Chakana Coaching

This is not therapy, and it is not advice. It is a structure for looking at your own life with someone who is not inside it. The structure is the Chakana — the Andean cross, a stepped bridge between three worlds. In the teacher training it is used to sequence a class. Here it is used to sequence a life: Uku Pacha, the lower world — roots and memory. What is asking to be released. Kay Pacha, this world — the present. What is asking for action, now, in the month in front of you. Hanan Pacha, the upper world — practice and service. What you are being called toward. We move through them in that order, and the order is the point. Most people want to start at the top: the vision, the calling, the new thing. Started there, it usually collapses within a season, because the pattern that ended the last thing is still running. What I will and will not do I will ask questions, reflect back what I hear, and hold you to what you said you wanted — including when you would rather I did not. I will tell you plainly when I think you are avoiding something. I will not tell you what to do with your life. I will not pretend to certainty I do not have. And if what you actually need is clinical support rather than coaching, I will say so and help you find it. What this asks of you Honesty, mostly. The sessions work in proportion to how quickly you stop performing in them. You do not have to arrive composed, and you do not have to have done the homework perfectly. You do have to tell the truth about whether you did it.

Answer these three before we meet. Write them somewhere you can bring back — a notebook, a document, the notes app. Half a page each is plenty; a paragraph is fine. 1. What is the situation, as plainly as you can say it? Not what it means, not what you have concluded about it. Just the facts, the way you would describe them to someone who has never met you. Where you live, what you do, who is around you, what has changed recently, and what has stayed the same longer than you wanted it to. 2. What have you already tried? This is the question people skip, and it is the most useful one. You have almost certainly attempted to solve this before. Write down what you tried, and what happened. If something worked for a while and then stopped, say when it stopped and what was going on at the time. 3. What would be different in six months, if this went well? Be concrete. “More at peace” is not something either of us can work with. “I am teaching two classes a week and I have stopped apologising for charging for them” is. Practical Sessions are one hour. Come somewhere you can speak freely — not a café, not a car. Bring the notebook. We refer back to it constantly. If you need to move a session, more notice is better, but life happens and I would rather you moved it than arrived hollow.

Uku Pacha is the inner and lower world — roots, memory, the things growing in the dark. In the Andean view it is not a bad place. It is where things are stored, and where they rot down into soil. What we are looking for here is not trauma. It is pattern: the thing that has happened more than twice. The exercise Write down the last three times something ended badly — a job, a relationship, a project, a practice you abandoned. For each one, answer: What did I tell myself about why it ended? What was the first moment I knew it was going wrong? What did I do in that moment? The third answer is the one that matters. Most people find the same move in all three: they went quiet, or they over-explained, or they took on more work, or they left before they could be left. Naming it Give the pattern a plain name. Not a diagnosis — a description. “I disappear when I am disappointed.” “I take responsibility for other people’s comfort.” “I start things at ninety percent so I can say I never really tried.” Once it has a name you can see it happening in real time, which is the whole point. You are not trying to eliminate it. You are trying to notice it early enough to choose. Bring the name to the next session. If you have three names, bring the one you least want to say out loud.

In the Andes you do not throw things away. You give them back. A despacho is an offering: you gather what you are carrying, you name it, you wrap it, and you hand it to the earth. You do not need a ceremony to work with this. You need the structure underneath it, which has three moves. 1. Name it out loud Say the pattern aloud, alone, in a room. It will feel absurd. Do it anyway. Naming a thing silently keeps it in the realm of thought, where it can keep negotiating with you. Said aloud, it becomes an object outside you. 2. Say what it gave you This is the step people want to skip. Every pattern was, at some point, a solution. Disappearing kept you safe. Over-functioning got you loved. If you try to release something while still holding it in contempt, it does not move — it hides. So: what did this pattern protect you from, and how well did it work at the time? 3. Say what you are giving back Be specific about what you are putting down, and what you are keeping. “I am giving back the belief that I have to earn rest. I am keeping the capacity to work hard when it matters.” Doing it properly Write the three answers. Then, if it is available to you, burn or bury the paper — not as superstition, but because the body registers a physical ending in a way the mind does not. Then leave it alone. The temptation is to check whether it worked. Do not. Notice instead, over the next weeks, the moments when the old move would have been automatic and was not.

Kay Pacha is this world — the present, the middle, where things actually happen. The puma’s world: alert, physical, now. Most people arrive at coaching with a story about the future and a story about the past, and remarkably little contact with the present. So we start by getting an honest inventory. The four columns Draw four columns. Put every significant thing currently in your life into one of them — work, relationships, health, money, practice, obligations. Alive — it gives back more than it takes. Neutral — it is fine. It costs what it costs. Draining — it takes more than it gives, and you know it. Dead — it ended a while ago and you have not admitted it. Be specific. Not “work” but “the Tuesday class”, “the client who pays late”, “the certification I keep meaning to finish”. Then the honest question Look at the Draining and Dead columns. For each item, answer one question: what am I getting out of keeping this? There is always something. Status, safety, an identity, the avoidance of a difficult conversation. Nothing stays in your life for no reason. Until you can name the reason, you will not be able to put it down — you will just feel guilty about it. Bring the four columns to the session. We work from them for the rest of the container.

Llankay is the Andean principle of work — bringing a thing into form. Not effort for its own sake. Form. Between now and the next session you will make three moves. Not thirty. Three. The shape of a move A move is something that changes the facts, not your feelings about the facts. It has a verb, a date, and another person in it more often than not. Not: “think about whether to raise my prices.” But: “email the three regular clients on Monday with the new rate from October.” Not: “get back into practice.” But: “mat down, 6.30am, Tuesday Thursday Saturday, twenty minutes, no phone.” Not: “sort things out with my brother.” But: “call him Sunday and say the thing I have not said.” Choose one from each One ending — something from the Dead or Draining column that you stop, cancel, or hand back. One beginning — the smallest version of the thing you keep saying you want to do. Smaller than you think. If it takes more than twenty minutes it is too big for the first month. One conversation — the one you have been avoiding. You know which. Write them where you will see them On paper, somewhere physical. Then tell one person other than me — not for accountability theatre, but because saying it aloud to someone who will remember changes the odds more than any app will. If a move does not happen, that is information rather than failure. We will look at what stopped it, and that is usually where the real work is.

Hanan Pacha is the upper world — the condor’s world. Height, perspective, the long view. We arrive here last, deliberately, because a vision built on top of an unexamined pattern is just the pattern wearing better clothes. By now you have named what was running you, and you have moved something in the present. This is where we ask what it is all for. Not “what do you want” That question produces a shopping list. Ask these instead: When you have felt most useful — not most successful, most useful — what were you doing, and who was in the room? What do people come to you for, without you advertising it? What would you keep doing if nobody paid you and nobody watched? The overlap of those three is usually where the calling actually lives. It is rarely as dramatic as people expect, and it is almost always something they were already doing quietly. Yachay and Munay The Andean principles are useful here as a test. Yachay is knowledge through direct experience — do you actually know this, from having done it, or do you like the idea of it? Munay is love, willing the good — does this serve anyone other than your own standing? A calling that fails either test tends not to survive contact with a hard year. Write the sentence One sentence, present tense, plain: what you do, for whom, and why it matters. If it takes more than one sentence, it is not clear yet, and that is fine — bring the draft and we will work it.

Ayni is the principle underneath all of this: reciprocity. Today for you, tomorrow for me. In the Andes it is not charity and it is not transaction — it is the assumption that nothing stands alone, and that what you take you also return. Applied to a life, Ayni asks a question most planning skips: what does this cost the people around you, and what does it give them? The three circles Take the sentence you wrote and test it against three circles: You. Can you sustain this at the pace you have described, in the body and the circumstances you actually have? Not the ones you intend to have by January. The people closest to you. Who carries the cost of this while it is being built? Have they agreed to that, out loud? The people it serves. Are they real and specific, or a category? “Women in transition” is a category. The three people you can name who would sign up next month are real. What to build first Whatever the answer, build the smallest complete version of it. Complete, not partial — one class that runs start to finish, one client taken properly through, one workshop actually held. A small finished thing teaches you more in a month than a large unfinished thing teaches you in a year. The long view The condor does not flap. It finds the current and holds. What you are looking for is not maximum effort — it is the version of this you could still be doing in five years without resentment. Bring: the sentence, the three circles, and the smallest complete version.

The sessions are not where the work happens. They are where it gets looked at. What actually changes things is what you do on the days nobody is watching. The practice below takes ten minutes. It is deliberately small, because the failure mode here is not laziness — it is designing something so ambitious that you abandon it in week two and then feel worse than before you started. Morning: five minutes Sit. Breathe normally for one minute without trying to fix the breath. Then ask one question and write the answer in a line or two: What is actually asking for my attention today? Not what is loudest. Not what is most overdue. What is asking. They are often different, and the difference is the whole practice. Evening: five minutes Three lines, same three every night: What did I do today that I would do again? Where did the old pattern show up? What am I carrying into tomorrow that I could put down tonight? If you miss a day Start again the next day. Do not go back and fill it in, and do not restart the count. The point is not a streak. The point is that over a month you accumulate an honest record of your own life, written by someone who was there. That record is what we read together in the next session. It is more reliable than memory, and considerably more interesting.

Come to each session with four things. It takes five minutes to prepare and it roughly doubles what we get out of the hour. 1. The moves What happened with the three moves. Done, half-done, not started — all three answers are equally useful. What is not useful is arriving without having looked. 2. One line from the daily practice Scan back through the month and pick the single entry that still has heat in it. Not the most dramatic day — the line you would rather not read out. 3. The thing you noticed but did not act on There is always one. A conversation that landed oddly, a decision you made faster than you should have, a moment where you felt genuinely alive and then got busy. These are the real material and they evaporate if you do not write them down. 4. What you want from this hour One sentence. “I want to decide about the studio.” “I want to understand why I keep doing this.” “I do not know, I just need to think out loud.” All valid. Saying it at the start stops us drifting. A note on the hard sessions Some sessions will feel like nothing happened. That is normal and it is often the one before something shifts. The work is cumulative rather than episodic — you are not looking for a breakthrough every month, you are looking for a different set of defaults a year from now.

Containers that end badly tend to end by fading — a session moved, then moved again, then not rebooked. We do not do it that way. The last session is scheduled as a last session, and it has its own shape. What we do in it Read the record back. We go to the notebook from the first session — the three questions you answered before we met — and read them aloud. Almost everyone is surprised. The thing you came in with is rarely the thing you leave with, and you will have stopped noticing the distance travelled. Name what changed and what did not. Both, honestly. Some things you came to solve will still be unsolved. Saying that plainly is more useful than a tidy ending. Name what is now yours to carry. The practices that stay, the pattern you can now see in real time, the conversation you know is still owed. What I will ask you What would you tell yourself on the day of the first session? What are you still avoiding? What do you want to be true a year from now — and what is the first move? Before it Re-read your daily practice entries from the whole container in one sitting. It takes twenty minutes and it is the single most useful thing you can do to prepare. Mark the three entries that stand out. Bring them.

Everything in this container stays open to you. The lessons, the practices, the questions — they do not lock when the sessions end. Come back to them when something shifts and you want the structure again. The two failure modes Drifting. Six weeks after a container ends, the daily practice quietly stops, and three months later you are back where you started, wondering what happened. The fix is small: keep the evening three lines, even if you drop everything else. Five minutes. It is the thread. Chasing. The opposite: immediately looking for the next container, the next training, the next teacher. There is a version of this work that becomes a way of avoiding living. If you notice yourself booking the next thing before you have done the last thing, that is worth saying out loud rather than acting on. If you want to come back Some people take a second container a year later, for a specific decision rather than a general reckoning. Some come for one session when something has genuinely changed. Both are fine, and neither is a sign that the first one failed. Write when you want to. There is no re-application and no wait — just tell me where you are. And if you want the other doors The 200-hour training in Pisac is the fullest version of this work, held in a body and a community rather than a conversation. If the container has pointed you there, we will talk about whether the timing is right — including the possibility that it is not, or not yet. Ayni: today for you, tomorrow for me. Whatever you built here, someone will need it from you eventually. That is the point of building it.