Hike down a cliff to oceanside pools where Hawai’ian women once gave birth. Visit a Tibetan Buddhist temple with spectacular views high up on Haleakala. Walk through a canopied bamboo forest to an isolated pool where a waterfall pours down upon your back. You can do all of these things right here on Maui.
Sachin Hazen is a private tour guide who specializes in sacred sites in nature. He says, “It’s amazing that there are so many of these special places that kama’aina have never even heard about. My favorite is a recently discovered heiau that was once a place of refuge and healing. The Hawai’ians who discovered it have joined with non-Hawai’ians to maintain it. Unlike the heiaus under state auspices, this heiau is being landscaped and includes an altar where many offerings have been left.”
Hazen believes that many Caucasians and others have been drawn to Hawai’i, and Maui in particular, for a specific purpose. He says that these people were Hawai’ians in former lifetimes and have come to unite with present day Hawai’ians to create a new sovereign Hawai’i. He also says that a number of psychics and visionaries, who have never been to Hawai’i, predict that these islands will be, and are already becoming, a beacon of light for the rest of the world.* He claims that this heiau is one of the first physical manifestations in Hawai’i of this new consciousness.
“My intention is to help people get in touch with their own deep connection to Spirit and nature. We treat the aina with great reverence and respect. People have the opportunity to sense what it might be like to be an ancient Hawai’ian about to perform sacred ceremony. Some experience the presence of Hawai’ian spirits and others realize that they are former Hawai’ians themselves. Some people get insights into what is next for them in their lives. For others, it’s simply a beautiful experience in nature.
“Once I took an older woman to some very special pools on the back side of Mauna Kahalawai (West Maui Mountains). She had a lot of energy and wouldn’t stop talking. As we approached a quiet emerald pool next to pounding surf, she started to slow down. We played in the buoyant water, gazed at the colored fish, and a deep peace seemed to take her over. As we stared out at the ocean, she turned to me and said, ‘Of all my sixty years, this is the highlight.’ ”
Hazen himself seems to be an unusual mix of right and left brain. He was Phi Beta Kappa at an elite college on the East Coast and worked as a software engineer and manager at a high tech medical corporation. He left that role and moved on to a spiritual community in Massachusetts where he practiced yoga and meditation for five years.
He visited Hawai’i as a tourist and went to all the islands except Maui. “At that time, I had heard that Maui was a place for wealthy people who came to be part of a trendy New Age spiritualism. I was not interested.” Later when the community he was a part of dissolved, he followed two friends to Maui who had established a retreat center in Makawao. “I would have gone wherever they were,” he says, “they just happened to be on Maui.”
Later, after he became the manager of that property and ran it as a residential community and B&B, he realized that Maui had called him. Immediately, he started to study Hawai’ian and joined a company which brought people from the mainland for spiritual rejuvenation. He started to visit sacred places that had been shown to a friend by a local kahuna. One of them is a quiet valley once home to a highly evolved spiritual tribe of ancient Hawai’ians. “I rarely take people there,” he says, “unless I feel there is a special reason to do so. I was headed to Iao Valley once with a man who works on weapons systems with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. For some reason, we went up into this valley instead. The man was so moved he started crying.”
Hazen does mostly private tours with one or two individuals. Sometimes, local people take their friends who are visiting from the mainland. He does lead group excursions out of Unity Church in Wailuku. He has lived on Maui for over five years and, besides leading tours, has a bodywork/healing practice and markets the hybrid Honda Insight. You can tell, though, that his heart is with the magic places of Maui.
Sachin Hazen is fully licensed and certified as a tour guide both for the state of Hawai’i and the island of Maui. You can reach him via his website KeikiAnanda.com, email, or at 808.495.5837.
photos available
* One of the leading authorities on Lemurian research was Sgt. Williard Wannall from Army Intelligence in Oahu. He reported that ruins of a submerged Lemurian city lay between Maui and Oahu. It was a Top Secret project in Naval Intelligence in 1972.
[This is a revised version of an article that was published in Out in Maui, November, 2001.]
808-495-5837