What Is Ho‘oponono And How It Can Help You
I wanted to talk to you about the Hawai‘ian forgiveness code and the philosophy that lies behind Ho‘oponopono. In another video, I’m going to talk about Ho‘oponopono, take you through the process, but this is really by way of introduction to help you understand what’s really going on. And there’s a couple of reasons for doing this.
The first reason is that, as I’ve often said before, in Hawai‘ian culture, the lineage, where the knowledge came from, is incredibly important. It’s not just what you know. It’s who taught you, who gave you permission to teach, and who taught your teacher.
So understanding the lineage also helps bring in the ancestors. When you know your lineage, then your ancestors will line up behind you and beautiful things can happen and that’s something I really want to support you in, as I explain the lineage and pass the knowledge to you, that the lineage lines up behind you and you have great experiences with this subject matter.
Another reason is that, if you follow me on YouTube, I’ve got some videos up about Huna, and sooner or later you’ll come across some Hawai‘ian comments that what I teach is bullshit because I’m not Hawai‘ian bloodline, I don’t live in Hawai‘i, and, “Who gave you permission to teach anyway?”
I know where my lineage comes from. I know where the permission for me to teach comes from. So, actually, I’m fine with this stuff, but I think it’s important to explain and also to honour the fact that there are people out there who feel that their culture is in some way being appropriated.
It’s not my intention to appropriate other peoples culture. It’s my intention to share this culture because I know that the reason that it was shared with my teachers and why my teachers share it with me and give me permission to teach, is because they all believe or believed that the knowledge needs to be out there in the public domain and not just hoarded away.
That’s why I teach it. I think it’s important, important knowledge, and it should be shared. And I only teach what I teach with permission. If I haven’t got the permission, I don’t teach it.
So, for example, back in the early 2000’s, I studied Lomi Lomi Hawai‘ian massage with Auntie Margaret. Now the only thing I have permission from Auntie Margaret to do is to practice Lomi Lomi, so to give somebody else a Lomi Lomi massage. I don’t have permission to teach it and I have no intention of teaching it even though I am, in my history, a teacher of massage.
Lomi Lomi isn’t something I teach because I don’t have the permission.
So, onto the subject of Ho’oponopono and forgiveness.
Ho‘oponopono
Ho‘o, to make. Pono, right. Ponopono, doubly right. Because in Polynesian language is when you double a word, you make it doubly powerful.
Ho‘oponopono is a cultural tradition and it’s something that in the ancient Hawai‘ian times it was believed that you must forgive anything.
Threads I teach
With the Ho‘oponopono, forgiveness that I teach, there are three threads.
The first thread is the lineage of the Bray family, which has now passed into the James family. Daddy Bray was a Kahuna, a Hawai‘ian spiritual leader, a Hawai‘ian cultural leader, and if he was alive now, I think he’d probably be described as an activist, because he was a real defender of the Hawai‘ian culture.
In the 1950s, Daddy Bray was arrested for chanting in the Kona marketplace, Kona being the town that he lived in on Big Island.
At that time, the public practice of any Hawai‘ian spiritual beliefs was illegal. Daddy Bray was well aware of that and he did it anyway. Hawai‘i had only recently become the 50th state. Hawai‘i 5-0, that’s because it’s the 50th state. It had only relatively recently become the 50th state and the practice of native religious beliefs was not permitted. Same was true for the Native Americans and other indigenous people of the United States.
So Daddy Bray publicly practised what he believed and got arrested for it. Daddy Bray passed his learning and his knowledge onto Papa Bray, his son, also known as David Jr, and Papa Bray wanted to share the knowledge with his own children, with his own family, but nobody in his family wanted it, and his fear was that if he didn’t teach it to somebody, the knowledge would be lost.
So he started teaching it to some Haole, some non-Hawai‘ians, one of whom was Tad James. Tad was my original teacher of Huna and his son Matt is now my teacher. He obviously taught his son. So Papa shared this knowledge with Tad because he wanted the knowledge to stay alive, and when Tad first started teaching it publicly, there was a combination of a number of Hawai‘ian elders who really came together to make the teachings happen, to make the Huna Workshop, as it ended up being called, to make the Huna Workshop happen, to allow the knowledge to be shared so that it didn’t get lost.
One of the people who was very instrumental in making it all happen, was a gentleman by the name of Uncle George Na‘ope.
Uncle George was, along with other people like Auntie Dottie, a founder of the Merrie Monarch Hula Festival, he was a Hula master, and had been since the age of 13. But Uncle George was another real defender of the culture, so he created the Merrie Monarch Festival as a way of preserving the knowledge in Hula, because, again, there was a danger that if that knowledge wasn’t somehow preserved, then it would be lost.
So some of the teaching comes from Uncle George, some of the teaching comes from the Bray family, and some of the teaching around Ho‘oponopono comes from Auntie Morrnah Simeona.
Now, Auntie Morrnah Simeona, like Uncle George, was a Hawai‘ian Living Treasure, cultural expert, and she went around the world teaching Ho‘oponopono, teaching forgiveness.
She taught it to the United Nations and she taught it to others. She shared the knowledge so that others could use it. And on her death, the lineage, the keeper of the knowledge, was Hew Len, as she designated, and it was Hew Len who taught Joe Vitale.
Many of you may have come across the Hew Len-Joe Vitale version of Ho‘oponopono, and it’s a little bit different from the version I teach. In both versions you create a stage, and you put the people you want to forgive on the stage, but in terms of what you say to them and what you do afterwards, it’s a little bit different.
You’ll find that in Hawai‘ian culture there are probably as many versions of Ho‘oponopono, as many versions of the various things that I teach, as there are families in the Hawai‘ian bloodlines.
They’re different. It doesn’t make one wrong or one right, it just means difference.
The Hawai‘ians, as they say, believe that forgiveness was absolutely essential. You would forgive people no matter what. There are a couple of reasons for that.
One was that holding onto the revenge, the hurt, the forgiveness, the feelings that needed to be forgiven, would bind your spirit. It would bind your energy. It would act like a fetter, and I’m sure if you’ve got somebody you need to forgive, you’ve had that experience of how it really ties you, it holds you back, it blocks you.
A number of my clients have talked about how when they’ve used Ho‘oponopono, when they’ve learned the Ho‘oponopono process, and they’ve done it with somebody with whom they’ve had a bad relationship or a tricky relationship, it’s really given them freedom, because when you do Ho‘oponopono, you don’t have to like the person that you forgive afterwards. You don’t even have to see the person that you forgive afterwards. You simply have to forgive them and let them go.
Hawai‘ians had a forgiveness code
Most of this comes from the teachings of Daddy Bray, or Papa Bray. And the forgiveness code was for three different sins, if you like, all of which needed to be forgiven.
- The first one was Hala, which is, it’s a mistake, so I unintentionally do something that upsets you, or you unintentionally say something to me, and I take it wrong and it upsets you. That’s a Hala.
- Hewa, then, is to go over overboard. It’s more serious. It’s to go overboard, to do something to excess. Hewa can be an addiction, so all these things can be things you do to other people, or they can be things that you do actually do to yourself. So Hewa can be an addiction, it can be just getting in somebody’s face again and again and again. Or it can be repeatedly doing something that you know irritates the hell out of somebody else, but you just keep doing it anyway.
- The third one is Ino. Ino is to deliberately do harm to somebody, and harm could be physical harm, it could be mental harm. It doesn’t really matter, but it’s that intention and it’s the strength of the harm that you intend to do.
All of them need to be forgiven. And Uncle George Na‘ope talked about the main three different ways that you can forgive.
The first way is to do it in your mind, and that really is what we’re teaching in the Ho‘oponopono process that I teach. The second way is to do it in a face-to-face discussion, and the third way is to do it as a family, it’s a family process for forgiveness.
Back in 2001 when I was studying Lomi Lomi with Auntie Margaret, her cousin Auntie Mona came along. Auntie Mona was a forgiveness expert. Auntie Mona had studied with her grandfather, who was a priest, a Kahu of a temple locally, and she had become a Ho‘oponopono expert and social worker. She was telling us that, even back in the 1950’s, before restorative justice was really well-known outside of anywhere, I think, in Hawai‘i, the Hawai‘ians were encouraging prisoners to meet the people they had hurt so that those people could forgive them.
So Ho‘oponopono is deeply, deeply embedded in the Hawai‘ian culture, a fundamental part of the Hawai‘ian culture. And it’s not necessarily even Huna, it’s not even particularly spirituality, except that it does bind your spirit when you don’t forgive.
So, three types of sin, three ways of forgiving. And in the process that I teach, there are three stages. Magic number three.
The first stage is the healing of yourself with healing light. Much of that really comes from the Bray lineage.
The second stage, is to do the healing in your mind. Say what you need to say to them. Say “I forgive you” to them, and have them say “I forgive you” to you. That’s very much Morrnah Simeona, but as I said, Uncle George Na‘ope often talked about how Ho‘oponopono would be done in the mind.
The third stage, is the cutting of the Aka cords. Aka is etheric sticky stuff that connects you to source and to other people. It’s almost like an energetic umbilical cord that goes out. And it exists, whenever you think of somebody, if you’re related to somebody, you love somebody, you hate somebody, whether you brush against somebody in a public place, it sets up an Aka cord. So the last stage of the Ho‘oponopono process I teach is from the Bray lineage.
I hope that’s been useful as a precursor to actually going through the Ho‘oponopono process, and in the next video, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to take you through the process as a guided meditation so you can use it any time you want, and may your ancestors line up behind you and the ancestors of our lineage line up behind you as you’re doing so.
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