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