Aloha

Well, good morning. Aloha kakahiaka. I thought I’d make this quick video because it’s the last full day for me in Hawai’i. So it’s aloha to Hawai’i for me as well and I thought I’d talk about aloha.

The word aloha in Hawai’ian means several things.

It means love, it means hello, it means welcome and it means goodbye. And if you walk into a restaurant, you’ll hear, “Aloha, welcome.” Or if you walk into a hotel, the receptionist will always say, “Aloha, welcome to Hawai’i.” But aloha’s actually much, much more than just hello and goodbye.

The spirit of aloha, which really pervades the Hawai’ian culture, is all about unconditional love and coming from the heart. So when you come from the spirit of aloha, when you come from your puʻuwai, the beat of your heart, then you are really working in unity and harmony with yourself, with others, with everything on the planet.

You work with dedication and perseverance because aloha isn’t just a short-term thing. It’s a long-term thing; it’s forever. It’s all about humbleness.

Humbleness for us as Westerners, can be a bit of a struggle. But in the Hawai’ian culture, there is something about being at least modest, not telling everybody everything that you’re brilliant but being modest. At the same time as being modest, it’s important to be truthful.

So for example, in my case, I’m now a reverend and I have a PhD and I went to Oxford University, and yada, yada, yada. I’m modest about them. I don’t go out and tell everybody, in general, about these things. But if somebody asks me, somebody says, “Oh, I hear you have a PhD,” yes, of course I’m going to talk about it.

And sometimes in terms of the work that I do, I have to talk about my credibility, my credentials, and that’s true for many of us in the work that we do. We have to talk about our credibility and our credentials, and we need to be honest about them, not over-egg the pudding but be straight-talking. Balancing humbleness and truthfulness.

And truthfulness not just about our credibility, but truthfulness in all things. Telling the truth, speaking the truth, and speaking the truth to ourselves as well as to other people.

Aloha is also about the light, bringing in the light wherever you go. And I love that idea that we are beings of light and the more we can express our lightfulness in the world, the more joy we will find inside ourselves.

So that’s a really, really quick introduction to the spirit of aloha.

I’ll be doing a much longer video in the next month or two for the Secret Art of Huna Pioneers Club. That’s a membership club that I’ve just opened.

I hope you enjoyed this post and aloha from Hawai’i and the next time I talk to you will probably be from Yosemite.

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