The Shaman's Mind by Hammond Jonathan

Author:Hammond, Jonathan [Hammond, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Monkfish Book Publishing
Published: 2020-07-06T16:00:00+00:00

chapter Eight

To Love Is To Be Happy With

Aloha: Love, compassion, affection, mercy, sympathy, kindness, grace, charity.

You probably know the old song, “Love Makes the World Go Round.” To the shaman, this is not merely a colloquial way of saying, “Being nice matters,” it’s also a precise description of the underlying intention that is the causative source of everything in existence: Love literally sets the universe in motion. Why else would the forest always move in the direction of growth and creation other than its loving and joyful intention to experience more of itself?

According to the fifth Huna principle, Aloha , love and happiness intertwine. Aloha teaches us that the depth of our love is the extent to which whatever it is that we love brings us happiness, and to share that happiness is a powerful means for change: To love is to be happy with.

What I have never understood about contemporary psychology, and most clinical approaches to health and wellness, is that love is not considered to be an integral part of the practitioner’s skillset. Not only is love a potent tool, but for the shaman, it is the tool. At the root of any illness or disease (physical or otherwise) there is always some sort of conflict, tension, separation, or depletion. Aloha is the polar opposite of those discordant energies, and its etymology indicates its deeper meanings: Alo means “to share an experience,” oha means “affection” or “joy,” and ha translates as “breath” or “life force.” To Hawaiians, Aloha is a connective and cooperative experience, one in which sharing the energy of life with another is the formula for joy.

In today’s world, striving for happiness is often considered naïve, simplistic, and unrealistic. We fancy ourselves to be too driven, too smart, too practical, or too world weary to buy into happiness completely. The collective threshold for our own suffering and self-compromise is extremely high because we exist in a contemporary culture that subtly terrorizes us through its endless messaging of formulaic “goals” and “rules for living,” to which we are all supposed to adhere. We are either falling short of, or prospering in, the acceptable status quo, based on some version of the conventional story of grade school, high school, university, marriage, children, job, money, “success,” retirement, pension, death—and, if we have been particularly good, some sort of paradise in the hereafter. It matters far less how life feels as long as it looks a certain way, and according to those standards, happiness is rather low on the list of life’s priorities.

But, as Alan Watts once said, “The point of life isn’t really to get anywhere in particular, it’s more of a musical thing, and we’re supposed to dance.” The Hawaiians have a saying, A ‘a i ka hula, waiho i ka maka ‘u i ka hale, which means, “Dare to dance the Hula, and leave shame at home.” For shamans, love and happiness are not unrealistic ideals, but the means for evaluating every choice that they make for themselves, and in their guidance of others.

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