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Encounters on
the Shaman's Path
with anthropologist Dr. Hank Wesselman, PhD.
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by Dr.Hank Wesselman, P.h.D. |
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The Bowl Of Light
Our columns over the past three months have been focused upon how I came into relationship with a Hawaiian elder, a man named Hale Makua who was also a kahuna nui, a high priest, as well as ali’i nui—a high chief. In our last column, I recounted parts of the meeting that my wife Jill and I had with him and his partner Nina on December 31, 1996, one that unfolded on the rim of the volcano Kilauea, a side vent on the great mountain Mauna Loa’s southeastern slope.
I have related how my wife Jill had gone for a walk with Nina, leaving the kahuna and me alone so that we could get to know each other and establish rapport, and this is precisely what then occurred.
I had asked Makua about his life and his genealogy, then listened open mouthed as he mentioned some of his illustrious family members and his immediate (and distant) ancestors. This was the topic of last month’s column—one in which I also shared some of what I knew about my own ancestors with him.
This knowledge contributed greatly to the rapport that came into being between us, for this was correct protocol in Makua’s eyes as an indigenous elder, although I didn’t fully understand this in those days. In the circles of Polynesian elders with which he met on a regular basis, before anything of note could be discussed, each person present had to ‘chant’ their ancestors. It was a way of saying who you are, but it was also considerably more.
In that vast oceanic world that today is called Polynesia, crossed and recrossed through time by countless migrations of tribal peoples, it was also a way of determining how they were all related to each other. And when a gathering occurred, each would chant their lineages of ancestors and all would listen for that name that revealed familial connection.
But on that day, the last day of the year in 1996, much was still being brought into being, and I sensed rightly that the chief was aware of this and that he had come to help me out. I thought about the visionary experiences that I had had while living on the island in the late 1980s and wondered what the chief would have to say about them.
“The positive polarity of spiritual experience is validation,” he suddenly volunteered. No hiding from this guy, I thought. He just smiled and nodded. “We have been drawn together for a reason,” he continued gently. “We agreed to have this meeting before we were born, before we came into this life. I have been looking for you for a long time. I knew that we would eventually meet. I just didn’t know when… or where.”
“Why, Makua? How did you know this?” The scientist within me wanted to hear him say it.
“We agreed to meet up during this life so that we could continue the work we began together so very long ago…” He left the thought hanging again, his eyes luminous in their knowing. “We have a responsibility, you and I… and Nina and Jill as well,” he turned and looked over his shoulder, and sure enough, we could see them (our women) returning from their walk. “They are part of it, a big part!” he laughed.
“But when I read your book Spiritwalker, I suddenly knew who you were and that you were the one I had been looking for all these years.” He flexed the muscles of his arms and hands to break the tension, and he looked me over with considerable satisfaction.
“What is coming into being is all part of the plan that was set into motion long ago by the ancestors. It’s what we all signed up for!” and he laughed again with the pure joy of it, his long bushy beard quivering with mirth.
“There are things we must discuss, things that will come into being through our knowing of each other…” He watched me attentively, reading me like a book. “None of this has happened by accident, you know. There is a hidden agenda at work here, one of which you and I can only be partially aware, for there are always others involved, and they too affect the shape and the quality of it.”
We looked at each other then, with mutual approval and with a growing sense of confidence that all was just as it was meant to be. Makua grinned and nodded, picking up on my thought, then he laughed again with a proclamation--“Everything is right on track!”
It was a statement I would hear him make many times in the years to come.
Jill and Nina rejoined us then, looking us over and perceiving to their satisfaction that all was in order. Our friendship had taken root, and the bond between us had been cemented, chief to chief. Yet I was also aware through my training as an anthropologist how important protocol was to indigenous people and I suspected (rightly) that I would have to find my way into correct alignment with this Hawaiian elder. I also felt reassured that he would wait for me to find that path, and that he already knew that transgressions would occur.
I was a Westerner. He was a traditional elder. We lived in different worlds, yet those realities were now beginning to be drawn closer together. Neither of us knew for sure what would eventuate. But there was expectation, and in response, the unknown began to open and it beckoned to us both.
Jill and Nina sat down and the four of us then spoke of many things, freely shared from the heart, carried on our breath, on our “ha,” and in those moments, we were all aware that this dialogue possessed a vitality and an energy that was vital—and new. As a writer, I understood that all this was going to be difficult to capture with the written word. Yet feelings of warmth, friendship, and trust grew between us, and throughout, the Hawaiian elder exuded power and gentleness, wisdom and humility—all enriched with his heartfelt aloha.
He spoke of the double-hulled voyaging canoe Makali’i berthed in the harbor on the Kohala Coast at the port of Kawaihae, and how it had become a floating school on which Hawaiians were rediscovering themselves and their heritage. He even surprised me by saying that I would sail on the canoe, if that was my wish, and that a great transoceanic voyage to Rapa Nui, Easter Island, was in the planning stage.
As the afternoon progressed, the shadows grew long and the light softened, and the time of departure approached. I noted that the lenticular cloud formation above Mauna Loa was still there. Makua looked at it too, then glanced at me curiously and said: “I am aware that your descendant Nainoa is tapping into your mind from time to time to recover lost knowledge of the past. He is, isn’t he?” I nodded, startled. The older man laughed and observed offhandedly that there was much that could be shared that would be of value to Nainoa and his people.
Then Makua stood up, and using his stick as support, he walked over to his truck and reached into the bed behind the cab. He returned to the table under the shelter with a large pu’olo, a ti-leaf bundle that was wrapped and tied in the traditional style. He presented it to Jill and me with a grin and the simple word makana--“gift.” We eyed the large, leafy bundle with anticipation for long moments, savoring this moment in the dying light of the last day of the year. Then we opened it excitedly and found within a beautiful bowl made of kamani wood in the Hawaiian style.
“This is your bowl of light,” intoned the kahuna with a warm smile, “the light that was a gift from your aumakua, your higher ancestral spirit soul that divided itself before you were born. Each of us comes into the world from the great beyond with our bowl of light. This light nourishes us and sustains us as we pass through life… and as we grow in experience and wisdom, things happen.
“Sometimes we lie. Sometimes we steal, and sometimes we injure others through our thoughts, our actions, or our words. When we engage in the negative polarity in this manner, it is as though we put a stone in our bowl and some of our light goes out. Slowly through time, our bowl of light fills up with stones and our light dims until it is nearly gone.”
Makua stopped and looked at us with great seriousness. “The great problem in the world today is that the whole show is being run by men whose bowls of light are filled with stones. There is no light shining forth from their bowls, despite what they may think and proclaim as so, and we can observe the result.”
He looked away, toward the crater, for long moments, and then continued. “Hopefully, we wake up to what is going on and discover what we are doing.” The elder paused dramatically, his expressive dark eyes luminous. “At that moment, we become aware that our bowl of light is almost filled with stones… and that there is almost no light shining forth. And you know what do we do then?” He paused. Jill and I were hanging on every word.
He took the wooden bowl from me and turned it over, shaking it vigorously. “We simply dump it out!” Huge laughter, shared by us all. “ We start over then but from that time forward, things are different. From then on, we begin to live our lives with awareness, braided with the cords of aloha. And it is then, precisely then, that we begin to walk our path as spiritual warriors.”
The Hawaiian elder looked us over slowly. “As spiritual warriors, the path that we walk is narrow, and it is constrained by three sacred kapus, three sacred directives… Since you have reached that place of knowing, I can offer these three kapus to you:
Love all that you see-- with humility…
Live all that you feel-- with reverence…
Know all that you possess-- with discipline.
“When we love all that we see, this can only come from a place of humility. I worked on that one for seven years,” he observed and we all shared a laugh. “When we live what we feel—what the mythologist Joseph Campbell meant when he said ‘follow your bliss,’ this leads us inexorably toward reverence, an active sense of respect. This is the foundation stone of indigenous mind…” He paused to see if we were getting it.
“And when we know all that we possess—and this includes what possesses us—we find our self discipline. We cannot walk the sacred path without self discipline. This is where so many spiritual teachers and gurus have stumbled…”
Silence. In those moments, surrounded by flowering ohia trees and scrubby ‘olelo bushes, with bright green ferns growing directly from the stony volcanic substrate in the dying light, I was aware that something quite rare had just occurred. I glanced at Jill and saw tears gathering in her eyes.
Makua simply smiled as the silence deepened and we digested his words. He then ran them by us again just to make sure we had it. “When we come from the place of humility, we connect with the energy of compassion,” he rumbled gently. “This allows us to experience the power of aloha.
“When we practice acceptance and live what we feel, we are drawn inexorably toward reverence, an active respect for everyone and everything we encounter in life.
“Through knowing what we possess, we find our discipline. And in order to discover who we are as well as where we are, self-discipline is essential, because without it, we cannot progress.”
His words activated a memory within me, something I had learned through my erstwhile descendent and future self Nainoa. It had happened in conversation with another man of his time, a man who was an authentically initiated shaman.
“To be a medicinemaker,” that individual had said, “one must have strongly developed ethics and one must have heart—a well-developed heart. We may acquire great power in life, but if we have poorly developed ethics and an underdeveloped heart, we cannot be a medicinemaker…”
I felt light-headed, as though I was slowly recovering from the impact of all that Makua had shared with me on this afternoon, and as I did, I realized that I had no gift to give him in return for his bowl. On impulse, I took off a string of bright tribal beads from Kenya that I was wearing around my neck and offered them to him. I had received them from a tribal man more than 20 years before. He took them graciously and then studied the repetitive pattern revealed by the beads themselves.
“For me,” I began, “the red beads symbolize blood and thus the body, the physical aspect of ourselves. The dark blue ones represent the mind, and especially the higher aspects of the intellect, our inner chief…”
“And the white beads,” he broke in “represent the spirit—the higher aspects of our selves… our aumakua.” He then graciously put them on.
I asked if we might take a photo or two to commemorate our meeting and he agreed. I hauled out the Nikon and the flash attachment. The first one I took reveals the chief staring directly at me, his formal demeanor conveying the approval he felt in our new connection. Jill took one of the two of us, in which Makua looks every inch the dedicated and serious chief. But when I took another shot of him and Jill, she said something that cracked him up and he smiled.
As the long afternoon came to an end and the kahuna and his lady prepared to leave, Makua walked up to me and gently pressed his forehead and nose to my own, briefly looking straight into my eyes and into my soul as we shared the breath. Then he smiled and kissed me lightly on the cheek with the words “Love you…”
He then gave the honi to Jill, with Nina following his lead and giving the honi to us both. The four of us looked each other over as the light faded, then they turned and got into his truck. As Makua started the engine and backed up, he leaned out the window and called “A hui hou… until the next time.”
The kahuna’s bowl has traveled with me since that day, holding the candle and thus the light in the center of the circles at my workshops and presentations. Whenever I feel the need, I put my face into the bowl and breathe deeply, replenishing and restoring my supply of light… and periodically, when I have stepped temporarily into the negative polarity, I sit with the bowl in meditation, then I turn it over and empty it out with focused attention.
In choosing to share with you the reader this account of the inception of my friendship with Makua through the past several columns, you now have a sense of him, and who he was. Allow me to ad that he passed unexpectedly in 2004, the recipient of a car accident.
But before his passing, he gave me a gift of great magnitude—one of his walking sticks. You may see it on page 224 of our small book Spirit Medicine, a book that presents an overview of shamanic healing from the Hawaiian perspective. The last chapter is about Makua and includes the famous drawing of him holding his stick and generating light between his hands.
I am currently working on a manuscript about my friendship with this extraordinary man and will alert you when and if it ever comes to publication.
So until next month, allow me to invoke Makua who would become my great Hawaiian friend, and with his blessing (and his words), I extend to each of you the Light and the Love of the Ancestors, The Source of Life, rejoicing in the Power and the Peace, braided with the cords of Patience, revealing the tapestry of the strongest force in the Universe, your Aloha.
With warm thoughts—Dr Hank
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Dr. Hank Wesselman, P.h.D
Anthropologist, Shamanic Teacher, Healer, & Author
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Dr Hank Wesselman PhD., holds advanced degrees in anthropology and zoology from the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Since 1971, he's conducted research with an international group of scientists, exploring eastern Africa's Great Rift Valley in search of answers to the mystery of human origins--fieldwork that has allowed him to spend much of his life living and working with traditional peoples, rarely, if ever, visited by outsiders.
During this time, he has worked with many notables including Prof F. Clark Howell, Dr Don Johanson, "Lucy's" discoverer, as well as members of the famous Leakey family.
He is currently engaged in fieldwork in northern Ethiopia with the Middle Awash Research Project headed by Prof Tim White, where he is reconstructing the paleoenvironments of sites dated between four and six million years old that have yielded the fossilized remains of humanity's earliest ancestors.
Dr Wesselman has taught anthropology for the University of California at San Diego; the University of Hawai'i at Hilo's West Hawai'i campus at Kealakekua; California State University at Sacramento; American River College and Sierra College in northern California; and Kiriji Memorial College and Adeola Odutola College in Western Nigeria, where he first became interested in indigenous spiritual traditions while living among people of the Yoruba Tribe as a US Peace Corps Volunteer during the 1960s.
Dr Hank (as his students call him) is also a shaman in training, now in the 23rd year of his apprenticeship. His autobiographical trilogy Spiritwalker, Medicinemaker, and Visionseeker describes an ongoing continuum of visionary experiences that began spontaneously out in the bush of southern Ethiopia in the 1970s, resumed in Hawai'i in the 1980s, and continue to the present day.
Combining the sober objectivity of a trained scientist with a mystic's passionate search for deeper understanding, Hank's books and teachings contain revelations about the nature of reality, the self, as well as the shaman's spiritual worlds.
Since 1994, he has offered seminars and training workshops at many internationally-recognized centers such as the Esalen Institute in California, the Omega Institute near New York, and the New Millennium Institute in Hawai'i.
Hank's newest books include the Journey to the Sacred Garden: A Guide to Traveling in the Spiritual Realms, and Spirit Medicine: Healing in the Sacred Realms (co-authored with transpersonal medical practitioner and soul retrieval specialist Jill Kuykendall).
He currently serves on the advisory board of the Society for Shamanic Practitioners, is a member of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, the American Anthropological Association, the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness, and is featured in Traveling Between the Worlds: Conversations with Contemporary Shamans by Hillary S Webb.
In addition to his scientific publications, he is at work on a book about his expeditionary field experiences in Africa.
He has also written a small book for children: Little Ruth Reddingford and the Wolf.
Contact info and workshop schedule:
www.sharedwisdom.
com
email:
hw@sharedwisdom.com
Notes & Updates
from Dr.Hank
Descriptions of the workshops and presentations offered by Hank Wesselman and his wife Jill Kuykendall, as well as the website links to the centers where they will be held in 2007, are now taking form on their web site:
www.sharedwisdom.
com
Soul Catchers
I discovered, quite by accident almost 15 years ago, that I am married to a great soul catcher. My wife Jill Kuykendall was trained in the Western medical paradigm and has worked as a physiotherapist in acute care rehabilitation in hospital as well as home health settings for more than 25 years.
Today, Jill works primarily in transpersonal medicine and has a private practice devoted to soul retrieval. Clients come to her from all over the country, as well as from abroad and she is usually booked up months in advance.
Interestingly, the transpersonal nature of this work means that it is “nonlocal’ and is just as effective when done long-distance, revealing that Jill can still do the work on behalf of those who cannot travel to meet with her in her office.
Jill is the co-author with me of Spirit Medicine and wrote the chapters on soul loss, soul retrieval and more. As you may be aware, we have a website <www.sharedwisdom.
com> where Jill has a page describing the nature of her work in soul retrieval.
For those interested, there are also two hour-long interviews with me posted on the Broadband Learning Channel <www.bblc.tv>, one of which is focused upon health, illness and healing the soul in the indigenous perspective.
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