My Journey with Lomi Lomi

It is with profound gratitude, humility and respect that I share my journey with lomi lomi. For over two decades now, I have been practicing and leading workshops in Temple Style Lomi Lomi – the work Abraham Kawai’i, later known as Kahu – brought out to share with us. It has been the primary focus of the work I put out into the world.

It has been said, and I have felt that this work is a ‘calling’ and a ‘remembrance’. My own journey has proven to be just that. From the moment I first experienced the work, it spoke to the core of my being and awakened the lineage in my soul. In a single short experience, I recognized the difference between the traditional, secular, separate life that I had been leading and the interconnected oneness of what is possible.

My first experience came when I was at a demonstration of ‘Temple Style Lomi Lomi’ in Southern California. I was chosen out of the audience to be the demonstration body. The practitioner was a woman who had had what she called a ‘kaboom’ experience during and after a workshop she took with Kahu. She worked on my back for no more than twelve minutes. Afterwards I was motionless, un-able to get off the table. When I finally did, I went into the bathroom, looked in the mirror and saw and felt a bright light all around my body. Something had shifted and all of my cells and molecules were vibrating rapidly.

A week later, I went to another demonstration and again, she selected me out of the group. During and after the work, I felt an incredible amount of love for her. When I shared what I was feeling, she told me to walk outside and said that I’d feel that same love for the telephone pole, the trees, the cars… and I did. That small amount of bodywork had shifted the way I saw everything.

About a month later, in July of 1991, a Temple Style Lomi Lomi workshop happened to come to Northern California where I was living. I had been ‘looking’ for a massage school or healing practice and I knew that this was it.

In the workshop, it was late at night, the teacher had left for the evening and we were practicing. At some point, I was receiving face down on the table and my whole body started to crack open, like an earthquake whose epicenter was my solar plexus. I was crying out of joy, ecstasy and spontaneously saying, ‘Thank you. Thank you. What I can do to thank you?’  I saw in my mind, what seemed like an eight-foot high vision of the workshop facilitator, who was a student of Kahu’s. In the vision, he kept pointing to the ‘tool’ area – the point-of-contact we use on the forearm in Temple Style Lomi.  I knew in my heart that the vision was saying, ‘Just keep doing it’. That by practicing the work and sharing it with others, I could give back the incredible gift that I had just received.

When my session was over the whole room had finished practicing and there was a large circle of people around me as I ‘came back’.  I had somehow become the center of a ceremony that symbolized for me that this was not just a personal journey; it was a transformational journey that I would share with many people in many circles.

Within six months of my first experience of Temple Style Lomi, I moved to Hawaii where I lived for nearly a decade, deepening my practice, healing and growing. I offered tandem Lomi Lomi sessions with my partner. Tandem lomi is very powerful for the receiver and it gave us, as practitioners, the opportunity to deepen our understanding of what happened during each session. We learned to trust our ‘knowing’ by checking in with one another and seeing if we each received the same guidance – which we nearly always did.

My partner at the time trained directly with Kahu on Kauai. At the time, we did not have the economic means to both attend the longer intensives. So she went and I experienced the teachings through the ethers and with her when she would return.

Even in my first workshop, I had visions of Kahu teaching and guiding me and offering support. His teachings have been as real for me through visions and after his passing as they were for me when I saw him in person at shorter workshops.

Kahu was and is a great teacher, even a Kaula. A Kaula is a prophet, a seer. In ‘Tales from the Night Rainbow’ Kaula are described as pure energy, a true light carrier, who do not seek the limelight but are there when you need them. For me, Kahu has been and is Kaula guiding me and leading me with light.

There is a perception among some that this style is not ‘authentic’. ‘Temple Style’ is not documented in history – as other styles were not documented in the oral tradition either. And it may be that it is an amalgamation of techniques from more than one tradition. When I examine the word ‘authentic’ and reflect on it’s opposite, which is ‘fake’ I know in my soul that this Temple Style Lomi Lomi is most definitely real and powerful and effective.

Kahu’s teachings have been immense and immeasurable and have given me and the nearly two thousand people I have taught a gateway through which to access the vast realms beyond our conscious grasp. More importantly, his teachings have provided a means through which we can embody the light, love, aloha and realizations that come from those experiences. Temple Style Lomi Lomi is a profound gift to the individual, the ‘ohana nui and the planet.

It has been my profound honor to share this work, to help facilitate on the earth plane this lineage of healing and transformation. I work, every step of the way with my guides, with my inner knowing, my ho’o’ike. And by doing so, I have always felt pono (right with) my choices. On that note, I would like to honor Kahu’s beautiful wife, Ho’okahi who continues to share his profound work through her teachings on Oahu and through her website www.napuaolohe.com

If there is one lesson I encourage each of you to glean from Kahu, from Temple Style Lomi Lomi, it is this:

You are a unique being. You are a divine being. You have within you the entire universe. You need only look within and allow your divinity and you will find your path of least resistance that connects you with all that is and all that is possible in your life. Receive, receive, receive! Lomi, Lomi, Lomi. Trust, trust, trust. You are divine.
Me Ke Aloha,
Tom