Podcast: Jeana Naluai
Our March/April 2020 cover subject is Native Hawaiian cultural practitioner and lomilomi expert Jeana Naluai. Rabbi Rami spoke with her to learn about healing and forgiveness.
Based on Maui, Jeana Naluai is a trained physical and massage therapist who shares her Native Hawaiian cultural healing practices with students through retreats and trainings, and at her spa in the town of Makawao.
For the past 10 years, she has taught lomilomi, a Hawaiian traditional massage and healing tradition. It is used for medical treatment such as tissue massage and bone setting, but also has a spiritual and holistic purpose.
Not all Native Hawaiians are comfortable with lomilomi being shared with people from other backgrounds, Naluai tells Rabbi Rami. There was and continues to be spiritual violence and cultural trauma inflicted on Native Hawaiians, who to this day suffer from disproportionate levels of poverty and disease. However, Naluai shares that some of her teachers had the viewpoint that is is okay to share lomilomi and Hawaiian wisdom as part of the Hawaiian Renaissance. “It is time to come together, it is time to heal the past, it is time to shape the future with the energetic of aloha.”
The world needs healing, she says. “We are igniting a remembering of who we are, beings of light.”
For more on Jeana Naluai, visit her website. And as always, you can subscribe for free to our podcast with any of your favorite podcast sources.
