Honolulu Weekly

Hawaiian Healing

Traditional learning

There are three methods used in traditional Hawaiian medicine: lomilomi, popularly known as massage; la‘au lapa‘au, treatment with medicinal herbs; and ho‘oponopono, conflict resolution. Lomilomi techniques are traditionally handed down within families by elders who select a child as an apprentice. “It [lomilomi] ran in my family. My grandmother, Dolores Kaleimamookealohikikaupea Lee Wayland Zakimi, taught me since I was a little girl,” says Pi‘ilani Wright, who grew up in Hawai‘i Kai. Now she works at Moku Ola, a Hawaiian healing center she founded with her cousin Aoi Wright after getting her license in massage therapy, apprenticing in lomilomi with the Lomi Shop in Windward Mall and studying ho‘oponopono with kumu Aunty Malia Craver.

‚ÄúI feel my grandmother around me all the time,‚Äù says Wright, who is Hawaiian-Chinese and in her late thirties, with an athletic build and calm oval face, a frank expression in her alert eyes. As soon as she greets me at the Center, with a handshake and a kiss, I‚Äôm aware that she‚Äôs studying me‚Ä'gleaning my pain points, no doubt, but also sizing me up. I feel that I can trust her, and I want to be worthy of her trust.

It’s important to understand, Wright says, that physical massage is only one component of lomilomi, in which aches and pains are regarded as symptoms of an overall spiritual imbalance. To heal the spirit and release negative energy, lomilomi employs pule (prayer), pono (to make right), ha (breath) and na‘au (guts, intuition).

For the most part, traditional Hawaiian healers do not advertise. But if you’re ready for their healing you can find it, sometimes just around the corner, in a place you’d least expect.

For instance, in touristy Waikiki, there’s an authentic healer on a shabby block of ‘Ohua Avenue behind a chain link fence, in a cluster of low buildings with a prefab look. All the early mornings I’ve parked at the curb to go surfing at Queen’s, I’ve never noticed the Waikiki Health Center sign.

Beyond the parking lot, however, are coconut trees and a big green lawn. At the reception desk I am greeted by “Auntie” Francine Dudoit, director of Native Hawaiian healing, a statuesque lady of middle age, bare-armed in a bright dress, fair-skinned, with a dark-red beehive, her hazel eyes rimmed with liner. Waikiki Health Center, she explains as she leads me down the hall, is a non-profit clinic that receives funding from state agencies and private donations. It provides health services to a broad spectrum of clientele, including the homeless. Its sister center in Hale‘iwa, Ola Like, also offers traditional medicine.

Dudoit invites me into a small office furnished with an examination table and a couple of chairs, its shelves and walls covered with artifacts‚Ä'poi pounders, photos of her children and grandchildren, of herself with Hawai‚Äòi and U.S. legislators, and her degrees and awards. As both a registered nurse and traditional healer, Auntie Francine spans two worlds. And she truly sees herself as a bridge, she says.

She defines lomilomi differently than does Pi‚Äòilani Wright. ‚ÄúIt is the spiritual laying on of hands‚Ä'not massage,‚Äù she says.

Could you call it manipulation?

Auntie Francine arches her russet eyebrows. “No! Lomilomi is not therapeutic or Swedish massage and it’s not Shiatsu, it’s not about pressure points. It’s in its own element. It’s a hands-on, soothing touch. But if you have a pinched nerve, or are really stressed, when I go over certain areas you can feel a certain discomfort.”

How, then, to best describe lomilomi?

She opens her mouth, looks into the distance, and appears to give up with a toss of her hands. “Your words and our words are so different!”

Maybe, I say, if she could show me by lomi’ing me a little, I’ll find the right words.

“I will show you.” She regards me for a moment as we sit facing one another. “For you, it is in your arms and your shoulders. Your elbows.”

“You can tell that from the way I hold myself? My posture?”

“No. Not from looking at you.” She opens her arms, stirs the air with her fingers like a dancer. “I feel it in the room. I can feel your anxiety and your pain. I’ll start with your arms.”

As Auntie Francine digs steely fingertips into my elbows and manipulates forearms, wrists, thumb pad‚Ä'I feel more than a certain discomfort. It is all I can do not to cry out in pain.

Now that I can no longer take notes, Auntie Francine relaxes. The talk flows easier. “I’m from Moloka‘i. My training came from my grandmother, Harriet Lealoha Kaleimamahu, and from another practitioner, Kailua Kaiohoa, who was of the generation of Papa Henry Auwe,” she says.

“As a child, I used to see the people waiting outside my grandmother’s house. Night and day. They would come from far away, even other countries. And I thought, that’s not for me. I knew I wanted to help people, but not like that. When I was fifteen, my grandmother said, ‘It’s time for you to learn,’ and I said no, ‘I’m going to school.’

“I went to college and nursing school, and I got married, and I had my first job in a clinic here on O‘ahu. And then my grandmother came over and said to me, ‘It’s time. And so I started to learn from her. She was in her seventies by then. I realized I was just a funnel. Here to bridge the gap.”

Asked if it felt like a calling, “If it was, I wasn’t the one doing the calling,” Auntie Francine says. “And when I work with other healers, when they show me what they do, I can feel who they learned from. It’s highly individual. Everyone is different.”

###>HEAD Healing a culture

Auntie Francine moves to my right hand and arm.

“This is pretty excruciating, Auntie,” I finally have to say.

She nods. “You have to be willing and ready to heal,” she says.

She moves her chair behind me and works on my shoulders, neck and upper back.

It is still painful in a sharp, discomfiting way, but I also begin to feel a loosening up: A softening, a lightening.

She goes on, telling me about how she loves to teach and lecture and travel. At the University of California, Irvine, she was saddened to meet adult Native Hawaiians who had never been to Hawai‘i. She was also amazed to find that they were mostly free of the diseases that disproportionately afflict Hawaiians here.

At least, Dudoit says, things are getting better. “Twenty years ago, Kekuni Blaisdell [an M.D. and convenor of the sovereignty group Ka Pakaukau] warned that if our health kept going in this direction, Hawaiians would be extinct by 2040,” Auntie Francine says. “I don’t think that’s going to happen now.” Hawaiians’ health is improving in their homeland, Dudoit says, not least because the integration of native healing and western medicine makes them feel more comfortable about going to the doctor.

When I speak with Dr. Blaisdell, however, he is far from upbeat. ‚ÄúNative Hawaiians still have the highest prevalence of diabetes, the highest rates of heart disease and of behavioral risk factors‚Ä'smoking, alcohol, obesity‚Ä'of any ethnic group in the state of Hawaii,‚Äù says the retired physician, now working as a consultant to the new Department of Native Hawaiian Health at UH‚Äôs John Burns School of Medicine. ‚ÄúWhile mortality rates seem to be declining in some categories, the rate of decline is not more than previously, and we do not have hard data showing improvement.‚Äù Meanwhile, Blaisdell says, Native Hawaiians continue to suffer the highest rates of the leading causes of death: ‚ÄúHeart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, infections.‚Äù

For almost thirty years, Blaisdell has been seeking to reduce his people‚Äôs disproportionate burden of ill health. ‚ÄúWe first became aware of these striking differences in the 1980s. Until then, all of the data were hidden‚Ä'we weren‚Äôt supposed to acknowledge ethnic differences and disparities. The official policy of the state Department of Health was that we were a melting pot, we‚Äôre all Americans.‚Äù

Blaisdell contributed to the Native Hawaiian Commission Report of 1983; in 1988, Congress passed the first Native Hawaiian Health Care Improvement Act. “It set up five Native Hawaiian health care systems throughout the Islands, and each system has a council of kupuna who advise them. Traditional healing is part of the movement to restore and invigorate our culture,” he says.

What about the adoption and promotion of Hawaiian healing techniques at Western hotels and spas?

“That represents another example of cultural conflict,” Blaisdell says. “The exploited are now undergoing a second, economic exploitation.” Blaisdell explains that Native Hawaiians traditionally refuse to be commodified. Just as with the concept of private property, or owning the ‘aina, the selling or certifying of one’s services is a foreign notion. “But others are commercializing their products and selling them.” Papa Ola Lokahi, an organization created by the Native Hawaiian Health Care Act, is “… very concerned about this,” Blaisdell says.

###>HEAD ‘Ohana network

Kim Birnie, director of communications for Papa Ola Lokahi, says that the Native Hawaiian community is “not real thrilled” about the offering of Hawaiian healing by hotels and spas. Asked whether it might help to require that all Hawaiian healers meet certain criteria, Birnie notes that Papa Ola, as the state’s Native Hawaiian Health Board, does not compose a list of traditional healers because each community recognizes its own healers. “We facilitate communities on all islands to meet with their own kupuna to discuss certification, how to charge for services, and what are the criteria for being a Hawaiian healer,” Birnie says. However, a Native Hawaiian Board of Health formed by Papa Ola has advised that they “get away from certifying Hawaiian healers,” she adds.

Resistance to standardization is understandable, as every healer is different, with his or her own individual technique. Also, Birnie asks, how can one certify what is essentially a spiritual practice?

This leaves native healing in a sort of quandary: commodified, but uncertified.

I ask Birnie whether non-native practitioners who make Hawaiian healing claims give back to the traditional community in some way.

She rephrases my question. “Is there any reciprocation to the host culture? Some non-Hawaiian massage therapists say they believe they’re in touch with the land, Hawaiian culture and spirits; some have trained for a year or so with the kumu and say they want to give back,” Birnie says. However, she adds, she hasn’t seen any concrete benefits flow from them to the Hawaiian community. “They talk about how to reach out to local Native Hawaiians, but it’s mostly just talk. I don’t see them, for instance, giving scholarships to students.”

Hawaiian healing, it appears, encompasses separate and unequal entities. There are the hotel spas and non-native therapists. Then there is the traditional network that’s always been there. “Native Hawaiians know who to go to. They ask family,” Birnie says.

Upstairs in Moku Ola’s entryway, one takes off one’s shoes before entering the light-filled rooms overlooking the blue waters of Hawai‘i Kai marina. “We’re like family, very ‘ohana here, in how we treat both our clients and our employees. We want you to feel as if you’re walking into someone’s house,” says Pi’ilani Wright. There are photographs of her and Aoi’s families, and a portrait of a beautiful young woman kneeling on the grass, flowers in her hair. “My grandmother,” Pi’ilani says.

Instructing me to lie face down on the massage table, Pi’ilani gives me a brief demo. “Breathe,” she says before she starts lomi‘ing me. “Again.”

What follows a kind of massage I’ve never felt before, particularly on the back, where Wright works from the sides inward to the spine in smooth, soothing, rolling waves. It’s very different from Auntie Francine’s penetrating technique. My muscles relax and warm up; blood flow seems to increase.

In addition to lomilomi, Moku Ola provides body wraps and body and foot scrubs. The plant-based products, including coconut-based massage oils (or pure safflower oil for the allergic), are made in-house and by Pure Hapa, a local business. Aoi Wright, who worked for 10 years as a pediatric nurse at Kap‘iolani Children’s Hospital before studying la‘au with Aunty Alapa‘I Kahu‘ena and others, oversees medicinal plant treatments, including la‘au kipola, which detoxifies the body.

Moku Ola offers lomilomi for children and teens as well as adults. The Center’s non-profit arm reaches out to the community with a free workshop, teaching “a basic understanding of what lomi is, where it comes from,” to families at the Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center, which is owned by the Kamehameha Schools. “For the kids, it’s all about quality time and bonding with the parents,” Pi‘ilani says.

I am struck by the generosity of these healers, so closely woven into their communities. Aunty Francine tells me that she is the only Native Hawaiian healer at Waikiki Health Center, and she works seven days a week, commuting to their Hale‘iwa center, as well. “I never turn anybody away,” she says, adding that she’s able to do this because, “My family takes care of me. They cook, they do everything I need.”

Dudoit’s open door exemplifies the overall policy of this non-profit. While its primary mission is to provide health care to homeless Native Hawaiians, WHC makes room for kama‘ainas and visitors alike. “We don’t just target our own people,” Auntie Francine says. “Everyone is welcome whether they can pay or not.”

For others, as Blaisdell says in his deep, ironic cadences, “Lomilomi is burgeoning. It’s big business.”

In the absence of certification, how can a consumer find a pono healer? Perhaps the simplest way is by word of mouth. Ask your family and friends. Call around. True healers will refer you to others. Ask a healer’s lineage. Who did they learn from? A legacy is impossible to fake, because everyone knows one another. They recognize by touch. The hands don’t lie.