Brian Rose of London Real interviewed me while I was in London. The following is a excerpt where we discuss the Hawaiian healing practice called Ho’oponopono and how you can use it to produce clarity and spiritual healing in your life.
Brian: Tell me about this Hawaiian practice that you go through. It involves, I believe repeating a set of four mantras in your mind. Tell me a bit about it because it’s interesting.
Oh, it’s fascinating. We need a lot more time to talk about it. I wrote two books about it, Zero Limits, and 10 years later, I wrote At Zero. This book has changed millions of lives. It’s the true story of a therapist who helped field an entire ward of mentally ill criminals by using this Hawaiian process called Ho’oponopono. Now, you don’t need to remember Ho’oponopono, but I’ll tell you how simple it is.
There’s four statements, and what the therapist was doing, he was working at a hospital for the mentally insane. These people were shackled and sedated because they were so dangerous. They were murderers, they were rapists, they were violent. The hospital couldn’t keep staff, it couldn’t keep doctors. In a desperate attempt to get a doctor on call, they found this Hawaiian therapist who said, “Well, I’ll go and I’ll be there as your therapist, and you’ll satisfy your state requirements, but I’m not going to do traditional therapy. I’m going to do Ho’oponopono.”
So he started doing Ho’oponopono, these four phrases, and as he did it, those patients got better. They didn’t have to be shackled. They didn’t have to be sedated. In a few months, they started to be released, being pronounced as healed and whole. In four years, that ward was closed. I researched this, I interviewed him, I wrote Zero Limits, which is the story about this. I did seminars with the therapist. And the four phrases are so simple. He is saying these four phrases inside himself to his connection to the universe, to God, to the divine, to Gaia, whatever you want to call that higher power, we all have different words. I call it the great mystery or the great something. And he’s saying inside himself, “I love you. I’m sorry. Please forgive me.” And, “Thank you.” I love you.
I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. That’s all.
So what’s happening? When he was looking at the charts of these criminals, he’s looking at their charts, he’s not looking at the criminals. He’s looking at their charts, he’s feeling emotion. He’s feeling embarrassed, rage, anger, guilt, any number of different things. He wants to clear those emotions. It’s not trying to heal the patient. The patient is triggering emotions in him. So whatever’s being triggered in him, he’s feeling it, and he’s kind of talking to the divine, the universe, the great something, the great mystery. “Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you. I’m sorry.” It’s a shorthand petition or a prayer where he’s saying, “Please forgive me. I don’t know what part of me or my ancestors helped create this person, this belief system in them, it must be in me if I’m noticing it in them. I’m sorry for any part of my role in this.” Even though he wasn’t physically involved with any of it, he’s taking responsibility. “I’m sorry for any part of that. Thank you for healing this, for erasing this, for removing this. I love you for this healing, for this clearing, for my life, for this rejuvenation.”
As a result of saying those four phrases over, and over, and over again, those feelings in him disappeared. So he’s removing his beliefs, he’s removing his emotion, and getting back to that little spiritual vibe that I said earlier was going through him. As a result of him getting to peace, the patients responded to it and got better. Now, let’s take this by extension. For everybody that’s watching this, for you and me, I have heard from tens of thousands of people who have used these four statements for money problems, relationship problems, health problems, animal problems, employer problems, business problems, world problems, everything. Everything.
And what’s happening is there’s a couple fundamental concepts. One is you have to accept total responsibility for whatever you’re noticing. So if you don’t like whoever is in the political party right now and you’re blaming them for everything, not in Ho’oponopono. In Ho’oponopono, you have to look within yourself and say, “Some part of me helped create this, and if I don’t like it, I love you, I’m sorry, please forgive me, thank you. Please heal it, please clear it, please remove it.”
You do this for whatever is surfacing in your life. You’ve got a relationship problem, somebody at work, an employer or employee, health problem, anything like that, you notice that you’re noticing it. The therapist used to say, “Have you ever noticed that when there’s a problem, you are there?” Meaning, you’re the common denominator. You are participating in this problem unknowingly. So you take responsibility for it even not knowing how you are responsible in whatever crazy way.
So you take responsibility like, “Okay, I see that I’m not getting along with my sister, but it’s not my sister, it’s my perception of my sister. The problem is over here.” The sister is a trigger. The trigger is here in me. It all goes back to everything we’ve been talking about, it’s all inside, and it’s coming from a belief. One way to change that belief, that perception is with Ho’oponopono. I love you. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. Saying it to the divine, the great something, the great mystery until that dissolves.
Brian: Okay, so say I see President Trump acting out in a way that bothers me, right?
Right.
I’m sure this happens to a lot of people, right?
Brian: Right. Yeah.
And maybe in some ways that they like as well, but again, people always say, when you see something in someone else, it’s a reflection of that thing inside of you that you don’t like. Nobody wants to hear that, Joe.
That’s right.
Okay. So say in this case, I see him, I don’t know, whatever, separating migrant families. So first of all, those four mantras, one of them shows me that maybe I am somehow part of this whole occurrence. Somehow there’s something in me that might have contributed to this behavior, or the lack of action in me, or whatever it is, so I have to take ownership of that. And is that through one of those phrases?
Through all four of those phrases.
Through all four of those phrases. So when I’m saying-
I love you. I’m sorry. Please forgive me.
I love you, I’m saying I love you to the world, to Trump, to the situation?
I say it to the great something. In other words, I’m saying thank you, I’m sorry, please forgive me, and I love you to the great something. I am not speaking to another person, and I never say them out loud. I would never say them to you. If I had a problem with you, I wouldn’t be saying it directly to you. I wouldn’t walk up to you and say, “Hey, I love you, I’m sorry, please forgive me, thank you.” You would have no clue what I was doing. It would be internal because I would go, “Oh, if I have a problem with him,” which could be Trump, it could be anybody. “If I have a problem with anybody out there, the problem is in me.” It’s my perception that is causing me pain. I clean my perception and the outer will get better.
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