Surrendering To The Spirit Of Lomi Lomi

The unconscious expression

Anybody exploring the fields of interpersonal communication or self-development will soon bump into various models and concepts explaining how part of our life is driven by our conscious decisions or as a result of our reasoning, and how part of our life is an expression of unconscious patterns and conditionings. As a narrative, these models or concepts use various images, often the image of an iceberg, to describe that actually the part that is conscious is merely like the tip of the iceberg, and the part that is unconscious is like the rest under the water.

Whatever the image might be, the message is clear regarding the proportions – the unconscious expression of ourselves is by far larger and more powerful than what we do consciously. The Hawaiian tradition sometimes uses the image of the body to confirm the same message in a very simple and beautiful way.

Becoming aware of you

Now, when you are reading this, there is vast amount of activity and processing that is happening in your body that you are not aware of. First of all you are breathing, hopefully without any effort. Your hair and finger and toe nails are growing without you making any commands. You are probably in a phase of digesting food, again, with no intention of doing so. In your veins, blood is flowing in various directions, transporting all sorts of ingredients. Your endocrine glands are regulating the amount of various hormones impacting your mood or your immune system. The body does all that without asking you about it. The muscles in your body are doing dozens of micro movements each minute to maintain the posture in which you are reading now. Your eyes are following the letters and lines of this article. No need for your approval. And then there’s the brain that is processing how to put together these lighter and darker patches on your screen into words and meaning, and create reflections based on evoking memories of similar or conflicting readings, conversations, experiences from your past. Amazing!

All of that is pretty much happening without you being aware of it. Yes, you might become aware of part of it for a few seconds as you direct your attention there, but most of the time you don’t – and until your tummy hurts you have no clue about what it does or how your bowel system is moving forward the processed food through your body. All of that is you, whether you are aware of it or not. And it’s alive! In a better or worse shape or form, but it is a fact that it all does what it does, and it is also a fact that it’s you.

Surrendering to the spirit of Lomi Lomi

What the Hawaiian tradition and Lomi Lomi massage teaches us is not that all of a sudden we should become aware of all that above – that is not the goal. And by the way ‘becoming aware of everything’ is certainly not possible if we imagine that becoming ‘more aware’ means that we simply ‘upgrade’: after constantly and scrupulously maintaining a focused observing attention, now, becoming ‘more aware’, we just expand the scope of this attention and we will observe ‘more’ things than we did before until we become aware of everything.

Giving and receiving, teaching or learning Lomi Lomi massage is a way of surrendering to the spirit of Lomi Lomi and being transformed – potentially, totally. In some way we could say that what Lomi Lomi is ‘telling’ us through working with the body is no different from what various Eastern, aboriginal or Western cultures tell us: we are more than what we think we are, there is a greater intelligence beyond our limited perspective, and the best part is that it is not something separate from us but that spirit is ultimately – us.

To sum it up: this whole – by today almost cliché – thing about becoming ‘more aware’ ultimately is not about paying attention to more things, it is rather a transformation to become all these things – and Lomi Lomi is a beautiful way of exploring this transformation.