Grokking for Good With the Big Kahuna

Most people reserve Sunday mornings for such relaxing pursuits as reading the paper, watching sports, eating brunch or going to church. But, on one recent Sunday morning at the Airport Quality Inn on Point Loma, 40 people agreed to forgo languor for a more noble effort.

Grokking.

By combining their “loving energy,” they attempted to heal the Amazon rain forests, halt a hurricane headed for the Philippines, bring rain to drought-stricken North Africa and break the arctic cold snap that had recently hit San Diego. Settling into vinyl chairs in the motel’s conference room, they closed their eyes and breathed deeply. The grokking was about to begin.

“Imagine a small seed at your navel,” said Serge Kahili King, as he began the session aimed at bringing regrowth to devastated South American rain forests. “You are in the seed, the seed is in you and you are the seed itself.”

His students sat silent.

“ Pico Pico, “ he said, uttering the Hawaiian incitement to concentrate.

Merging with Nature

“As the forest, you feel good about yourself. Feel your happiness and the contribution you make to the Earth,” he said.

Grokking is a Polynesian word for merging with nature’s elements to change existing natural conditions. Like a typhoon, for instance. Or a cold snap stunting crop growth in the Midwest. As the five-minute grok came to a close, participants opened their eyes and shared their experiences with one another.

“I visualized being a seed and then a tree, taking nourishment from the Earth,” explained Ula Susanne Garfield, who moved from North Park to the island of Kauai, Hawaii, six months ago to study with King. “I see trees as the friends of the forest. I just imagined how it would feel to shade the ground with my thick branches and have someone sit beneath me.”

Such positive visualizations are part of the Polynesian philosophy of huna that King teaches during two-day seminars he offers for $185 in cities around the world. Huna is a mixture of Polynesian and Hawaiian maxims and New Age dialogue familiar to enthusiasts of self-help books and workshops. King promises the revered New Age values of joy, peace and prosperity if students follow The Huna Way.

It’s kind of like “Terry Cole Whitaker Goes to Hawaii.”

Kahunas, those who practice huna, may not like that characterization. But huna is merely another way of becoming more self-actualized, more centered, more self-confident. King tells followers they will learn how to use their minds to relieve physical pain, change the future, and heal plants, animals and people.

Out-of-Body Experiences?

Advanced courses promise students that, among other things, they will learn “magical flight” and have out-of-body experiences.

Kahunas admit that their beliefs of what it takes to lead a more meaningful, more loving life have been made by other “wise people” throughout history. The twist is that their philosophies are rooted in Hawaiian culture and utilize Polynesian words for the same basic tenets pushed by most self-help programs.

Mana , for example, is one of the seven principles of huna. It means “all power comes from within.” Ike , states “the world is what you think it is.” Manawa, “now is the moment of power,” sounds similar to your mother’s advice--”don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today.”

King uses huna as the basis of his Hawaiian shaman training, the seminar he taught here recently. A shaman is a person who has achieved balance between mind, body and spirit. He can then use his mind, according to King, to move energy and influence matter.

Grokking is a good example of shamanism. King teaches proteges to use their own balance to create balance in nature. The Big Kahuna’s own grokking experiences are no small feats. He claims to have turned hurricanes away from his home in Kauai and to have helped stop a tidal wave headed for the Hawaiian Islands.

“The newspapers called it ‘The tidal wave that wasn’t,’ ” King said.

Perhaps best of all, grokking is foolproof. No guilt if some shamans fail to stop a fire destined to destroy two-thirds of a national forest. If a grok doesn’t work, it’s because not enough people--regular people--wanted it to work. The shamans were unable to accomplish their goal, he said, because there was not enough collective energy floating around favoring their task.

Just Lending a Hand

“We’re never the cause of a tidal wave not happening,” he said. “There were enough people who didn’t want that to happen . . . we just assist in the natural process. That’s why we don’t run out and take credit for things.”

In other Aquarian Age parlance, that would be known as picking up on good karma.

King’s goal is to train hundreds of thousands of shamans around the world, enough to create a shaman network he can call upon when the world needs balancing.

“The role of the urban shaman,” he explained, “is to use his or her self-development for community service and to help increase the peace on Earth.”

Ironically, King, 51, is Caucasian. He was born in San Diego and reared in Los Angeles. Dressed in a bright Hawaiian shirt, a lei of Hawaiian kukui nuts around his neck, King explained he was adopted into a Hawaiian family that followed the path of huna. He took to shaman training so well that his family dubbed him kahuna kupua, or “master shaman.”

Those studying shamanism under the kahuna kupua are considered lucky. Even five years ago, it wouldn’t have been possible for them to follow the shaman’s path. A master shaman like King usually accepts only one or two apprentices during his lifetime.

“But I realized that just wasn’t enough. I needed to train more healers,” he said.

King decided that, in an age when the Earth had become a global village, it was time for the emergence of urban shamans. Many of them. So he created Hawaiian shaman training.

In just a weekend, students supposedly can cull secrets that once took years to learn.

Enthusiastic Participants

San Diegan Robert Garing, an interior designer and healer, enrolled in shaman school so that he “would be more effective and efficient in my experience and expression of life.”

Garing, 44, has taken a variety of consciousness-raising classes and holds a ministerial license. But he felt King’s shaman training would help expand his healing abilities.

Elaine Willis, an elegantly dressed psychologist and corporate nutritionist, drove down from Newport Beach to study with King.

“The principles of huna will be helpful to my clients. They’ll realize they can take charge of their lives. That the mind does have the power to keep the body healthy,” she said.

Candace McGinnis, 28, of Cardiff, also hoped to learn shaman techniques that she could employ with patients in her physiotherapy practice. Most of her clients have been injured in job-related accidents. They must learn not to resist life, she said, to accept both the good and the bad and to learn that negative experiences can be creative.

Although King is out to change the world, he said he’s not out to persuade everyone to go Hawaiian. “It’s a good thing I’m not out to make a lot of money,” he said. “When you start talking about changing the weather and that kind of thing, it creates a very limited market appeal.”

He earns enough to keep himself rolling in kukui nuts, however. In San Diego, his workshops attracted 40 participants willing to pay $185 for the two-day seminar, and 90 people who attended a three-hour mini-workshop for $15. That totals $8,750 for four days work for his nonprofit Aloha International.

King and his three assistant master shamans will conduct 30 such workshops between January and June.

King said he plans to use this year’s profits to finance a Hawaiian Cultural Peace Center near his home in Kilauea, Kauai. It would include an event pavilion, nature center, botanical garden and sacred prayer site where shamans from around the world could come and study.

The kahuna’s plans don’t stop there. He believes the corporate world needs more aloha. He hopes companies will buy his idea of building Polynesian gardens in high-rises. A daily visit to his so-called “mind-spa” would help refresh weary workers.

“People can heal their spirit simply by being in that environment,” he said.