What is ho’oponopono?

Ho’oponopono, sometimes spelled Hoponopono, is an ancient Hawaiian healing practice that can change your life. It’s a rather simple practice, with a long history.

How to pronounce ho’oponopono

Lets start with the pronunciation it is HO – oh – Po-no – Po-no

When it is all bunched together as one word it seems very hard to read, but when you put a little space between key letters it becomes very easy to read.

In a similar way, the ancient Hawaiian practice of Ho’oponopono puts a little space between certain thoughts… and it changes the ease in which the thoughts can process.

Ho’oponopono means to make right, to make double right. I will explain more as we go along.

How I Learned Ho’oponopono

I have been using the practice of Ho’oponopono for many years. I first learned about it from my best friend in the Army named Howard Salmo back in the late 1970’s. He was from the big Island in Hawaii, a town that is actually the southernmost town in the 50 United States called Naalehu. (Pronounced Na–a-LEY-hu)

Howard was an amazing human being. In fact, he was one of the best human beings I have ever met. He was also a very spiritual man. He taught me what his grandparents had taught him, about the ancient practice still utilized by many Hawaiians today, to bring healing and magic to communities. Unfortunately, Howard passed away a year or so ago.

Then in 1996, my NLP and hypnosis teachers, John Overdurf and Julie Silverthorne, taught me more about ho’oponopono and some techniques and processes to do some incredible healing work. Coupled with what I learned from Howard in the 1970’s, John and Julie helped me take my knowledge of ho’oponopono to deeper and more healing levels. I started weaving its power into more and more of my relationships, and into the understanding I had of our spiritual nature of being.

Then, in the early 2000’s, my friend in Mount Shasta, California gave me a blue sheet of paper. He said, “Spirit has asked me to give you this.”

My friend Oh Be met a man named Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len in Mount Shasta, who taught ho’oponopono. The teachings were based on the same Hawaiian healing modalities my friend Howard had taught me years before, with a slightly innovative spin. Instead of simply being used to make things right between members of a community or in a relationship, Ihaleakela Hew Len taught how we can heal all that we experience through ho’oponopono.

It resonated deeply, as I had just finished reading The Book of EST by Luke Rhinehart, a book I now publish with my good friend Luke. The Book of EST has some similar principles of taking full responsibility for the experience of our lives.

It wasn’t long after this that I introduced a friend to ho’oponopono. He was a fairly successful internet marketer at the time, and he sold a number of products related to hypnotic marketing and copywriting. He rolled his eyes at me and told me I was nuts. A year later, I mentioned ho’oponopono again. This time, however, he saw the marketing potential in ho’oponopono and knew he could use it to his financial benefit.

I knew that ho’oponopono could help a lot of people heal their lives and the world in many ways, and I thought it was the slingshot needed to bring ho’oponopono to a larger audience.

In the end, my former friend did get ho’oponopono out there to a lot of people. But this man had some folks really angry at how he marketed a divine spiritual practice of Ho’oponopono, and people got a bad taste in their mouth from how he did it.

After he stopped making as much money with it, he wrote a book to slam Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len and myself. He really used this sacred practice to not only make money but to do the exact opposite of what the practice teaches — to make right — to make double right. Instead he lied and used it for self-aggrandizement.

I wrote to Dr. Hew Len telling him I was sorry for all that had happened, all that transpired from bringing this man into Ho’oponopono. I was feeling bad that my former friend had done this to me and to him in the name of the sacred healing practice of ho’oponopono. Dr. Hew Len graciously said we should do the process together on our former friend.

“Every wrong is an opportunity to make right,” he said. And, of course, I agreed.

I moved on from my friendship with this former marketer, and I moved on from doing much with ho’oponopono after that for 4-5 years.

However, during that time, lots of things kept coming up for me having to do with ho’oponopono. In the last few months even, the synchronicities have grown. It is now to the place where I can no longer ignore them. These synchronistic events have actually brought me to consider teaching ho’oponopono more prominently again.

I recently made a DVD called “The Secret Meditation 2” ( yes there was a The Secret Meditation 1 ). I used the Name The Secret Meditation 2: Timeless Forgiveness and Love because I didn’t want to use the name ho’oponopono due to my past with the unethical marketer. However, the feedback from people who have used the program said it was my best ho’oponopono DVD since the advanced ho’oponopono DVD I created for Subliminal Clearing.

It got me thinking if maybe I should have named it The Secret Ho’oponopono Meditations or something similar.

Another reason I didn’t title it using ho’oponopono relates to this article: most people had no idea how to pronounce or spell Ho’oponopono after they heard it.

I used to love hearing people trying to pronounce it and then teaching people to say it properly. But if people were looking to get some of my Ho’oponopono products or learn anything about it, first they had to spell it properly when searching for it.

People would spell it Hoponopono or oponopono or hopono or as my friend Kevin Hogan would call it jokingly No’oponopono. So here is an amazing healing practice that a lot of folks couldn’t spell, thus why I named it The Secret Meditation 2. But now I think I should have used ho’oponopono in the title because it really is about advanced ho’oponopono practices.

To learn more about how this new meditation, The Secret Meditation 2: Timeless Forgiveness and Love can deepen your understanding and practice with ho’oponopono, visit here. And if you’d like a 10% off coupon for getting the DVD, sign up for my mailing list.