Tribe, Family (Ohana) And The Antidote To Loneliness

Well aloha and good morning from a beautiful sunny Hawai’i. I’m feeling very blessed this morning because we were supposed to have a hurricane coming through. Hurricanes, like tsunamis and earthquakes, are deeply, deeply inconvenient, and it’s downgraded itself to a tropical storm and luckily for us it decided not to pass immediately over the Hawai’ian Islands.

So feeling really, really blessed this morning, because if you look, the sea is beautiful, it’s calm. And the sky is, there’s some cloud around, but the sky is pretty blue. So yeah, I’m feeling blessed.

And I thought this morning I’d talk to you about tribe.

Tribe’s a really important concept in Hawai’ian. And they call it ohana, they call it family. Family isn’t just your blood family. Family in the Hawai’ian culture is your extended family, it’s friends.

In the hula schools, the halau, as they call them, the halau effectively becomes your ohana, your tribe. And when you’re in a tribe, you give everything you can to the tribe, and the tribe gives everything it can to you. It’s a support network.

One of the things that I’ve noticed a lot for myself and for friends in the UK, is a lot of us experience isolation because our tribe or our ohana isn’t really there or we don’t know how to use it, we don’t know how to ask the ohana for help.

In the Hawai’ian culture you don’t need to ask for help. In the Hawai’ian culture you stay alive to what’s going on with your tribe, with your ohana. And you step out and you step up, and when you see things aren’t quite right, then you go and help them, you go and support them.

Knowing that what goes around comes around and when the time comes and you need that support, somebody will notice and step up for you. So, people are watching out for each other in ohana. Again, something I don’t think we do necessarily in the Western culture, we’re so busy.

Not saying the Hawai’ians aren’t busy, they can be, I mean a lot of Hawai’ians are doing three day-jobs. But there is this sense of a support network, people there, your tribe.

So what I wanted to say in this video was, find your tribe, who is your ohana?

And it may be your blood ohana, it may be your blood family. Or it may be a group that you’ve connected with at some point along the way. But find your ohana, connect with it, engage with it. Give to your ohana. And then when the time comes, it’s easy for your ohana to give back to you.

What I love about the Hawai’ian ohana, like I say is, it doesn’t have to be bloodline. I have no family, I have cousins, but I have no immediate family, so I don’t have bloodline ohana.

Certainly for people like me, finding a tribe that isn’t necessarily bloodline, is really, really cool. But whether it is your family, your blood family, or whether it’s your adopted family, it makes such a difference.

So many of us complain of loneliness. So many of us complain of isolation or feeling unsupported or having to do it all ourselves, particularly as women. And when you find your tribe, knowing that your tribe will support you and you can support them, it’s such a gorgeous feeling. And actually, that’s one of the things that keeps me coming back to Hawai’i, 34 times now.

With my ohana, my tribe, I know with these guys here, where I teach, that anytime I need support they really, really are there for me even though most of them are on the other side of the planet from me. If all they can give me is energetic support, they’ll give me that. And if they can give me more support than that, they will do that too.

So, ohana, tribe…  Connect and give to yours today.

Aloha!

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