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.”