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I did not plan to have a spiritual awakening in Hawaii. I planned to take a break.
After three years of grinding through a career that had stopped feeling like mine, I booked what I told myself was just a retreat. Some time off. A chance to breathe. I had read a little about shamanic healing, but it wasn't until I committed to a dedicated shamanic awakening retreat that I realized how much I needed it—a choice sparked by a colleague who came back from Maui looking inexplicably lighter. I did not fully believe it would do anything for me. I went anyway.
What happened over the following seven days is still difficult to put into words. What I can describe is the places — because it was the places, more than any session or ceremony, that did the deepest work.
Standing at the Rim of Haleakalā
We arrived at the crater before 4 a.m. on the third day. No coffee. No talking. Just a van full of quiet people being driven up a mountain in the dark.
Standing at 10,000 feet as the sky began to shift from black to deep blue to gold — I felt something happen in my chest that I can only describe as a loosening. Like something that had been braced against impact for years finally realized the impact was not coming.
The silence at that altitude is different from any silence I had experienced before. The clouds were below us. The stars were fading. And in that space, without any agenda or performance, something in me went very still and very honest.
Our guide had told us beforehand: just show up. The mountain does the rest. He was right.
The Forest That Listened
Two days later, we walked into a rainforest above a waterfall valley in upcountry Maui. The kind of forest where the green is so dense it feels alive in a way that makes you realize most places you have spent your life are not.
We stopped at a clearing and sat without speaking for forty minutes.
I had tried meditation before. Apps, classes, guided recordings. It never stuck. But sitting in that forest, with the sound of water somewhere below and the trees doing whatever trees do in the presence of genuine human stillness — something shifted. My mind did not empty. It settled. There is a difference. The thoughts were still there but they had lost their urgency.
On the walk back out, I started crying. Not from sadness. From relief. Something I had been carrying — a version of myself I no longer recognized but had been afraid to let go of — released somewhere between the waterfall and the trailhead.
The Coastal Cliff at Dusk
The last sacred site we visited was a cliff overlooking the ocean on Maui's western coast. The sun was dropping. The water was moving in that ancient, indifferent way oceans move.
Our guide explained that this particular stretch of coastline had been used for ceremony for centuries. That the Hawaiians understood certain places as energetically concentrated — as sites where the distance between the ordinary world and something larger was simply thinner.
I do not know if I believe that in any literal sense. What I know is that standing there, I felt completely seen. Not by another person. By something I do not have a better word for than the land itself.
By the time we walked back to the vehicles, I had made three decisions I had been unable to make for two years. Quietly, without drama. They were simply obvious in a way they had not been before.
What I Know Now
I came to Maui for a break. I left with a new relationship to myself.
The sacred places in Hawaii are not a metaphor. They are real locations that carry something — call it energy, call it mana, call it accumulated human intention over centuries of prayer and ceremony — that interacts with you when you show up honestly.
The shamanic awakening retreat I attended did not give me answers. It created the conditions in which I could finally hear the ones I already had.
Begin with Sacred Voyages
Sacred Voyages offers guided shamanic retreat experiences set within Maui's most powerful sacred sites and energetic vortexes. Led by Greg "Magick" Bernstein — with over 25 years of practice across multiple indigenous wisdom traditions — Sacred Voyages holds space for genuine, lasting transformation.
