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ОглавлениеThe Shaman’s Mind
The
Shaman’s
Mind
Huna Wisdom to change your life
Jonathan Hammond
Monkfish Book Publishing Company
Rhinebeck, New York
The Shaman’s Mind: Huna Wisdom to Change Your Life © 2020
by Jonathan Hammond
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher except in critical articles or reviews. Contact the publisher for information.
Paperback ISBN 978-1-948626-21-7
eBook ISBN 978-1-948626-22-4
Library of Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hammond, Jonathan, Shamanic practitioner, author.
Title: The shaman’s mind : Huna wisdom to change your life / Jonathan
Hammond.
Description: Rhinebeck, New York : Monkfish Book Publishing Company, 2020.
| Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020000478 | ISBN 9781948626217 (paperback) | ISBN
9781948626224 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Huna. | Shamanism--Hawaii.
Classification: LCC BF1623.H85 H36 2020 | DDC 299/.9242--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020000478
Book and cover design by Colin Rolfe
Cover painting: “Plantas Medicinales” by Anderson Debernardi
Ho‘oponopono Diagram by James Donegan | Jamesdidit.net
Quote on page 152 from The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self by Alice Miller copyright © 2008, 1994. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
A portion of the proceeds for this book will be donated to
Hawaii Wildlife Fund
P.O. Box 790637
Paia, HI 96779
Monkfish Book Publishing Company
22 East Market Street, Suite 304
Rhinebeck, NY 12572
(845) 876-4861
This book is dedicated to Serge Kahili King, Brian McCormack, and my mother.
Contents
Part one: Introduction to Huna
Discovering Huna and Ho’oponopono
chapter two: Hawaiian Cosmology
Creation — The Po, the Ao, and the Kumulipo
chapter three: Huna Basics
Huna
The Kahuna
Huna Origins: The Ancient Pacific Continent of Mu
Part Two: The Seven Principles of Huna
chapter four: The World is What You Think It Is
Ike Practice — Beliefs
Beliefs Exercise
chapter five: There Are No Limits
Kala Practice — Visioning Exercise
chapter six: Energy Flows Where Attention Goes
Makia Practices
Makia Practice — Pikopiko Breathing
Makia Practice — Kahi
Candle Magic
chapter seven: Now Is the Moment of Power
Manawa Practice — Reframing the Past in the Present
Manawa Practice — Watching Your Thoughts
chapter Eight: To Love Is To Be Happy With
Aloha Practice — Blessing What You Want
chapter Nine: All Power Comes From Within
Mana Practice — The Permission Plumeria Meditation
chapter ten: Effectiveness is the Measure of Truth
Pono Practice — Hailona
Color Guide
Part three: The Three Selves
chapter eleven: Ku
Ku Practice — Kummunication, or Dialoging with the Body
Ku Practice — Ku Resistance
chapter twelve: Lono
Lono Practice — Connecting with the Child
chapter thirteen: Kane
Kane Practice — Shamanic Journey to Kanehunamoku
Part four: Ho’Oponopono
chapter fourteen: Ho’oponopono
“I love you.”
“Please forgive me.”
“Thank you.”
Bibliography
About the author
Acknowledgments
Preface
This book is about becoming a finder and no longer a seeker.
It’s about truly healing. It’s about learning to love yourself; to think straight; to step into wellness, prosperity, and love; and to feel the inner satisfaction of these attainments to such a degree that the inevitable response is to give yourself back to the world. Imagine yourself so well, so full, and so supported, that you can’t help but want to spread your good fortune around.
In every given moment, each of us has a glorious opportunity to release our self-limiting stories, learn to live from our true nature, and become the highest and brightest expression of ourselves. And I know of no better, more practical, or more effective system to guide you there than Huna, the esoteric knowledge and philosophy of Hawaii.
We are currently in the midst of an immense, difficult, and sometimes terrifying planetary shift of consciousness. We are on the brink of complete unsustainability—we cannot continue our current ways without careening toward destruction. The Cree tribe of North America speaks of a contagious psychospiritual disease of the human soul—a virus or parasite of the mind that is currently manifesting itself in the form of unprecedented conflicts and crisis on a global scale. This wicked spirit, which terrorizes and cannibalizes others, is called Wetiko or the Wetiko Virus. In Hawaiian, it is referred to as ‘E’epa, which means “deceit that passes comprehension.”
Wetiko/‘E’epa is born of our disconnection from the natural world and it operates by covert infestation of the human psyche, compelling us, through toxic selfishness, to act against our own best interests by blinding us to our own insanity: destruction for profit, massive hoarding of wealth, allowing suffering without compassion, dehumanizing others, and recklessly exploiting natural resources.
Wetiko, however, is non-local. In other words, it doesn’t have any substantive, material existence except in our own minds. This points to an incredible intrinsic power and deep personal responsibility within each of us to make a difference in this world by cultivating our own individual consciousness, by cleaning up our own mess and making ourselves so well so that we can have a positive influence on all of life, and on all of those whom we touch.
Quantum physics posits the Quantum Inseparability Principle—every atom effects every other atom, everywhere, because everything influences everything else in every direction and every which way in time. This means that everything we do matters; how we think and live has energetic reverberations that affect all beings everywhere. The microcosm of our individual selves is the macrocosm of the entire planet and beyond. There is no separation.
I can only guess that if you are holding this book, you feel a deep calling and personal need to be part of the global solution. And because we are all inseparably connected in this one universe, even the simple yearning to live our best lives contributes vitally toward this deeper intentionality. In the last fifty years we have become inundated with consciousness-expanding, esoteric wisdom from a host of indigenous and spiritual traditions, and for good reason. A contemporary spiritual movement, an army of “light workers” is being formed to prepare and fortify millions for the changes ahead.
This has already been prophesied.
The Quechua people, who live in the Andes of South America, call the time in which we are now living the Fifth Pachacuti. A Pachacuti is a five-hundred-year interval, and this particular one is an era in which, as the legend states, the Eagle and the Condor will fly together in the same sky. According to the Quechua, the previous two thousand years were dominated by the Eagle—a visionary, but materialistic bird; one connected to seeing vast distances, the intellect, and the masculine principles of growth and movement. Over the last two thousand years, the Eagle’s influence was seen in the huge advancements and discoveries that took place in science, medicine, and technology.
But the Fifth Pachacuti, which we now inhabit, is a time when the feminine, spiritual, and environmentally-minded Condor will begin to dance together with the Eagle, restoring balance and harmony with her intuitive Earth wisdom. The Quechua believe that the Condor embodies such sacredness that she might not actually fly, but can somehow spiritually move herself.
In the Quechan prophecy, during the Fifth Pachacuti, the entrance of the Condor will come about with the help and support of those humans who espouse Earth-honoring ways, those who live in right relation with themselves and their environment, and those who choose to lean into the interconnectivity of all things.
And that is you.
The best way to fight the Wetiko/‘E’epa demon is to start by naming it. By naming it, we diminish its power. Then we can lend ourselves, through the inner rainbow light of our hearts and minds, to anyone—and anything—which, for whatever reason has lost their way or had their freedoms diminished.
We do this not only through the actions we take in the world, but by cultivating a consciousness within our own minds that always leads us toward choice, possibility, and the highest levels of inclusivity. The Hawaiians call this consciousness Aloha. The word Aloha is a commonplace greeting in Hawaii, and it is often translated as “love,” but it has great spiritual significance as well. In Hawaii, Aloha is considered an attitude, an ethic, and a means for change. It means to share life force with another, using the essence of love as an expression of our life force in order to further creation.
This is an utterly natural process, because creation itself, as you will find in the pages that follow, is made of the very stuff that is Aloha, the love that is in alignment with what we consider to be the most elevated qualities of Spirit: grace, forgiveness, compassion, gentleness and kindness.
To learn to infuse your thinking mind, and therefore your external life, with the potent force of Aloha is to do your part to confront Wetiko/‘E’epa and help the Condor lift off to the tallest and most transcendent heights. If enough of us learn to do this for ourselves, the Wetiko/‘E’epa demon will be no match for what we can accomplish individually and globally.
It’s time for real and substantive change, which only you can make for yourself. It’s been said that there is nothing new under the sun, and I am convinced that the ocean of spiritual books, classes, workshops, and internet programs that are now so readily available mean absolutely nothing if we don’t dig in and do our own personal work with gusto. It’s time to let go of what I call “weekend spiritual adventures,” or reading the latest self-help gurus so that we can sound interesting at cocktail parties. The invitation rather, is to learn to change your mind. By doing so, you will awaken an inner shamanic self that moves in alignment with the most beneficent and powerful forces of Nature and Spirit. This is the essence of Huna, and the overall aim of contemporary shamanic practice.
But if you don’t feel a particular connection to the Hawaiian Islands, pay that no mind. I often refer to Hawaiian Shamanism as “Shamanism with better beaches.” The wisdom contained in this book transcends the culture from which it came because it points to universal truths that open us to love, and as we open, so does the world. Even though we will address both in great depth, this is not just a book on Huna or Hawaii. My aim is to use both as a framework to introduce much broader psychological, spiritual, and healing perspectives.
If you are reading this, you are operating under some vestige of freedom—at the very least, you have enough choice and space in your life to delve into this material, and choose what you want to do with it. But there are so many beings—people, rivers, animals, oceans, and trees—who for whatever reason don’t have that same luxury.
So read this book for them. Show up for yourself for them. Make yourself well for them. Awaken your interior magic for them. It’s definitely you first, but they all need you too. Because the truth is, we as a collective no longer have time for you not to do this.
Me ke aloha,
Jonathan
Part one
Introduction to Huna
chapter one
My Hawaii Story
Given that I am a Haole—a non-Polynesian white person—living in New York City, without a drop of Hawaiian blood in my body, it seems relevant to offer some clarification as to how I have found my way to Huna. My connection to Hawaii is actually something that I am still trying to understand—a perplexing web of crazy synchronicities, gut instinct, and happy accidents. And yet, as true as it is that I found Hawaii, I can’t deny that Hawaii somehow also found me.
Sharing my story is not an act of self-indulgence; it is a teaching in and of itself, one that is loaded with the hidden and mysterious realities that we often deny or refuse to see. Realities that, if we choose to be open to them, point toward the deeper tendrils of connectivity and intelligence that underlie all things. “Limitlessness,” or infinite connection, is one of the seven major principles of Huna, so as I introduce my Hawaii story to you, I will likewise introduce you to the seven principles.
To delve into Shamanism is to open to an inner knowing that lies beyond what we are able to learn from books, teachers, or the culture to which we believe we should adhere. “All power comes from within” is another major Huna principle, and following this inward direction became my path to this knowledge.
By the time I reached my late thirties, I had been on the spiritual and healing path for almost two decades—and I needed to be. I had been through periods of severe anxiety and depression, the difficult end of a thirteen-year relationship, and struggles with addiction. I did not have an easy go of things. The more I healed, the more I found myself unfortunately settled in a career that felt out of alignment with who I was becoming spiritually. I was restless, searching, and sometimes quite angry. Up to that time, I had spent the majority of my life as a professional actor, appearing on Broadway and on stages across the country, and I had done a little television as well. I loved being an artist, but I struggled with a lifestyle that was financially difficult, lacked opportunity, and felt disempowering.
Despite relative success, acting was generally a difficult slog. I often felt judged, rejected, and compromised. Even worse, it was becoming clear that I needed to compartmentalize and hide my spiritual life and my work as an energy healer. My theatrical agent told me that the “woo-woo stuff” made me a lot less marketable. There was a faint whisper within me that questioned whether I should stop acting. After all, since early childhood, it had been the only thing I ever thought I wanted. Giving it up felt like an identity crisis, so every time the idea of quitting came into my head, I would banish it immediately.
That is, until I went to Maui.
Haleakala Volcano
I had been to Hawaii a few times before the events that I am about to describe and had absolutely loved it. I can lose myself fairly easily being in Nature, and the sumptuous paradise of the islands provided unparalleled delights. I loved the emerald green hills and rainbow valleys, the crystal blue and indigo water, the delectable smells of wild flower perfumes, the misty sea salt sprays, the cleansing rains, the cloud-capped mountains, and the busy click-click-click of palm trees singing their songs through invisible tropical winds. If you haven’t been to Hawaii, I highly recommend it.
But other than my delight in Hawaii’s natural wonders, I had acquired no knowledge whatsoever of Hawaiian spirituality, language, or culture. The Hawaiian words on street signs or restaurants seemed cumbersome and almost too foreign. Like most tourists, I had a vaguely titillating awareness of the lithe, pretty girls and the tattooed, muscular men wiggling their hips in exotic Hula movements, but I was quite unaware of Hula’s deeper meanings, and I certainly never dreamed that the islands contained a spiritual philosophy that would become such an important part of my life.
Despite my lack of knowledge of many aspects of Hawaii, there was an internal experience that I had on those early trips to these islands, and have had every time since. I call it my “Hawaii feeling.” In my deepest being, it tells me, “These islands are the most magical place on Earth, and I am only complete if I somehow carry them with me always.” Many Hawaiian words contain hidden meanings or concealed references that are buried within them; these are called kaona. If you examine the kaona, of the word Hawai’i it is understandable why I and so many others are so drawn to return there again and again. Ha is the word meaning the breath of life to man, Wai means the water of life to the earth, and ‘I is the Supreme Being. Hawai’i, or Hawaii, as we more commonly spell it, is the homeland which all mankind continues to seek because it is there that life, Earth, and Spirit conjoin together.
My story begins on the volcano in Maui. Getting to the Haleakala Crater, Maui’s dormant volcano, which had its last eruption in 1790, involves a dizzying thirty-five-mile drive into the clouds, up ten thousand feet on a road that twists and turns so abruptly that speed limits often max out at ten miles per hour. Many tourists do this drive in the middle of the night in order to be at the summit for sunrise, which I find rather terrifying because one’s vehicle is sometimes only a few yards away from a thousand-foot drop.
On my first trip to Haleakala, with my husband Domenic, we reached the top after almost two hours. When we got out of the car we could not believe where we were and what we were seeing. Among the many lessons one receives from the land of Hawaii is just how small we are. At the Haleakala Crater, the hole, so to speak, where the lava once gushed forth, is the size of Manhattan. To stand at the edge is to view a gigantic, sparkling kaleidoscopic landscape of rolling rock and soil that appears to undulate in wave-like patterns of other-worldly greens, reds, purples, and browns for as far as the eye can see. It is breathtaking.
Being there makes you feel like you’re on another planet, or perhaps the moon, and the bright, shiny Haleakala Silversword plants, which only grow on the crater and nowhere else on Earth, add to the otherworldly nature of this magnificent place. You never know what to expect in terms of weather at the summit, and having been there many times now, I can attest to rain, snow, clouds so thick that you can’t see anything, freezing temperatures, and hot sun. But on the day I visited for the first time, it was warm and clear with high visibility.
In addition to the astonishing scenery, there is an energy at the summit that I have never experienced anywhere else. The land itself has a visible and pulsating aura or luminous field, almost like the heat waves that come of an asphalt highway in the desert, but mystically different. Pele, the volcano goddess of Hawaii, now lives on Big Island, where there are four active volcanoes. Although she is often thought of as ferocious and wrathful, her presence on Maui has a sense of sweet and tranquil luminescence, as if her work on this island is done and she is now at peace here.
In addition to the astonishing scenery, there was a strange sound in the air, an extremely high-pitched ringing—“zzzzzzzzzz”—that felt like it was the sound of silence itself. It had an oddly faint and deafening quality at the same time, as if it were somehow sonically cleaning my ears and sinuses. I couldn’t believe that none of the other visitors there seemed to notice this sound, but once I pointed it out to Domenic, he heard it too.
Before we began walking the long and well-worn path down into the crater, we found a posted sign explaining that the ancient Hawaiians considered Haleakala (which means “House of the Sun” in Hawaiian) an extremely sacred place. The sign spoke of a time when only the Kahunas, or Hawaiian shamans, were allowed to come there, because the crater held so much Mana, or power. The sign also stated, rather mysteriously, that when the holy men and women of old would come to Haleakala, they would do so only for what they needed, and when they received it—a message, an omen, an answer—they would leave immediately. The other tourists walked past this sign, paying it no notice—and oddly, the last time I was there the sign was gone—but I felt like it was giving me the very instructions that I needed to experience this place in the proper way.
We hiked Haleakala in silence (except for the “zzzzzzz”) for quite a while, stopping along the way to pause, breathe, and behold the majesty around us. I definitely lost all sense of time, and when I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket to check, it read 12:34. The first of the seven principles of Huna states, “The world is what you think it is.” These kinds of numerological synchronicities mean something to me—I choose to think they do, so they do. Seeing 12:34 set off an inner signal that told me it was time to stop and sit down.
Looking up, I found myself at the edge of a picturesque plateau with knee- and waist-high lava rock all around me. This seemed like the spot. I lost sense of where Domenic was, but my instinct was that he was probably having his own experience. Sitting on sharp lava rock can be dicey. It is born of fire, and its roughness is a physical manifestation of the “burn” that is still inside it. Because it can cut easily, I placed a towel underneath me, got into as comfortable a seated position as I could, and entered into a light meditation.
I don’t know exactly how long I was sitting there, but suddenly, from out of nowhere, a roaring force began rushing toward me as if a speeding train was headed straight in my direction, and I was on the tracks in its path. This wasn’t an internal feeling or inner vision; this was a visitation with something so powerful that I found that I could no longer sit up. An invisible push forced me to lie back, and as I did, the unforgiving lava rock seemed to cradle my body as if I were on the most comfortable reclining chair in the world. I was instantaneously in a visual white-out and could not see my hand in front of my face. I knew that I was being surrounded by clouds, but something else inexplicable was happening around and inside me.
My consciousness became ephemeral and spacious. I began to feel light-headed, nauseous, and not a little frightened. I was coming face to face with what I can only call IT. God, Source, Great Spirit, the Mother—whatever you want to call it—IT was there, and I could do nothing but allow IT to wash through the very fabric of my being. I experienced wildly unfamiliar physical sensations and feelings as a dream-like experience of altered awareness overtook my mind and body.
A spontaneous life review, the kind that people are said to experience at the moment of their death, ensued. Thre wasn’t anything I could hold on to, make sense of, or control. I was experiencing Relative Reality, the implied opposites contained in all things simultaneously: tears and laughter, past and future, regret and hope, terror and peace, all at once.
And then something even stranger happened: I had the realization that IT knew what was happening. Not only was I aware of IT, but IT was aware of me. And I knew that IT knew that I knew this!
I remained with IT for as long as IT chose to stay with me (I think it was only about thirty minutes, although I can’t know for sure), and when IT left, I remained unmoving in the same position for some time. I knew that something had shifted deeply, but I hadn’t even begun to process it. I wanted to remember the exact place that I was in, so without getting up, I began to take pictures with my cellphone all around my head and shoulders so that I had some record of where I had met IT. What I was to find out when I got back to my hotel was that in those pictures, right next to my head, was the unmistakable face and shell of a turtle, my totem animal, carved into the lava rock by the elements, smiling at me. When I saw it, every hair on my body stood on end.
After the IT experience was over, I found Domenic, who had also had his own profound encounter, although very different than mine, with IT. I remembered the instructions from the sign, and I knew that I had certainly received what I had come for. Now it was time to go, and we began walking back along the path, both of us awestruck by what had just occurred.
As we hiked, with our consciousness still feeling slightly altered, we both saw flying red and purple things in our peripheral vision, but when we would turn our heads quickly to follow them, there would be nothing there. Haleakala was sharing some of its secrets with us on that day, and bizarre and strange phenomenon—faces in cloud formations, strange sounds, and tricks of vision—continued on our return journey up the volcano’s crater slope.
We walked in silence for a while and then I suddenly blurted out, “I want to be a full-time healer and teacher. I want to quit acting, and I want to run spiritual retreats around the world.” At the very moment that these words exited my lips, a tiny dust tornado formed on the path right in front of us. It lifted up into the air, hovering a few feet from the ground, and then whizzed away in a flash with a “zing!” Domenic and I looked at each other, wide-eyed and slack-jawed. “Well, alrighty then!” I exclaimed.
In the years that followed, I did exactly what I said I would do on that volcano. The third principle of Huna says, “Energy flows where attention goes,” and I put all my attention and focus into changing my life. I went full-steam ahead with some formal education that I still needed, and dove even more deeply into shamanic practice.
In no time I opened a spiritual counseling and healing practice in New York City that now operates with a wait-list. I started a travel company, leading spiritual retreats around the world. The preeminent teacher and author Llyn Roberts asked me to join her core faculty for Shamanic Reiki Worldwide, and I began teaching Shamanism and Reiki in major venues across the country. I never looked back on acting. Once I had made the choice, it just faded into the distance. The fifth Huna principle says, “Now is the moment of power.” I caught up with myself by fully acknowledging who I had now become, and this allowed me to release a past self that existed only in memory.
During those early years as a shamanic teacher and practitioner, I still hadn’t found Huna. Shamanism, to my mind, lived in Central and South America. I previously had held an apprenticeship with some of the shamans of Brazil to work with their plant medicine, and the retreats I was leading were mainly to Latin countries. Despite my love affair with Hawaii, I never thought to look there for spiritual influence. But later I would find out that I was practicing Huna without knowing that I was doing so. The next step to this realization happened on a shamanic journey that would eventually take me to the island of Kauai.
Kauai and the Aumakua
Shamanic journeys are the cornerstone of my shamanic practice; they are how I most easily connect with spirit guides and healing wisdom. (How to journey will be covered later in this book.) One day, on a break between clients, I decided to do a journey in my office. I lay down, lowered the lights, covered my eyes, and allowed myself to be taken wherever my psyche and spirit wanted me to go. After a few minutes, I found myself in what seemed to be Hawaii, but the landscape was quite different than anything I had seen before. I certainly had never been in this particular place in real life.
This landscape was the same Hawaiian green that I knew so well, but its hills and slopes were larger and more dramatic. There were magnificent and insurmountable sea cliffs that were unfamiliar to me, but I now realize that I was seeing the Napali coast of Kauai. My journey took me to a lush and verdant meadow, where a stunningly beautiful Polynesian woman, complete with a Plumeria flower behind her ear, was performing an elegant dance to the gods of the place. As she saw me approach, she said smilingly, “Come to Kauai, you have ancestors here.” A moment later, she faded away, and I came out of the journey with a start.
Now, I was fairly certain that I did not have ancestors in Hawaii; I’m Italian-Irish and from Michigan. But the first principle of Huna says, “The world is what you think it is,” and I believe that shamanic journeys connect us to deep wisdom and truth, so I felt that my only choice was to set out to discover what this woman meant. Domenic and I had another trip to Maui planned in around six weeks’ time, so I immediately called him. “Dom, we need to go to Kauai, not Maui,” I told him. “I had a shamanic journey and a Hawaiian woman told me that’s what I should do because I have ancestors there.” Domenic is used to me, and puts up with my antics most generously. So, even though he probably rolled his eyes on the other end of the phone, he agreed and changed our reservations.
From a shamanic perspective, the word “ancestors” can mean many things. While it typically points toward bloodlines, ancestors can also be lineages that we relate to spiritually—our spirit family, so to speak, rather than our real one. We can often recognize ancestral currents simply by observing which traditions of wisdom attract us, and they can even reveal themselves through aesthetics that we admire—Buddhist art, Peruvian fabrics, or Sufi music can all point us toward the ancestral lines within us.
Our high self (Kane in Hawaiian) holds all that we ever were, and all that we will ever be. It is a guiding and connecting higher personal spirit that acts as a mediator between each of us and the cosmos. Kane contains the soul material that makes up the totality of our limitless being. It is the part of us that never dies, and as the Hawaiian phrase hanau wawa, which means reincarnation, suggests, Kane creates our many lives in such a way as to maximize the lessons our soul is to learn in whatever lifetime we happen to be experiencing.
In Hawaiian cosmology, Kane relates directly to the aumakua, the ancestors—and not just our ancestors, but all ancestors. “Po’e aumakua” in Hawaiian means “the great company of ancestors,” or the higher selves of all beings. Carl Jung had a similar idea in his concept of a shared and hereditary memory and consciousness between all humans that he termed the “collective unconscious.” The second Huna principle states, “There are no limits,” which means that there is a connection to everything if you can somehow find it.
So I went to Kauai to find my ancestors.
But by the sixth morning of our seven-day trip, I was feeling disappointed. Despite spending a glorious time on the lush garden isle of Kauai, there were definitely no ancestors to be found. Nada. I had all but given up on what was seeming like a rather silly quest, but since “Energy flows where attention goes,” the third principle of Huna, I kept my eyes open, despite feeling that the search for my ancestors seemed futile.
We had already seen most of the main sites on Kauai, but the second-to-last day of our trip was reserved for a visit to Waimea Canyon, which Mark Twain once called, “the Grand Canyon of the Pacific.” Seventy-five percent of Kauai is inaccessible on foot and uninhabitable. Waimea Canyon is on the east side of the island. From where we were staying, in Princeville on the north end, we couldn’t drive to it directly, but had to circumnavigate the entire island. It turned out to be worth the effort, because the drive up the canyon revealed amazing scarlet rock waterfalls and spectacular views.
Waimea Canyon itself is remarkable. On its precipice is a cliff-side that plunges straight down almost four thousand feet. Standing close to the edge of it is like being on the tallest floor of a New York skyscraper with no windows and nothing to break your fall. It felt dangerous to stand too close to the edge, and it made me queasy; I only felt comfortable by staying a few feet back.
On the day that we visited the canyon, we were alone, without another soul in sight. I found a large rock to sit on, and quietly communed with the spectacular views of immense purple, green, and red walls of earthen forest, cliffs, and valleys.
As I sat there, a man appeared, seemingly from out of nowhere, and approached us. He looked like a typical tourist, possibly from the Midwest, wearing a bright Tommy Bahama Hawaiian shirt and a silly white fedora hat. He was rather jolly, and, with a big smile, came up to me and asked if I would take his picture. I was kind of “having a moment,” connecting with the canyon, and he was definitely interrupting my meditative state, but I hid my haughty annoyance and politely agreed.
As he stood there, posing for the picture with his back to the canyon, just a foot or two from the cliff’s steep drop-off, he suddenly took a startled breath, and intuitively grabbed his chest when he realized how close he was to the edge. He moved further away from the precipice and a little closer to me, and gave me a wide-eyed look, saying, “Wow, that cliff is intense.”
“I know! It is scary, right? It’s straight down for thousands of feet!” I said.
His smile faded, and his face became rather serious. Locking his blue eyes on mine and taking an audible breath as if to center himself, he said, “If your ancestors hadn’t taught you to be afraid of this cliff, you wouldn’t be here to take my picture.”
I felt slightly faint, and probably turned white. I looked straight at him, and asked him to repeat what he had just said. As if he were waiting for this request, he calmly said again, “If your ancestors hadn’t taught you to be afraid of this cliff, you wouldn’t be here to take my picture.”
Speechless and dumbfounded, I took his picture and handed him back his camera, somehow finding a way to conceal the shock that I felt. His only other words were, “Have a good day!” and then he vanished as quickly as he had appeared. Domenic, who had observed the whole interchange said, “Was he even real?” to which I replied, shaking my head, “I have absolutely no idea.”
Later that day, while sunbathing at Hanalei Bay, I suddenly jumped up and ran to the ocean. I had felt Turtle’s presence and went to investigate. Within a few minutes, I found all one hundred and fifty pounds of her, eating sea grasses in less than three feet of water. We stayed together for quite a while, and she didn’t swim away, but was warm and friendly to my presence. It was a heart-centered exchange for both of us, and it epitomized the fifth Huna principle, Aloha, which states, “To love is to be happy with”—in other words, to love is to share love with another.
I didn’t know then that many Hawaiian families believe that, in addition to loved ones who have passed on, certain animals and even elementals—stone, fire, etc.—are part of their aumakua, or totemic spirit family. Given that this was a special day of feeling into an ancestral stream that was all new to me, it was an incredible gift to make contact with an animal ally that was such an important part of my shamanic path.
By the way, I know that there are some schools and teachers of Shamanism that hold it to be improper to reveal one’s animal totem to others. That isn’t a belief that I hold, so it isn’t true for me. I instinctively know that Turtle wouldn’t mind either. “The world is what you think it is.” What’s true is only what is true for you.
My aumakua experiences with the odd man on Waimea Canyon and with Turtle in Hanalei Bay had a lasting impact that validated something within myself that didn’t yet make sense, yet was impossible to deny. My connection to Hawaii began to transcend my natural affinity for the islands, for the land was starting to live inside my bones. I began to seek out books and resources on Hawaii’s indigenous spirituality, and the more I learned, the more I found direct corollaries to my own shamanic understanding and ways of working. Huna felt like a homecoming, an inexplicable affinity for material that I should not have known, but somehow already did.
Discovering Huna and Ho’oponopono
When I began studying Huna, I was already feeling quite pleased with myself about what I was accomplishing in my private practice. I considered myself a skilled, knowledgeable, and effective healer, and I was seeing substantive results with clients, making good money, and feeling “cutting edge” in what I thought was my own unique blend of psychology, somatics, the chakras, Shamanism, and energy healing. However, my inflated ego took quite a blow when I started to realize that everything that I thought I knew, as well as many of the contributions made by Freud, Jung, and a host of other pioneers in the fields of psychology and healing, had long been discovered, at least in part, by the ancient Hawaiians.
Furthermore, unlike many philosophical or spiritual systems that claim to be the only legitimate path, Huna has a flexibility and permissiveness that encourages experience through gnosis. Gnosis is our own personal knowledge or insight into humanity’s spiritual mysteries that doesn’t come from what we are told, or even believe in. Gnosis is conscious, experiential knowledge, rather than intellectual belief or theory. We each possess a unique inner compass, a deep internal knowing, that is born of the personal experience we have with ourselves and the world. Our gnosis can’t be argued with, it just is what it is, and I was so surprised to find this indigenous philosophy from across the ocean that encourages it.
With its seven principles, Huna was providing me with a multi-perspectival system of esoteric wisdom whose philosophical tenets are built upon developing an intimate relationship with one’s own creativity, insight, and experience. Huna helped me to clarify and bring language to what it is to think like a shaman and to begin to teach others to do the same. And along with connecting me to a lineage of others who were trafficking in similar currents, it introduced me to Ho’oponopono, which was to become among the most powerful healing practices I have ever encountered.
If I were to categorize the overarching methodology of my healing practice, I might call it something like “spiritual re-parenting.” When a client presents with a longstanding problem, pattern, or self-limiting story, we seek to find its origin together—where or when did the client first learn that they were unlovable, wrong, not good enough, unworthy? These entrenched patterns almost always trace back to childhood, and to go back to the source of the issue—attending to “the child within”—can be a transformative way of relating to oneself.
There are many Western terms for this kind of therapeutic approach, including “inner child work,” “reframing of the past,” and “soul retrieval.” Ho’oponopono, the Hawaiian forgiveness process (which will be covered in depth later in this book) is a simple and potent practice that achieves these ends with directness and efficiency; it’s a kind of “map” that demonstrates the magical alchemy of what love can do. To co-create our lives with support from the benevolent spiritual intelligences that want nothing more than to lovingly assist us back to our wholeness, is to practice Ho’oponopono.
Before I formally trained in Ho’oponopono, my first introduction to it was through a five-minute YouTube video. Huna seems to merge immediately with my intuitive understanding. Based on the information from the video, I created a Ho‘oponopono practice that I could use with my clients, and which I still use.
The day that I first decided to experiment with Ho‘oponopono with some of my clients, the results were beautiful, and I was quite surprised by just how positive they were. Everyone that I brought through the process experienced a gentle and deeply healing reclamation of themselves. Even more surprising was that as we did Ho‘oponopono together, I, as well as some of my clients, sensed a palpable “presence” around us, as if the process was inviting in a kind of spiritual energy or grace that seemed to fill the room. Even the lights in my office would sometimes flicker and shift. To this day, I often experience these kinds of phenomena when I am guiding someone in the Ho‘oponopono process, and the first time it happened, it seemed to be synchronistic evidence of the legitimacy and potency of a practice that would eventually become the foundational model for my healing work.
But then I got scared. I had no training in Ho’oponopono, I was clearly trafficking in some intense energy, and I didn’t exactly know what I was doing. (I had only watched a YouTube video, for goodness sake!) I went to talk to my supervisor, Brian, who I had been working with for almost twenty years. Brian is a primary spiritual influence in my life. He is among the wisest people I know, and if I ever say anything clever, it probably came from him first. We began our conversation as therapist and client, and now our relationship has taken on a professional affiliation. These days, he is the person I talk to about client work, ethics, and standards of practice. Even though I am not a clinician, I have a large practice, and I find his supervisory support vitally important. Plus, sometimes you just need someone to talk you off the ledge, and my first experience with Ho‘oponopono was one of those times.
After I told Brian about what had happened when I used Ho‘oponopono with my clients, I said to him, “But Brian, this can’t be right, I have no idea what I am doing, I just watched a YouTube video. I’m a fraud!”
“Well, yes, but you said it worked, right?” he replied.
“Like gangbusters,” I said, “but I don’t know exactly why.”
“Relax,” he replied. “Keep doing it, and by all means take a class to make yourself feel better. But it’s clear that you have tapped into something universal, and you seem to instinctively already know how to do this.”
Brian’s advice pointed toward the sixth and seventh principles of Huna. The sixth says, “All power comes from within.” I already had the knowledge. It couldn’t not be inside me, because everything was already inside me . As my wonderful shamanic teacher Llyn Roberts often says to her groups, “The wisdom is in the circle,” meaning there is no hierarchy between her and her students; she has nothing to teach that isn’t already held and known in the group. The seventh Huna principle states, “Effectiveness is the measure of truth.” In other words, if it works—as Ho‘oponopono certainly did with my clients—then it’s real. In fact, I have heard my magnificent Huna teacher, Serge Kahili King, Ph.D., exclaim, “If it works, then it’s Huna!”
Now, I am not claiming that all you have to do is watch a YouTube video and then you can run out and open a healing practice, although I am definitely a bit of a mad scientist when it comes to this stuff. But, often, in my trainings, participants don’t take what they learn back into their everyday lives because they are either afraid that they might do it incorrectly or they lack the confidence or self-esteem that gives them permission to try.
As I mentioned in the preface, so much esoteric wisdom that was once considered “secret” is now readily available to the masses. The intelligences of the Universe know what they are doing, and if you have found your way to any of it, you owe it to yourself to try it out at your current level of understanding and development. Don’t worry about it, just try it. Remember the fourth Huna principle, “Now is the moment of power.” Use the practices you learn in this book in the present moment, and they will work for you too!
The Psychics in My Office
During the time when I was enmeshing myself in all things Hawaiian, I was allowing a talented group of psychics and mediums to rent my office on Friday nights for a bimonthly practice circle. I myself had little to do with the group, and I only attended intermittently—and when I did, I kept to myself and allowed myself to be a student. The participants had a vague notion that I was a healer, but they didn’t know me well, and I hadn’t shared with anyone that I had been studying Huna.
One Friday night when I didn’t attend the circle, I stayed home, reading a book about Hawaiian spirituality. (Yes, I know what you’re thinking. That is the extent to how exciting most of my Friday nights are these days!) Around ten o’clock that evening, the time when the psychics and mediums would have just finished their meeting, I received a text message from the head facilitator: “Great group tonight. Sorry you missed it. And what’s going on with Hawaii?”
I looked at my phone, perplexed. As far as I knew, no one in the group had any knowledge about any connection I had to Hawaii. I texted back, “OK, this is weird. Why are you asking me this?”
His reply was, “Well, we had this totally strange thing happen tonight. Everyone was psychically getting all these Polynesian gods and goddesses in your office that they didn’t recognize and have never received before. The entire group were on their phones Googling them, and they seem to have been Hawaiian.”
By this time, Hawaii synchronicities had become pretty commonplace for me, so rather than being stunned reaction, I just laughed. Pretty freaky, right? Well, yes, but if you remember that the first Huna principle is “The world is what you think it is,” you will understand why I believed this to be a message of encouragement for me to stay on this path: the akua were clearly working with me. And the third Huna principle, “Energy flows where attention goes,” showed me that my continued focus on Huna was creating an energetic current with Hawaii that had found its way into my workspace five thousand miles away from the islands.
The Omega Institute
For the past few years, I have been honored to co-facilitate shamanic Reiki programs at the prestigious Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York. Omega is arguably the largest holistic learning facility in the world, hosting hundreds of programs each year for tens of thousands of attendees. Llyn Roberts, who has been a faculty staple there for over twenty years, made an introduction for me to meet with the program director to discuss the possibility of them sponsoring my own shamanic program. It is a very exclusive honor to teach at Omega; only the most celebrated spiritual teachers have offerings there.
To say the least, this meeting was a bit of a “big break.” My intention was that if I were accepted, I would teach something relatively tried and safe, a curriculum that had been successful in the past. Because it would be my first solo program, I was expecting no more than that I would facilitate a weekend shamanic program either based on Llyn’s work or on an aspect of Shamanism that I knew well.
I was definitely nervous before my meeting with Brett Bevel, Omega’s program director. Brett is a celebrated author and famous Reiki teacher, and I still feel like I am with a wizard whenever I am in his presence. He has deep connections to Merlin and he writes about them in some of his books. He’s a pretty magical guy.
We met in a private room at Omega, and after just a few minutes of chatting, Brett perused my resume slowly, stopping when he got to the Huna and Ho‘oponopono training. He pointed at those few lines, shrugged and said, “I think you should teach this.”
Now, I had no intention of bringing up Huna in this meeting. I had only just had my first in-person Huna training in Hawaii, and I was absolutely not ready to teach that material because it was still so new to me. But if I’m anything, I’m a little nutty, and almost before the words were out of Brett’s mouth, I blurted out, “Yes!” Some secret part of me knew that I could do it, and though it felt daunting, I had over a year to prepare. It was also significant and characteristically synchronistic that out of all the different things that I could offer at Omega, Brett the Wizard, who barely knew me, brought me back to Hawaii.
If I wasn’t already a raving “Hunatic,” over the next year, I became a genuine, card-carrying one. My goal was to saturate myself in this material to such an extent that Huna would become integrated knowledge. “Energy flows where attention goes.” I spent a year and a half preparing for a weekend workshop that ended up being one of the most successful achievements in my life. After teaching that class at Omega, I returned home to New York City, inspired to write this book. Much of the material presented here is based on that workshop.
About a month before the workshop, and after hundreds of hours of reading, studying, and practicing, I went back to Maui by myself to just be with the land one more time. The Omega class was at the forefront of my mind, and I was still trepidatious. It felt so important that I do a good job, and I wanted some sort of a sign that I was ready.
As I lay on Little Beach, my favorite beach in Maui, I guided myself into a shamanic journey. Despite the fact that Maui is my favorite island, my shamanic journeys always end up in Kauai. This time, I found myself in a cave, deep into the Napali Cliffs in Kauai. Often, on journeys, I visit a muscular, handsome, and slightly gruff Polynesian man who is one of my spirit guides. His cave is clearly shaman’s quarters—there are always a fire, luscious smells, and tables filled with herbs, oils, talismans, and other medicinal things. Sometimes he gives me healings; other times he provides me with simple, pithy messages and insights about whatever is going on in my life.
On this particular journey, I asked him if I was ready to teach at the Omega Institute. He furrowed his brow, frowned, and said in his low, raspy voice, “No.”
Then he took me to a ceremonial space in his cave where I had not been before, and left me there for a few minutes. When he reappeared, he was wearing traditional Hawaiian garb that was more elaborate than usual—he wore ti leaves around his wrists and a lei around his neck, adornments of shells and kukui nuts, a headdress of feathers, and a beautifully ornamented kihei shawl made of tapa cloth (bark cloth). He approached me as I stood in this space, and began chanting beautiful Hawaiian words that were far beyond my understanding. He placed a lei, similar to his own, around my neck, and then brushed some large leaves all over my body, as if he were doing some sort of cleansing. Finally, he stopped and held my shoulders and looked at me with kind, smiling eyes.
He placed his forehead and nose to mine, and we began sharing breath together, something that Hawaiians call Honi. The Hawaiians believe that the breath of the nose is purer than the breath of the mouth, because the breath of the mouth has the ability to criticize. To share breath in this way is to share Aloha. After a few moments, he pulled back a bit from me, smiled, and said in his characteristic grunt, “Okay, now you’re ready.”
In that moment, I opened my eyes. As the blinding Maui sun came flooding in, directly above my head (I was still lying down), a line of ‘Iwa or frigate birds, one after another after another, soared in a straight line directly above me. There were literally hundreds of them.
My heart was so full.
I had needed Hawaii to give me permission to teach some of her secret wisdom to others, and with the birds’ appearance, I knew that Hawaii was granting me that permission. In her beautiful book The Hawaiian Oracle: Animal Spirit Guides from the Land of Light, Huna author Rima A. Morrell writes, “The appearance of the ‘Iwa is a sign that you’ve made contact with your higher self. Your spirit message has been sent.” I watched the ‘Iwa birds for a long time; eventually, they flew so high that, despite their large size, they became a maze of swirling, tiny dots.
This leads us to the end of my Hawaii story—at least so far—and to the beginning of yours. I hope that you will enjoy learning Huna wisdom and practice with as much enthusiasm and excitement as I experience when I present them to people. Remember that the real purpose of the teachings that follow is to address your thinking mind. The world is an effect of what goes on between your ears. And, like the magical, multitudinous spectrum of possibilities that is Hawaii, your mind can open in similarly expansive ways. If your mind is filled with Aloha, your life will be too.
The best thing about shamans is that they seem to know just about everything about everything: they sniff out healing wherever they can find it, and in just about any instance, and their capacity for love is seemingly endless. To learn to be like them, is to learn to think like they do. When they like what’s happening, they make it better, and when they don’t, they change it. And so can you.
Breathe, enjoy, explore. Mahalo.
chapter two
Hawaiian Cosmology
Hawaiian cosmology is a vast landscape of myths, gods and goddesses, language, history, and Nature. Because this is a practical book on how to work with your thinking mind to effect change in your life, I will focus on the underpinnings of a few Hawaiian themes in order to guide you to a universal shamanic paradigm—one that transcends Polynesian culture and points toward alternative ways of relating to your life. For our purposes, throughout this book, it is of little importance that you remember the Hawaiian words themselves. Instead, I encourage you to be open to what they might be teaching you about your own life experience.
Shamanism is an embodied path, not an ascendant one. Unlike many of the Eastern mystical traditions, it wasn’t developed to transcend worldly existence, but rather to come into harmony with it. Many indigenous cultures hold that each of us come from the stars. Celebrated Hawaiian elder Hale Kealohalani Makua has said that we made that trip on celestial canoes made of light, accompanied by whales and dolphins. At the very least, if the Big Bang went down the way Western science says it did, it’s safe to say that we are all made of some sort of star material.
But we left those heavenly realms to be in bodies. Our souls wanted us to experience all of the delights that this magnificent Earth has to offer. The opportunity for you in your current incarnation is to be here now on this planet, and to do whatever you can to enjoy it to the fullest. The earliest indigenous peoples developed Shamanism for extremely practical purposes—to find food and medicine; to live in collaboration with the Earth and each other; to appreciate Nature, both that which surrounds us and our internal natures; to heal and love well; and to connect with the compassionate spirits that help people do all of this with grace. In his workshops, Serge Kahili King, Ph.D., the author of many books on Huna, often speaks of “getting the healing done so that there’s more time to party.”
And that’s the point.
The point is to get to the beach. The point is your love life, your career, your family, your health, your bank account, and your connection with the Earth. And, when you’ve got all that in order for yourself, helping others with theirs. So the material in this chapter is not an anthropologic examination of Hawaii, rather, I use Hawaii as a metaphor, a template for developing the expansive shaman’s mind that is waiting for you just beneath the surface of your everyday awareness.
Before we begin, I’ll share a few thoughts about cultural appropriation. You will see in the pages that follow that I use generalized terms such as “the Hawaiians” or “Hawaiian spirituality,” and so on. These expressions have a myriad of associations for people, and I am in no way suggesting that I speak for all Hawaiians or the entirety of their spiritual traditions, history, or culture. To do so would be incredibly presumptuous on my part, well beyond the scope of my knowledge, and antithetical to my efforts. Instead, I present universal shamanic truths that are prismatically demonstrated in the
Hawaiian paradigm.
This is really no different than Buddhist meditation, Qi Gong, or yoga, among many other spiritual practices finding their way to the West. Western teachers of these modalities seldom, if ever, claim quite the same “authenticity” as those teachers found in Tibet, China, or India, and the best Western teachers would never even attempt to do so. There are slight and inevitable shifts whenever the indigenous wisdom of one culture is translated for the psyche of another, and part of the Western teacher’s job is to make cross-cultural correlations as accessible as possible.
What makes any spiritual truth truly universal is its being substantive enough to be built upon, geographically transported, reinterpreted, and, most importantly, cross-referenced with other spiritual traditions. We all benefit greatly by “feeling into” other cultures through our own lens, for it is in discovering the overarching commonalities that we share that allows us to grow together as a global village.
I will never fully understand what it is to be Hawaiian. My hope with this book is to provide a loving portrait of some of the islands’ shamanic traditions, particularly those that are echoed cross-culturally, meanwhile, at the same time, remaining well aware that although there may be some who might take exception to my efforts, I make them in the spirit of celebration, reverence, and respect of a land, its people, and its traditions—which I feel Westerners would be wise to learn from and emulate.
My ultimate goal then, is not the impossible task of offering you a definitive vision of Hawaii, but rather to help you awaken an inner paradise of your own making, one that Hawaii exemplifies just by being Hawaii.
The Kahuna and the Student
Offering Huna teachings freely is to do something that it is not traditionally Hawaiian, and is actually contrary to the ways in which this wisdom was typically passed down from one generation to the next. You may have heard the axiom, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” While this is true, to a certain extent, from a Huna perspective we think of everything that we experience as a reflection of our thoughts, so the reverse is possibly more appropriate: As Serge Kahili King once said, “When the teacher is ready, the student will appear.” The Hawaiian word for “student” is haumana, which has an interpretive meaning indicating that the pupil’s willingness to learn gives Mana, or power, to the teacher.
For in Hawaiian tradition, it is the student, through his or her questioning of the Kahuna, or shaman, that guides his or her own path to the knowledge, and empowers the Kahuna to provide just the right curriculum for each individual. The Kahuna doesn’t volunteer information, but responds only to questions. I have heard Serge Kahili King say, “You want to be my apprentice? Okay, be my apprentice.” And then he’ll stare at you, waiting for you to make the
next move.
Traditionally, the wisdom-keepers of Hawaii were notoriously tight lipped about sharing Huna. But this wasn’t because of a desire to keep it secret. Rather, it was about preserving their culture and its wisdom by holding it in sacredness, imbuing it with value by carrying it close to their hearts with reverence. As with anything that is precious, it was believed that discernment is needed around where and when it is appropriate to allow Huna to be seen.
There was also the influence of discriminatory legislation against certain spiritual practices, instituted by invaders of all kinds and sometimes by the native Hawaiian rulers as well. It wasn’t until 1989 that all of the laws against “sorcery,” some of which were punishable by a year in prison and a thousand-dollar fine, were finally overturned. Given that Hawaii has historically been victim to much usurpation by the West—and has suffered its own fair share of native in-fighting—many islanders downplayed or even hid their indigenous spiritual knowledge over the years so that it would appear less valuable or powerful to those who would try to eradicate it.
There are stories of early missionaries and others from the West asking the Kahunas about their legendary magic. They would receive vague and shrugging responses from the Hawaiians, who told the Westerners that the ancient ways no longer existed, and possibly never did—downplaying Hawaiian “magic” to be nothing more than local folklore.
But for the serious student, there were practical benefits to this conservative guarding of the knowledge. The fact is that we can’t learn what we don’t want to learn, and we can’t know what we aren’t ready to know. Knowledge given at the wrong time is at best knowledge wasted, and at worst knowledge exploited or misused. You will find that to practice Huna effectively requires you to take one hundred percent responsibility for yourself—and this responsibility is not to be taken lightly.
Huna says that everything that happens to you is an effect of your thoughts. What exists within you is mirrored back to you by the outside world, which means that your fingerprints are on absolutely everything that you experience. The fact is, sometimes we don’t want to heal or grow, because that would mean that we would have to do something different. Healing and resistance go hand in hand, they are two sides of the same coin, and to take responsibility for yourself is to acknowledge that resistance, and carry on in spite of it.
Neuroscience has identified a default network in the brain that causes us to constantly replay the past and worry about the future. This is a survival mechanism that ensures a continuity of self that remains fixed and unchanged by keeping us in perpetual relationship to a rigid perspective of who we think we are. This is the reason why, when we attempt to make changes in our lives, to meditate, or even just center ourselves, our minds start to chatter incessantly. We are literally hard wired to resist change, even positive change.
Time and time again, I have seen how a client’s resistance to their own healing will energetically reveal itself and try to take over. Clients will manifest parades, accidents, traffic jams, or anything else that can prevent them from making it to my office. The proverbial story of “the car breaking down on the way to the healer” exists for a reason. Being on the healing path often leads toward shifts in identity, which can be scary—habits, friends, careers, relationships, and even family members may have to fall away. The biggest success stories that I have witnessed in my clients involve those who approach their healing with honesty, consistency, and care. The path of development is not a straight line, it’s a wave of ups and downs, expansions and contractions, and it is only by continually honoring our sincere yearning to grow and create that we stay on that path.
There is great wisdom, then, in the Kahunas not offering information, but only responding to the queries of the students. This puts the responsibility on the student to enter into a present-time process that requires them to feel into their own internal experience for guidance. The Kahunas were also meticulous about responding only to the exact questions being asked and offering nothing more. As the student gained readiness, subtle shifts in their questions would lead to further revelations of deeper dimensionalities embedded in the knowledge.
We each have an intuitive voice inside that lives deep within our body. The Hawaiians call this Na’au, which means “guts,” “intestines,” and, most pointedly, “the heart of the mind.” The Na’au is our gut instinct, the seat of our feelings—or, as it is sometimes called, “the second brain.” The ancient Hawaiians believed that the intellect and the emotions were essentially one and the same; because from their perspective, there was great wisdom in synthesizing thought and emotion to be in agreement with each other. You have experienced your Na’au at those times in your life when, grappling with an important choice or decision, you go to a wise friend who tells you to “follow your gut,” and when you can feel into what it is telling you, you always make the right choice. That’s the Na’au.
The Na’au is connected to Nature itself, and when we learn to discern it, it will never steer us wrong. The more we listen to it, the more we are led toward “flow”—the effortless living that comes from being in our authentic truth. This inner compass lives in us, and being on the shamanic path requires that we nurture an intimate rapport with its deep wisdom. The Kahuna tradition of only answering questions from the student ensures that the student really wants to listen to what the Na’au has to say, and will take responsibility for whatever it tells them.
There is a Huna proverb: A‘ole ka ‘ike I ka halau ho‘okahi, or “All knowledge is not taught in one school.” In other words, Huna is one path but it is not the path. Acquiring knowledge comes not just from teachers or following established systems, but from the creative engagement that we can each choose to have with our lives. Everything that happens to us (even the bad stuff!) is the material through which we step toward enlightenment.
And what is enlightenment, anyway? If you were to follow any legitimate spiritual path to its penultimate conclusion, you would learn two things: that we are all connected, and that we are all God. Now, I can tell you this myself, but it means very little, or possibly nothing at all until you come to decide what it means to you, if it is true for you, what you want to do about it, and if you want to start asking questions about it. That is your work to do. It is only by engaging deeply with our life that we enter into a co-creative relationship with it, one in which the questions that we ask become the path to the deeper truths within.
The Hawaiian Language
Like the islands themselves, the Hawaiian language is a metaphor for the shaman’s mind. The point of my linguistic exploration is obviously not to teach you the language, but rather to offer you a snapshot into how the Hawaiian language supports the indigenous thinking of the shaman’s mind.
If we contemplate English or the Western languages with which we are most familiar, we see that their primary purpose is to name things and to label experience. There is a linear, fixed quality to Western languages. Their subject-verb-object structure implies something static and apart. Western languages point at life, but fall short in expressing the beingness of it. It’s like vacationers grabbing their cell phones to take a picture of a beautiful place, but forgetting to actually look at the beautiful place! A Zen philosopher once said that when a child learns that a bird is called a “bird,” that child’s experience of bird is forever changed. The very act of naming distances us from the universe.
The simple sentence, “I hit the ball with the baseball bat,” implies a separation between me, the ball, and the bat. This takes us away from the unitive consciousness of the shaman’s mind which never forgets an interconnective perspective of oneness. The fact is that the ball, the bat, and I cannot exist without each other and the space between us. Further, that simple sentence tells us absolutely nothing about the flesh-and-blood experience of performing that action.
In our language, words can certainly be put together in highly intelligent, and even wildly creative or poetic ways, but the expression of the experience itself is limited because our language can’t vibrate experientially. A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. The moon is the actual lived experience of the moon. That is why when the wonderful spiritual philosopher Alan Watts was asked the question, “What is reality?” he didn’t give a verbal answer, he just rang a bell.
The Hawaiian language functions very differently from Western languages. It doesn’t point at reality, it comes at reality from the inside. To even begin to understand it, we are required to release our habitual way of seeing the world through eyes of limitation and separation and, instead, bring ourselves into a shifted perception that presupposes unity, feels into vibration and energy, and assumes the presence of concealed and hidden truth.
Hawaiian is a relatively simple language. Although there are comparatively few words, they often contain layers of kaona (hidden meanings), ranging from the mundane to the poetic, the metaphysical, and even to the sexual. For example, Hawaiians don’t usually tell the tourists that the word Waikiki, the name of a city on the island of Oahu, also means “flowing water,” “springing life force,” and “spouting semen.” This implies the lived experience of Waikiki involves water, vitality, sensuality, and possibly the literal or metaphoric seeds of creation.
While that is a colorfully illustrative example, here is possibly a more elegant one: The Hawaiian word ha‘ena can be translated as “red hot” or “hot sun” but it has another meaning, “intense breath.” Ha‘ena not only depicts the extreme heat of the sun, but it is also the felt reaction from us through our own breath that the hot sun induces. At the beginning of the day, we breathe out “Haaaaa,” as we feel the exhilaration of beholding an awe-inspiring sunrise, feeling the sun’s warmth on our face. At sunset, we sigh out an entirely different kind of “Haaaaa” as we breathe out relief, peace, and tranquility while watching the sun disappear down below the horizon.
Nouns and verbs do not exist in Hawaiian in the same way that they do in our language. It’s not that the Hawaiian language doesn’t name things or depict action, but it does so under the presupposition of a connective experience, where everything exists together. The Hawaiian language implies process. There is a Hawaiian proverb that reads, I ka olelo no ke ola, I ka ‘olelo no ka make—“In the word is life, in the word is death.” Hawaiian words often contain seeds of their opposite meanings, and nuances in almost every syllable can be doubled for emphasis, or altered with the addition of another vowel to reveal other aspects.
In Hawaiian, there are the same five vowels as in English (a, e, i, o, and u), but only seven consonants—h, k, l, m, n, p, w—and the ‘okina, a glottal stop that is written as a single open quote—‘—and is pronounced similar to the sound between the syllables of “uh-oh.” Hawaiian has a fluid movement and melodiousness to it because every word ends in a vowel. The vowels function roughly like verbs, which means that change or movement is implied in every word. In this way, Hawaiian is vibratory and energetic, a closer approximation to the felt experience of reality—a myriad of changing potentialities and limitless prospects in every moment. To see reality in this way is to see through the lens of the shaman’s mind.
If we examine the nature of fear, for instance, we see that it is actually nothing more than an adverse reaction in the present moment to a possible future state of permanent “stuckness”—some negative situation that may continue, unchanging, forever and ever. If you bring to mind your worst fear right now, and follow it to the scariest possible consequence, you will find yourself in a story that is bleak and desolate, with no way out.
The Hawaiian word for sickness or illness is ma‘i. If we examine other meanings of this word’s syllables, we have ma, which means “a state of,” and ‘i, which can mean “great” plus an interpretive meaning of “hardness, closeness, or stinginess,” which might be thought of as “tension.” From a Huna perspective, every illness of the body or mind is born of tension, whether that tension be mental, emotional, or physical. But when we remember that change is inherent in everything, as the Hawaiian language reminds us, then we see that the nature of reality itself is change. So, to fear an unchanging permanent state is to fear something that doesn’t exist in reality—and to let it go is to release the tension.
This is the quintessence of Huna: replacing a thought form that induces tension with one that produces relief. And when you do this consistently, the thought form that produces relief grows in strength to such a degree that we begin to exist at an energetic frequency in which that thought form transforms itself into a new reality.
The Hawaiian language has no equivalents for the past or future tenses of verbs; everything is linguistically related to the present moment. Serge Kahili King often gets a giggle in his workshops when he explains that an English language sentence like, “I went to the store yesterday to buy milk,” is roughly translated in Hawaiian as, “My having gone to the store yesterday to buy milk is now over.” Similarly, “I am going to the beach next week to go snorkeling” becomes, “My going to the beach to go snorkeling next week hasn’t happened yet.” Experience only exists in the present moment, and nothing else exists outside of it. The present moment is often a foreign land for many of us, and the Hawaiian language brings us back to it by not giving us any other alternatives.
There is a saying among the locals in Hawaii that says, “If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes.” This isn’t an exaggeration, as the Hawaiian Islands encompass twenty-one of the world’s twenty-three climate zones. On one occasion, when I visited the Kilauea Volcano on the Big Island, I experienced rain, snow, sun, mist, and a rainbow while just walking though the parking lot. The Hawaiian language has over two hundred words for “wind,” and eighty of them are just for the winds of Kauai. There is not a single word that indicates the concept of time, but close to sixty Hawaiian words can be used to describe the subtleties of pleasant or unpleasant smells.
The Hawaiian language cracks open the imagination because it points us toward the endless possibilities exemplified by the islands and by life itself. To think like a shaman is to open to the interdimensional discovery available to us in each instant of our lives. Remember that the shaman improves what is going well, and transforms whatever isn’t. You may have to wait five minutes to know what your next move is, but if you keep your eyes open, as the Hawaiian language demonstrates, infinite prospects and hidden surprises can’t help but reveal themselves.
Creation — The Po, the Ao, and the Kumulipo
The word “shaman” comes originally from the Tungusic tribes of Siberia, and while it is most often defined as an indigenous healer, another esoteric translation is “one who sees in the dark.” It is in the darkness that one develops the shaman’s mind, for the darkness holds the mystery. The shaman’s domain is in the hidden and invisible realms; those in-between places and worlds that the shaman navigates to receive information, retrieve lost power, and commune with the spirits. I often speak of consensus reality being like the one small slice of an apple pie that you’re eating, and shamanic reality, the unseen, being equivalent to the entire rest of the pie. There is so much that doesn’t meet the eye.
In Hawaiian cosmology, the visible and the invisible coexist together. Manifest reality, Ao (meaning “light” and “day,” in Hawaiian), is born out of a vast expanse of creative potential—a womb of inception from which all of life emerges. The Hawaiians call this Po, which is translated as “night” or “darkness,” and also, interestingly, as “the realm of the gods.” In Hawaiian thought, darkness contains spiritual intelligence, and it is from darkness that life itself springs forth.
In the Western psyche, darkness has a pejorative connotation. The creation story of Genesis in the Old Testament speaks of God separating the light from the dark and calling the light “good.” Darkness became synonymous with evil, separate and distinct from “the light,” something to be avoided and transcended, or a place where one is exiled for punishment. But for the Hawaiians, the new day begins not at sunrise, but at sunset. It is in the nighttime dream of the Po that creates the waking life of the Ao. Ao also means “enlightened consciousness,” and this is significant because it implies that the daytime of our manifest existence is a kind of paradise, or at least it has the potential to be.
Rather than God, Heaven, and Earth being separate from each other, as Genesis suggests (“In the beginning was God and God created the Heaven and the Earth”), according to Hawaiian Shamanism, we are thrust into a shamanic reality that says “Heaven is right here, and God is too,” and we can find them by going into our hidden and darkest aspects and allowing them to emerge from there. In his book Psychology and Alchemy, Carl Jung echoes this when he writes, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
The creation chant of Hawaii, the Kumulipo, translated as “the pattern of the unseen” or “beginning in deep darkness,” tells the story of all of the Earth’s inhabitants (plants, animals, and people) being birthed during a vast cosmic night. In her book The Sacred Power of Huna: Spirituality and Shamanism in Hawai‘i, Rima A. Morell cites a line from the Kumulipo that adds insight into how creation functions: He po uhe‘e I ka wawa, which she translates as, “The darkness slips into light.” Darkness and light are not polar opposites of an infinite spectrum, a vast distance apart. Instead, creation is like the experience of an actual dawn—the thin veil between night and day is a liminal space so subtle and gradual as to be
almost imperceptible.
The shaman’s mind opens to the hidden truths of the unseen because, according to this wisdom, there is virtually no distance between what we can perceive and what we can’t. From here, we can’t help but come upon the spiritual paradox in everything: what seems big is small, what seems strong is weak, what seems easy is difficult, what seems disappointing is beneficial, and every other iteration of opposites that you can imagine.
When I was about twenty-five years old, I played the leading role in a highly acclaimed stage production in Boston. I had received some notoriety for my performance and even won some prestigious acting awards. Some New York bigwigs came to see a performance, and the cast was told that they intended to move the show to New York. This would have catapulted my career.
Not only did that not happen, but when the show was produced in New York, I couldn’t even get an audition. After my artistic triumph in Boston, I could not get hired for anything to save my life, and I did not work for an entire year. I went through a major depression that lasted for months. It was during this time that I began to look into meditation and spirituality, and I began working with a psychotherapist.
Little did I know that the hidden reality of one of the greatest disappointments of my life was to be the seed of the book that you’re now reading. Had I gotten what I thought I wanted at that time, I would have been sent even further off my path. I would not have started the spiritual search that led me to my truer self and, almost certainly, I would not be typing these words right now. I can track the “failure” of that time in my life to this very moment, and there is a perfection in all of it.
Time and again, I see this dynamic in many clients in my private practice. When someone comes to me who is experiencing extreme difficulties such as relationships breaking up, major career changes, illnesses, or the questioning of long-held values, I know that hidden gifts of the soul are contained in those hardships. A new dream, even if at first it seems like a nightmare, will bring the light of a new awareness to them. I may not tell them this initially, because they may not be ready to hear it, but I always think it because I have never known it not to be true.
The shaman helps the client enter into a new dream by shifting the meaning of what their hardship represents or symbolizes—this is called shamanic healing. As you learn to think like a shaman, the easier and clearer this process becomes. It doesn’t mean that there is no pain in our difficulties, but you learn that the struggles are there to serve you and to direct you, not to punish you. And by giving the difficulties different meaning, they are transformed into power.
I often speak of the “gift in the wound,” the hidden offering that lives in our ‘eha‘eha, or pain and suffering, and reveals itself when we are ready to discover it. For instance, the best healers are the ones who have suffered most, the most empowered women are the ones who have had to fight the hardest for their place at the table, the most visionary innovators are the ones everyone laughed at, and for all of us, the sweetest success comes when we are told—or we tell ourselves—that something can’t be done and yet we somehow do it anyway.
Spiritual teacher and author Carolyn Myss has a very simple instruction for living. In a talk based on her book, Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential, she tells us: “Give up the need to understand why things happen as they do, and if the door closes, take the hint.” In other words, rather than shake your fist at the sky, protesting the hard knocks that the cards of life have dealt you, begin to wonder why they might be happening for you. If life presents you with a limitation of some kind, assume that it is doing so for a reason that is in your best interest, and adjust accordingly. This isn’t just putting a positive spin on things, it’s honoring a deeper truth that is the nature of creation itself: “The darkness slips into the light.”
Conversely, if there are gifts in the wounds, then there can also be wounds in the gifts. For example, I have seen many clients who developed low self-esteem because, when they were children, their teachers, parents, and authority figures pathologized their spiritual giftedness and high emotional intelligence with a diagnosis of ADHD. These children didn’t fit into a standardized curriculum and the established expectations of the community because they were special—not because they were damaged—and their giftedness became a source of pain, rather than one of celebration. As adults, when the hidden truth of their giftedness was finally named as a positive aspect, they were able to create a new sense of who they were.
I remember working with an award-winning television journalist who came from a long line of Harvard intellectuals and luminaries. As a child, she was given love, support, and every possible advantage and opportunity. But despite her success, by the time I met her she was continually plagued with a sense of never feeling good enough. She couldn’t understand why she always felt so badly about herself, until she realized that, along with all of her advantages, her parents had set up a subtle competitive dynamic between her and her brothers. When she was finally able see it, she could start to let go of the pressure and judgment that she had always placed on herself.
The darkness slips into light.
The first line of the Kumulipo adds further texture to this discussion of creation: O ke au I kahuli wela ka honua has been translated as, “At a time that turned the heat of the Earth” or “The active seed transforms the Earth with passion.” This points toward the hypothesis that there was never an actual beginning to creation, that all creation happens spontaneously of its own accord. It suggests a joyful intention—creation occurring for no other reason than to experience more of itself.
Well, that sounds like love, doesn’t it?
The Hawaiians believe that the creative void of the Po is not only the realm of the gods, but also the dwelling place of our Kane, or individual god-self. If this is true, and creation happens all by itself as an act of love, then we can assume love no matter what our experience, because each of us is an individual expression born out of that love. The Hawaiian proverb He punawai kahe wale ke aloha means, “Love is the spring that flows freely,” which Serge Kahili King interprets further as “Love is boundless and available to everyone.” The shaman trusts in the goodness and rightness of life by seeing it as a creation born of benevolence, inevitability, and a spark of love contained within each of us.
Hawaiian Magic
Historically, magic was a commonplace assumption on the islands of Hawaii. Like all indigenous peoples, the Hawaiians consciously participated in co-creative relationship with the forces of Nature, the universe, and their own minds to effect change and to influence events and circumstances in their physical world. This is called kalakupua, translated as “under control of mysterious or super natural power,” or simply as “magic.”
From a Huna perspective, magic is our birthright. It is a propensity in all of us that is as natural as any of our five senses, and our bodies and minds are the only tools that we need to practice it. Other than some cultural differences, Huna magic is essentially the same magic that is practiced in the Western Hermetic traditions. Occult associations can make it more complicated (and more loaded) for people than it needs to be, for magic is nothing more than conscious manifestation; the utilization of the natural forces of thought, emotion, energy, and spirit to bring about change. While we have all experienced this to a certain degree, Huna provides a conceptual framework that leads us to understanding and developing the magical resources within.
We have been socialized away from these intrinsic gifts, but to think like a shaman is to return to childlike ways of wonderment and imagination. Like children, shamans play with drums, rattles, and bells; daydream their way into faraway lands; and communicate with their “imaginary friends,” the spirits. Shamanism brings us back to a time when we were not victims of the empiricism of science and its postulation that if something can’t be measured or explained, it can’t be real. Further, many of us rejected the hypocrisy of organized religion and cynically threw the baby out with the bathwater on all things energetic and miraculous, deferring instead to a sterile, scientific view of an entirely mechanical world.
If we are lucky enough to still believe in magic, we are at odds with the judgmental and religious morality that is embedded in the collective unconscious of the West, whether we adhere to it or not. It tells us that we do not deserve to advocate for ourselves magically, and to do so is wrong, egotistical and, in some circles, blasphemous. But it’s not just our pulpits of origin that are the problem, we may also have self-limiting stories. These stories often originate in the wounding we received in our families or communities, and continue to disempower us from cultivating our magical gifts.
But from an indigenous perspective, you are here to live your best and most natural life, not the life that looks the most acceptable to your neighbors. Shamans practice magic from a place of deservingness and even entitlement. They give themselves full permission to want what they want, to honor their heart’s deepest yearnings, and to be unencumbered in their desires’ expression. As you will learn, this is what makes our magic most effective—it is the ache of our wanting that seeds kalakupua—our ability to make magic and do wonderous acts as shamans do—into full blossom.
To take this a step further, and I know I’ll be ruffling some feathers with this one, but here goes: Our primary obligation in this lifetime must be to ourselves. This is not selfish. It is centered on the self, yes, but it is not selfish. What is counterintuitive here is that when we focus on ourselves, the entire universe benefits.
The altruistic impulse that many of us have to contribute to humanity and to the planet happens most effectively when our own needs are met first. Because when they are met, we are able to give from our surplus, rather than from depletion or lack. The more gratitude that we feel in our fullness, the stronger our impulse to share becomes. The instruction that we hear on airplanes to secure your own air mask before helping others with theirs isn’t just practical advice, it’s shamanic thinking at its finest.
While the paths of spiritual anorexics, ascetics, martyrs, and barefoot yogis begging for food are considered legitimate by some in the West, they are, in my opinion, mostly symptomatic of spiritual bypass, or seeking to find spiritual solutions for real-world issues that can only be solved through concrete action. Instead, indigenous wisdom asks us to be in right relationship with the world. This means that we are in a constant cycle of receiving from the Earth, and then giving back to replenish her.
The ancient Hawaiians lived abundantly on their lands; they had a forest of fruit in the morning and an ocean full of fish in the afternoon. They unabashedly and gratefully practiced magic to increase the natural abundance provided throughout their archipelago. By maintaining a deep conversation with the dynamism of Nature and the infinitude of the cosmos, they developed a psychological framework that allowed them to see reality as a matrix of interconnectivity; one that was more energetic than it was material. In doing so, they learned to exist magically. It was this artful connection with life that captured the interest of the early researchers of Huna lore.
Dr. William Tufts Brigham (1841-1926), was an American geologist, ethnologist, and botanist, who lived for many years in Hawaii. As the first curator of Honolulu’s Berenice Pauahi Bishop Museum, which holds the largest collection of Polynesian artifacts in the world, from 1892 to 1918, Dr. Brigham spent much of his time researching the Kahunas. While he barely scratched the surface in excavating and understanding the ancient magical practices of the shamans of Hawaii, he was an instrumental player in influencing others to pick up where he left off. One of these was an American novelist and New Age author, Max Freedom Long, who became Brigham’s protégé during the later years of Brigham’s life, and was a tireless researcher and the author of many books on Huna.
Long’s writings on Huna from the earlier part of the twentieth century were clearly influenced by the Theosophical Society and the New Thought movement, but he was among the first to attempt to bring Huna wisdom out of the inland shadows of the secret dwelling places of the Kahunas. Long is a controversial figure, considered an outsider by traditionalists, because he provides us only with his interpretive view of Huna rather than an authentic one. Yet his fascination with Hawaii, his scholarship with its language, and his earnest yearning to understand the Kahunas cannot be denied.
Brigham made this observation of the mystical powers that he witnessed in the Kahunas, which he shared with Long:
“There is a set of laws for the physical world, and another for the other world. And, try to believe this if you can, but the laws of the other side are so much stronger, that they can be used to neutralize and reverse the laws of the physical.”
The magical practices of “the laws of the other side” to which Bishop alludes, and which Long and so many others were to study in depth, send the imagination reeling. There were stories of Pele-worshiping Kahunas who ritualistically walked on lava that had only just cooled and hardened, and was still well above the temperature that could incinerate a man. There was the Love Prayer, hana aloha, which could cause romantic infatuation, and the dark sorcery of the Death Prayer, ana‘ana, which could kill another person just by thought—a widely disdained practice considered dangerous for the practitioner. Trafficking in negative energy that extreme could cause illness or misfortune to the practitioner, and there were kahunas who specialized in reversing the ana‘ana prayer, sending it back to the very source from which it was sent.
There were also miraculous healings of physical illness through the use of massage (lomi lomi), herbs (pala‘au), and prayer (pule), as well as intricate divination systems (hailona) involving casting shells or stones to predict and change the future. It was commonplace for the Hawaiians to have spontaneous visions (akaku) of spiritual beings and to hear supernatural voices (ulaleo). And there were magical practices for fertility, spiritual protection, and harvesting crops, many of which are still in use today.
The Kahunas read omens (ho‘ailona) from plants and trees, animal behavior, the stars, and weather systems. Many of them could influence the weather to suit their needs. Certain aspects of the islands are still affiliated with the gods and goddesses traditionally worshipped by the islanders, and these are not symbolic; rather, they are considered to be a direct communion with the gods and goddesses themselves. So to look at the clouds is to behold Lono, the god of agriculture and rain, himself; Pele, the volcano goddess, is the lava; Kane, the god of procreation, makes a visitation in manifest form through the rainbow; and the moon isn’t a representation of the moon goddess Hina—rather, when we see the moon, we are actually in Hina’s presence.
This immediacy with the metaphysical opened the Hawaiians to messages from the gods (akua) or from the ancestors (aumakua) that offered insights into what time of the day the fish may be at their most plentiful for catching, or from what direction an enemy might attack. If the land and its spirits were able to communicate so effectively, it stood to reason that humans held the same propensity for influencing the outside world. Animism, the idea that everything is alive and conscious, is a cornerstone of shamanic thought. Huna takes it a step further by postulating that everything also wants to connect.
In Hawaiian thought, Mana is the power that can make these connections: aka is the substance through which Mana’s powerful influence makes things manifest, and our focused attention, Makia, fuels the process. These were the three factors that Bishop and Long, in their observations of the Kahunas, identified as the building blocks of Hawaiian magic. While Long’s work creatively elaborated on what he personally learned from studying the Kahunas, Mana, Aka, and Makia are universally accepted tenets of Hawaiian cosmology.
Mana, Aka, and Makia
