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.