On pachakuti, the rising of what was buried, and what this moment is asking of you.Something is moving in the world right now. Not just on the surface — though the surface is noisy enough — but underneath it, in the place where I do most of my work. The field itself is shifting. And if you have been feeling a particular kind of weight lately, or a particular kind of restlessness, or the strange sense that your ordinary life no longer quite fits the moment you’re living in — I want you to know: what you are feeling is real.
What I am tracking, in session after session and in my own practice, is this: people who have long been in relationship with the unseen are finding that relationship intensifying. People who have never thought much about any of this are suddenly asking questions they don’t have language for yet. And people who built their lives around systems that are no longer working — systems of certainty, of accumulation, of looking away — are finding that those systems are cracking open whether they chose that or not.
This is a turning.
“When the land has had enough, she moves it through the people who still know how to listen to her.”
In Ireland, right now, as I write this, farmers and workers are taking to the roads. They are blocking the arteries of the modern machine with their tractors and their bodies and sleeping on the land while they do it. The news is calling it an economic protest. And yes, it is that. But those of us who work with energy — with the living field beneath events — know that when a land-connected people physically stop the flow of something, the land herself is often speaking through them. Ireland is a thin-veiled place. She has always been. The people of that land carry centuries of knowing what it costs to be dispossessed, to be made to kneel, to have the ground pulled from beneath them. That knowing lives. It waits. And then, when the conditions are right, it rises.
What strikes me most, watching from here, is not the disruption. It is the tenderness. Farmers bringing food to one another. People who have never met, sleeping side by side on the same cold ground, sharing a common refusal. That is not anger alone. That is memory. That is a people’s body remembering something it was never supposed to forget: that the ground is sacred, that life depends on it, and that no system built on extraction is stronger than the living earth it extracts from.
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In the Andean tradition I was trained in, there is a word for this: pachakuti. It translates as world-reversal — a time when the cosmic order turns, when what was suppressed rises and what dominated descends. It is not metaphor. The Q’ero people, the high-altitude mystics of Peru who carry the oldest living threads of this lineage, have always understood that history moves in great cycles, and that some moments are thresholds — not problems to be solved, but passages to be moved through as consciously as possible.
But here I want to be precise about something, because it matters: pachakuti is not new. It did not begin when those of us in the comfortable world started to feel the ground shifting. Indigenous peoples — on every continent, in every tradition that has stayed close to the earth — have never stopped knowing this. Across generations they have been tending this understanding, carrying the memory of what it means to be in right relationship with life, and paying the cost of holding that knowing in a world that refused to hear it. What is new is not the turning itself. What is new is that the people who were insulated enough to look away are finding they can no longer do so. The ones who could afford not to feel it — are beginning to feel it.
That is a different thing than waking up. It is closer to: being brought, finally, into what was never forgotten by those who couldn’t afford to forget.
What I see in the field is a collective organism that has been carrying more than it can hold. Centuries of extraction. Generations of being severed from the land, from each other, from the interior life. The weight of pretending that this was sustainable. That weight, in shamanic terms, is hucha — heavy, stagnant energy that accumulates when life-force is blocked or denied. And hucha, when it reaches a saturation point, must move. Not politely. Through the body. Through eruption. Through people standing in roads and asking, with their physical presence, that the world slow down enough to remember what it forgot.
“The eruption is not the solution. It is the discharge. The organism moving what it can no longer hold. What comes next depends on who is present and grounded enough to midwife it.”
I see this in people’s personal lives too. The marriage that can no longer hold what it was holding. The career that made sense until it didn’t. The spiritual practice that was working until it stopped working. The body that is asking — insisting — for something different. The same turning, wearing personal clothing. Pachakuti does not only move through nations and through history. It moves through every life that is ready to be more honest than it has been.
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If you have been feeling called to something you can’t name yet — pay attention to that. If you have been grieving without knowing exactly what you’re grieving — that is the field moving through you — that is participation. If small falseness is starting to cost you more than it used to, if the numb and the hollow are becoming harder to tolerate — that is discernment sharpening. That is your own interior life refusing to be managed any longer.
The Q’ero teach that in times of great turning, the work of the paqo — the one who tends the living field — is not to stop the turning. It is to help the energy move cleanly. To hold the space between what is releasing and what is being born. To be, as best as one can, a clear and grounded presence when everything around is in motion.
You may not be a paqo. But you are alive in this moment, which means this moment is asking something of you. Not necessarily something large or visible. Sometimes the most powerful thing a person can do in a time of collective upheaval is to tend their own ground — to know what they stand for, to release what has been weighing them down, to plant something that is oriented toward life rather than toward the maintenance of what is already dying.
The turning has always been happening. What is different now is that more people are feeling it. And feeling it — really feeling it, without looking away — is where everything begins.
Stand on the ground beneath your feet. Let it be real. Release what is heavy back to the earth. And listen — with whatever interior ear you have — for what is being asked of you now.
It is asking. I promise you. It is asking.
Written in the season of new beginnings — April 2026 Susan H. Harris Shamanic Practitioner • Seer • Author