Based on an ancestral Hawaiian shamanic ritual, the healing practice of Ho’oponopono teaches you to cleanse your consciousness of negative memories, unconscious fears, dysfunctional programming and grant yourself (and others) forgiveness, peace and love. Ho’oponopono means: to make (ho’o) right (pono) right (pono), and it’s practice allows people to harmoniously re-align with themselves, others and the universe.
The process is deceptively simple – first you must recognize your own responsibility in attracting and co-creating the events in your life, then you are ready to apply the Ho’oponopono mantra:
I’m sorry
Please forgive me
I see you / I honor you
I thank you
I love you
This mantra will open your heart to feelings of empathy, forgiveness, respect, gratitude and love. This can significantly shift your state of being and therefore your own frequency and perspective towards a certain relationship, occurrence etc.
How I use it is as follows. I find something in reality or in my past that I don’t feel good about. This can be a relationship, an event, a certain thought etc. Then I search for and recognize/find my own responsibility (not guilt) in being a co-creator of that situation. Even if I am just a witness, that is still a co-creative role for which I carry the responsibility.
By saying I’m sorry I practice remorse and empathy for the situation and my co-creative role in it. Where before I might have had a negative judgement on somebody like myself or another person or something I watched on TV, that state now shifts towards understanding that I am partly responsible for it and that I am sorry for all the parties involved in that co-creation that are not happy about it including myself. This part makes me feel acceptance and empathy.
The asking for forgiveness can be towards myself, other people involved in the co-creation and even the universe, All That Is, etc. Often I remind myself in this step that every person including myself is doing the best that they can. Even if the results are not what people might have intended, aimed for or wanted. Instead of being too hard on myself or others I ask for forgiveness so I can be open with what is. This part really helps my state of being to shift towards empathy and forgiveness.
I see you / I honor you is about acknowledging and respecting the journey that you yourself and that all other co-creators of the situation have been on so far. We all have our unique life histories with it’s ups and downs, it’s nice parts and its difficult parts. We might not ever fully understand the other person’s journey and they might never fully understand ours, but we can take a moment and acknowledge and honor our own and others peoples journeys. This step creates respect and empowerment for self and the other co-creators within the situation.
The thank you part can be towards all co-creators as well. I thank the universe for what is without any judgement on it. I am grateful for what has come to occur in the first place so everybody can experience and learn from it. It gives all co-creators involved the opportunity to reflect upon what they do and do not prefer about it. I see it as a possibility to learn and grow from it. And that growth can hopefully result in me being able to create something more in alignment the next time. I thank all parties involved for being willing to have co-created it, even if they aren’t aware of their own co-creative role in it. This part really helps me to experience gratefulness.
In the I love you part, I send feelings of kindness, warmness, openness and understanding to all co-creative players of the situation including myself and the universe. I also try to remind myself that we are all parts of the same oneness on some level and therefore we are always connected. This part helps my state of being to shift to a state of love and connection.
Ho’oponopono is a great permission slip. It helps people to shift their state of being from feeling bad and judging the outer reality, towards understanding their own responsibility in what has occurred and feeling acceptance, empathy, forgiveness, gratefulness and love. This new state of being is much more pleasurable and it is much closer to Inner Peace. 🙂
Have some tissues close by when practicing Ho’oponopono. And remember that crying is a way of the body of letting go, of releasing and therefore crying should be seen as a positive indicator that things are shifting within you.
Here is a guided meditation to try out this process for yourself.
Related articles:
-) Loving Kindness meditation to cultivate Inner Peace & Harmony
-) Forgiveness Meditation – ask for forgiveness of others, forgive yourself, forgive others
This was originally a Reddit comment that I liked
You can increase the effectiveness of this technique by ‘completing the circuit’ between self and others (who you could call ‘other selves’ if you are familiar with the Ra Contact).
All you need to do is add the responses from a perspective of wholeness, so it becomes like a dialogue between self and other self.
I’m sorry > It’s ok / I understand
Please forgive me > I forgive you / You are forgiven
Thank you > You’re welcome
I love you > I love you too
As a male I find it more effective to imagine my own responses coming in a female voice to balance my own masculine / feminine polarities, but your mileage may vary.
I find this to be particularly useful for healing inner child or childhood trauma / woundings, where there is or was a lack of understanding of how one’s soul purpose / evolutionary path may have been a factor in the traumatic experiences.
You could do this in two directions:
From the position of your higher self / soul forgiving your inner child for not understanding what you didn’t / couldn’t know as a child, or
From the position of your inner child, forgiving your higher self / soul for choosing an incarnation / evolutionary path that involved the trauma
This can clear some of the negative energy to get to the underlying pattern that needs to be grasped now that you have more ability as an adult to handle what comes up.