Huna Article

Huna International

Love Heals from Within
by Stewart Blackburn

Ua ola loko i ke aloha - Love heals from within

The notion that love heals is not new, even though it is generally overlooked. Most of us recognize that having people show that they care about us helps in the healing process. And when we love ourselves by taking care of our bodies in general, that usually keeps sickness at bay. We also recognize that most of our sickness comes from stress, the conflict of ideas and feelings within us. But, I, for one, spent a long time not connecting the Love we're talking about here with healing. It was too vague. Sure, I can feel love and that's nice, but does that do anything for my cold?

The Fifth Principle of Huna - Aloha, to love is to be happy with - got me started. To be happy with something or someone. To feel good about that thing or person. To enjoy them. To get pleasure from the connection. These are all ways of looking at love. So, we could just as easily say: Feeling good heals from within. Enjoyment heals from within. Pleasure heals from within. And by a small extension: Fun heals from within. Joy heals from within. Excitement heals from within. Peace heals from within. Harmony heals from within. Compassion heals from within. For simplicity's sake I will lump all of these fabulous feelings together and call them feeling good or pleasures.

Isn't it interesting how difficult it is for many people to actively choose to feel good? They would rather take care of business and do their chores (real or imagined) than to make the effort to focus on feeling good. So often they make great preparations to feel good. They certainly talk about it enough. Yet, very often we all have seen people stressing when they could be enjoying. They seem to have walked away from the pleasure they so ardently seek and the health that goes with that.

Could good health really be so simple?

Well, for starters, we don't have any better definition of health than feeling good. So intentionally feeling good is probably the fastest way to feel good and be healthy. When we really pay attention to feeling good and what the things are that give us an experience of pleasure rather than the distractions and "shoulds" that surround us, then we can manage our feelings and choose the ones we want. And even in the process of taking care of the things that need to be taken care of, we can choose to them in a way that keeps us in a place of feeling good.

For those people who like the Law of Attraction, feeling good sets up a vibration that attracts more of that vibration. For those people who like the Third Principle of Huna - Makia, energy flows where attention goes - focusing on pleasure will increase that energy and decrease the energy of fear. And for those who prefer "Circumstances don't matter, state of being is what matters," then feeling good is a very powerful state of being that creates more of the same.

Not only is feeling good its own reward, it is extremely powerful. It is from this place that we can envision the future we prefer, including the absence of challenges in our bodies, and can marshal up the energies to make things happen. Consider this: Our sole motivation to do anything is to feel better. The better we hope to feel, the stronger the motivation. This is not to say that we are always successful in getting to a place of feeling better. Very often we miss the mark widely. However, it is the desire to feel better that gets us to try in the first place. And it is the anticipation of feeling really good that energizes us to make the effort to do anything.

So back to love heals from within. When we pay attention to how we are feeling, give ourselves permission to feel good (or better yet, feel better than we have ever felt before), let go of expectations and recognize that we don't really know what happens next but that we are capable of handling whatever it is, and choose to focus on pleasure and feeling good rather than on our fears, then we are ready for one of the most powerful forms of feeling good-savoring.

Savoring is not just noticing that something tastes good, sounds nice, or looks beautiful. It is taking the time to allow that pleasant feeling to sink into our entire being. It is allowing that sense of wellbeing to flow into each cell of our body and fill our aura with life energy. It has the physiological aspect of reducing the levels of the fear-associated neurotransmitters, norepinephrine and dopamine, and increasing healing neurotransmitters like endorphins and serotonin. Savoring lets our body-mind know that this is the blueprint or pattern that we want to live from. It is a life-affirming act that is love in action. And, most importantly, it is an act of self-love.

So far as I can tell, there is no more potent hell than feeling bad about oneself. And there is no greater heaven than feeling good about oneself. We fall in love so that someone else will show us how to feel good about ourselves. We try hundreds of ways of getting the outside world to help us feel good about ourselves and yet we often resist the most effective way of doing it - relaxing and enjoying our lives in this present moment. That's savoring. That's loving ourselves. And that's also healing from within.