Garnette Arledge, author

Fine Print Independent Book Reviews

Wise Secrets of Aloha:
Learn and Live the Sacred Art of Lomilomi
Kahuna Harry Uhane Jim and Garnette Arledge
Publisher: Weiser Books, 800/​423-7087, www.weiserbooks.com

In the preface and the introduction, the
Rev. Garnette Arledge gives some history of
Hawaiian kahunas and Temple Lomilomi, and she describes Harry Uhane Jim as the one of the last kahunas of Lomilomi.

Hawaiians believe that people who are large around the solar plexus area are filled with much mana (divine power), and Jim is no exception, explaining Hawaiians don’t eat until they’re full, they eat until they’re tired! Anecdotes like this pervade this pleasant read in the Hawaiian talk-story tradition.

Sometimes Arledge asks questions, sometimes articipants’ stories are shared, but mostly it is Jim talking to the readers as if he were in their presence.

Arledge devotes half a chapter to the many meanings of the word “aloha,” as well as defining the esoteric aloha spirit. A glossary of Hawaiian words can be found in the back of the book.

Jim describes the triune self, which is composed of the superconscious (Au’makua), the conscious will (Uhane), and the unconscious (Unihipili). The kahuna explains the Unihipili represses memories by
crystallizing them in the body, one reason why Lomilomi (vibrational energy-touch therapy) is needed to shape-shift energy, moving it out of the body. One technique to do this is bone washing, massaging
the tissue around the bones in a particular way to release “cherished” or early childhood wounds.

Jim instructs readers how to create sacred space by making a channel for energy to run throughout the body, mind, and emotions. Other topics covered are the ha breath (grace-receiving gratitude), Laulima
(laying on of hands), and the path to manifesting life abundance. A strong message for givers of Lomilomi is to cultivate compassionate disengagement. The more disengaged the giver is, the more grace can
come to the receiver.

Arledge is an experienced writer living in Woodstock, N.Y., who had an intuitive revelation she would work with Jim on this book. Jim was born on Kauai, mentored and taught by Hawaiian elders. He treats
clients and teaches in the the U.S. and Canada.

David Paulsen, Ekaha Enchantments, Keaau, Hawaii
Trade Show 2007 issue. www.newageretailer.com
800/​463-9243 and 360/​676-0789

Garnette’s Introduction:

“Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately ... The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness." - Michel de Montaigne

Aloha calls. Listen in the breeze, the splash of waves, the air is filled with Aloha.

Listen, you are being called to the Aloha Spirit in the book you are holding. Listen like I did. Aloha can change your life as it did mine. All the abundance, freedom from cherished wounds and joy you have ever yearned for can be yours with the Aloha Spirit. I know, Aloha called me at just the right time. (See Introduction – Calling the Wave)

For a lifetime spent writing journalism, articles and books, I’ve also spent 30 years seasoned by doing energy and hands-on healing. Working with death, dying and hospice grew out of my experiences of profound love as an opportunity for service to those who suffer.

If pressed I might say I am a practicing mystic but probably rather say a regular person. I have dedicated my adult live to honoring and studying the Divine One impinging spirituality as many names in the world religions.

I love the deep life. Perhaps that’s why I got into hospice work, first as a Hospice Volunteer Trainer and then Chaplain. I wrote a book called On Angels Eve on the world religions mystical teachings for serene dying for family members because I longed to help people overcome fear of dying.

Then suddenly my partner, co-creator of our golden quest, was killed on the NY Thruway changing a tire.

Everything changed.

Let’s skip the grimy details of my own grief process which you can imagine if you like, but I don’t recommend it, and get right back to the state of mind called Hawaii.

Once the Angels’ book was finished, I began praying for another life affirming, deeply spiritual topic to write about next. While I was still carrying the burden of missing him so terribly, I was invited to be the guest cook for a workshop.

So I laughed, and said yes, cooking in a way is like writing. Bringing beautiful colors and fresh organic nourishment to bless and enliven others, that’s a book as well as a meal.

An authentic native Hawaiian Kahuna was giving a teaching on Lomilomi, the delicious healing touch therapy of the Islands. Lomilomi’s primary definition, one of its many definitions, is to raise the vibration of the receiver. (See Chapter 1 – The Aloha Spirit).

That’s what I am married to as a theology, to raise the vibration, for goodness sake.

Here’s the picture: It’s the western Catskills not too near Oneonta, NY, I’m cooking in a brand new kitchen, first use of a ten-burner commercial stove and dishwasher. Lots of food. Big food, not just PBJ, widow’s food. For a lot of people.

Up drives a Dodge Caravan and from the back seat, a six-foot Hawaiian Kahuna with curly black hair, bare feet, shorts (it’s early April Upstate NY there’s still snow on the ground and he’s in shorts), emerges, laughing. He has a very large presence. That’s how I first met Harry Uhane Jim. (See Chapter 2 – The Halau Guardians).

He puts on his sandals, saunters into the steamy kitchen, having felt the vibration of cooking chaos miles away, offering at once to help prep right after a six-hour car trip.

Now that’s a true healer who humbly rises to help, even in the kitchen.

Later, he and his wife would come in to help out during breaks. His first assignment, a dozen spaghetti squash to wrestle open. With his massive hands, he takes the knife, and one swift cut they open.

Spaghetti squash is not an easy opener; but for Harry, who uses gravity and a giggle, it seems like cutting pie. Then he invites me to join the class – which I do during cooking breaks. (See Chapter 3 – Creating Space).

The first time I was a receiver on the table, a friend and I are learning Creating Space.

I’m lying there with my eyes closed, trusting the process. Harry walks over, sticks his great hand into the heart chakra, that area from the top of the spiritual heart to just under the ribcage above the diaphragm, and releases a great big bag of mourning.
In a second, literally, the grief flies out.

I feel waves after waves of release, rushes of energy pour through my heart and out the top of my head, then enormous, cosmos size, gratitude and brilliance. It was a huge Gratitude Wave.

All I can do is laugh, grin and smile with gratitude. Then Harry’s wife of twenty-five years, Sila (pronounced with a long i) holds my feet to ground me back on the planet. I find myself again. It was huge as Harry says. (See Chapter 4 - Ha Breath).

During the last treatment of the workshop with my colleague Sue Ann Wilkerson as the giver, it seemed like a enormous healing guardian stood stalwart over the massage table where I was soaking in the Aloha, and said: “Write a book about Aloha.”

Synchronistically, Harry came over as this vision is happening, so I put the suggestion on the table to him. One month later after pondering, he said No.

Later, I asked again, he said No.

I asked a third time as I really, really felt guided to do this, he laughed and said yes.

Hawaiians know you have to ask three times. He was not playing three questions games with me. He was really, really reluctant to do so until his guidance confirmed now is the time.

The reluctant teacher, he did not want to lift the orchid curtain or set himself up in aggrandizement. Kahunas are Keepers of the Deep Mysteries, steeped in the oral tradition, lineage to lineage, person by person transmission. But the book was not in either of our hands alone, the Halau Guardians know that the Whole Earth needs these gentle teachings now. (See Chapter 2, The Ha Breath).

That day as Harry agreed we were sitting on a balcony in the Western Catskills. At the very moment he said yes a bald eagle flew overhead. I said that's an omen.

Later that day as we were traveling, he stopped the van, as we watched a turtle the size of a thanksgiving platter cross the road. “That’s the blessing,” Harry said. The one Hawaiian word for turtle, spirit guardian of turtle and for the High Self is Au'makua.
We were on our way to your reading this.

If someone authentic and Hawaiian does not teach the healing secrets, these healings will disappear from the planet with the passing of Harry Uhane Jim, the Last Kahuna of is Lomilomi lineage.

We considered deeply before committing to this work. Then our publisher Weiser’s stepped forward, the most respected name for deep esoteric and metaphysical books for 50 plus years.

I knew then, the Halau Guardians are leading this concert. (See 7, 8, 9 chapters – Calling and Healing):
We got to work and so, here it is, Aloha.

Enjoy. Laugh a lot. Be easy-going. Go easy. Listen to the air, there’s an inner island paradise waiting for you in these pages ahead.

Garnette Arledge, M.Div. (Master of Divinity)
St. Hilda’s Lodge
Woodstock, NY

BLESSINGS, HILDA

Preface by Garnette Arledge
Hilda Charlton listens as profoundly as she speaks, as she loves. Her life was lived blessing, blessing, blessing. She listened inside. She listened and heard, responding to the cries of the hurt, wounded, ill, miserable, and lost in the world. She listened to God in creation. She listens still. Listen. You can hear her voice in the fabric of all life.

From her earliest days, then later, performing dance and glorying in the spiritual life, she listened within. She forthwith practiced what she heard in her own life before she, in turn, taught this to others. No one knows for sure whether she was born illuminated or she became enlightened. There are clues, but she would not broadcast that. I suspect the following incident in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, is not the story of her illumination but a code-story for each of us on how to practice with determination for our own illumination.

Hilda was careful not to make claims for herself. She said, “Do not look at me, I am the moon, I am only a reflection of the Light. Look beyond the teacher to the One Source.”

Still, how else to understand her remarkable life, extraordinarily compelling gifts, and honest simplicity except in the context that she was a fully God-realized being. Find out for yourself, and accept the blessing as you read on. Make my experience your own with her. Too many people have said that they missed having a personal experience with Hilda. Not so, she gave this interview for you, that you might spend the afternoon with her in her home.

For twenty-three years in New York City, she planted as seeds of light what she realized were mysterious, ineffable truths. As tools for self-realization when so many teachers offer complicated directions, her lessons seem simple but they can take one all the way home. Hilda opened the Mystery to all. Her lessons are like Zen koans awakening the Aha! in a moment of simplicity. She danced, she taught, countless were healed in her presence.

From her early days teaching in the Bay area of San Francisco to her final days on Earth in Manhattan, thousands of the spiritually thirsty were offered the satisfying, thirst-quenching cup of wisdom. From India, after her eighteen-year sojourn in the East, she settled in Manhattan in 1968. There she taught meditation, healed and prayed for the world. She called her life the Golden Quest. Hilda Charlton passed into the cosmic January 29, 1988.

As a prophetic journalist, I sought and received the following interview with her in 1984. Yet even that she turned upside down into a personal initiation, a lesson of life for me. Further, she blessed my writing, showing me the fierce concentration and determination it takes to birth creative work. She seemed so deeply interested in my process of writing, even to how to obtain the interview. I believe now, she was making a pathway inside me to be a writer of the Light.

By 1984 when I first approached her for this project, she had turned down repeatedly, all calls for interviews, even from Barbara Walters. I did not know this, and when I heard in the air ‘ ask me for an interview at her class’ I casually scribbled a note on a scrap of paper from my purse asking for a spiritual interview – not planning on publication, but for my own growth. She turned it down. I heard it again: I handwrote again. She turned it down.

I heard ‘ ask me for an interview a third time.’ Finally, I typed a formal note requesting a professional interview for a book I was working on about artists and their creativity. My idea was to write about the link between spirituality and creativity. In an article she wrote herself in The New Sun, about her experiences in then-Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, with the Holy Mother Ammal, Hilda explains that a person must ask three times to receive a response of truth. In writing three times, I knocked gently on her heart three times until she finally said yes. This three-step method also helped me later, for my further books, in writing query letters in a professional manner. So even in my initial contacts for the interviews, she taught. Watch the saints. They teach by doing.

Finally, she accepted my request. She would come to spend long hours in her home after the initial interview, personally helping me fine-tune the writing, even debating grammar and sentence structure with me. We went over every word and comma until I thought I would evaporate under her intense scrutiny.

And still there were errors on publication, despite her tender care, which delighted others and mortified me. Even that humiliation chipped away at my self-pride of finally being an author not merely a scribbler. I had to work through so much unworthiness to even approach Hilda, that the critiques devastated me despite even more who praised and thanked.

I have no idea if I am stronger today, but I hope so, or perhaps by a miracle there are no errors here. Yet, remember if you find typos and interpretations that are outright wrong to you, I take full responsibility. Hilda tried to help me understand the iron law that demands rehearsals, rehearsals, rehearsals for perfection. Like this book, I am still a work in process.

When it finally came time for a title, I named it Blessings, Hilda because she left her blessing and signature on my heart. She taught me not only how to write but how to live. I took every word she said and applied it to myself. I bought my first computer. She changed me into an imaginative writer and blessed my work. I would not be the person I am today without her guidance. Self-publishing the interview as a modest book, it sold out in three months. I reprinted it once; there are just two printed copies left. I did not attempt to find a publisher because this book is so personal, having its own integrity as it is. But when a colleague suggested offering it on the CD's, I agreed. Hilda did not accept money for herself; all proceeds will go to my non-profit foundation Angels Eve Inc., education for life.

Since 1985, Blessings, Hilda has found its way around the world. A friend glimpsed a copy in Indianapolis. Another on the Riviera, France; in California, and one even in a remote ashram in South India. Below is a translation into Spanish from Mexico, made in honor of Hilda’s mahasamadhi. Now, with the web, may you, too, enjoy Hilda’s wisdom. I wish you could hear her laugh. Even almost twenty five years later, I have the audiotape with her rich as sweet butter laugh to uplift me.