Kahu · respected elder
Kahu Kāhealani
Satchitananda
Hawaiian minister. Hoʻoponopono practitioner. Grandmother.
She learned to set things right before she learned to read.
Her full name is Kahu Kāhealani Kamakaokalaniamekaʻanuenuepaʻakaula Kawaiolamanaloa Satchitananda. Her first teachers were her mother, Auntie Kuʻualohaemaliakalawaianui, and her kupuna, Tūtūwahine Kawaiolamanaloapaʻakaula of Molokaʻi. In that house hoʻoponopono was not a subject. It was what you did when something went wrong between people.
She went on to study under Kahuna Morrnah Nālamakū Simeona — the Living Treasure of Hawaiʻi who carried the practice into the world. And in 2008, one week before he died, Kahuna Papa K Kepilino gave her the Hoʻomanamana initiation, the Sacred Breath of Hā.
She is one of a council of eleven elders chosen to offer an ancestral blessing to the world.
The other half of her life
She is also a scientist by training.
UC Berkeley, 1974. UCLA School of Dentistry, 1980. Ordained through the United Church of Religious Science the same year, and into the International Teaching Order of Science of Mind in 1987.
She spent decades in clinical practice and was among the early practitioners of holistic dentistry. She has studied the five major world religions since 1977 and has walked, in her own words, as Muslim, Hindu, Christian and Buddhist.
This matters for one reason. She is not a mystic who cannot do arithmetic, and she is not a marketer who found a Hawaiian word. She can hold the ancestral and the analytical in the same hand — which is exactly what a westerner learning this needs from a teacher.
In her words
"Being Hawaiian is not a race. It is a state of heart."
Kahu Kāhealani Satchitananda
Why she is teaching this now
Because it should outlive her.
She has taught for forty years — retreats, ministries, prayer work in substance abuse and domestic violence programmes, private clients across the world. What she has not done is set the twelve protocols down in one place, in order, and take a small group all the way through them.
That is what this is.