In The Iao Valley

Barbara Hand Clow, left, 66, an author and teacher, with her husband, Gerry Clow, 60, a polarity and craniosacral therapist, Feb. 26, 2009. “I had been wanting to go to Maui for about 30 years because my husband comes from a very famous Hawaiian family, the Charles Brewer family. They were originally whalers; his great-great-grandfather arrived in Hawaii on a clipper ship in the 1840s, and the next generation had plantations and ran C. Brewer & Company. So I wanted to explore that and see if I could find remnants. I’ve got 12 books in print including the “Mind Chronicles” trilogy, an exploration of my own past lives. I did 100 sessions under hypnosis, and this is where it gets interesting: I discovered that I was my husband’s grandmother. The deepest reason I went to Maui was to see if it was one of those places that felt like I’d been there before. And it was. Now that I dragged him there we’re going to go back every two years; it’s just exquisite.”

As told to Seth Kugel at The New York Times