How To Do The Ho’oponopono Spiritual Forgiveness Practice

Ho’oponopono is an ancient Hawaiian forgiveness practice that is incredibly powerful for healing, growth, and transformation.

A mature and integrated spiritual path requires that we work with how energy gets stuck inside us and prevents us from growing and evolving in our capacity for more profound love and wisdom.

For a good reason, forgiveness is believed to be the ultimate spiritual practice. This is likely because it is so hard to let go of those things that aren’t serving us and forgive ourselves and others.

Although it may be a spiritual practice, the absence of forgiveness impacts our physical and emotional health because of the effects of long-term resentment on our nervous system. The John Hopkins Medicine article, Forgiveness: Your Health Depends On It, explores this further

Forgiveness is a transformative experience that enables us to release the energy and toxic emotions that get stuck inside us. It’s an alchemical inner process that integrates the body, mind, and heart.

Through a gentle process, we harness our power and let go of the Soul-sapping effects of anger, resentment, and bitterness, which erode our health, inner peace, and the quality of our lives.

It’s essential to approach forgiveness from the perspective that we have a dual nature, meaning that we’re spiritual beings having very challenging human experiences.

This post focuses on the spiritual nature of forgiveness.

In a previous post, Learning How to Forgive Will Free Your Heart And Expand Your Soul, I share why it’s important not to jump too quickly to spiritual practice. When we bypass the story, we risk denying and turning away from how we feel because it feels uncomfortable. If we jump to forgiveness by touching the hurt and telling our story, we bypass a vital step and stay stuck in pain.

Once we’ve gone through the forgiveness steps outlined in the previous post, we’re ready to enlist the help of the divine, universe, or whatever we call something bigger.

From a spiritual perspective, we view our experiences as an opportunity to grow both psychologically and spiritually.

We realize that everything that happens to us is happening for us and allows us to grow and heal, returning to that place of wholeness.

How does the Ho’oponopono practice work?

The ho’oponopono practice is deeply spiritual in its underlying premise that situations and people are present to heal something within us.

It stems from the belief that we are all connected by one conscious mind and that something within us needs to be healed when something is triggered.

This forgiveness practice reminds us that we are not victims of our lives and how people treat us. Instead, we co-create our lives, and by changing ourselves, we create a ripple of healing in the world, starting with ourselves.

It is a powerful practice that shifts us from victim consciousness to accepting responsibility for our lives.

The ho’oponopono mantra consists of four simple phrases: I’m sorry, please forgive me, thank you, and love you.

In the book Zero Limits: The Secret Hawaiian System for Wealth, Health, Peace, and More, the author explains that “Ho’oponopono is very simple. For the ancient Hawaiians, all problems begin as thought. But having a thought is not the problem. So what’s the problem? The problem is that all our thoughts are imbued with painful memories—memories of persons, places or things. The intellect working alone can’t solve these problems because the intellect only manages. Managing things is no way to solve problems. You want to let them go! When you do Ho’oponopono, what happens is that the Divinity takes the painful thought and neutralizes or purifies it. You don’t purify the person, place, or thing. You neutralize the energy you associate with that person, place, or thing” (2007, pp. 33-34).

This book stretched my thinking, and I was fascinated to learn that research has also validated the effectiveness of the Ho’oponopon practice, as shared in Psychology Today.

The following video briefly overviews the ho’oponopono mantra and how it works to heal and forgive ourselves and others.

What is the meaning of this ho’oponopono mantra?

The first thing to realize is that when you’re repeating the mantra, you are not directing it to yourself or the other person; you are directing it to whatever force/power/energy/spirit, etc., you believe in.

The 4-phrase mantra is:

I’m sorry for my part in creating this situation. I am not a victim but responsible for what is happening in my life. I am sorry we are experiencing this, and I accept and acknowledge my role.
Please forgive me as I realize that I may have responded in ways that I don’t feel good about, and that isn’t my true nature of love and compassion.
Thank you for this experience, which allowed me to heal, explore my soul lessons and learn what I’m meant to learn from this. It may be painful, but thank you for the opportunity to grow and move closer to my true nature.
I love you, which is the energy of healing that arises from the level of our heart, not the head.

Here’s a guided meditation that leads you through the process: