Huna Article
Huna International
Building a Better Life
by Graeme Kapono Urlich
Energy Flows Where Attention Goes
I was watching my grandson playing with some blocks the other day and I noticed something interesting, a
correlation with life and the way many people approach their problems. There is a pervasive way of thinking
that says, in order for life to get better, we have to clear away all the “stuff” that makes life unhappy in
some way.
In Huna we teach that being happy is a decision we can make about any situation. What I see with the idea
that “stuff” from the past has to be cleared away first, has to be healed, is that people make the decision
to be unhappy more and more because when one thing is healed it tends to uncover a deeper layer to work on
or they have simply suppressed something that comes back later.
In watching the way my grandson plays with the blocks, I noticed he takes apart something he built before,
leaving blocks strewn everywhere. Rather than trying to sort out all of the blocks before beginning again,
he clears a space in the “rubble” and starts to think about what he wants to build. He starts a foundation
for it and grabs bits from the mess strewn around him as they become useful to his plan, a plan that seems
to evolve as he builds. He tries different blocks in different ways and maybe changes his mind about how to
build his new creation, partially dismantling it to redo it to his new plan. When he is finished he enjoys
his new creation with oblivious disregard of the mess of unused blocks still around him.
Trying to sort out the mess before he starts to build would most likely take up too much of his playtime and
he would have to stop building his creation before he was able to finish. Starting with building a
foundation and utilizing parts as they became useful always resulted in a finished and enjoyable creation.
“Tidying up” is seen as a chore and can become an obstacle to creating something new. My grandson’s method
of creating something new automatically has the effect of clearing away much of the mess around him in the
process, leaving much less to “tidy up” afterwards.
The same is true of many people’s approach to “fixing” their lives. Many want to “kill” their ego because
it’s the source of everything wrong with their lives or they have to heal trauma, real or imagined, before
things will get better and they can start working towards the life they want, only then can they be happy.
The end of this process is never reached, they always seem to find or create a new problem to fix before
something new can be built.
Some people think they need to fix the "whole world" before they can be happy. Many use the “whole world” as
an excuse not to bother trying to create a better life for themselves. Many believe it is selfish to have a
better life than someone else. This way of thinking quickly becomes overwhelming and leaves us feeling
helpless. When we take a positive attitude to our own lives and the things that directly involve us, we can
start to improve our lives and in doing so, make the “whole world” a better place and encourage others to
do the same.
When we set our focus on something we want to create, a certain level of prosperity or a goal of some kind,
ku brings up all the beliefs that support that as well as any that would get in the way of that
goal. In order to achieve the goal, it will be necessary to resolve the conflicting beliefs but only those
directly involved with it. We do this without judging them to be bad or wrong in any way. We can
assume they were learned from somewhere or are part of our wealth of genetic memory. They are simply not
effective for what we want to achieve and they are easier to change without the tension that judging them
inevitably produces. My grandson didn’t judge the mess that he had created in taking apart his previous
construction, he simply focused on creating something new.
In my article From Small Beginnings I talk about how I used an online
game to change my relationship with money. I put a concentrated focus onto one part of my life and made a
real change there. This flowed into other areas of my life and so on. When we want our whole lives to be
fixed all at once or wait until everything is fixed, we can become overwhelmed by the things that don’t work
yet and completely miss the opportunity to appreciate the things that do, and help them grow.
Graeme Kapono Urlich (January 2024)
Aloha New Zealand - School of Huna and Hawaiian Shamanism
Inner Gardening
Healing Trauma
Beliefs Are Just Rules (video)
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