What is Ho’oponopono?
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.

Ordinary Reality
This is the world we live in. It is the physical reality of our five senses. It is the world that we describe through our chemistry and physics, the conscious mind and faith. In this reality, there is separateness: a beginning and an end; a cause and an effect.
Non-Ordinary Reality
Coined by Carlos Casteneda, Non-ordinary reality is the world of spirit. It is the world of dreams, spirits and intuition. It is where all things are conscious. It is the place of “no time” where the past, present and future all exist and are accessible. It is the place where thoughts, feelings and emotions create our physical reality and is the spirit mirror of our ordinary reality. In this place, all is connected and related. It is a place of symbolism. The Shaman “journeys” to non-ordinary reality to access the information contained therein. He then uses this data to help facilitate healing in ordinary reality.
Path to healing
Shamanism, specifically the shamanic journey, is used primarily for divination and healing. Shamans utilize the journeying techniques to study with their individual spirit teachers in non-ordinary reality. During the journey, the shaman can gain knowledge and insight from Spirit Guides as to what is necessary to restore spiritual power, and heal oneself, others, and the Planet.

I wanted to chat a bit about some basic Shamanic concepts. Primarily, it is often the case that one experiences difficult situations when there is power loss. To define “power loss”, this is when some of your life force energy goes missing, like in soul loss, or situations where diet, toxins, or other environmental conditions diminishes your power. There can be negative power loss where something nefarious attacks a person and steals power. Also, power loss can also happen as a learning tool. For instance, if one needs to learn a life lesson, there may be suffering or hardship in one’s life.

All in all, the role of the shaman in these cases is to help to the person to regain his/her/their power. Once the power is returned, it is up to the person what happens with the power. This means that the suffering/hardship experienced may or may not ease. Back to my previous example, if the life lesson is to experience suffering, little may change once the power is restored. It just may be that the person is able to cope more effectively with the suffering. To an external observer applying the filter of their own expectations, the person will still be “suffering.”

This brings up a paradox: How can I ease one’s suffering if suffering is their lesson in life? To attempt to “take away” the suffering would, actually, take the power of the experience away from the person. In a way, it would be doing the same thing as the person who steals power, although not done nefariously.

Each culture tends to view the world through the filter of experience. What is suffering to one, is life to another. Imagine, if you will, what a person who lives on the land thinks of those who live in a city. City life could be viewed as “suffering.” So, when one sets out to “ease the suffering of [fill in the group/person here],” and the goal is to remove that suffering, you have to ask yourself, “Is that my place? Am I robbing the person/group of a teaching?”

An alternative I’ve seen and used is to offer your energy and support without the preconceived notion that there is suffering. In this way, the energy can be used to best contribute to the person/group. This may mean the suffering becomes more bearable…it may not. Either way, the person/group’s power is augmented by yours vs. trying to mold the situation into what you perceive as right or good.

For the non-shamanic practitioner, when you see a situation that you perceive as “suffering” and you want to help, is your goal to be the savior and remove the suffering, or are you there as a supporter contributing to the person?

Shine!

The goal of Oneness is to reconnect you with God, YHWH, Divine Source, Great Spirit – or the name that you use to describe the Universal Oneness that is the source of all – and to help you get back in touch with that Spirit. I say “back” because we are all born with that strong Oneness connection. We know this when we are children. Some very lucky people carry this knowledge with them throughout their whole life. However, many of us are “societized” out of it and live our lives in “duality” – right/wrong, good/bad, us/them.

The objective is for you to rediscover the grand plan for your life and to realize that you are not just out there flailing on your own. The Bible, in John 15:5, quotes Jesus as saying, “I am the vine and you are the branches.” This is a very powerful statement addressing the concept of Oneness. We are all part of the plant or complete entity. We cannot separate ourselves from the rest of the plant without dying. When we acknowledge our Oneness, we move from simply surviving (subsisting in a day-to-day existence of consuming nutrients, exhaling carbon dioxide and watching the world go by) to truly living.

There are many ways to achieve Oneness, through many different methods – for example: meditation, Shamanic journeying, healing modalities, practices of organized religions, etc.

The concepts and methods you will read about in this book are in no way a religion in the formal, accepted definition, although the ideas are addressed throughout various religions. I offer them as enhancements to your existing practices, whatever they may be.

Returning to Oneness with the Divine Source will allow you to grow and flourish with the knowledge that you are not alone. As your Oneness connection grows, you will consistently begin to recognize that the Divine Source is in all, both the “good” and the “bad.”

Excerpt from my book, My Journey Back to Oneness

Come on a journey with me. It offers you the probability of experiencing healing on physical, mental and spiritual levels. This is a journey back to the place where we all started…a place of Oneness with the Divine Source. Are you interested?

As we begin this journey, I would like you to get comfortable. Take four deep breaths. In through the nose, holding your breath, then out through the mouth. I find that an inhale of four counts, holding for another four counts, an exhale of eight counts, then a slight pause works nicely.

This type of breathing exercise tells your mind, body and spirit that you are ready to do shamanic work. It also helps to connect your Lower and Middle selves to further establish the connection with your Upper self. In doing this breathing exercise, allow your diaphragm and chest to expand fully. Feel the air filling your lungs. Concentrate on your breath. Clear your mind of your daily clutter. As thoughts arise, acknowledge them, thank them for offering the information and then let them go.

Take your first breath as most of us normally do, just with our lungs. On your second breath, feel yourself breathing with your whole body from the top of your head to the tip of your toes. On your third breath, fill beyond your skin…your house…your town…country…and beyond the Earth into space. On your fourth breath, feel the connection with the Divine!

I’d like you to try this breathing exercise. Clear your mind…

In…hold…out…pause

In…hold…out…pause

In…hold…out…pause

In…hold…out…pause

Start with doing this exercise four times for several days. Then lengthen your practice in increments of four till you achieve 40, 400, 4000, and so on.

How do you feel?

Shine!

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!