Humility and Huna

Well aloha and welcome to The Secret Art of Huna, where today I thought I’d talk about humility, modesty, and unpretentiousness. Not a subject you’d normally think to see me talking about but it is actually a core stone of the beliefs of the ancient Hawaiians, it’s a key aspect of Huna and I think it needs decomposing a little bit.

Particularly because as women in western society one of the challenges we face is that we’re too modest, we’re too humble, typically. Huge sweeping generalisation, but typically we are too modest, too humble, we don’t talk about what we’ve done and our successes and as a result we then feel left behind, left over because we tend to assume that just doing a good job is enough and quite often it isn’t.

So I thought this would be a fun bit of exploration. And I should say that when I started exploring Huna, learning about Huna, the thing that gave me the biggest difficulty was this question of humility, of modesty.

So the word in Hawaiian is and it just means, it means a number of things actually but humility, modesty, unpretentiousness are good translations in the context and context is always important in the Hawaiian language, in the context of Huna and spirituality.

Now culturally in Hawaii, one is humble, particularly for instance you honour your teachers, you honour your elders and that’s not just Hawaii, it’s common in the Polynesian culture and a number of cultures around the world. And you also, you don’t advertise.

So for example, our hula master, he was a long time ago was made a master of masters but he would never use that title until his own master was dead and he still doesn’t use it very much because that would be too much like bragging and culturally as I say for us, that’s like phew, that’s what women do and that’s what we’re not supposed to do. We don’t talk about ourselves. So what do you do with this?

Well I think, particularly from reading, I’ve been re-reading some of the work of Daddy Bray who was a very inspirational Kahuna in the lineage that I teach, the Bray James lineage that I teach and that I’ve studied.

Daddy Bray, the way Daddy Bray talks about humility, , is very much in the context of exploring your own spirituality and I think part of what he’s talking about is actually humility, surrender, to the higher power, source, the divine, God, whatever your word for that higher power is. It’s very easy to get into these kind of, almost battles, with the higher power.

I found myself recently doing a very conditional higher power please help me kind of thing where I was asking for help but I put a whole load of conditions on what I wanted the help to look like. Well actually that’s not the best way to ask for help, to pray for help from God or a higher source or the divine or whoever, whatever.

So it’s easy for us not to be humble in terms of our relationship with our higher power. If you think about it, each of us is but the pimple on the backside of the elephant. Here I sit in my room, in my little chair in my room on this amazing planet which in turn is part of an amazing universe, and an amazing galaxy.

We’re tiny. We’re really tiny. So it’s important that I remember that from time to time, that I am tiny. But as the pimple on the back side of the elephant, I’m connected, we’re all connected. There is a oneness that holds us all together.

The old saying of, “As above, so below.” Whatever is there above is reflected in the below, including in me. So I am a reflection of the divine. But I can still be humble, I can still show humility in relation to the divine. The other thing is that in the definition of aloha, there’s another word , which means truthful honesty, which is just as important as humility.

So truthful honesty means not just, it’s not just about telling the truth, it’s not just about avoiding white lies and lying to people and all that sort of stuff, it’s also about being honest about who you are, being honest about your qualifications, being honest about your achievements.

And there’s a balancing act that has to take place between humility and truthful honesty and as women, in the western culture, how do we make that balance work with this whole thing of we don’t talk about ourselves enough?

I grew up with a dad who, he didn’t criticise me very much, my father, but the one thing that all through his life he would criticise me for, he would say you’re too modest. I don’t particularly see myself as modest but my dad did see my modesty, he did see that I didn’t talk enough about what I’ve done and what my achievements are and I didn’t celebrate them enough.

And I think humility, it still allows us to celebrate our achievements in a way that we possibly don’t do enough.

It might be about, it’s not about bragging, but sharing, being truthful, about what we have done and what we’re capable of because if I want help from you and I don’t know what you’re capable of, I’m probably not gonna ask you for help. If you want help from me and you don’t know what I’m capable of, why would you ask me?

So when we share our capability, we allow other people to ask us for help, we allow other people to come to us, we allow ourselves to be servants to other people because that’s another aspect of humility, this being of service to others. And that’s very important in the Hawaiian culture, being of service to others.

All the great faiths have something to say about the question of humility or modesty or usually it’s humility and modesty and many of the native faiths do too. So this isn’t a question that just suddenly pops up in Huna, it’s a big question. It’s one that is difficult because like I say, culturally it’s ew, it feels weird, it feels Uriah Heep-ish.

But actually, when you do step into humility and you do step into that owning and honouring who you are and owning that in humility and gratitude for everything that has made it possible for you to be and for you to do, then I think that becomes incredibly powerful, energetically powerful, energetically attractive and certainly in terms of relationship with the divine, it’s an appreciation of what source or the divine or God has given me and enabled me to do and yeah, I think that’s a good thing.

So I hope you found this interesting and useful. If you wanna get in touch, do, secretartofhuna.com/diary or you can message me on Facebook in the usual way and I look forward to talking to you very soon. Aloha.

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