When the air and water are about the same temp which is also about the same temp as the surface of your skin and you are floating drifting along it's like you can't really tell where the water stops and the air starts. Or where you start and the outside world stops. Kind of like crawling back into a giant amniotic sac.
My Hawaiian healer is the most gentle sweet human being I have ever met. He spent childhood here on Molokai but then spent most of his life elsewhere, Honolullu and the mainland. He was in the military and has been to university (the only way to pay for college for a lot of young Hawaiians is to join the navy unfortunately).
I'm just saying this because I want you to know that he is not some shaman in a hut with chicken bones around his neck. He has a computer and a cell phone. He shares a house with a cousin who is widowed at the age of 70 (my healer is 60), so the two old bachelors are helping each other out.
Also my healer is not totally closed to the ideas of western medicine. He recently(less than a year ago) had open heart surgery to repair a congenital deformity in one of his heart valves. He understands that no amount of coconut oil and turmeric is going to fix something like that.
Now that he is recuperating and getting back to healthy again, he is transitioning off of the cumadin (a.k.a. rat poison) that the VA had him on for a blood thinner. He is now on a combination of krill oil and turmeric.
(Side note. VA health care, at least out here in the Pacific is piss poor. That is not the way we should be treating people who put their lives on the line for their country.)
So, since he moved back here to Molokai, he has established a practice as the local "medicine man". The native born Hawaiians listen to his advice more than white coated MDs even though they are often both telling people the same things like cut back on the sugar, get some more exercise, lose the booze, etc.
His way of looking at the body is very holistic and functional. Everything is connected. When patterns of tension or old injuries get established, they create blockages where the energy doesn't flow right.
One doesn't have to believe in the woo-sci of "seeing auras" and such to understand that there is a physiological basis for this "flow" model. Blood flows, lymphatic fluid flows, nerve impulses flow.
He generally starts at the top of the body with the patient sitting down on a padded bench. He works on "opening up" the top of the head and then works on the arms. Any work he does later in the central part of the body will release tensions and such that will need a way to get out. Getting the head and arms ready for this provides an unblocked exit.
He has got the most amazing combination of strong yet gentle hands. He works over all my cranial sutures and it feels like my brain suddenly has more room to breathe. He says I tend to carry my tensions in my neck and shoulders so he gives these a thorough going over too.
Then he transfers me to a massage table lying face up. Most "Swedish" style massage is done with the person face down but this is different.
First he works on the legs, making sure they are aligned with one another and that my pelvis is lined up right too.
So there are elements of what we would think of as massage but also what we would call chiropractic care as well, just not the heavy bone crunching kind.
When the legs are all straightened out he moves on to the torso which for me is a massive tangle of scar tissue. Gently but persistently he is breaking down those blockages and restoring normal blood flow, nerve impulses, etc. Areas of my body that have been dead to me for 8 years are coming back to life.
He does work on the spine but he does it by moving organs aside and manipulating things from the front. He works his way all along the vagus nerve from the head down. I wonder if some of why a VNS works could be replicated with this kind of work instead of wires and magnets and invasive surgery that doesn't always work.
There are a lot of people here on Molokai who are hurting financially particularly the native born folks. Well off mainlanders like me help to pay the cost since he never turns down a patient in need even if they can't pay. A lot of the local folk pay him in barter like bringing produce from their gardens or some fish they caught or venison they hunted. Or an older patient will send a grandson over to do a day of yard work or fix his roof or whatever needs doing.
One of the things that I think is really cool about this community is that the MDs with white coats are not closed off to traditional healing. They know that the two can work together. They let my healer come in to a patient's room after surgery and find that his treatments allow the patient to go home much sooner with much less heavy meds.
One of the often repeated objections to "alternative " practitioners is that they are dangerous because they get people to "fire their doctors". Nothing could be further from the truth in this case. He gets people to listen to their doctors. Diabetes is a huge problem here. Standing there with his long hair in a knot at the back of his head and telling the kupuna (elders) that they need to get back to the way their grandparents ate (cut out the Spam and sodas) it gets through better than it would from a haole doctor.
My Hawaiian healer is the most gentle sweet human being I have ever met. He spent childhood here on Molokai but then spent most of his life elsewhere, Honolullu and the mainland. He was in the military and has been to university (the only way to pay for college for a lot of young Hawaiians is to join the navy unfortunately).
I'm just saying this because I want you to know that he is not some shaman in a hut with chicken bones around his neck. He has a computer and a cell phone. He shares a house with a cousin who is widowed at the age of 70 (my healer is 60), so the two old bachelors are helping each other out.
Also my healer is not totally closed to the ideas of western medicine. He recently(less than a year ago) had open heart surgery to repair a congenital deformity in one of his heart valves. He understands that no amount of coconut oil and turmeric is going to fix something like that.
Now that he is recuperating and getting back to healthy again, he is transitioning off of the cumadin (a.k.a. rat poison) that the VA had him on for a blood thinner. He is now on a combination of krill oil and turmeric.
(Side note. VA health care, at least out here in the Pacific is piss poor. That is not the way we should be treating people who put their lives on the line for their country.)
So, since he moved back here to Molokai, he has established a practice as the local "medicine man". The native born Hawaiians listen to his advice more than white coated MDs even though they are often both telling people the same things like cut back on the sugar, get some more exercise, lose the booze, etc.
His way of looking at the body is very holistic and functional. Everything is connected. When patterns of tension or old injuries get established, they create blockages where the energy doesn't flow right.
One doesn't have to believe in the woo-sci of "seeing auras" and such to understand that there is a physiological basis for this "flow" model. Blood flows, lymphatic fluid flows, nerve impulses flow.
He generally starts at the top of the body with the patient sitting down on a padded bench. He works on "opening up" the top of the head and then works on the arms. Any work he does later in the central part of the body will release tensions and such that will need a way to get out. Getting the head and arms ready for this provides an unblocked exit.
He has got the most amazing combination of strong yet gentle hands. He works over all my cranial sutures and it feels like my brain suddenly has more room to breathe. He says I tend to carry my tensions in my neck and shoulders so he gives these a thorough going over too.
Then he transfers me to a massage table lying face up. Most "Swedish" style massage is done with the person face down but this is different.
First he works on the legs, making sure they are aligned with one another and that my pelvis is lined up right too.
So there are elements of what we would think of as massage but also what we would call chiropractic care as well, just not the heavy bone crunching kind.
When the legs are all straightened out he moves on to the torso which for me is a massive tangle of scar tissue. Gently but persistently he is breaking down those blockages and restoring normal blood flow, nerve impulses, etc. Areas of my body that have been dead to me for 8 years are coming back to life.
He does work on the spine but he does it by moving organs aside and manipulating things from the front. He works his way all along the vagus nerve from the head down. I wonder if some of why a VNS works could be replicated with this kind of work instead of wires and magnets and invasive surgery that doesn't always work.
There are a lot of people here on Molokai who are hurting financially particularly the native born folks. Well off mainlanders like me help to pay the cost since he never turns down a patient in need even if they can't pay. A lot of the local folk pay him in barter like bringing produce from their gardens or some fish they caught or venison they hunted. Or an older patient will send a grandson over to do a day of yard work or fix his roof or whatever needs doing.
One of the things that I think is really cool about this community is that the MDs with white coats are not closed off to traditional healing. They know that the two can work together. They let my healer come in to a patient's room after surgery and find that his treatments allow the patient to go home much sooner with much less heavy meds.
One of the often repeated objections to "alternative " practitioners is that they are dangerous because they get people to "fire their doctors". Nothing could be further from the truth in this case. He gets people to listen to their doctors. Diabetes is a huge problem here. Standing there with his long hair in a knot at the back of his head and telling the kupuna (elders) that they need to get back to the way their grandparents ate (cut out the Spam and sodas) it gets through better than it would from a haole doctor.
