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,