What is Huna?
I’ve been running Secret Art Of Huna now for over two years. There’s a lot of people who joined and a lot of people expressed interest in Huna. I know that for some of you, it’s a kind of a curiosity, but you don’t really know very much about it. So this is particularly for you, but it’s also for any of my friends, my colleagues, my peers, who are interested in hearing my take on what Huna is.
About Me
I’m Dr. Jane Lewis. I’m an Ordained Interfaith Minister. I have a PhD in Spirituality and Leadership and the topic of spirituality that I covered in depth was Huna. I’ve been studying it now for about 23 years and teaching it at workshops in Hawaii for 15 years. So I’ve been immersed in it for a long time.
Huna saved my life. It really did. I was depressed and it turned everything around for me. It made it possible for me to believe that it was possible to be happy. So I am now happy. I am now grateful and so much of that has been down to Huna and the practises that I learned. That’s why I’m such an advocate for it because I know what it can do for you. I know what it did for me.
It’s down to Huna that I have the relationship that I have. Obviously yeah, I took some steps on my own but so much of that was down to Huna and changing my thinking and using Huna in the way I thought about myself. Financially, the attitude that I had to money was not great but working with Huna, I’ve been able to develop my attitude towards money and I feel really comfortable financially.
So Huna’s done many, many things to me. And as I say, I’m an absolute advocate for it. For me personally lots and lots of reasons to be an advocate for Huna, to teach it, to share it. I know that for many of the people that I’ve studied Huna alongside, the same thing is also true.
What is Huna?
What is this thing that we call Huna? Huna is a Hawaiian word and it means secret. Hundreds of years, Huna was at one level closely guarded. Now, Huna is the spiritual, energetic, shamanistic and healing practises of the ancient Hawaiians. That’s kind of the quick definition. But actually, Huna is much, much more than that.
It’s very fundamental to the Hawaiian way of being, the Hawaiian way of life. It’s a very western thing to separate out a lot of our more spiritual healing and energetic practises. So, on the one hand, I have spiritual healing and the energetic, and on the other hand, I have life. It’s not like that in the Hawaiian system. They’re all part and parcel of the same thing. We don’t separate in the way that the west does. It was carefully guarded because it was so much part of life.
People didn’t guard it, but there were experts. Kahuna means an expert. There were many different kinds of experts. There were canoe experts, there were healing experts, there were fishing experts. They’re experts across the many disciplines. And each expert teaches a set of teachings, like canoe building or fishing. They might have knowledge that was kept hidden for a while. But eventually, people would come to know.
Canoe building wasn’t just sort of taking a bit of wood and putting it together. It gets started with choosing the right tree. And you’d go out, and you’d talk to the tree, you’d connect with the tree. And you’d either get a sign or a symbol that this was the right tree or you’d get a feeling inside that this was the right tree. That’s really where the secret bit was.
So many of these teachings had a secret aspect. It was the aspect that wasn’t generally known. But in the 19th century with the coming of mormon missionaries and other Westerners to Hawaii, the teachings, the old teachings, the old ways started to be driven underground, because they were not regarded as well they weren’t regarded but they weren’t Christians, so they weren’t regarded as Christian. And they weren’t regarded as proper whatever that might mean. So they became illegal.
They were actually made illegal. They went underground. Even if they hadn’t been illegal, there was the danger that they would be corrupted. So a lot of the people who knew about who knows, wouldn’t share it. Then there was the fact that in the 60s and 70s, Huna became a little bit uncool. So families who’d be brought up in the Huna tradition didn’t want to share it. The kids didn’t wanna learn it which is why my teacher’s father, so Tad James, arrived in Hawaii, he was a transcender and meditator at the time.
Somebody realised that he was somebody they could teach Huna to, teach the ancient teachings to, to perpetuate them because Daddy Bray, Poppa Bray, the lineage that I know, Poppa Bray’s family, they didn’t want it. They didn’t want to perpetuate it. So Huna is a Hawaiian word. It means secret. It’s not what the Hawaiians would call this. But it has a truth about it because it is to some level unseen. It was to some level not shared, not explored. It certainly became very uncool in the 60s and 70s. It’s actually become pretty cool now. So a lot of people are interested.
Friend of mine, Dr. Patrick Scott, Patrick Scott is also a Kumu Huna. Kumu means teacher but it’s like an honorary title. You don’t give it to yourself. Someone else gives it to you. Your teacher gives it to you. He and I are both Kumu Hunas. It’s a bit like having an honorary PhD or something. Patrick talks about Huna as being yoga for the mind. So it’s a set of tools and techniques and practises that come from the Hawaiian tradition, that expands your mind, expands your consciousness, expands your connection, deepens your connection, both with yourself and with the source.
Of course, when you’re more deeply connected with yourself and you’re more deeply connected with source, then you’re more deeply connected with the planet around you. The late, great John Kaimikaua, who is a teacher of ours, wonderful, wonderful man. He used to say that if you want to be really ponar, really right with yourself, really connected with yourself, then you needed to be connected in three directions.
The first direction was with the planet and everything on the planet. So that’s humans, animals, and plants. It’s the entire package, that we call the planet. How relevant that is now today, I was watching David Attenborough’s programme last night about extinction. How we’re extinguishing species because we’ve lost that connection to the planet. So John would say that you have to be connected to the planet and everything on it, and aware and conscious of the planet.
You need to be connected to Ke Akua, which is the Hawaiian word for God. It could also mean source, the universe, God, that sense of a higher organisation. So connected with God and connected with yourself. And it’s so easy these days to be disconnected from yourself. I know that when I was doing the whole clinical depression thing, one of the reasons I think why I was clinically depressed was I’d lost my connection with myself.
Because I’d lost my connection with myself and I didn’t have any connection really with God or source or universe, I had when I was a teenager but I’d kind of put that to one side. It was really difficult to feel that sense of wholeness and connectedness and happiness and joy. Because when you are connected, that happiness and that joy really, really comes in.
Huna covers a number of different things. As I said, you can lose, you can sort of very quickly describe it, as the energetic and the shamanic and the healing and the spiritual practises of the Hawaiians. But within that, there’s a number of things that Huna covers. We do teach a lot of tools and techniques for release, releasing things in yourself, old beliefs, old emotions, suppressed stuff, that’s holding you back, or doesn’t allow you to really become the person that you want to be and have what you want to have in your life.
So we teach tools and techniques for that. We teach Ho’oponopono. A lot of people have heard of Ho’oponopono now because Joe Vitale has amazingly gone out there and shared it with a lot of people. He’s a professional marketer. He knows how to market. He shared it. The way we teach Ho’oponopono in the lineage I teach is a little bit different, but it’s still Ho’oponopono. It’s still the making everything right with you and with me so that we can come to a place of forgiveness.
We also teach connection with the higher self, with the source. So we teach how to connect. We teach about the connection with the elements, how to become really aware of these five elements in the Hawaiian system and how our connection with the planet, how our connection with everything around us, becomes so much more special and deep, and truly magnificent, and gives us that ability to really draw on different aspects.
If you wanna be more grounded, drawing on earth, how to draw on fire so that you can be more passionate and motivated when you’re sitting there thinking. So we teach connection with the elements. we teach dream interpretation. A very important part of the tradition. It was a very important part of the healing process to learn how to interpret your dreams.
We teach a model of psychology, a Hawaiian model of psychology, where there’s the higher self, there’s the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. It’s a model that’s been around for hundreds of years. Freud started to describe it in the 19th century, and then Jung in the 20th century. So there’s a psychology behind it as well.
We teach healing practises. You can use the elements for healing, healing yourself and healing other people. We teach a lot around, we have a whole energy system. It’s Reiki’s nearest parallel. It’s not Reiki. It works differently with the Reiki. But it’s using symbols which Reiki also uses. It’s using symbols to draw in energy and describe the energy and talk about energy and feel the energy and send energy to others and use energy.
So Huna is about an awful lot. But ultimately, it’s about learning how to be more deeply connected with yourself, more deeply connected with the planet and the people around you, and the animals and all the parts of the planet. Being more connected to source, higher self, God, whatever you call that. And through that, to really bring in joy and happiness. That’s really the essence of what it’s about.
To be honest, the easiest way for me to teach it is for me to give you an experience of it. So if you are interested in that, stay connected to the Facebook page. Like the Facebook page and stay connected to it. Ladies, you can join the Secret Art Of Huna For Powerful Transformation, the Facebook group. I talk about it on LinkedIn, and from time to time, I do share tools and techniques. I run webinars.
There are plenty of ways for you to get more deeply under it. But just as a really quick idea of some things that you can do with Huna. One of the things that you can do with Huna is a quick breathing process. The great thing about this breathing process is that it actually is brilliant for stress because it connects you with the relaxed part of your nervous system. What they call the autonomic nervous system.
Certain breathing processes hook you up to your autonomic nervous system, really help you relax. The Huna one is where you breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth. The out-breath is twice as long as the in-breath. As you’re doing it, just start to notice a calmness coming in. You can do this anywhere, anytime for any length of time, particularly if you need just to connect with a bit of relaxation, a little bit of distress. I do it first thing in the morning, sets me up for the day. And I’ll quite often do it at night before I go to sleep, just lying down. It takes me into sleep if I do it lying down.
There’s meditation. Meditation is such a powerful way of connecting up with yourself and with that higher sense. So we have a particular meditation that we teach. Another thing that you can do, is to use peripheral vision. Just like the breathing, peripheral vision hooks you up to that relaxed part of your nervous system, the autonomic nervous system. The parasympathetic nervous system in fact, so that you can actually be relaxed and it’s wonderful if you go out in nature, in expanded awareness in Hakalau, as it’s known in Hawaii.
If you go out into nature in Hakalau, it looks like the trees are walking alongside you. It’s quite extraordinary. So that’s a couple of things that you can do easily and quickly, to get into a kind of Huna groove. If you’d like to learn more, book a session with me, secretartofhuna.com/diary, and you can book a complimentary session. Or as I say, find me on LinkedIn, hook in on Facebook, Secret Art Of Huna and like the page. Ladies join the Secret Art Of Huna For Powerful Transformation group.
Prefer To Listen?
I’ve added this to my podcast too! Listen or download by using the player below. Or subscribe via iTunes, Stitcher or your favourite podcast app by searching for Secret Art Of Huna.
