REVIEW:

AROHA MAI, AROHA ATU
LOVE FLOWING TOWARDS US, LOVE FLOWING OUT FROM US
THE WORK OF DR. BETH HEDVA

BETRAYAL, TRUST AND FORGIVENESS – A GUIDE TO EMOTIONAL HEALING AND SELF-RENEWAL
BETH HEDVA, PHD
CELESTIAL ARTS, BERKELEY-TORONTO, 1992, 2001 [IMPRINT OF TEN SPEED PRESS]
http://www.tenspeed.com

At the core of all Beth Hedva’s work is the flow of love – aroha mai, aroha atu – love flowing towards us, love flowing out from us. For it is not possible to go through the epic journey of Betrayal, Trust and Forgiveness without this love – arohanui – which my Maori ancestors always described in this whakatauki as a flowing circular energy. Emotional healing and self-renewal are enriched and nurtured by this natural flow of unconditional loving. Throughout the pages of this now classic book, we learn the pathway – te arahia – for this flow of healing energy. The miracle is that in the process of this learning, we not only forgive others but we also heal ourselves, so the flow of love embraces and nurtures all people, freeing us all to reach higher places in ourselves and freeing us all to become reunited with the essential core of joy, fulfilment and healing in our lives.

I am focusing on the revised edition [2001] of this classic text, which was winner of the Coalition of Visionary Resources Award as the Best Self-Help Book and also looking at the work of Beth Hedva moving forward to preview her next book. I am coming from a place of experience with the author as well as her work and can testify personally that the authenticity of her practical work truly supports her written work. I once was graced with the gift of a 90 minute visionary reading and meeting with Beth Hedva in the late eighties, shortly before I left USA, after three years as Fulbright Post Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. I was interested in seeing what the next stage of my life’s journey might be. At the time, I expected to return to my university career and she predicted I would be working with a large organisation. In fact, every single part of that reading was accurate. However, the organisation would be administering arts and culture for the Tai Tokerau region for the Whangarei City Council and my role was in helping develop Maori and multi-cultural visions for the future in the area of community and arts. Beth predicted I would lay the seeds of change then move on to develop the vision in other areas. This resulted in the freedom to develop the vision through my writing and since then I have 23 books in print and translation on ecological, indigenous and global healing themes. I state this because that meeting freed something within me to have the courage to move forward out into the world of light: unuhia ki te ao marama – even though parts of the freeing meant moving out from a painful dark place where I fought to shift the energy from working against those with other agendas into a lighter area of being where I was self-employed and more free to create new vision.

In other words, the journey can be difficult and is not always easy, as indeed her text states. Yet the fulfilment along the way makes it inconceivable not to embrace this inner voyaging. Betrayal is ever present in many realities, but trust and forgiveness frees us to move forward and strengthen our vision and encourages us not to be distracted by the whims of others with different agendas. My own ancestors laid out the vision in different terms. They followed the path of Te Arahia. When keynote speaker at the International Oceanic Conference on Creativity and Climate Change at the University of the South Pacific, Fiji, I recently described this pathway in terms of Kaitiakitanga, which is guardianship of the body of land [Papatuanuku], including the oceans [moana] and rivers [awa] which resonates with the caring for our own bodies [and souls]. Kaitiakitanga embraces all the central principles of Te Arahia within the new Kaitiakitanga workshops we are developing here in Aotearoa. 

The courses are designed to work in tune with the core principles of Kaitiakitanga which have been implemented on marae throughout the Pacific and Aotearoa for centuries. The kaupapa which guide the courses follows the central principles of Te Arahia, The Pathway. Te Arahia comprises: Aroha, Love; Pono, Truth; Mana, Integrity; Tika: Right Living; Wairua: Spirit, Kaha: Strength and Mauri, the Sacred Life Force. All of these are important for a sustainable organic and holistic approach to permaculture. The courses are also based around the key principles of Hau Ora or good health, where we need a balance between: Tinana [body], Wairua [soul]  Hinengaro [emotions] and Whanau [family].

If you translate the core principles of Te Arahia and Hau Ora, you will find that these also guide the vision supporting the essence of Betrayal, Trust and Forgiveness. And the key element in all is the flow of love – aroha mai, aroha atu. Where Dr. Hedva is so gifted is in her beautiful command of language and her visionary politics and accessible way of explaining the core principles of her vision. The author uses cross-cultural storytelling and examples from real life experience to support her visionary structures for dealing with betrayal, trust and moving towards forgiveness.

Dr. Hedva’s ability to embrace so many other cultures in her work makes her books, lectures and readings stand out from so many other gifted healers. She has a vision that goes deeper than healing people one by one. This is of course utterly necessary for us all to move forward. But behind the vision is the need to extend this healing out to the whole of humanity, to move the healing beyond the personal and into the political realms.

This book is a blueprint, if applied on a larger level, for healing between nations as well as healing between individuals. Her final chapter, from Retribution to Reconciliation, provides the way forward for us and is supplemented by her vital healing work within several nations after they have endured terrible crises like tsunamis and earthquakes. For further examples of this important work, please see her website: http://www.hedva.com Please note that the webiste is currently in transition and will be available as: http://www.drbethhedva.com from mid January 2011.

This ongoing dedication to healing on a much wider scale than just the personal makes her vision a leading voice guiding us through this next century when we face the coming together of all people on this earth and the challenges of overcoming our different visions and belief systems to work united as people who need to protect and look after this planet.

It is vital we, as individuals, do the mahi [work] in dealing with the issues of betrayal, trust and forgiveness before we are ready to complete this healing on a much larger scale. In her classic, award winning book, Dr. Hedva covers the universal rite of passage in the journey from betrayal to trust and emphasises the importance of each of us dealing with this in terms of those who brought us into life on this planet, our mothers and our fathers [and indeed our wider extended whanau/families].

She moves on to talk about the gateways to wholeness, surrender and forgiveness and the essential gateway to the “Family of Humanity” and the the vision of a “New World”.

We have all witnessed the Truth and Reconciliation process initiated by Bishop Desmond Tutu and President Nelson Mandela in South Africa. Here in Aotearoa/New Zealand we have seen the impact of restorative justice within indigenous communities where great healing has been achieved when both the offender and those offended have come to some form of reconciliation. As keynote speaker at the international climate change conference in Fiji, 2010, I outlined a concept for Environmental Restorative Justice which extends this notion to help restore the ecological balance of our earth.

What is now needed is a wider vision where the entire globe becomes involved in the same process outlined by Dr. Hedva in Betrayal, Trust and Forgiveness, where we can move beyond the current stalemate where different groups of different belief systems fight and blow each other up - for what? For an idea of a better world? How can violence ever bring about peace? This has never happened and never will. Far better we encourage people to find peace within their own lives and thus be better prepared to encourage peace between us all.

Within the frame of this review I cannot go into the detail I would love to describe the brilliance of this classic book as a seed of hope and reconciliation which has been planted lovingly into Papatuanuku, our earth, and we can only anticipate it will be reprinted again soon, for there is considerable work to be completed yet. But there is always hope.

As Dr. Hedva wrote as inspiration at the beginning of her book:

“In the soil of shattered dreams
inessentials decompose
soul seed sprouts…
life”

Look out for her next book which takes this healing into global realms and shows us the way forward if we have the courage to sow the seeds for this global renewal with our hard work now.

A vital part of BTF is where the author shows us how to integrate the four worlds, just as the Celts talked about drinking from the four sided cup of truth. We learn how to honour the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual selves and thus how to honour the greater self.

The Four Worlds Development Project encourages us to feel freedom from hate and fear, have a healthy detachment, how to cultivate wisdom, objectivity, clarity and discernment, the importance of honouring our heritage and appreciating our elders and our ancestors and becoming comfortable with the wonderful learning within the realms of silence.

By honouring our greater selves we retrieve that which has been lost to us but is necessary for the planet to be whole. Harmony and balance with all four worlds means we can walk the Path of Integration. The taonga, or gifts of this include freedom of choice, increased concentration, self responsibility, setting realistic goals and meeting them, being willing to initiate action and cultivate perseverence and become of service to others.

All of this is also present in the indigenous Maori world view of our ancestors which emphasised the importance of Te Arahia as the pathway and Hau Ora, the four areas of balance between mind, body, soul and emotions. Most indigenous cultures have their own versions of this and by integrating these into her wider vision, Beth Hedva shows a contemporary way forward for us as individuals and as a global community.

Dr Hedva is in high demand globally from those facing the disasters inherrent in climate change scenarios and realities today. She has spoken about “The disaster of International Disaster Recovery” with a vital call for creative reconstruction in honour of deep ecology and global healing, using the tools of environmental justice, deep ecology and transpersonal psychology for global healing, arguing for a self-ecology which involves the balancing of the elements as described earlier. Losing ourselves in the material world is no answer but a denial of our very being. We need to find more healthy ways to survive and nurture and embrace survival on this planet through networking across cultures and professions globally and through creative reconstruction as well as building new alliances in the media, arts and education and across all professions and cultures so we can combine our global knowledge for no less than our very survival on this planet.

Dr. Beth Hedva is a visionary whose work will help define our path forward into the heart of the twenty first century. I can attest to a personal experience of this vision that proved to be deeply empowering and like many others, I look forward to her next book which will delineate how we can move forward with this essential cross-cultural vision. Any publishers, editors or agents reading this review and interested in the foreign rights for Beth Hedva’s next book should contact her agent: Robert Mackwood (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Instead of looking at climate change as a disaster, maybe it is time we saw this as a global crisis that makes sure we have to work together cross-culturally for the future survival of us all? Maybe this is a taonga or gift that has come at a time we have to face the consequences or perish? By bringing the principles of Kaitiakitanga forward and working this into a contemporary global permaculture movement, we hope to resonate with the work of Dr. Hedva and many others as a part of this global network needed to form alliances for our future health and survival on this planet.

If we apply Dr. Hedva’s own poem, where the the soul seeds sprout new life in the soil of shattered dreams, where the inessentials decompose, we do indeed have the wisdom to look after all people on this planet, and as my own Maori ancestors always knew, by sharing, we have enough food to nourish all people from all iwi, tribes:

Nau te rourou, maku te rourou ka ora te manuwhiri
With your food basket and my food basket, everyone has enough to eat

If first world countries spent as much time and money and effort as they do on food, instead nourishing their inner souls which cry out for food as denial or to nurture wounded souls, then we could prevent food wastage and junk food cravings overnight and heal people from terrible illnesses. We could instead address the real issues of survival and crisis that face us today in a way that heals us all and fulfills the notion we already know - that there is, right now, as you read this, enough food on the planet to feed all people if shared. That alone would help alleviate climate change which has been bloated by the need for industrialised fast food produced on land poisoned to create a surplus of food that is bad for our bodies and souls and which forces others to die from starvation.

Here in the Pacific, we have islands sinking under the waves while first world people continue to fulfil the craving for more than material existence by consuming and eating far more than is needed or good for anyone. It is time we followed the directions set out in this blueprint of Dr. Beth Hedva for our personal, political and global survival and made pacts to ensure self-ecology and environmental justice brings about a renewed vision that nourishes and feeds our bodies, minds, emotions and souls as a global community that cannot afford to turn its back on those in need. Those others are the mirror selves of us. If we do not nourish and empower them, and we continue with mass consumption, we will indeed extinguish hope for us all. Now is the time to act and now we have the taonga or gift of wisdom from the past to move forward with aroha, love, to ensure the future healthy survival of our planet and all people, plants, animals and life that exists on this planet. Networking for positive change redeems us from past betrayals. We know the way forward with trust and forgiveness, essential tools on this path to global healing. Let us now enact this with aroha, love.

I end these reflections on Dr. Hedva’s book and healing work globally with the same words as I began because they provide a key to the essence of this mahi:

At the core of all Beth Hedva’s work is the flow of love – aroha mai, aroha atu – love flowing towards us, love flowing out from us. For it is not possible to go through the epic journey of Bertrayal, Trust and Forgiveness without this love – arohanui – which my Maori ancestors always described in this whakatauki as a flowing circular energy. Emotional healing and self-renewal are enriched and nurtured by this natural flow of unconditional loving. Throughout the pages of this now classic book, we learn the pathway – te arahia – for this flow of healing energy. The miracle is that in the process of this learning, we not only forgive others but we also heal ourslves, so the flow of love embraces and nurtures all people, freeing us all to reach higher places in ourselves and freeing us all to become reunited with the essential core of joy, fulfilment and healing in our lives.

Aroha mai, aroha atu: If we plant the seeds of this aroha now, we can be sure that the essential flow and nurturance will be here for all generations to come.

[c] Cath Koa Dunsford, 2010.

Cathie Koa Dunsford [Te Rarawa/Ngapuhi/Hawai’ian/Croatian] is author of 23 books in print and translation in USA, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Germany and Turkey, including the popular Cowrie novel series featuring strong tangata whenua and eco activists from the Pacific region promoting Kaitiakitanga for our shared global survival. She has taught Literature, Creative Writing and Publishing at Auckland University since 1975. Dr. Dunsford is director of Dunsford Publishing Consultants, which has brought 197 new and award winning Pacific authors into print internationally. Cath is recipient of two major literary grants from Creative New Zealand Arts Council and was International Woman of the Year in Publishing in 1997. She is on the Board of the Asia Pacific Writer’s Network and on the International Panel of Established Artists invited to speak at Artspeak Pasifika, 2010, funded by CNZ, NZ Arts Council. Cath Koa has performed her work at the Frankfurt, Leipzig and Istanbul Bookfairs. She was recently keynote speaker on Kaitiakitanga at the International Oceanic Conference on Creativity and Climate Change at the University of the South Pacific, Fiji. A documentary of her work has been directed for Maori Television by Makerita Urale. She tours the world performing from the books with traditional Maori waiata and taonga puoro. Contact: (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), http://www.dunsfordpublishing.com