Ho’oponopono is a simple yet effective healing process that has been used by the Hawaiians for thousands of years. The goal of Ho’oponopono can be found by breaking down the term:

ho’o – to make, do, create

pono – balance, goodness, correctness, perfect order

Ho’oponopono – a method of creating perfect order and balance in order to heal a situation

Through discussion, prayer, honesty, ceremony, and forgiveness, Ho’oponopono offers the ability to heal on mental, intra-personal, physical, temporal, and spiritual levels. Ho’oponopono also helps you to reconnect with your family (ohana as the Hawaiians call it), loved ones, and those with which you are/have been in connection, including the Divine.

The Ho’oponopono process operates under the concept of Oneness with everyone and everything. This Oneness is represented by a connection or aka, as the Hawaiians call it, that forms between two or more things when they come in contact (physical, mental, or spiritual.) Many of us have been taught cord cutting in one form or another as a way to facilitate healing by releasing unwanted connections. Basically, it involves releasing the connections between yourself and persons, places, or things. In its basic form, cord cutting can be quite effective. In many cases, however, people find that the cord is cut only temporarily. The situation can, and often does, return after the cut.

In the Hawaiian view, these connections are like telephone wires—one wire for transmitting your voice and another wire for receiving the voice on the other end. When you cut your transmit wire, there is still a connection that can be used to reconnect you to the issue. In Ho’oponopono, all parties (people, places, things, elementals….everything!) release their 2-way connection(s) to the situation, thereby making it very difficult for those connections to be rebuilt.

So, how does Ho’oponopono heal? The healing begins when we recognize that these connections that we’ve established, both in this lifetime and throughout our spiritual history, are not always supporting our highest good. In many cases, they draw down our energy stores and block our path. To understand how ho’oponopono can heal, it is important to know how the Hawaiians view blockages. To them, a blockage is a “piece of baggage” or “stone” that you are carrying that keeps you from fully healing. In VisionSeeker: Shared Wisdom from the Place of Refuge and in Tales from the Night Rainbow, the authors relate an ancient Hawaiian healing tradition of the accumulation of stones in a bowl that holds our life force (mana) energy. The stones represent instances when we have been jealous, judgmental, uncaring, cruel – in general, negative. The more stones we have, the less room there is for the light or life force. How do we get rid of these stones? Simply turn the bowl over and pour them out! This symbolic dumping of our old ways of thinking, issues, or wrongdoings removes the blockages to healing.

Shine!