To learn more, read my article below or go straight to the experts and click here to join the Live Seminar Recording with Dr Joe Vitale and Dr Hew Len.
Before explaining the background to Ho'oponopono, I'll start with an incredible example that shows just how powerful it can be.
There was a ward in the Hawai'i state hospital in Honolulu where they kept the criminally insane patients, and it was a dangerous place. Psychologists would quit on a monthly basis and the staff would call in sick all the time because they were so afraid of being attacked by the patients. It was not a safe place to work.
"No one wanted the job I did with the criminally insane. They were averaging about one new psychologist a month. But I got asked. Everyone would walk with their back toward the wall so that they wouldn’t get struck. They had no family visits. No one could leave the building. A year and a half later there was none of that. What did I do?I worked on myself." – Dr Ihaleakala Hew Len, Ph.D.
Dr Ihaleakala Hew Len, a Hawai'ian expert in the spiritual practice called Ho’oponopono, and master teacher, was asked if he would work there to see what he could do.
Dr Hew Len agreed. He worked in the hospital for three years, from 1984 to 1987, and by the end of that time the ward was closed. Not because it was such a dangerous place to be, but because all the patients had healed.
There were no more patients left!
What happened to change things so dramatically?
Dr Hew Len says, “I was simply cleaning the part of me that I shared with them. I took 100% responsibility.” He never saw any of the patients professionally or counsel them at all. All he did, and agreed to do, was review their files. While he studied their files, he would work on himself, repeating the Ho'oponopono mantra over and over.
How could that possibly work?
Ho’oponopono recognizes that we are all part of one consciousness and, as such, everything that is in our experience is affected by our actions and reactions. Dr Hew Len explains, “total responsibility for your life means that everything in your life, simply because it is in your life, is your responsibility. In a literal sense, the entire world is your creation.”
While the rational part of me was still incredulous that this story could ever have happened, it made me curious to try the technique and find out for myself if it might be helpful in my life.
What is Ho’oponopono?
The literal translation of the word is: "to put to right; to put in order or shape; correct, revise, adjust, amend, regulate, arrange, rectify, tidy up; make orderly or neat".
On the surface level, many people have understood Ho’oponopono to be a simple ritual where you repeat a series of phrases as a form of mental and spiritual cleaning. Others use a more complex process with multiple steps. Some people describe it as a forgiveness and reconciliation practice, for cleansing of "errors of thought". According to Hawai'ian philosophy these are where problems and illness originate.
The Ho’oponopono mantra: I’m sorry, please forgive me, thank you, I love you.
To start with, I wasn’t sure if there was a specific order to the words and even whether the order mattered. I tried them in different sequences and chanted them over and over in the hope of finding out whether they were useful in some way. But mostly I was curious about what it was about these words and phrases that supposedly makes them helpful.
I chanted them with no purpose in mind at all. As I did this more, many questions arose in my head. And different questions would come up depending on the order I said the phrases. “What do I have to be sorry for? What do I need forgiveness for? Is that for something recent or generally things I’ve done in my life? Why do I need to say ‘thank you’? Am I grateful to certain people or just meant to feel thankful in general? When I say ‘I love you’ am I really feeling it? If not, what is in the way?”
I found that by simply chanting these words, my inner mental stuff would come to the surface. It was as if my inner discordances were being tuned to the “frequency” of these words in the mantra, like a series of tuning forks.
The good thing is that you can do it yourself, you don’t need anyone else to be there, and you don’t need anyone to hear you. You can “say” the words silently in your head. The power is in the feeling and in the willingness of the Universe to forgive and love.
Best of all, I found that applying this chant to the chaos of my mind brought about stillness and calm.
The only problem with human beings is that they are arrogant, because that’s what thinking is. This is in essence ‘I know’. Wisdom is being in the void. To be thoughtless. Only by being in the void can the Light come through. As long as I have something going on in my mind the Light can’t come through. The Light can only come in when the mind is cleared–in a state of silence. – Dr Hew Len
Why is Ho’oponopono powerful?
It’s a really rare thing for the vast majority of humanity to be in agreement about anything. Yet across all cultures - regardless of other divisions between them, like race, language or religion - practically all of us would agree that the concepts of Repentance, Forgiveness, Gratitude and Love are relevant and powerful.
So the power of Ho’oponopono may come from the sheer volume of people throughout human history who have agreed that these concepts are valuable, important and useful to humanity. In this way, Ho’oponopono may be tapping into a level of awareness that extends far beyond its Hawai'ian roots into perhaps every culture that has ever existed.
Click here to join the Live Seminar Recording with Dr Joe Vitale and Dr Hew Len to learn more, so you can experience the peace, harmony and power of Ho’oponopono yourself.
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