Ho’oponopono

Ho’oponopono, as I understand it, is a healing process that can be used to let go of all that shows up in your life as some type of suffering. Used consistently and with intent it has been known to powerfully change lives.

I will not claim to be an expert, I have never taken a class and I have been working with it for only a few weeks. But it is something, that once I spent just a little time with, has become familiar to me as the back of my hand and as useful as my right thumb. And I wish to share it with you. You don’t have to trust me and you don’t have to take my word for it. Just try it and then add your comments to tell me how it touched your life.

To connect with the energy and power of this prayer you need to consider the possibility that you are responsible for everything that touches your life. I recognize that this may be difficult for many to accept and I understand. But by taking responsibility you are also opening to the possibility that if you are responsible, you are also capable of transforming that which you see as unacceptable.

Read the lines below and allow it to sink into your being. Work to not argue against it. Just allow it, for now, and for the purpose of working with Ho’oponopono. There are three simple lines used to release the transformative power of this prayer.

I am sorry.
I was wrong.
Forgive me.

Now, apologizing does not mean losing face or accepting defeat. At the least, if you communicate from a honest, loving space, you experience some profound healing if not, build broken relationships. At the best, it is a method for connecting with suffering– ours and that which is all around us– everywhere we go. To overcome the fear of suffering and for dissolving the tightness of our hearts...and awakening the compassion that is inherent in all of us, no matter how cruel or cold we seem to be.

I have my own theory about this, actually on personal experience. I was deeply attached to somebody who I felt disliked me very much and I couldn't get out of it. What's more, this person was inaccessible and wouldn't talk to me about the problem. That feeling of being disliked and having no chance to discuss it made me feel something terribly wrong is happening and it hung somewhat heavy on my hands. But as I relaxed into that feeling, it went away. It always goes away. And I didn't die. That was a big moment for me. I realized that struggling with the idea that she was unlovable only made the pain worse. Unless we can relax with these feelings, it's very hard to stay in the middle when we experience them. We want victory or defeat, praise or blame. If somebody abandons us, we don't want to be with that raw discomfort. Instead, we conjure up a familiar identity of ourselves as a hapless victim. Or maybe we avoid the rawness by acting out and righteously telling the person how messed up he or she is. We instinctively want to cover over the pain in one way or another, identifying with victory or victimhood.

But in the middle way, there is no reference point. The mind with no reference point does not resolve itself, does not fixate or grasp. How could we possibly have no reference point? To have no reference point would be to change a deep-seated habitual response to the world: wanting to make it work out one way or the other . If I can't go left or right, I will die! When we don't go left or right, we feel like we are in a detox center . We're alone, cold turkey with all the edginess that we've been trying to avoid by going left or right. That edginess can feel pretty heavy. However , years and years of going to the left or right, going to yes or no, going to right or wrong has never really changed anything. Scrambling for security has never brought anything but momentary joy. The middle way is wide open, but it's tough going, because it goes against the grain of neurotic pattern that we all share. When we feel lonely, when we feel hopeless, what we want to do is move to the right or the left. We don't want to sit and feel what we feel. We don't want to go through the detox. Yet the middle way encourages us to do just that.

Next is, contentment. When we have nothing, we have nothing to lose. We don't have anything to lose but being programmed in our guts to feel we have a lot to lose. Our feeling that we have a lot to lose is rooted in fear, of loneliness, of change, of anything that can't be resolved, of nonexistence. Could we just settle down and have some compassion and respect for ourselves? Could we stop trying to escape from being alone with ourselves? Relaxing with loneliness is a worthy occupation. As the Bard once said, "If you want to find meaning, stop chasing so many things."

This loneliness allows us to look honestly and without aggression at our own minds. We can gradually drop our ideals of who we think we ought to be, or who we think we want to be, or who we think other people think we want to be or ought to be. We give it up and just look directly with compassion and humor at who we are. Then loneliness is no threat and heartache, no punishment. Loneliness doesn't provide any resolution or give us ground under our feet. It challenges us to step into a world of no reference point without polarizing or solidifying. And the less we spin off and go crazy, the more we get the satisfaction of loneliness.

So it is working with negativity. There's nothing wrong with negativity. There's really nothing wrong with what you're going through. It's very real, and it brings you closer to the truth. And there's nothing wrong with our thoughts and emotions except that we identify with them and make them seem solid. But if you don't identify with them, you begin to see life as a sort of movie in which you are the protagonist. It still has plot and conflict-there's no other way it could be- but you don't have this tight grip on it all. We need to let the story line go and have an immediate experience of what's actually happening, without blaming ourselves or anyone else.

Okay, back to Ho’oponopono. Ho’oponopono is not just a word- its a total feeling coupled with an understanding that everyone who has ever hurt us and in fact every human being alive is only as good ( or bad ) as their past programming. That means being who those people are and the programming and resources they had at the time those people were responding in the only way they could, being the only thing they knew how to be at the time. Now it does not mean that you have to like the person, that you will ever let that person back into your life or that you will ever allow them or anyone like them to hurt you again.

Ho’oponopono simply means that you recognize that those individuals who hurt you regardless of what you might have thought, were only reacting out of the internal programming that they had at the time. With that realization one can begin to let the element of those people who hurt us in the past go, to release that energy from within us, because what is really hurting us is the part of that person, situation, or event that we refuse to let go of, and when we can let that go, when we can forgive what was done to us and forgive the people who did it...

So, why not take a break for a moment, close your eyes, breath deep, and allow yourself to just repeat these four lines over and over to yourself for a few moments. Allow yourself to sink into them, without expectation. How does it feel? Even undirected these words sooth, open, and heal.

The real power, in Ho’oponopono happens when one focuses towards something or someone in your world that is suffering, or causing you suffering. We start taking on the suffering of a person we know to be hurting and who we wish to help. For example, if your beloved is being hurt, you breathe in the wish to take away all the pain and fear of her. Then, as you breathe out, you send her happiness, joy or whatever would relieve her pain. This is the core of the practice: breathing in other's pain so they can be well and have more space to relax and open, and breathing out, sending them relaxation or whatever you feel would bring them relief and happiness. However, we often cannot do this practice because we come face to face with our own fear, numbness, anger, or whatever our personal pain, our personal stuckness happens to be at that moment. At that point you can change the focus and begin to do this excerise at you are feeling and for thousands of others just like you who at that very moment of time are feeling exactly the same stuckness and misery. Maybe you are able to name your pain. You recognize it clearly as terror or repulsion or anger or wanting to get revenge. So you breathe in for all the people who are caught with that same emotion and you send out relief or whatever opens up the space for yourself and all those countless others. Maybe you can't name what you're feeling. But you can feel it- a tightness in the throat, a heavy darkness or whatever. Just contact what you are feeling and breathe in, take it in– for all of us and send out relief to all of us. People often say that this practice goes against the grain of how we usually hold ourselves together. Truthfully, this practice does go against the grain of wanting things on our own terms, of wanting it to work out for ourselves no matter what happens to the others. And the practice dissolves the stoniness we've tried so hard to create in ourselves.

There's a joke about bodhisattvas, who are a kind of spiritual masters in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition- the biggest problem for bodhisattvas is that they don't have much to work with anymore, because fewer and fewer things bring out their negative emotions. It's humorous because this is everyone else's dream come true, but it's a big problem for bodhisattvas. I'm a far cry from that level, but I do know from personal experience that life can become smoother. Once I asked a spiritual teacher what happens as your life gets smoother, and he said you have to up the ante and go into more and more difficult situations. You have the capacity to go into the hell realms of the world and help the people there because you're less perturbed by how awful things are. As your own life gets smoother, you can move closer to people who are in severe mental or physical anguish, because you no longer have any fear of it and therefore you can be of some help. Even as Buddha cried at the moment of his enlightenment, looking out he saw that the whole planet was filled with so much suffering and everyone was selfishly acting and speaking and thinking in a way that they were blocking themselves more and more...

When you wake up some morning and out of nowhere comes the heartache of alienation and loneliness, rather than persecuting yourself or feeling that something terribly wrong is happening, right there in the moment of sadness and longing, could you relax and touch the limitless space of the human heart? When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you start to discover how much warmth and gentleness is there, as well as how much space.

Unless you're some casual, coffee-sipping cynic and you don't believe any of this, if you think that you are that one special person in the universe who the laws of nature don't apply to, you can see this world burn...or save a life with Ho’oponopono.