Ho’oponopono

Imagine taking responsibility for everything in your life…

I don’t just mean your health, your wealth, your family, your career, your relationships, your well being, and your over all happiness.

I mean EVERYTHING - Everything that crosses your path in any shape or form. Every problem you see, hear, or witness in the world – poverty, racism, illness, even a road accident across the street that you happen to witness from your bedroom window. Everything.

You are probably thinking that the concept is insane. It’s not humanly possible to take on that kind of responsibility. Nobody’s shoulders are that big and some things are simply not in our realm of responsibility. It’s just not realistic.

For the longest time I was a proponent of the school of thought that those who had the courage to take responsibility for themselves alone were way ahead of the game. Those who were not impacted by others opinions of how to live, how to work, or how to behave, and did not let fear hold themselves back were my heroes. They were people that really owned their lives; they were people that I wanted to emulate.

Until I came across Ho’oponopono.

Ho’oponopono: “To make right; to rectify, to correct” is a Hawaiian problem solving methodology that suggests that in order to solve the problems around us, we must focus on cleaning them out of our system first. So if there is a person that we are not fond of because he is greedy or self centered, we must look inside and clean ourselves of greed and self centeredness first. If we look at the problems in our life, be it with our children, our colleagues, our neighbors, our homes, our parents, etc… there is really one commonality among all these problems – it is us. As such, in order to solve our problems we must begin the process internally. And in order to solve the problems that cross our path, even big ones, like world hunger, cancer, and terrorism, we must also begin with ourselves.

According to Ho’oponopono, our problems are a result of the memory of painful past events, experiences, and feelings that continue to be triggered and recycled in our brains. In order to truly live from inspiration we must work at cleaning out those memories to arrive at a place of no painful memory, or point zero, and truly living in the present moment. How is this done?

Love, and forgiveness. In fact, it’s as simple as retiring negative feelings by replacing them with energy and thoughts that are more useful.

Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len used this technique to help treat patients who were in an institution for the criminally insane. These patients lived their lives shackled in handcuffs to circumvent the danger they might inflict on the doctors and other patients. Dr. Lew treated them without having any face to face contact with them or even any interaction with them at all. He looked at their medical/psychological files and studied their criminal records. As he looked at each case and read about their criminal activity, he noticed his reactions ranging in intensity from deep sadness to outrage and repulsion. He began to work on himself and through meditation; he cleaned up these feelings and replaced them with love and forgiveness. He repeated the following mantra, “I love you, I’m sorry, forgive me, thank you.” As he continued to do this, the dangerous threat of the patients started to diminish to the point at which many of them were unshackled and some were even released.

I know this sounds like a bunch of hocus pocus but my instincts tell me that on a pretty deep level this has the possibility of having a profound impact on our world. Imagine if each of us took the responsibility to clean ourselves of the poison we ingest daily. Imagine if we worked at eradicating the toxins of hate, resentment, jealousy, anger, despair, and depression that seep into our thinking and our general disposition on an ongoing basis. Imagine if we understood that peace, true peace, begins internally. How powerful would that be?