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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 Kahuna
We are going to take a new direction this month, one that is much in keeping with the fact that my family and I have translocated back to the island of Hawai’i where we have taken up residence once again on our small farm above Kealakekua Bay in the district of South Kona.
Those who have read my first autobiographical book Spiritwalker know what happened to me while living in this place between 1985-89—a series of ongoing spontaneous visionary experiences that were quite extraordinary and which drew me into the shamanic worlds of mystery and magic. When we left this place to take up residence once again in California, the reasons for our doing so were obscure to us then… and yet we did it anyway.
The rest then followed almost as though according to some predetermined plan, and for the past 17 years, I have been a professor at several universities and colleges. During this time, I also re-engaged with the paleoanthropological world of research and discovery in Ethiopia, and last but not least, I was able to connect with the literary world, allowing my Spiritwalker Trilogy to be published, as well as several smaller books that bring together some of the spiritual teachings found in these larger volumes.
Our transition back to the island actually began in October of 2004 when our small farmhouse on our land in South Kona suddenly caught fire one night and burned to the ground in 20 minutes. Fortunately no one was injured and our renters’ losses were covered by their boss’s insurance policy so they were reimbursed and all we lost was our house.
When Jill flew out to assess the damage in November, she gathered some charred wood fragments and a heat scorched lava stone, then drove two and a half hours to the crater of the volcano Kilauea on the other side of the island. She went to ‘The Women’s Place’ right on the crater’s edge along a ridge called Uwe Kahuna—the tears of the kahuna. This was the place that the kahuna mystics went to cry for visions in the pre-Christian days of the past. We had been taken there by a powerful kahuna elder many years before.
The crater itself is easily ten miles across (and very much active). Directly below where Jill was standing, 500 vertical feet straight down on the cauldera floor, is a huge gaping circular pit half a mile across and about 300 feet deep with clouds of sulphurous steam rising out of it. This awesome hole in the earth is called Halemau’ma’u and it is the volcano goddess Pele’s traditional home.
On that day, Jill did ceremony in this powerful place with our younger daughter supporting her, creating ‘awa, the sacramental drink of Polynesia, then mixing it with the charred remains of our home and offering it with the scorched lava stone—a stone that belongs to Pele.
As Jill made her pule—her prayer, she asked Pele why she had taken our home—for there was no doubt in our minds that this fire goddess had decided to take back what had rightfully belonged to her to begin with. Jill asked if this was the sign that our time in the islands had finally come to an end.
When Tutu (Auntie) Pele graced my wife with an answer, the whisper of sound that flowed through her mind and her heart was quite clear. With Pele’s long-tailed white crater birds knifing through the air overhead, her words came softly, carried by her aloha-–her love.
Her answer conveyed that our former house always was going to be a fixer-upper, that it would have distracted us, pulling our energy in directions that were not productive, in a sense repelling us from returning to live there. Now we would receive a new house to replace it so that we would want to come back to the island. Free of distractions, we would then be able to apply ourselves toward that for which we were destined.
By taking our house, she was inviting us to return home. Actually, it was stronger than that. Her thought-feeling carried an element of directive—of command. “You will now return…”
Two and a half years later, our house is now rebuilt, our small farm replanted in coffee, and by the time you read this, we will be there, in connection with the island, its dreaming, and its great spirits once again. We will be home.
My readers will have noticed that my sign off at the end of each column offers a blessing from a Hawaiian elder and kahuna mystic named Hale Makua. It’s time to say something about him now. We met him in an interesting way.
More than ten years ago, in the last days of 1996, Jill and I spent Christmas on the Big Island with our two small daughters. The year before, I had published Spiritwalker, and because I was living in Hawai’i when the visions began, my curiosity had led me toward an area of knowledge about which I knew virtually nothing--the esoteric wisdom of the Polynesian kahuna mystics. And it was there that I found something of great value--a perspective on the nature of the self as well as the nature of reality that elevated my understanding of just about everything to an entirely new level.
In writing about this indigenous perspective in Spiritwalker, I was sensitive to the fact that I was trespassing into an area that did not exactly welcome outsiders, and especially anthropologists. Because of this, I knew that sooner or later, the kahuna families might send someone in to have a look at me. And this is precisely what happened in 1996, but not exactly in the way I had thought.
I had been invited to speak at the New Millennium Institute, an educational center that was then housed in a just-completed Frank Lloyd Wright hemicycle house up on the northern part of the island near Waimea. On December 28, Jill and I drove up there in the early afternoon.
Upon our arrival, we were greeted by our hosts, Susanne Sims, a tall, attractive blonde of Polish extraction, and her husband Sandy Sims, the house’s builder and a retired advertising executive from Honolulu. They had fixed a bite to eat and the four of us sat down in their striking kitchen to get to know each other a little.
About 50 expectant people then began to show up to hear what I had to say. As the introductions were made, the sky outside suddenly darkened and it began to rain, torrentially. The leaks in the new roof made themselves known within seconds, and as my hosts busied themselves with the mop-up, Sandy told me offhand that until this rain, the area had been suffering from a severe drought.
Abruptly, the rain began to slack off, and the clouds cleared as rapidly as they had arrived. There was something at work that I did not fully understand in those moments, something I would eventually come to accept. When the Hawaiian deities arrive, they are often accompanied by (or concealed by) clouds and rain.
As if on cue, the front door opened and in walked a big Hawaiian man. He was taller than myself and considerably more robust. His thick gray and white hair, glistening with the rain, was tied in a long pony-tail that hung halfway down his back. His dark face was framed by a long, bushy white beard that masked his upper chest. He smiled broadly as he brushed water drops from his massive shoulders encased within a flashy aloha shirt. With his right hand, he leaned heavily on a brownish-gray wooden walking stick elaborately carved in the Polynesian style.
Our hosts immediately abandoned their mop-up to introduce us to our esteemed guest, the Hawaiian elder Hale Makua. His strong white teeth gleamed in his brown face as he laughed with the delight of it, then he deftly drew two thick flower leis from around his own neck and draped one around mine, the other around Jill’s.
As I inhaled the fragrance of my lei, I noticed that several more Hawaiian men were arriving through the door, all with long hair and beards. I smiled to myself somewhat nervously as I sensed (rightly) that the time of reckoning had come.
Under such circumstances, one’s mind can work exceedingly quickly, and as I took stock of my situation, I saw that the Hawaiians had brought their wives with them. This was good news. I would not be turned into a pillar of salt, at least not this day. I greeted each in turn as we were formally introduced, almost immediately forgetting their names with the shock of what was occurring. The Hawaiians sat down across the circular room from me with Makua right in the center.
Jill and I had heard about this man for years, and yet we had never met him until this moment. I watched him warily and reflected with some chagrin that this might be a good time to address a prayer to my spirit allies. This was not just any kahuna who had come to hear me speak. This man was a seventh generation direct descendent of King Kamehameha. This was the big kahuna.
I looked down into my inner place of power and tranquility and I mentally addressed the spiritual beings who serve as my protectors, asking them to provide me with support and the ability to speak from a place of truth. Then after a brief introduction from my hosts, I launched into my talk, a rather academic discussion of the beliefs, values and trends held dear within the transformational community taking form in the Western world.
I spoke of this collective of awakening souls as a subculture whose members are very much aware that our old myths are no longer serving us. I revealed them as well-informed individuals who know clearly that the time has come to write a new story—a new cultural mythos that encompasses a new view of who we are, who we are becoming, and what our purpose is, our destiny for being here.
As my talk progressed, I suspected that Makua was well-aware of everything that I was saying, and I watched him tracking my logic like a hunter, smiling when I uncovered something well-known to him, looking thoughtful when I challenged my audience to come up with a new solution or resolution to a problem at hand. Throughout, I felt Makua following my thought-line, the light in his eyes supporting me in my attempts to make certain points clear, his laugh confirming when I had.
As my talk came to an end, I began to feel a curious intuitive impulse, so I smiled and addressed him directly: “Makua. I am getting a strong feeling that there is something that you wish to say… Please feel free to do so if that would be appropriate.”
The chief glanced down at his walking stick and smiled. I would learn in time that this was a man who traveled in the company of many generations of his ancestral spirits in constant attendance. He leaned over slightly to his right as though someone was speaking into his right ear. After a brief pause, he leaned over to the left and again listened intently. Then he smiled again and nodded… and he stood up.
Makua looked around the room at the assembled gathering, making connection with each person present, and then he directed his full attention at me. “A friend of mine sent me your book Spiritwalker,” he began, “and I read it.” There followed a long pause during which everyone in the room looked alert and watchful.
“I read it again just to make sure I got it right,” he continued, “then I went down to the beach. I put your book down on the sand, then I called in the ancestors and we had a talk about you.”
Silence in the room. This was ‘High Noon’ in Polynesia.
“The ancestors asked me what your name is,” Makua went on, “And I told them that your name is Wesselman… Hank Wesselman.” Long pause while the elder looked thoughtful, then he grinned. “The ancestors told me that I wasn’t pronouncing your name right… they told me that your name is really ‘vessel-man’… that you are a vessel, like a canoe…” Makua watched me closely to see if I was getting it yet.
I, for my part, had been psyching myself up to be condemned, for I was very much aware that the Hawaiians have mixed feelings about well-intentioned but often ill-informed outsiders trespassing into their spiritual traditions. For starters, ‘Huna’ is not the correct word for the Hawaiian spiritual tradition. I had also been informed by another Hawaiian elder that all those who have written books about huna, from Max Freedom Long on down, are unaware of the deep knowledge of the Hawaiian kahuna mystics.
In those days, I did not know that Makua was clairvoyant and that he was monitoring my thoughts and emotions. I was stiffening my resolve when he laughed and proclaimed: “Don’t worry. We Hawaiians don’t write. We talk, and we share what we find in our hearts with each other. But in your Western culture, it is the tradition to write.”
He paused again as if to see the effect of his words. “I have been told by the ancestors to say something to you…” he continued, “They have told me to say in front of all these people here that you are one of the light-carriers of aloha and that we Hawaiians need to support you…” Then he laughed boisterously and finished me off. “The ancestors said that everything you have written in your book is true. So keep writing. You’re making my job easier.”
The release of tension in the room was palpable. People were smiling and laughing in a semi-distracted way, yet all seemed to be aware that something quite rare had just transpired. Many were weeping. My talk had come to quite a conclusion.
Makua walked over to me then and smiled. “We should have a meeting before you leave the island.”
As the participants milled around, talking animatedly with each other and looking at the architectural gem of a house, Jill joined Makua and me near the big windows that looked down and out across the dry grasslands of Waimea toward the volcanoes Mauna Kea, Mauna Loa and Hualalai, all three of which could now be seen as the sky had cleared.
We talked about small things, friends we had in common and such, getting to know each other a little although I sensed that he already knew a great deal about us and that he had come to confirm this understanding.
When the chief turned to respond to something someone else had said, Jill looked down at his legs and I followed her glance. He was wearing shorts and the entire backs of his bulging calves bore the scars of formidable skin grafts. His right foot was permanently frozen, the ankle joint nonfunctional. I noted that his right calf was considerably atrophied. For Makua, the walking stick was not an affectation. It was the third leg that allowed him to walk at all.
Jill is a registered physical therapist who had worked in the Western medical paradigm for more than 25 years, much of that time in acute care rehabilitation, and when the elder turned back to us, leaning heavily on his stick, she asked him gently “Makua, what happened to your legs?”
There was silence between us through several heartbeats. I knew that Jill suspected a motorcycle accident as she had worked with many such trauma cases over the years. Makua’s answer came calmly and with a slight smile, one that conveyed a sense of utter acceptance. “Viet Nam.”
We moved to the end of the long living room then and sat down as one of the Hawaiian men brought him a plate bearing some of the refreshments from the repast that the Sims’ had arranged in the kitchen. To my surprise, the same man then brought plates for me and Jill as well.
“When I was still a teenager back in the middle 1950s,” Makua began, chewing thoughtfully, “I walked into the Marine recruiters office in Honolulu and said ‘sign me up and send me to the hottest place on the planet!’” He laughed with the reflection of himself at that stage in his life, then his gaze turned serious. “They did, and after my basic training, I was sent to Beirut. That was the first war in which I served. The last was Viet Nam.
“I was a gunnery sergeant specializing in point reconnaissance…” and when he saw that I did not understand the significance of this, he added “I did 90 patrols behind enemy lines in Viet Nam. In the last, I was shot up pretty badly through my legs and feet. I then spent five years in a VA hospital, in San Antonio, Texas, dealing with osteomyelitis, infection of the bone. Antibiotics could not reach it so I was subjected to repeated surgeries in which my wounds were continually reopened and cleaned out… but I kept my legs.” He smiled.
“How did you do it, Makua?” Jill asked, “five years in a VA hospital…” she let the thought hang.
“Well,” he began, “I had my own room for the last two years,” big laugh, but the deciding factor was my ancestors. They came to visit with me every day during my time there, sometimes twice in one day!” Another laugh shared by us as well. Others had gathered around us and were listening open-mouthed to this discussion. Like Jill and me, many had heard of Makua, but virtually none had had the privilege of meeting him.
“My ancestors came every day, and over that five year period, we got to deal with all my stuff—all my anger, my pain, my grief, everything.” He paused again as his eyes looked deep into his past and his mind moved back along those trails of pain and resolution. “When I walked out of that hospital five years later on my own legs, I was the luckiest man alive… and I was free.”
Others now began to contribute to our discussion. As the conversation turned this way and that, Jill and I were reintroduced to Makua’s partner Nina and to Mason Maiku’i and his wife Eva and to the several of the other Hawaiians who had come. When the gathering came to an end, he again indicated that he would like to meet with us. In two days, Jill and I and the children were going to head over to the Volcano House, a hotel perched right on the edge of the crater of Kilauea, and when we revealed this to him, he laughed. The meeting was set for noon, on the last day of the year, December 31st. We would meet at the visitor center in the Volcano National Park.
We will talk about this meeting next month. Until then, allow me to invoke the spirit of Makua who would become my great 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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