I can arrange horses or donkeys to you also for going down. Going down is not as hard as going up is). We will reach the village, eat and take the bus leading us back to Lima where I will make sure to leave you in your places/hotels.
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