The Munay Ki Rites: A Gentle Path to Shamanic Power
There was a time in my life when I could not digest food.
I lost three stones in six months. I dropped below six stone in weight. Food would not stay in my body.
Doctors ran tests and found nothing wrong.
"You're anxious.""It's psychological.""You're anorexic."
I was nineteen. I was intimidated by their authority, and I began to doubt myself.
But I knew something was wrong.
Finally, I was gifted a session with a homoeopath and herbalist. She looked at me — really looked — and said gently:
"You've eaten too much trauma. Your body can't take any more."
She gave me Calendula officinalis to heal my gut. Within three days, I could eat without vomiting. Over the following months, I recovered physically.
But it would take years before I understood the deeper truth.
I wasn't just carrying my own pain.
I was digesting everyone else's.
That was my first encounter with the concept of heucha — the heavy, unprocessed emotional energy that the Q'ero lineage teaches us to recognise, metabolise, and release. And it was the beginning of a path that would eventually lead me to the Munay-Ki Rites: the ten sacred initiations that, more than anything else in my three decades of shamanic practice, changed not just what I do, but who I am.
What Are the Munay-Ki Rites?
The Munay-Ki Rites are a series of sacred initiations believed to be over 100,000 years old. They were originally received by the Laika people — ancient shamanic masters who journeyed from the Himalayas across the world to the high Andes of Peru, where these rites became the sacred inheritance of the Q'ero shamans.
The word Munay comes from the Quechua language and means love. Ki, borrowed from the Japanese, means life force or energy. Together: the power of love.
For tens of thousands of years, the rites were passed within the tribe — gifted to children beginning at age thirteen, one rite per year, until the ninth and final rite was received at twenty-one. That final rite — the Creator's Rite — allowed the receiver to pass the rites to others, and was considered a great honour, bestowed only upon a chosen few.
In the mid-1990s, the Q'ero elders received a message: it was time to share these rites with all of humanity. The Earth is calling us to evolve — and these initiations, the elders said, help facilitate that transformation, all the way down to the level of our DNA.
Through the lineage of the Four Winds Society and the teaching of Alberto Villoldo and Marcela Lobos, these rites were brought to the West. They were passed to me through my teachers, and I now have the great honour of gifting them to others.
There are now ten rites in total — the original nine, plus the Womb Rite, channelled by Marcela Lobos — and I believe it is most beneficial to receive all ten if you are able.
The Ten Munay-Ki Rites: What Each One Does
Prefer to watch? In the video below, I walk through all ten rites in detail — or scroll on for the full written guide.
1. The Healer's Rite
This rite awakens the healer within you. Similar in some ways to a Reiki initiation, it seeds healing potential into three chakras: the sacral, the heart, and the third eye. Your hands become healing hands — not because something is given to you from outside, but because something dormant inside you is remembered and reawakened. All you touch begins to receive love and light as you step into your role as a channel for source energy.
(For a full guided ceremony receiving the Healer's Rite with ceremonial cacao, visit the Munay-Ki Healers Rite ceremony page →)
2. The Bands of Power
Six luminous bands of light — black, red, gold, silver, white, and rainbow — are woven into the luminous energy field. They act as a protective shield, digesting heavy or toxic energies before they can penetrate the body. They also begin the slow, deep work of removing past trauma — including inherited epigenetic wounds — and healing their effects on the energy body, down to the level of DNA.
3. The Harmony Rite
Seven Mayan archetypes are transmitted into the chakras: the serpent, jaguar, hummingbird, eagle, and three others held in the upper chakras. This rite helps to combust the psychic sludge that accumulates in our energy centres over a lifetime, so that each chakra can return to its original luminous expression. It begins the process of what the Q'ero call growing a rainbow body — an energy field that shines clear and unobstructed.
4. The Seer's Rite
Extra-cerebral pathways of light are installed — luminous threads that connect the visual cortex to the third eye and to the heart chakra. This awakens our capacity to perceive the invisible world of energy and spirit, not with the analytical mind but through the heart. We begin to see with more clarity, to sense what is true, and to act from a place of love rather than fear.
5. The Daykeeper's Rite
This rite connects you to a lineage of master healers from the past — medicine people who have held the light through every age. It helps you to begin healing your inner feminine, to move beyond fear, and to step into the graceful power of one who tends sacred space. You begin to sense the flow of time — the cycles of nature, the rhythms of the moon — and to lead others with peace and presence.
6. The Wisdomkeeper's Rite
Here you connect to a lineage of luminous beings who exist outside of time — elders of both the past and the future. This rite helps you to begin healing your inner masculine, to step outside of linear time, and to access the accumulated wisdom of all ages. Many find that this rite begins to activate memories of their own past lives as healers and wisdom keepers, helping them to integrate those gifts into the present.
7. The Earthkeeper's Rite
This rite connects you to the lineage of archangels who are the guardians of our galaxy and our Earth. It helps you to learn the ways of the seer — to dream your world into being rather than simply reacting to it. We are Earth angels, and this rite helps us remember how to live as one, walk in beauty, and see our interconnectedness with all living things.
8. The Starkeeper's Rite
A more recent rite, the Starkeeper's anchors you safely in the time after the great change foretold in 2012 — the birth of a new age. It helps our physical body benefit from this collective shift, supporting our evolution into what the Q'ero call Homo luminous: the new human, who can heal without violence, live without fear, and help birth a world where all beings are free. This rite helps the body remain strong and vital as we age, and invites us to hold a vision of the future as a place of harmony, choosing to be an active part of creating it.
9. The Creator's Rite
This rite awakens the creator-light within — and with it, a profound sense of stewardship for all of creation, from the smallest grain of sand to the farthest galaxy. It breaks the illusion of victimhood and reawakens the powerful spirit within us. When we receive the Creator's Rite, we are empowered to pass the rites to others — not as a duty, but because when something changes your life this profoundly, the desire to share it arises naturally.
10. The Womb Rite (The 13th Rite)
Channelled by Marcela Lobos, this rite is for all genders — because we are all birthed through a womb, and we all carry womb imprints in our energy field. For women, it aids in the healing of pain, shame, and trauma stored in the sacral chakra, including wounds from ancestral lineage. For men, it helps clear the imprints of suffering received in the womb. It is a profound cleansing rite — one that helps us step from victimhood into the role of creators of beauty, harmony, and peace. It restores the sacred feminine within us all.
What Do the Munay-Ki Rites Actually Feel Like?
This is the question I am asked most often, and it is the one I find the most beautiful to answer — because everyone's experience is unique.
The rites are not information. They are transmission.
The Healer's Rite feels like remembering something you have always known. Many feel heat in their hands. Tingling. A rising current of love that brings tears. One of my students, in her early seventies, described her initiation as blissful warmth flooding her entire body, making her cry softly from sheer joy. She felt the activation energy travel through my hands into hers, and then felt it continue through her own hands to others — not imagined, not forced, but a reawakening of a sleeping gift.
The Bands of Power feel like sovereignty. Like a safety shield settling softly into the nervous system.
I know this from experience. Before I received the Bands, visiting my parents would send my body into crisis — week-long migraines, forty mouth ulcers at a time, full-body tension that resembled fibromyalgia. I now understand that I had spent a lifetime eating their heucha — absorbing the emotional weather of the household to keep the peace. It was survival. But survival has consequences.
The next time I visited after receiving the Bands of Power, something was immediately different. My body was not bracing.
No tightening across my shoulders. No creeping sense that I was about to collapse into a teenage version of myself.
I felt adult. Present. Sovereign.
My children went for a walk with my husband and mother. My father and I were left alone.
We both fell asleep on the sofa, side by side.
For the first time in my life, I felt safe enough to sleep beside my father.
No migraine followed. No ulcers. No pain.
The rite had not changed them. It had changed my field. It strengthened my boundaries without armouring my heart.
And over time, as I arrived differently, they responded differently. There was more respect. Less regression. Less unconscious replaying of old roles.
I had stopped eating their pain. And my body stopped paying the price.
The Harmony Rite introduces the archetypal allies — serpent, jaguar, hummingbird, eagle — not as mythology, but as embodied presences. Many feel a distinct shift in perception after this rite: the world seems clearer, more layered, more alive.
The Seer's Rite sharpens everything. The third eye activates. Colours deepen. Intuition sharpens.
The Daykeeper and Wisdomkeeper Rites bring a profound sense of being anchored — in the earth, in time, in a lineage that stretches far beyond your individual lifetime.
Some people, after a rite, feel exhausted for days. Others feel energised and almost over-excited. Both are normal — both are the energy body adjusting to its new configuration. I always allow time and space after each initiation, and I guide my students through a specific meditation to support integration.
My Own Journey: Receiving the Rites
When I first received the Munay-Ki initiations, I had no idea what to expect. I was part of a two-year shamanic training, and my teacher — a woman in her early sixties, initiated by the Q'ero — had not gifted the rites in some time. She was tired that day. She struggled to explain what the rites were or how to work with them.
And yet. Looking back, I can clearly see the significant shifts that occurred within me after that first transmission. My capacity to sense messages from the spirit realms took a remarkable leap forward. My connection to my own path deepened. Something had moved, even if I couldn't yet name it.
I was intrigued. I wanted more.
My search led me to an online teacher in Australia, who guided me through all nine rites plus the Womb Rite via Zoom. I felt the energetic shifts — the tingles, the current — but something was missing. Receiving the rites virtually lacked the stronger sensations I had felt in person. And intellectually, I was still hungry for depth and clarity.
So when the student was ready, the teacher appeared.
I found a retired Munay-Ki teacher in the north of England who was passionate about gifting the original, authentic rites. Knowing I intended to share them with others, she invited me to spend three days at her home.
Those three days were extraordinary.
The peak experience came when we walked to the top of a trail high in the Yorkshire Dales — breathtaking views stretching for miles, towards Manchester in one direction, the North Sea in the other. This was where we chose to work with the Ninth Rite: the Creator's Rite.
As my teacher gifted me the rite, her partner walked their dogs further along the path and — with a camera — captured us from a distance. I felt the rite delivered like a surge of electricity, activating through me from my crown chakra down to my root and into the earth.
Later, as her partner reviewed the photographs, we noticed something none of us had anticipated.
A distinct ball of light, moving from my teacher's hands toward my head.
The energetic exchange, it seemed, was visible to the camera.
I wish I had thought to ask for that photograph. But I was exhausted and overwhelmed and utterly present — simply living in the moment.
I took dedicated time after those three days to sit with the rites, to integrate them, to feel into how I wished to share them with others. Since then, I have continued to work deeply with them — exploring them through my own lens, refining my understanding with each circle of students I have had the privilege of guiding.
Why I Teach the Rites Slowly
When I began gifting the rites myself, I made a deliberate choice about how to work.
My first teacher had been secretive — I was given something powerful without understanding what it was. The teacher in Yorkshire was the opposite: abundant with words, rarely quiet, a beautiful, excited energy that left little space for integration.
I chose a different path.
I teach the history. The meaning. The cosmology. The psychology. And I gift the rites slowly — one per month, over nine to thirteen months — because a transformation that moves too quickly can frighten the subconscious and cause the system to contract rather than open.
Gentle transformation. Graceful awakening.
Change that integrates into daily life — that is what lasts.
Between each rite, I teach my students to nourish the seeds that have been planted. Time in nature feeds the rites. Ceremonial fire works with them. Specific meditations accompany each initiation, supporting the process of integration. It is not arduous. It is, in fact, possibly the easiest and most profound shamanic work I have ever encountered.
How to Prepare for Receiving the Rites: A Note on Heucha and Ayni
The Q'ero teach that in order to receive the Munay-Ki rites, we benefit from cultivating two qualities: humility and gratitude.
Humility in the sense of recognising our place within the web of life — we eat from the Earth; we say thank you. We acknowledge the mistakes we have made. We hold compassion for others who are also learning.
Gratitude as a state of being — not just a feeling we access occasionally, but a lens through which we begin to see the world.
To work with heucha — the heavy energy — we also learn ayni: sacred reciprocity. Nature does not hoard. Trees do not store resentment. Rivers do not internalise grief. When we live in right relationship with the natural world, energy flows freely. The rites support us in restoring that flow.
No prior shamanic experience is required. These rites are for all humanity. You simply need to show up, open your heart, and be willing to receive.
Go Deeper: The Munay-Ki Healers Rite Ceremony
The Healers Rite — the very first of the ten initiations — is available to receive right now, in a free guided cacao ceremony.
In this ceremony, I guide you through the full initiation: we cleanse our energy fields, call in the seven sacred directions using the Mayan medicine wheel, open the eighth chakra (the Wiracocha), and seed the Healer's Rite into three chakras — the sacral, the heart, and the third eye.
You are then led into a deep gong bath and guided meditation to help the seeds take root.
All you need is an open heart and a willingness to receive.
This Work Is for You, If...
You absorb everything — other people's moods, tension, grief — and you are exhausted by it.
You are a natural nurturer who has forgotten to nurture yourself.
You feel the quiet fear of your own power — the old wound whispering that being visible is dangerous.
You doubt yourself, even as some deep part of you knows you are capable of more.
You feel a pull toward something — a purpose, a path, a way of living — that you cannot quite name yet.
The Munay-Ki rites do not make you someone new.
They help you remember who you were before you learned to shrink.
And that remembering — quiet, gradual, and sometimes astonishing — changes everything.
Join The Shaman's Way: Receive the Full Cycle of Rites
In The Shaman's Way, I share all ten Munay-Ki initiations as part of a thirteen-moon journey.
Once a month, we gather in circle. We receive the rites over thirteen moons. We learn the art of shamanic journeying and visioning. We work with powerful yet gentle plant medicines. We create sacred medicine bundles. We heal our collective ancestral wounds. We remember the lost parts of ourselves. We learn who we are, what we need, and how to speak up for ourselves. We dissolve what is toxic. We repair what is ready to be repaired.
My circles are kept intentionally small — a maximum of seven people — because I am committed to spending real, quality time with each person and fully supporting your unique healing journey.
By the time you complete the full cycle of rites, you are empowered — if you choose — to pass them on.
Not because you must.
But because when something changes your life this profoundly, you naturally want to share it.
