July 19, 2025
Initiated by Lightning: Trauma as a Sacred Rewiring
How trauma cracks perception open and reveals a portal into the soul’s higher gifts.
There is a kind of spiritual initiation in Peru that comes straight out of the sky.
Across the world’s spiritual traditions, initiations take many forms. Most are ceremonial and symbolic. Christian priests baptize parishioners with water to mark a rebirth in Christ, or offer communion through the ritual of bread and wine. In Judaism, the bar or bat mitzvah celebrates a coming of age. These are gentle rites of passage.
But in the high Andes of Peru, there is an initiation that comes not through ritual, but through lightning.
Many indigenous cultures have rites far more intense than the ceremonial softness of Western religion. Vision quests, burials, and Sun Dances are all deeply transformational…and often traumatic. In the Andes, some paqos, or Andean priest-healers, are said to be initiated by being struck by lightning. These are the altomesayokes, those who speak directly with the Apus, the mountain spirits. They are not chosen by human teachers, but by the cosmos itself.
While most traditional initiations involve ritual, community, and a symbolic death and rebirth, trauma reaches beyond ritual into a more primal embodiment based on true survival. Because trauma operates outside the bounds of ceremony, it transforms. It is a raw, embodied initiation—into death, and into rebirth.
There are much gentler initiations passed down in the Andean healing lineages from master to student. These are energetic transmissions, often invisible but deeply felt, which link an initiate to the lineage and subtly reorder their energy field, or poq’po. This energetic reorganization aligns the initiate more fully with their divine self and helps them express that divinity through their humanity.
These energetic initiations given along the qanchispatañan, or “seven steps,” guide a paqo through deeper levels of awareness and alignment with Source. They are part of a coherent and intentional unfolding.
Lightning, however, bypasses any ceremony. It blasts straight through the poq’po and into the nervous system, shattering the old sense of self. If the person survives, they are often plunged into what is known as “lightning sickness,” a disorienting period where body and mind are scrambled. The initiate must be tenderly cared for—attuned to, entrained, and painstakingly supported through energy work and prayer. But as the old self dies off, something new is born.
As with any trauma, the nervous system is suddenly repatterned. The brain becomes more vigilant, attuned to danger, and adept at scanning the environment. In the West, we call this hypervigilance and often pathologize it. In truth, it is both a burden and a gift.
After trauma, we are forced to reevaluate who we are and how we will stay safe. Our sense of self often fragments into strategies and roles, some of which abandon authenticity for survival. We lead with defense mechanisms. We adapt. We survive.
In our culture, we treat trauma as a dysfunction to manage. We medicate it, analyze it, apply behavioral tools, talk to the parts, and use therapeutic modalities like EMDR. And while these can be helpful, we rarely ask: What is this trauma trying to teach us? How are we being initiated? What gifts lie inside this rupture?
The deeper journey is to create a new container of self strong enough to hold the gifts that trauma awakens. This is the path of the altomesayoke, the one initiated not through lineage, but through lightning. And once that lightning clears the density of the old self, the initiations of the qanchispatañan can accelerate the initiate’s perceptual awareness. It is said that if you want deep healing… go to an altomesayoke.
The initiate does not choose lightning. But they do choose what to do with it. The same is true for every trauma survivor.
We are being invited, again and again—not just to manage, but to transmute. The path of the initiate is to hone the energetic self into a highly integral vessel for Source. To become, through our suffering, a more refined instrument of the divine.
True initiation rarely comes when we are ready. More often, it comes as rupture. But trauma, when held with intention and deep presence, can become a portal—one that cracks open our ordinary sense of self and reveals capacities we didn’t know we carried. In the Andes, this is the path of the altomesayoke, but we are all invited to walk it, if we choose to listen to what the break is trying to birth.
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© Christina Allen 2025 All rights reserved
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