Kahuna Teachings of Morrnah Simeona

There was always magic and mystery surrounding Morrnah Simeona. Here we are years after her passing still discussing her life and its meaning. I have rarely had so many emails after one essay, which tells me that Morrnah is among the immortals and therefore still celebrated.

In the nostalgic essay that I wrote a few days ago, I did not go very deeply into Morrnah's spiritual teachings much less her approaches to healing. Basically, it is because one cannot imitate without first unfolding the gifts. She was born with a readiness to work as a healer.

As a very small child, she had vivid dreams of great beings teaching her how to heal and she would discuss some of her dreams with her father. After one particularly important dream in which she was shown how to set broken bones, her father commented, "All you need now is a patient." She was three or four years old. A truck ran over her dog, and her father interrupted the natural emotions of a child and said, "You have a patient."

The ancient Hawaiian method of setting broken bones involves the extension of the lines of the aura. I doubt I can do justice to Morrnah's explanation but I can hear her gentle voice encouraging me "to continue." The etheric lines must be perfectly perpendicular to the surface of the skin. Preferably, they should be evenly spaced and very straight. If they are flattened because of trauma and/or shock, you visualize them standing up. If they cannot do this on their own, you very gently imagine yourself helping to prop them up, like you are using a very special comb to disentangle the nadi (the Sanskrit name for the lines). Each line is a potential conductor of energy but the etheric body needs to be properly interfaced with the other subtle bodies as well as the dense physical. The length of the lines and their delicacy determines the amount of energy they can transfer or transmit to the physical. Longer lines tend to be delicate and to bend whereas shorter lines are more resistant. One has to work with the aura, not overexert it. Once it is straight, one visualizes the inflow of energy. If the aura is perfectly positioned and the lines are where they belong, healing occurs very quickly and one can even hear the snap as the bones are repositioned. You use this technique only when there is a deficiency condition requiring additional energy. You never use this technique to send energy to a malignancy.

If you start off with a very powerful aura, the transfer of energy to the patient does not exhaust the caregiver or healer, but if you are yourself "thin", this technique can be devitalizing and it might be wiser to invoke the assistance of invisible beings. There are nearly always lots of them willing and able to help. Like Morrnah, I have had occasion to use this technique with some creatures one could hardly have expected to survive: birds and deer who had been struck by cars or otherwise injured. It has never failed to produce the desired results.

Hawaiians were famous for bringing the dead back to life. As Morrnah explained this to me, the body is not considered dead unless the silver cord has snapped and this often takes several days. For example, if a baby is born stillborn, a kahuna may go after the soul and request that it complete its incarnation by returning to the baby. In this case, the baby "comes back to life." The idea that the child will be brain dead because of lack of oxygen or that it would have any other handicaps did not occur to Hawaiian healers of old. They said they had time to find the soul and if they could persuade the soul to enter the body, all would be fine.

There are two other teachings I would like to describe today, one very esoteric and the other practical for everyone. The first is that Hawaiians did not always need the patient to be present. They made a representation of the patient by putting stones, usually of different colors, on the sand in spaces that represented energy centers, such as chakras or endocrine glands. They did not need to use gem stones or crystals, ordinary stones would suffice. Once they had their model, they studied it for anomalies and began correcting the energy patterns. The patient, no matter how distant, responded to the changes performed on the representation. This is a true holographic model of how healing is energetic not dense.

At the time I knew Morrnah, Rolfing was becoming popular and students were asking the foremost lomi-lomi practitioner of the Islands for her opinion on Rolfing. As I had come to expect, she did not answer the question directly. She said that the body resists whatever does not feel good. I have regarded this as one of the most important teachings in my long life as a student and healer. The unihipili is not rational so it is important to understand this fact as well as its relationship to emotions and somatic experiences. The unihipili is the repository of our memories and has feelings, not thoughts. It is not really responsive to words, rather to feelings. I do not know how to put this forward in a perfectly clear manner. Let's try. When you tell your dog to "sit", you assume the dog is listening to words and has a certain vocabulary for commands, but it is possible the dog is observing thought pictures and not paying attention to thewords at all. You can experiment by thinking "sit" and saying "bark" and see if the dog sits. I think you will discover that he follows the intended command, not the verbal one. The unihipili is also not tricked, but we scramble our memory banks by saying things that are not true.

For instance, we tell a little boy to be brave because "it won't hurt," but it does hurt and he knows it will hurt but over a period of time, you force this knowledge to go deeper and deeper until it is harder to access. We do this all the time, sometimes with good intentions and sometimes as a deliberate lie. Most people begin to believe the lies and to trust what they should not trust. This would not happen if we had proper relationships to our unihipilis. So, what Morrnah said with respect to Rolfing was not that it is a useless modality but that some of the energy of the subconscious and of the physical being would be used to deflect the treatment because the treatment is painful. If you recall what I wrote about the lomi-lomi on the hardwood floor, it felt blissful despite the lack of cushioning and Morrnah's 165 pounds. As such, I took it in and took it in completely. It therefore had a profound effect.

Finally, I would like to tell one more story. One night, I was at Morrnah's home in Honolulu. As I was leaving, already at the open front door, she said, "You have an interesting patient tomorrow." I was actually petrified because one of my students had a classmate whose baby was born blind. I had no idea what the underlying problem was much less what I might be able to do so I gave Morrnah one of those looks: "yes, well, help!" I had not told her anything at all about why I was in Honolulu much less who I was seeing. She said, "Well, it's easy, there are two bright lights behind the eyes and you merely have to get them to sparkle." Yes, sure! However, to tell you the truth, I felt a little better because she tried to make it sound simple.

So, I was totally unprepared for the reality. The little girl was about one and half years old and had no voluntary motions at all, none. Her mother put food in her mouth and forced it down. Her eyes were mercifully sealed shut, but when I pried open the eyelids to see where those two lights might be, I found two miniature eyeballs, no larger than peas, way in the back of the head. They were not even remotely positioned correctly in the sockets. Now what? Oh, gosh, why didn't Morrnah take this on; it's way over my head.

I did what I always do when I don't know. I sat quietly and watched. The mother talked and told me about her guilt over medications she had taken while pregnant. She told me what others had said about her daughter's past lives and present condition. I sat and watched. After a while, there was a movement, sort of a spastic movement, but a movement of one arm and one leg. I asked her mother if this happened often. She said, "Yes, always exactly the same." The long and the short is that we were eventually able to associate this movement with an intentional movement and then with a past life. . . at which point, I realized we had a very special soul inside this body. Using everything I had learned, precious little if the truth be known, I asked the girl to use her third eye and to put her hand in the palm of my hand. She did this, effortlessly and easily. Now, obviously, this was "impossible" so how could it happen. It could appen because we completely by-passed the rational pathways and evoked the functional part of her being. Now, we knew the lights were working because she had just demonstrated this. She went on to use her third eye constantly and was able to ride buses and attend school and do most of the things normal people do.

If you ask me to give an intelligent explanation of how this is possible, then I have to say, there is nothing that science can approach here because absolutely nothing was done except that a relationship between a working part and non-working part was partially repaired. In the many years since bathing in Morrnah's aura, I have had countless occasions to refer to her teaching, and I have had many memorable experiences as a result. This said, some of the best were with nonverbal patients, like horses and birds and deer. With people, the most important lesson was always to seek the obstacle to cure because until it is removed, healing will not occur.