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