Aina and the Mana

Let me preface this first by saying: I'm not a native Hawaiian. I have not been studying Hawaiian spirituality for a long time. I have only been introduced to the words and concepts of Hawaiian spirituality recently. I'm a white chick from the mainland United States. I mean absolutely no disrespect, and my understanding presented here is primarily intuitive. I have been introduced to these words and concepts recently through others; through conversations with friends who have lived in Hawaii for a while, through books and online sources.Last year I met up with Dreaming Bear, and we went for a journey out to the Applegate River area in Southern Oregon for an afternoon spent by the river. There he told me about the word 'Aina'. He explained to me that 'Aina' is the Hawaiian word for the Land, and for the spirit of the Land and Nature. It was so lovely to finally have a word for something that I've always felt, but never had a name for in our American linguistics. I love the word Aina, as it gives a name for the energy of the land, and by giving it a name - it is as though consciousness is breathed into it. I spent that afternoon by the river, meditating upon boulders, bathing in the cold, clear waters and contemplating the nature of Aina; the great web of life interconnecting reality in what we know as ecosystems, small and large.A few months ago, I picked up a book on Hawaiian spirituality written by Sondra Ray called "Pele's Wish", and in it she re-affirmed the understanding of Aina, and introduced another new word to me; Mana. The concept of Mana as I have come to understand it is defined as Universal Life Force Energy, that which could be called Prana in India, Chi in China - but in Hawaii, it is called Mana.So I've been contemplating these two words and concepts while on my first foray in Hawaii, and then last week I had an epiphany about the Aina and the Mana. I was at Kehena beach and it was a brilliantly sunny day, bright blue skies, rather hot with lots of sun exposure and the waves were feeling pretty primal. I was walking along the black sand beach, and with each foot step I felt my whole being present - I felt my entire body held by the matrix of life. I felt complete, relaxed, fully present and very energized. Suddenly, I was inspired to sing a song and so I walked over to the boulder tidepool area and perched on the edge and chanted for quite some time, and felt waves of bliss wash over me as swells crashed into white water upon the boulders before me as I sang. When I got into the waters, the waves were high and strong, and yet I felt luxuriously sensualized and caressed by the water as I swam in it. My whole body was sensually titillated; the water was turning me on as it licked my whole body. The lift of each swell caused an exhilirated euphoria, as did the drawing down after each wave. The amount of life force energy and vitality in my body was high, and I felt high, super awake, grounded and exhilirated with strength and presence.That afternoon, as I walked along the sand, I felt the waves of sunlight penetrate my body, felt the dense boulders that I lay on, felt the luxurious sensuality of the waters titillating me, a thread of insight penetrated my mind. I could feel a thread connecting my feet to the earth, through the earth beneath me, and the same thread stretching to the sun. When my mind was calm, relaxed, meditative and aware; the clouds would part and the sun would begin shining more brightly. I realized that my Mana, my life force energy, is in union with the Aina, and the Life Force Mana of the Aina, land, including the Sun, Stars and Universe surrounding me. I was being fed by the Mana of the Aina, my life force was being restored & rebalanced at the source level. And this was due to the sense of surrendering to full presence and awareness of the Aina. There is a union at work between ones personal energy field and the energy field of nature, of the Aina, that works to create a whole; reality. Time and Space and Consciousness is the result of the weaving together between our personal Life Force and the Life Force Mana of the whole.For years now, I have been exploring the correlation between where consciousness is at in the moment and the energy of our surroundings, and how the two interplay. I feel that in every moment, there is a psychic wholeness that creates a coherent field in the relationship between where we are at mentally and energetically and the energetic experience of everything around us; other people, our living environments, nature, plants, our pets, wild animals. This seems especially true in events with lots of people (lots of psychic energy) and power spots in nature (lots of psychic energy from eons of accumulated experiences.)My body is interwoven with the thread of life, just as a tree, just as the water, just as the boulders. We co-create the experience of every moment together through being interwoven in the ecosystems of life force energy. When we are in areas where there is a greater amount of vitality and life force energy present, we begin to be nourished in a way that is different from how we typically nourish ourselves with food. So why is it that in certain areas, there seems to be a greater sense of nourishment from the energy of the environment, whereas in other environments, I feel depleted, sad, drained, confused, stuck, frustrated?When I was living at Lake Atitlan four years ago, in Guatemala, I attributed this feeling to my sense that the consciousness of the people over an accumulated period of time - say thousands of years - contributed to a feeling of magic and aliveness in the place. Based on reading the writings of Martin Prechtel, I conjectured that their spiritual beliefs were that life was magical and governed by specific spirits to which they prayed and made offerings, and that their shamans were constantly working to repair and make right the energetic alliances the humans had with other animals, power spots, the Volcanoes and the Lake itself. Thus, a magical wholeness was maintained - and thus it existed simply because they believed it to be so.Thus, as I believe that there exists a magical unity between consciousness and nature, and I sing in power spots to offer up prayers and offerings to the spirits of the energies specific to that place, it is so - because of the intention and direction of my consciousness and my belief. It is what my experience of life has taught me as real, and thus I feel it and embody it. Thus, the belief systems and collective consciousness of tribes of people, along with the energy of the Aina, co-create specific versions of reality.In the modern American paradigm, we tend to think that reality is uniform and consistently the same everywhere; it is reflected in the attempt to homogenize reality across the United States by being able to expect to pull into the same gas station chain anywhere and get the same fast food anywhere. Despite this, there are regional differences that are palpable, that are specific to the local cultures of each region, and we take this for granted. So, despite our belief that reality is the same across the board, in fact - it is not. It is varied, depending on the local ecology and the beliefs and consciousness of the people of that region. Thus, being in New York City feels quite different than being in Hawaii, and it comes with a very different energy, different sounds, different foods available, different ways of being and lifestyles, different ways of communicating, different economies.I believe that in Modern America, our belief systems and collective consciousness have mostly destroyed magic and life force from the land. Our rational approaches to life, our beliefs that everything has to be clearly rational and that life demands hard work and suffering, our beliefs that life has to be a certain way have created that reality. There is a loss in the life force and vitality present in the land itself, and a multitude of energetically depleting actions such as mining, de-forestation, pollution, creating permanent towns and dwellings and roads and subdivisions, these have all worked together to drain the Mana from the Aina - the life force vitality of the Land - of its power. The Aina is rich in power and vitality when its ecosystems are intact, when water is clean and pure, when plants are abundant and wild, and when humans live in balance with nature. Living in a society that is disconnected from the Earth and natural rhythms has created a situation where we are energetically depleted, and we end up using substances and food and each other in order to compensate for this lack of life force energy.This lead me to the realization that when living in natural settings, our life force energy field has a greater opportunity to remain whole and balanced - it is supported in being so, because of the Mana from the Aina, which seems to cradle each individual's life force. This is supported by natural bio-rhythms in unison with the rise and fall of sunlight, of the predominance of natural and healthy local food, by having a regular sleep cycle, and the predominance of natural sounds - frogs, birds, wind, rain, insects. Whereas, in urban environments, disconnected from the Aina, we end up depleted of life force, and have to get it from somewhere. One of the ways in which we humans supplement our drained life force is through each other; there is a generally unconscious habit of energetically feeding on each other - ie, psychic vampirism. Often times, we give our energy to others knowingly; through performing and sharing our creativity, through working for each other, through giving another person bodywork, or through care taking our friends and loved ones. But as I looked through images from urban parties from afar, it becomes apparent to me that in urban environments where we are disconnected from the energy of the land, and are rushing from one demand to another, it's really challenging to be fully present and show up, and the use of a multitude of substances and artifice predominates the scene. It becomes really draining on our financial resources, on our energy and vitality, and on our inner peace; stress dominates the sub-current. People are hung over and depleted afterwards, or fraught with having to process a myriad of stressful dramas that came up and exploded during any particular episode. It becomes a perpetual drain of energy that is not sustainable - and stimulating substances are used and abused, in order to maintain the ability to make it through. It creates ungrounded, stressful, and energetically drained people; and it's unsustainable in the long haul. Which is why we escape to places like Hawaii, to recuperate, get our energy back, feeling re-charged and re-inspired. That's why I came here!One of the things I have experienced many times over the years is the sense that Native Americans have left a spiritual imprint upon the land they once inhabited. Despite that their presence has been wiped away from the environment, I have felt in many regions the spirits and the intelligence they left behind in the land, like a message in a bottle tossed to sea. Except, the message in the bottle is tossed into the fabric of time, and was embedded in the place through prayer, song and visions. I have accessed dream songs and dream visions when visiting certain power spots before, and have felt their imprint upon the soil - feeling their souls caught in the rift between time. And yet there are areas where the imprint from the living Indigenous cultures still exists; for example Guatemala, Peru and Hawaii. It is in these kinds of places that a noticeable difference exists in the way that reality is impressed with intelligence. In Peru, their ancient ways are still prevalent and the medicine path has been carried down for thousands of years - it is very real, not in a theoretical way, but in a very real, nuts and bolts, daily life kind of way. It has been described that in the Peruvian Andes, in order to become a shaman, one must develop a real relationship with the spirit of one of the local Andes Mountains, known as Apus. It is through cultivating the interwoven relationship of meditation, prayer, offerings and dialogue with the Mana of the Apus that one gains power as a Shaman. A shaman who has cultivated this power becomes an embodiment of the power of Nature, like a tree, ocean, river, or Apu. And the Mana of the Aina works through the shaman - It is the energy coming from Nature and the Earth that is the power working through the Shaman.

"The key was to gain alliance with the laws of Nature and become Universal inside. The process was to offer praise filled gifts and songs to the impulses of nature, which are essentially, the impulses of human life. For some, this would seem to be an amazing complexity of mysticism. Yet for those who knew it well, it was nothing but the natural way to interact with the environment." -William Levacyi

Here in modern Hawaii, feeling the spiritual imprints of the people who have passed is more intuitive, less nuts and bolts, for me so far. But I feel a sense of depth; of richness in the matrix of life here. Life here feels so interwoven and connected to each other. As I am in Hawaii, I literally feel my whole being held in the matrix of life force energy the whole time. There's a coherency in the ether. Before I arrived, people always talked about the "energy in Hawaii" that they could feel but was hard to describe. Now that I am here, I feel it's so rich here; it's like my bio-energy body is drinking deeply of the Mana from the Aina as long and as hard as it can to replenish the energy body after such a depleting, draining year. And I feel it is due to the Hawaiian ancestors, and the way they left their imprint on the fabric of the time & space dimension here; through their devotion to cultivating the Aloha spirit, and through honoring the integrity of the wholeness of nature and their part in it.I met a man the other day, while drinking Kava at the local Kava bar, and he was looking for a local Hawaiian spiritual master to come to his land where he was breaking ground on his new house, and offer prayers, blessings and songs. It was while listening to him that I realized the truth of Andean Shamanism and its focus on cultivating relationships with the Aina; because it is only through devoted, long-lasting connection with the Aina of a local bio-region that a Medicine person will cultivate their power and life force. It is not enough to be connected to the earth and enjoy spending time in nature. It actually requires that you really become a part of the environment and really devote to merging and unifying with the life force of that local region for a committed period of time, thus you gain alliance and power from the spirits of that land. It is thus that you have developed energy medicine to be able to use in the offerings for others.So, based in this entire understanding, it is not enough to imbibe the energy of the Aina; because a fundamental shift in the way reality is perceived could shift the Mana of the land in North America and anywhere else. All it takes is a shift in belief and consciousness, that of perceiving the inherent life force of the land and honoring it, praying to it and making offerings. I like to pray to the spirits of the Aina through chanting songs; it is my way of speaking to the Aina and the trees and the lava and the water. And I personally look forward to cultivating a solid, grounded home with a solid base in the local Aina and bio-region, for as a mystic, I realize that the ultimate power comes through Nature, and I intend to embody nature in order to be whole and be in service to the whole.