Integrating Ancient Traditional Healing Practices Into Today's World

This presentation addresses the methods involved in effectively working with the Native Hawaiian elderly community in the San Francisco Bay Area of California by reintroducing ancient cultural beliefs and practices into their daily lives. While working with the native Hawaiian healing arts clients of the Holistic Honu Wellness Center, we have discovered that most of our clients face severe acculturation stress; that is, regular exposure to mainstream Western beliefs and life practices makes them feel a strong, daily pressure to integrate themselves into generally accepted societal norms and thinking; yet many of these norms conflict with deeply held traditional Hawaiian beliefs. The nature of our approach to healing is to work within the traditional culture’s methodologies. By working in this manner we can then address how our native Hawaiian clients can integrate their traditional beliefs into Western medical practices. Most often the native Hawaiian patients do not follow the instructions of the Western doctors and are labeled as non-compliant, which hampers medical progress and overall health.  In essence, the healing process takes longer and often becomes much more difficult.  The Holstic Honu Wellness Center has experienced this disconnect  with multiple  clients simultaneously therefore prompting  the need to learn and understand the traditions and protocols of Hawaiian cultural health in order to increase our effectiveness in helping those we serve. This process has also been found to be effective with resolution in family conflicts and lowering the incidence of bullying and violence in children.