Healer Darrell Harada helps clients find peace

If fate hadn’t intervened, Darrell Harada would have been a financial planner today. Instead, the Aiea resident is a spiritual healer. “My purpose is to help people heal themselves. If you imagine God being the sun, my job is to get you to stand in that light, without anything blocking it,” he describes. Harada is a massage therapist, a psychic, and most recently, a kahu, or Hawaiian priest.

This is not a career Harada envisioned for himself when he was majoring in economics (and minoring in comparative religion) at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 1999. He imagined he’d be helping people figure out where to invest their money. Viewed differently, though, he’s still creating wealth – of the soul, not of the secular.

“I want people to feel a greater connection to something in life, and then share it with each other. That’s what everyone’s purpose is: to love and become love,” he asserts.

At the same time that Harada was matriculating at UH Manoa, he was also paying for his tuition by working as a massage therapist. At work, he happened to meet a psychic who told him something that shifted the trajectory of his life. “This guy told me I was psychic, too. I thought he was nuts,” recalls Harada.

But, Harada says, the man was right. Shortly after that meeting, Harada started getting psychic impressions during his massage sessions. “I put my hands on a client and I heard a voice in my head. It said, ‘She’s here with two friends. They’re mourning a death. She’s very hurt. Tell her.’ I didn’t want to, but the voice insisted, so I finally said, ‘Your body feels very sad.’ She started crying and talking about it, and that helped her heal a little,” Harada remembers of the first time that happened.

He is conflicted about this and many, many of the following psychic experiences. “I was terrified, but I also liked being able to help people, knowing I could change someone’s life for the better,” he admits. That is why, when Harada graduated from UH Manoa in 2001, he decided to continue working in the healing field.

He took on work as a professional psychic around 2005. He has a part-time job at Sedona Hawaii, but also markets himself independently. He built a client base in Hawaii and Japan. Over the years, Harada says, his intuitive skills have deepened to include an ability to speak with the dead. He says he is also clairaudient (hearing voices), clairsentient (feeling), clairvoyant (seeing images), and claircognizant (simply knowing).

Harada says he is most gratified when he can marshal his abilities to help a client find balance and peace. He cites three extreme examples: “People who were suicidal came to me. I was able to talk them out of it and help them see their life differently and find a new direction,” he reflects.

Around 2006, Harada met Kahu Kauila Clark, a certified traditional native Hawaiian health practitioner at Waianae Coast Comprehensive Health Center, as well as internationally-acclaimed artist and educator. Harada asked Clark to train him as a kahu, which ended up being a three-year process.

Clark died in 2017, but Harada says he is honored to carry on the principles Clark taught him. As a kahu, Harada blesses new spaces, presides over weddings and funerals, counsels large groups trying to find a solution to a problem (ho`oponopono), prays for a person’s physical healing, and helps guide people the way a behavioral therapist would. This last role, I’m least familiar with.

“I help them figure out the core issue, accept their responsibility – kuleana – in a situation, and find way to feel better,” clarifies Harada.

Like a talk therapist, I wonder?

“Kind of, but I’ll give them something to work on. Depending on the problem and the personality, I’ll suggest things like meditation, a walk in nature, art therapy, breathwork, or exercise,” Harada elaborates. “I help a client reestablish harmony and teach them to keep that within themselves so they can stay centered, even when life feels chaotic around them.”

He leaves me with a general exercise to try every evening. “There is a fundamental Hawaiian belief that every being is a pure bowl of light. Over one’s lifetime, stones collect in the bowl that block the light. To remain pono, one has to turn the bowl over and empty the stones out, and let the light bring kindness into perspective.”

More at https://darrellharada.com/.