Shamanism isn't concerned with why you're here. You are- that's good enough. Now let's have a good life already, shall we?
This is the end of the post.
Oh- you insist on brooding until you receive answers to your questions? It's interfering with your ability to laugh, drink and be merry? Oh all right then, let's look into it. If that's what it takes, curious as that may be- here we go.
Now the honest answer is that no one really knows why we're here. The traditional shamanic sources are notoriously light on the subject because they seem to concern themselves with the here and now. The attitude is a bit like I described above. Who cares?
I know you care, so here we go. So what do you do when you can't find an answer to a life question in Huna? That's right, you go and find one that seems right, and if it works for you, you just made some new Huna! Well I'll be isn't that a neat philosophy that lets you do that, right?
So after buzzing through all sorts ideas about the subject, here's what my higher self came up with.
Basically you are a blob of energy-consciousness.
You are incarnate because you chose to be incarnate, and you got whatever challenges because you chose those as part of your life experience. It's not pointless, and whatever challenges you have are there to be overcome.
The most generic reason you can give is that incarnate life is an adventure. You do it for the thrill of it, because you really want the experience. Do you see how we are magically drawn to stories? Your life is a story, expertly crafted.
There is a legend going waaaaaaaay back about the single being who was so lonely their desire for companionship shattered them into a million pieces, starting the universe as we know it.
And relating to others, after all, is about stories. We all craft stories together. Stories are the first thing we want when we come here as little children.
And so the story of a world was created where, we look like we are this body being. But in reality, the entire world we experience- that's all us. The earth below our feet, the people we meet, the things that happen- it's all us. In a very real sense. And so we play the game.
But if that experience gets a little out of hand, we have the tools of shamanism to fix things. This is where the teachings really start to give you information. It's supposed to be a good story, after all!
There are a lot of different kinds of shamanic dreaming exercises. If you do those every day, you are incredibly likely to feel good most of the time. But there is also the time in-between. Going to the post office, keeping your bills paid, and if you're really down on your luck, online video meetings. This article is about keeping your good vibrations during those.
There is a single idea to keep in mind. If you decide an experience is going to be a good thing for you, then you will get a good effect. There is a really nice phrase in Kahili Hula, and it's Everything Is Working Out Perfectly, and because that's kind of long- we just say EWOP.
Do you daydream?
Try just letting your mind wander a little bit.
You might think of something that's been on your mind. Or you might think of something that just happened- or that might happen. Or you might think of something that you plan to do. All of these are fine.
Now pick one thing and think about it a little bit longer. If you just stay with it, you might begin to notice some more detail about it. Say, if you were thinking about having lunch later, it might occur to you that's Friday, and that would be a great day for a Burger, with fries. And the burger might have little Sesame seeds on it. And you might wonder if it's Olivia's shift today or Emmas at your favorite burger joint. And then you remember that it couldn't be Emma's, because she went back to Oakland for the summer to stay with her parents for a while.
This is dreaming.
Dreaming is not particularly encouraged for the most part. There are a few people who do it professionally, like writers. They will come up with a part of a story, and then they will just stay with the story, and the story will unfold, much like your dinner unfolded into the story about Emma from the diner. Writers often talk about how the characters will take on a life of their own. All they do, they say, is stay with them, and write it down.
Now, if you like, dream of something that happened from your childhood. Maybe it was something nice, like your mother holding you, or a birthday. Maybe it wasn't so nice, like getting whacked over the head with a stuffed animal by a little sibling, and they just won't stop. Anything will do. Did you remember something?
Now go in there...
... and change it. Make it better.
Your little sibling wasn't whacking you over the head with the stuffed animal. They were just showing it to you.
How does that feel?
Probably, you will feel better.
You will also find, while this was a small change, it is permanent.
You will feel less triggered by situations where you might have felt similarly than this.
This is shamanism.
There are endless varieties, but still, it's always the same.
We let our mind pick something up. We experience the dream. And then we change it. Improve it. Make it better.
This is healing. Dreaming to heal. That's what shamanism is. The rest is details.
I gave a quick definition of the Haipule, the main Huna reality shaping technique. This is the heavy-duty tool. If you want to pick up a career in acting at age 50, this is the tool to use. If you think something is impossible by any reasonable way, but you are still fascinated by it- Haipule will get the job done.
I will take the example of having ten million bucks. Add or lose a zero if you like, doesn't matter- we are talking about a stupendous amount of money for those who aren't used to it. I take a personal power goal on purpose- I feel that most of us have an easier time helping others than standing up in the most deserving way possible and say: This big thing is what I would like for me! But having said that- my teacher Serge likes to use the Haipule for world peace. If you look at the trend- it's working.
As is customary with Huna teachings, telepathy isn't something you need to do anything special about. It happens naturally. But with Huna, you can do it on purpose. Then you can master it.
You are connected to everyone and everything all the time. There are little cords going out from you to everyone else, the question only is how thick they are. When you think about someone, you strengthen the connection.
If you are scientifically inclined, think of it as an electromagnetic-like energy with more resonance the more power the transmitter and the more tuned the receiver.
If you think about your parents, you have a connection. If you think about the philosopher Plato 2000 years ago, you have a connection to him, because telepathy transcends time. If you think about Mickey Mouse, you have a telepathic connection to Mickey Mouse! Because fictional worlds need to exist in order for someone to write about them. You can even have telepathic conversations with different versions of you who made different major decisions in life, with your past lives, with your ancestors, you name it. There are no limits.
There is a uniquely shamanic way to get things done.
Normally, we make a plan, follow the plan, handle all sorts of contingencies, and then nitpick about the result until we have no choice but to let it go.
Getting something done shamanically works a bit differently. We sit down in a comfortable place, a hammock works wonderfully. Then we imagine what that sort of thing we want done would look like. We see it in our mind until it's clear. We learn to move it around, and look at it from all angles. We notice little details. We might even chose to have more detail in one area, and less detail in another area where we don't care about the details as much.
Then, we will send it up to the high self, and proclaim: This is done! and that's it.
Then we go and find fun things to do, until the time comes again for imagination.
We will do zilch about whatever we want done, at least for a while.
Then, sometimes, we will notice that somebody else already did what we wanted done. Sometimes, we will find an irresistable urge to do something completely different at just a certain time and sure enough, that leads us to what we wanted done just falling into our lap.
Yet another time, we might get an irresistable urge to follow the completely normal and common sense steps to getting the thing done, and it will be done amazingly quickly with time to spare to go out and party!
To the outside eye, it looks like laziness, but it's not- it's harnessing a power greater than ourselves to get things done. And even in the greatest frenzy of activity it feels like somewhere between a light snooze and a fun game. It's a good way to live.
One of the hardest things you can do is fall in love and have a relationship. I'm not saying this to discourage you, but I mean it as a compliment. It means that whether you're just thinking about a relationship, or met someone and are wondering if they like you back, or have been married for 50 years- you are already doing really good just for having a go at it!
There's a reason for that. It affects every part of your life. Your identity, your plans, your physical surroundings, your body, your thinking, everything. No one else will ever get that close to you.
You can think of a relationship as something that is going to take every aspect of your being and give it a good shake!
So it's naturally going to hurt... that is, unless you are flexible.
Movement only hurts if you're not flexible.
So the first thing you want to do if you are interested in having or improving a love relationship is to be as flexible as you can be in your mind. The best way I know to do this is to have a few things you want to make happen for yourself, and also to clean up as many emotional snags as you can. You don't have to wait by any means, but it's good to have an ongoing process of making things better for yourself.
Then, the next step, whether you are already in a relationship or not, is to love them.
When I started out doing Huna, I would just forget about it for months at a time until it occurred to me again to practice. Like clockwork, when I was doing Huna, things were peachy, and when I wasn't doing Huna, they were not. But why on earth could I not just keep going?
I started giving myself a precise schedule, with timers and reminders. That worked a little bit, but it took the fun out of it. What was the point of living a life of magic and wonder if I needed to be this bureaucratic about it?
I was feeling bummed out about this, and did some Huna to cheer myself up.
Then it hit me. If I could train myself to respond with 'doing Huna' to certain situations, I was going to be in business. My practice would adapt automatically to whatever my schedule was at the time.
Huna has a lot of different concepts, and it can be a bit confusing to know where to start. For us Westerners it's made worse because Huna doesn't tell you where to start- you're supposed to find your own way to learn them by asking the right questions. Like many other archetypes, Huna has integrated what is broadly known as the seaker's quest.
But there's no reason we can't make it easier. Here are all of the Huna concepts I have learned. See if you feel drawn to and follow up with the full article about them if you do. This will give you a full course on Huna and should get you to the point where you can anchor and deepen your practice directly with your own higher self- then you've got it licked!
In most of Western teaching you are not assumed to be in charge, so when you learn Huna, it can be very confusing that there is no one there to tell you what to do.
This is a feature, not a bug. The point of Huna is to make you free. So if you want to learn Huna, the best way to do it is to fix a problem in your life.
Broke? Pick this.
Stuck? Pick that.
Airheaded? Pick that!
Angry? Pick that.
Huna is a philosophy that will allow you to change everything about your life that is humanly possible. If you can't do it with Huna, there is a weird spiritual reason grafted to reality itself, and that is rare, friends. Everything else is fair game.
And now for the big one- how to get rich, using Huna.
To answer your first question up front- yes, I have!
When the news reaches you and that news is not good- it disturbs you, and you find yourself going into a spiral of feelings of violent rage- and I'm speaking from personal experience right now- then it is a good time to heal yourself, and do your part to heal a situation.
The first thing to know is that you- right now- don't have to do anything about those feelings. You can just let them run their course. If you're like me, and the unbearable made you think and feel thinks you didn't quite know you had in you- that's okay. You don't have to act on it. You can do things differently, but you you don't need to hold back on feeling these things.
After you've done that for a while, acknowledging what you feel, realizing it isn't pretty, and doesn't have to be pretty, and you don't need to do anything right away- you will reach a point where those feelings have run their course and you will feel more calm. You don't have to force yourself to get there, it will come by itself. It helps to know you don't have to do anything about those feelings, for the time being- but if they do stir you into doing something, and that is a good thing, like reaching out to people you love- go ahead! My point is that if you get really angry and you feel like harming people or similar- there is nothing wrong with you. This is a pretty normal reaction to harsh events. But it is important to know you don't have to do anything about this, you can let these feelings run their course and only act when you can tell that there is some sort of inspiration coming through from them and you will be acting in a way that is good, that helps.
Now that most of the techniques and ideas in Huna Kupua have been shared on this blog, we'll be focusing on a new kind of article- the How-To. In these, we'll be going through processes of getting specific things done using Huna, with examples of chosing a goal, picking techniques to use, meeting challenges and persistently following through until a change has been achieved.
We'll start with the biggest one- taking charge of your entire life.
Don't worry- this may sound intimidating, but it's not about forcing yourself to go somewhere you "should" go, that very idea is completely foreign to Huna. We will simply learn from you which things are already very important to you, and acknowledge them so you can be yourself even better.
To give yourself direction, it's good to chose a core philosophy of life. There are lots of different ones, and personally, I chose Huna's- nothing else has ever given me that much freedom and still that much power. Huna's core philosophy is in its first principle:
When you are using any sort of mind technique- affirmation, visualization, the super effective Haipule combination, meditation, belief clearing- you are changing what the subconscious mind believes.
This has two interesting effects.
One, you feel good right now. Your life energy is flowing through new, positive beliefs.
Two, because of this, the life events that are lining themselves up to happen reflect the new beliefs as well, so they will also feel good.
One of the most powerful and unique techniques I found in Huna is called dreamchanging.
Dreamchanging is a type of visualization where you take an experience you don't care for very much, and change it, in your mind, into one you do like.
You can use it to change the outcome of an unpleasant night dream after waking up.
But- strikingly- you can use it in your everyday life to change the way your everyday life unfolds.
Don't you just love arguing with people who already made up their mind?
No?
Me neither. Who does? It's like trying to walk through a brick wall by taking a running start.
Even worse- how are we supposed to know our own ideas are true? Any idea can feel true, ideas are designed to feel true if you act like it long enough.
The most straight forward solution to this problem is violence. If you seem threatening enough, people tend not to disagree with you very much, at least not to your face. But this approach has, among others, the disadvantage that you don't learn very much any more and are stuck with what you learned when you were more accommodating.
Then a group of people a long time ago came up with the idea that you could just stubbornly argue it out until everybody agrees. They put their ideas in writing and their students are still arguing about them to this day.
Another group of people decided they would carefully set up special situations to test their ideas and then, depending on the outcome, everyone would have to agree. They tried it with falling rocks and turning gears and it worked really well for a while, but then people noticed it's really hard to set this sort of thing up when humans are involved. You just can't draw many conclusions from one person to the next because everybody is different and is always changing.
Even if we can test human behavior there's this little catch that the more important something is, the less obvious it is to other people because it gets very personal and very specific and very emotional. In other words, it gets subjective: defined by experience and relationships and strong bonds and big ideas. Can you imagine a harder place to go looking for universal truth with an inquisitive mind than another person's psyche? Let alone many people! It's so hard that the idea-testing crowd usually just throws in the towel and reverts to arguing that individual experience just isn't all that important.
Huna has a really, really elegant solution to all of these problems. Huna says: If it works, it's true.
The sixth principle of Huna is called "All Power Comes From Within" and it is related to the- hold your horses- the second-most important thing in life, according to the Huna philosophy.
Huna is very particular in this way. The most important thing bar none is love. Love is the end all and everything. Love is what everything is about, and even not-so-loving things are really only able to make love more recognizable no matter how mistaken they are or how hard they try otherwise.
I had an interesting experience last night. I woke up about three thirty in the morning and couldn't really go back to sleep,and after about an hour I kind of collapsed, exhausted.
I didn't exactly go to sleep- I was fully conscious and I could tell what was happening. But I wasn't exactly awake, either- I could see an image forming in front of me- I could see a line of cliffs and ocean extending to it, and huge waves which interestingly were coming from the cliffs towards me, outwards and away from the shore line.
To Love Is To Be Happy With is the fifth of seven principles of the ancient philosophy of Huna Kupua.
You can bungle all the other ones, reinterpret them to mean completely different things because then they fit your habits better, because that's more comfortable, while pretending to have made progress, because that feels good. You can sputter your energy all over the place and make your very existence a hapless exercise of half baked perplexity. You can be dogmatic and rigid and self-serving and deliver morsels of self-righteous hubris to anyone willing to listen. You can cower under a table most of your time and just stay there because it's a great way to stay out of trouble. If you get love right, none of that matters- your life will be a good one. You can royally screw up all the other principles, if you get this one right, you're good. Intrigued yet?
Love. The alpha and the omega. The be all and the end all. The core of every spiritual teaching- even the ones that don't make it very obvious. The only universal principle. The reason to exist, build civilizations, and get out of the bed in the morning, to meditate, have relationships with each other, own pets, not own pets, go skydiving, surfing and whale watching, for music, for philosophy, for math- and eating pizza. Poems have been written, duels and wars fought, wars prevented and duels rigged so nobody gets hurt, nuclear missiles sabotaged, condiments spread on sandwiches, wheat ground and shaped into noodles (did I give away my Italian heritage with that one?), cows farmed, cows kept in sanctuaries, houses built, houses burned down, wolves shot, wolves protected, chemicals developed, forests guarded, books written, amulets crafted, clothes designed, yarn spun, floors swept, computers invented. In a burning, chaotic urge to feel better about ourselves and the world around us. For love.
I'd been feeling a little off for a while.
I usually keep myself in pretty good emotional condition but this time, no matter what I tried to get better, it just seemed to make it worse. My back was in painful knots, I was grumpy, touchy, looking out of my eyes like a hungry lizard out of his cave, ready to lunge at someone. I knew this wasn't going to go well for long, so I decided to use my spiritual power of last resort: Distraction! So after a really unsatisfying session of watching television I decided to try a spiritual technique that I'd ignored so far because I didn't know what it was good for: Astral Projection.
The most reliable technique that I found in Huna Kupua, and also the most flexible, is symbol healing. Most other techniques like the La'a Kea, the Haipule, dream changing or journeying be considered variants of symbol healing with different emphasis and different flavors. On the four levels of reality, which are four distinct ways of perceiving the world around you, symbol healing is entirely a third-level technique. You look at the world as a representation of something else.
The fourth principle of Huna Kupua is called: Now is the moment of power.
Like all of the teachings of Huna Kupa I have encountered, it is both a common sense, everyday experience, and profoundly deep spiritual knowledge.
Most spiritual teachings, no matter where they come from and when they came about, recommend some version turning your attention to the present moment. It is featured in almost all schools of self-mastery, traditional or modern- martial arts, marksmanship, academia, acting, rhetoric, athletics, dance, gymnastics or Yoga. You could fill entire libraries with the pop psychology books about it. And there is this very personal experience that when you're paying attention to what's happening, and you're not hemming and hawing- you feel better, and people like you more.
But why?
The third principle of the Kahili shamanic tradition explains just about everything that happens to you, ever.
Energy Flows Where Attention Goes
So in the traditional Kahili shamanic worldview, there is such a thing as energy- you can probably feel it tingling if you like to meditate, or listen to really good music, or are in a place where everyone is happy and relaxed, and even though, you feel like the place is bursting with energy.
It is also what you notice when you see someone and think that person has a lot of energy, and then you might be strongly drawn or strongly repulsed based on that person's ideas, but you're not usually unmoved. Or you can see that someone is doing really well at something, like sports, or art, and you are moved somehow, by witnessing it.
Or you can experience a place with not so much energy that can have an eery feel, like a room where people are feeling a little awkward, or an abandoned building, or someone having a hard time for whom the simplest daily tasks are obviously very difficult, like getting up a short flight of stairs or getting their wallet out of their pocket. Or people who are just being slow, and you can just tell that person just isn't likely to be doing a lot of things today. People say it casually, there isn't a lot of energy in that room, or they're worried about Joe, he's been low energy lately.
So there is such a thing as energy, and it matters a lot to everyone's life. That's great! But now what?
The great, practical secret of this principle is that your energy follows your attention.
That's big. Why? Because your attention is, and is probably the only thing that is, totally under your control.
I've been using- and teaching- a really simple technique recently, to clear up some pretty intense bad feelings I was having that came up while I was working on a really ambitious money goal of mine.
It goes like this:
Whenever you don't feel so good, pay attention to the body feelings you get from it. So you let yourself feel that a little bit until you get a sense of what that feeling is about.
And then, you ask yourself: "What would I have to believe in order to feel this?
Expect a straight, short, comprehensive answer. If you don't get it right away- keep focusing on that question. Sooner or later, something will come to your attention.
Once you've got it, you're done. Nothing else to do, it's gone.
Now this technique is really, really, really simple, and it's also kind of technical, but it works- really well. It's the only way so far I found to get rid of ideas I don't in a way that feels like a clean slate, completely gone.
The most fundamental idea in shamanism- to explain it to someone with a background in Western-style thinking, it would sound very differently to explain to someone indigenous because those things that go without saying vary so much around the world- is that consciousness is more fundamental than time and space.
We are not living in a physical world, and then consciousness erupts fully armed from someone's forehead (to quote a Western legend). We are blobs of consciousness, dreaming of a physical world, together.
Yeah. Groovy, isn't it?
I remember very well the first time I grasped this I spent hours staring at my feet running up the hill towards my university yelling to myself in my mind (I hope it was in my mind) "It looks so real! It looks so real! It looks so real!"
Now the kicker is that, once you've gotten over your initial reaction (provided it came as a surprise), it doesn't change that much. The dream is still there. You interact with your dream as your dream character the same way as you used to interact with your perceived real world as a perceived real character. Your dream still works the same way- it is still good to pay your dream bills and interact with your dream government departments at the dream appropriate times to avoid dream trouble.
You can still describe your dream world using dream mathematics to make certain dream predictions and use dream tools to build other dream tools to do certain things you couldn't to before, which results in having stuff in your dream like electric cars and the Internet.
If you want to dream-fly, it's still a really good idea try to lift off while standing on a level surface rather than after having jumped off a dangerously high area, in case you need more than one attempt. Because it is still possible to take a dream exit by using very familiar mechanisms for transforming your body into something the dream rules say will now blend into the environment.