Ho’oponopono
Ho’oponopono is a practice rooted in Hawaiian tradition that focuses on healing, forgiveness, and reconciliation. In it´s essence, Ho´opononpono means to correct things, whether it is the relationship to others or to oneself. Any hurts from the past or present can be cleaned with the appropriate viewpoint and the use of a few simple words.
About Ho’oponopono
"I am sorry, please forgive me, I love you, I thank you"
The inner meaning is: I regret whatever is inside me that helped create this situation – I regret it. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you for healing everyone involved in the here and now.
Learning and practicing this technique can release blocked emotions, solve conflicts and heal relations. It can even help us let go of our judgments and become more at peace with ourselves and the world around us.
The technique of cleaning and correcting things is best known from this hawaiian knowledge but there is also other cultures that know of very similar practices, of course everywhere expressed in their own individual way.
But lets first dive into Ho´oponopono and its history.
Ho´oponopono History:
Morrnah Nalamaku Simeona was a Kahuna (Healer) and one of the first ones to bring her updated version of Ho´oponopono from a long hawaiian lineage into the world. After Morrnah Nalamaku Simeona passed away, one of her students, Hawaiian psychotherapist Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len, took over as chairman of her Foundation of I.
In his book Zero Limits, which he co-authored with Dr. Joe Vitale, Dr. Len reports how he worked intensively on his self-cleansing and self-healing between 1983 and 1987, during which time several inmates of a psychiatric ward at the Hawaii State Penitentiary were healed. I would like to illustrate Ho'oponopono's special therapeutic approach based on the extraordinary events he described. Dr. Hew Len, a physician by training, was employed by the Hawaii State Hospital in Kaneohe. His work with Ho´oponopono healed almost a whole department of severely mentally disturbed criminals within four years, without having got to know them personally.
A former colleague called Dr. Len and asked if he could help out at Kaneohe Jail. The prison's psychiatric ward has been described as hell because, although patients were sedated by psychiatric drugs and had handcuffs, violent assaults occurred regularly. The security and nursing staff as well as the therapists stayed an average of three weeks and then called in sick. They were overwhelmed and urgently needed support. Any help was appreciated and so it was agreed that Dr. Len should study the medical records of the patients in his office. There he worked quietly on his purification using a method he had learned: Ho'oponopono.
Solving the causes of conflicts through Ho'oponopono
Conflicts often arise that have hardly anything to do with the actual topic, but solely in our perception - are based on our early childhood injuries and memories. The focus is on erasing stressful emotions – e.g. B. early childhood injuries, red buttons and limiting patterns and beliefs.
The questioning technique in Ho'oponopono
With every patient whose medical record he studied, Dr.Len asked himself, “What is it with me that there is something like this in my world? What is in me that my brother (he gave the inmate's name) would do such a thing? What have I done to make my brother do that?” He would go into himself, do a longer hooponopono, consult his heart, and every time he found a resonance within himself about a patient's illness or behavior, he would end up saying, “I'm sorry. I forgive you. I love you." He recognized everything "negative" in himself and handed it over to the divine in a further step. Finally, he thanked God for the transformation with these words: "I am ready to witness a miracle." Every day, over several hours, days, weeks and months, he worked through all the destructive feelings, emotions and shares that connected him with the prisoners.
What happened next?
After a while, the atmosphere in the psychiatric ward changed more and more. Employees were suddenly happy to come to work. For the first time therapeutic talks with the patients were possible again, after eight months there were no more handcuffs and after about three and a half years 28 of a total of 30 inmates could be released from the psychiatric ward. Dr. Len explains in an interview that he only cleaned himself and had no contact with the patients. This is precisely why I consider this case to be an example of how Ho'oponopono works, because Dr. Len worked exclusively on his personal healing to erase all memories - he calls it data - that the mentally ill inmates in his world had created. In Ho'oponopono you stay with yourself.
I am sorry - please forgive me - I love you - I thank you
I'm sorry.
I accept the negative or the opposite of love in me. I regret. I am sorry that I and my ancestors hurt you and your ancestors knowingly or unknowingly. I'm sorry that I consciously or unconsciously hurt others and disturbed their development. I regret and apologize.
Please forgive me.
I forgive myself. I forgive the negative in me. I forgive myself for making myself available. I forgive myself for being a perpetrator. I ask that you forgive me for being part of the problem. I forgive myself because I feel guilty. I forgive the offender and let us go.
I love me - I love you. I respect myself and I respect you. I love myself with all my weaknesses and accept myself. I love what is. I have faith that this situation will take me further. I respect the situation that shows me what to do. I love the situation that has come to me to get me back in the flow of life. I see the divine in you and I see the divine in me. I use the knowledge and redesign the situation. Love is the only and greatest force in the universe.
Thanks
Thank you for the blessings that are in this situation. Thank you for the transformation. I thank you for the knowledge. Thank you for the experience. Thank you for the best solution for me and everyone involved. I allow the healing. I thank you for the miracle. I give thanks for my life.
The word "thank you" is like giving permission to heal and delete the data that led to the conflict. You say thank you when you receive something. Since you can't think of two things at the same time, your gratitude immediately moves from lack to abundance. To say thank you means to believe or to be convinced that you have already received - because if you were left empty-handed, it would be nonsensical to say thank you.
Another similar tradition
In some Indian traditions, you can find techniques with amazing similarities.
The karmic believe offers a whole new variety to changing perspectives and can therefore help a lot with the beginning of the correcting process. If you believe that whatever happens to you, has to happen and is an unload of an engery that has been uploaded before, it is very easy to take responsibility for that situation. It is an oposite worldview to the one we are used to. If in our western culture, somebody attacs me and I defend myself, we see it as action and re-action. So the person attacing me, makes an action and my defends is a reaction. In the karmic view, the person attacking does it because its is a karmic reaction and my defends would cause another action (karmic upload), that one day has to come back to me as a karmic unload.
So positiv and negativ loaded particles that are attached to our soul, are unloading and creating our life. If we manage to interfere in our upload, we step out of the wheel of samsarra. But this interfering is very tricky and needs quite some experience and awareness. If we manage to do what jesus said: "If somebody smacks you, offer your other cheek", we would possibly really settle the issue and not upload again. But to be honest, it gets a bit more complicated than that.
An upload or unload can happen in the form of an physical action, a word or a thought. Some even say that a hurtful intention can cause way more harm than a hurtful physical action. So in jesus version, its not only done by offering the other cheek. It has to be clean in your emotion, which some describe as the state of equanimity. This means when you are able to offer your cheek and are in an equanimous state, thats when things can really settle and we cut the cycle of samsarra. And equanimity is not easy to achieve when we are honest with ourselves. We do get better with practice but the more we dive in, the more we can see (of where we are not in equanimity).
In northwest India there is a practice called Pratikraman. It is said to be used when you can see any wrong doing on your side. When you hurt somebody in your action, word or thought, you can do pratikraman to ask for forgivness and clean your action. By doing so, you can reduce the load of the karmic particle until it might even be so small that the karmic reaction comes back only in a "homeopthic" intensity. In other words we could say, we are cleaning the dirt that we produce.
Most of us are quite aware when we cause hurt in our actions and words. The hole game gets really interesting when we go to our thoughts, emotions and intentions.
A judgement about somebody is so quickly made and we might think it didnot have an effect because nobody saw it. But we do feel that and taking responsibility for what we send out is the first important step on the way to become free, happy and peacful.
There would be a lot more to add to the techniques and to how it all works. What I found, is all out there. I am also happy to support you and you are welcome to book my services. I can speak from my personal experience that it works. I was able to get out of deep situations by just doing my self-cleaning. And although its wonderful to be able to settle a conflict with somebody together, it is very empowering to know that I just need myself to settle a conflict. And on the way to really become happy and free myself, the best way is to clean what holds me back, until everything thats left is pure love.
Before you talk, listen.
Before you react, think.
Before you criticize, wait.
Before you quit, try.