Energy, Karma, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves
by Graeme Kapono Urlich
Human beings are natural “meaning-makers.”
When something happens that we do not fully understand, we naturally reach for an explanation. We feel heavy after being with a certain person. Anxiety suddenly gets louder. Old reactions come up out of nowhere. Life seems to repeat certain patterns. So we explain it in the language our culture, beliefs, or spiritual training have given us.
That is how ideas such as energy vampires, psychic attack, fixed karma, or hostile unseen forces can take shape, sometimes through the way older concepts are translated into modern Western thinking. They are attempts to explain real experience. The experience may be real enough. The explanation is another matter.
From a Huna perspective, this distinction matters.
Different traditions describe similar phenomena in very different ways. One says spirits. Another says karma. Another says chakras. Another says ego. Another says trauma response. Another says subconscious conditioning. The question in Huna is not which explanation sounds most mysterious or impressive, but whether it helps. Does it increase confidence, clarity, effectiveness, and freedom of action? Does it open a path forward, or create obstacles that inhibit growth?
That is one reason Huna teaches that energy is infinite.
Some systems describe people as though they are containers with only so much energy inside them, and that other people can drain, steal, or deplete that limited supply. It can sound reasonable because it seems to match experience. Most of us have known what it is like to feel exhausted, contracted, or unsettled after being around certain people or in certain situations.
But Huna offers another way to understand it.
Energy is not a private stockpile locked inside you. It is not a tank that runs low because someone else siphoned it off. Energy is infinite. It is always present, always available, always flowing. What changes is not the supply, but your openness to that flow.
So when you feel “drained,” what may be happening is not that someone has taken your energy, but that tension has reduced your openness to the greater flow already available to you.
A person, situation, memory, or even an expectation can trigger stress. The body tightens. Breathing becomes shallow. Attention narrows. Communication within the body becomes less fluid. Ku starts bracing. In that state, you are not cut off from your greater self, because that deeper connection is never truly lost. But you can limit how much of that influence, support, love, clarity, and vitality is able to enter into ordinary awareness and expression.
It is like closing shutters against the sun. The sun has not gone anywhere. The light is still there, but less of it is getting in.
This is what Huna means by restoring connection or reopening flow. It is not about recreating something that was absent. It is about relaxing the tension, beliefs, and reactions that have been narrowing the channel.
When we decide that a person is an “energy vampire,” or that being around them will drain us, that interpretation begins to shape our experience. In our own mind and body, we begin to make them into a danger to us. The body starts preparing before anything has actually happened. Tension rises, caution increases, and the expectation of depletion is already in place. Then we not only tend to avoid that person, but often begin to avoid people like them or situations that remind us of them. In that way, the label can quietly create a larger world of threat, narrowing our choices and reinforcing the very tension that contributes to the feeling of being drained.
That is also where resonance comes in.
From a Huna point of view, we can be influenced by other people’s feelings and by directed thought, but only to the degree that we resonate with them. Something in us has to answer to it, even faintly, for it to affect us very much.
This does not mean another person is putting anxiety, fear, or confusion into you as though it were a substance. More often, it means there is already some matching pattern in you, usually quiet, managed, or half-suppressed, and under stress that pattern becomes easier to stir up and amplify.
Anxiety is a good example. A person may function quite well most of the time, while carrying old anxious tendencies beneath the surface. Then they enter a tense environment, or spend time with someone who is highly stressed, fearful, agitated, or emotionally chaotic. If there is resonance, their own anxiety may begin to surface more strongly. Not because it has been inserted from outside, but because what is already there has been activated and magnified.
The same can happen with anger, sadness, shame, irritability, compulsive thinking, and many other learned patterns. It does not have to be intentional. It does not even have to be personal. A stressed neighbour, a troubled room, a disturbed atmosphere, or an emotionally charged interaction can all have an amplifying effect when there is resonance.
That is why trying to work out who is “doing it,” if anyone is, is usually not very useful. It does not change the way we deal with it, because in Huna the aim is not to stop the other person, but to change our own response and restore harmony.
The more useful questions are: what is happening in me, and how do I restore harmony?
What many people call “negative energy” in a place is often, from a Huna point of view, not something that has to be fought or expelled. More often, it may simply be an expectation stirred by what the place reminds us of, an impression shaped by a memory or experience of our own, even one drawn from a film or story, or a response to memories of what has happened there, because places and objects do retain memory.
What a person notices will depend largely on resonance. We tend to tune in more easily to feelings, memories, or meanings that already have some echo in us. So one person may walk into a place and feel grief, another unease, another fear, and another nothing unusual at all. Without knowing what they are sensing, they may interpret that response as a present influence or presence. What we do, then, is strengthen the memories of aloha in a place, so that these are what people are more likely to tune into first. With training, people can learn to tune in to such memories without adverse reaction and do something constructive with what they perceive. This is part of what shamans do in the Kupua tradition.
This is one reason Huna is cautious about jumping too quickly to ideas of entity attachments or “bad energies” that need to be cleared out. Ike, the world is what you think it is, reminds us that the way we interpret an experience helps shape what kind of world we are living in. The experience of heaviness, fear, oppression, or disturbance may be real, but the explanation is shaped largely by culture and superstition. Faced with the unknown, we tend to fill in the gap with fears we already know. A place may hold memories. A person may resonate with those memories. Stress may amplify the response, then the mind supplies a story. In Huna, the aim of clearing is not to battle an enemy, but to increase aloha, harmony, and flow. Makia, energy flows where attention goes, is the reason this works.
When a technique such as Laʻa Kea is used to harmonize the field, the feeling may change enough that a person believes the entities they thought were there are gone for them. From a Huna perspective, what may actually have changed is not the energy itself, but the information being picked up, what the person resonates with, and therefore how the place is experienced. From a Kupua point of view, what matters most is that harmony has been restored and the person feels better in the place. In that sense, “clearing” is less about driving something out and more about transforming the way the place is being experienced.
Why do these experiences seem stronger at some times than at others? In Huna, we are most vulnerable when we are in a high state of stress, not because we are spiritually unprotected, but because tension makes us less flexible, less centred, and less open to the flow of deeper resources within us. As tension rises, the Ku, or subconscious body mind, becomes more reactive, old patterns are triggered more easily, and what was once manageable can begin to feel overwhelming.
So one of the first priorities in this tradition is not protection, but the release of tension.
Relax the body. Soften the breathing. Calm the nervous system. Ease the tension. Then go deeper and resolve the issues behind the tension, so that it does not simply return in the same way. As the causes of the tension are met, understood, soothed, or changed, the channel opens more fully and more naturally. The flow returns, not because it was absent, but because less is obstructing it.
This is a gentle but important difference.
We are never separated from our greater self. We only limit how much of its influence can move through us. When fear, stress, conflict, and old conditioning begin to soften, more of that wisdom, love, strength, and vitality can be experienced again in everyday life.
That is why Huna generally does not emphasize protection in the fearful sense. If you think of yourself as constantly needing shields against hostile forces, the symbol itself can increase fear. Fear creates more tension. Tension narrows the flow even further. Then you feel more vulnerable and think you need stronger protection, which only tightens things further. It is not a very helpful cycle.
The Huna preference is for harmony.
When we fear what we are feeling and begin to resist it, the experience often becomes stronger. Attention fixes on it, the body tightens against it, and the Ku reads it as danger. In that state, we may think we are defending ourselves, when in fact we are increasing the very tension that narrows the flow of energy. This is one reason Huna prefers harmony to resistance. What is met with calm, aloha, and skill can often be transformed more easily than what is resisted in fear.
Instead of trying to build barriers, we work to harmonize what feels disturbed to us. Instead of asking how to block experience, we ask how to restore flow. Instead of making fear more central, we make relaxation, awareness, and responsiveness more central to the experience.
This same approach also changes how Huna looks at karma.
Many people think of karma as a cosmic reward-and-punishment system, a spiritual accounting process in which suffering is repayment for the past. That explanation can sound satisfying, but it can also leave people feeling burdened, judged, and powerless.
Huna uses a simpler and more practical view.
Karma is what you have now, and in Huna terms Manawa reminds us that now is the moment of power.
It is your present patterning: your beliefs, expectations, habits, interpretations, emotional tendencies, and learned responses as they are active now. It is not a fixed sentence or an eternal debt. It is the current shape of your life experience.
And because it is patterning, we can change it.
When belief changes, karma changes. When interpretation changes, karma changes. When an old tension is resolved, karma changes. When fear no longer has the same hold, karma changes. When you stop rehearsing an old story and begin living from a different one, karma changes.
The outer results may unfold over time, but the turning point begins in the present.
This is why Huna treats its principles as tools, not dogma. They are ways of looking that can help people become more effective, more peaceful, and more free.
If an explanation makes you feel weak, afraid, and trapped, it may not be a useful tool. If it helps you become calmer, clearer, and more capable of responding well, then it is useful, because Mana reminds us that all power comes from within.
Some people, for example, use empathy as an explanation for why they feel bad, as though being sensitive means they must carry what others feel. Some even justify the experience by imagining they are transmuting other people’s suffering and somehow helping to save the world. Huna does not deny the experience, but it does not use the explanation as an excuse. If we are feeling disturbed, overwhelmed, or burdened, the question is not how to prove that someone else caused it, or how to make virtue out of suffering, but how to change the thinking, tension, and response that are shaping the experience in us. In Huna, an explanation is useful when it helps us respond in a more balanced, effective, and beneficial way, because Kala reminds us that there are no limits to our ability to change the experience.
That is the Huna way.
Not to deny experience, but to question the explanation. Not to ask which story sounds most mystical, but which one helps us live better. Not to decide what must be true for everyone, but to choose what increases love, power, and effectiveness. Aloha reminds us that to love is to be happy with. Pono reminds us that effectiveness is the measure of truth.
So from a Huna viewpoint, and in the spirit of Kala, there are no limits: we are infinite, and so is everyone and everything else. No one can drain the infinite. What we call draining is our own contraction in response to something we have interpreted as stressful, disturbing, or dangerous. What feels like outside influence can also be resonance, where something around us amplifies what is already active within us.
Makia, energy flows where attention goes, reminds us that what influences us most is what we focus on most. Karma is not cosmic punishment, but the pattern of what we are living now. And when the tensions behind that pattern are resolved, the flow opens more fully again. As we make beneficial changes in ourselves, we also become more of a beacon for others who are seeking to improve their lives.
Not because we were cut off from our greater self, but because we have stopped closing the door.
Graeme Kapono Urlich (April 2026)
This article is a summary and synthesis of ideas developed across various articles and videos by Graeme Kapono Urlich and Serge Kahili King.