By Daniel Hooker
Right now, the stories we are being fed are conflicting and dividing us. We are just human beings, trying to have happy daily lives, enjoying the peacefulness of our communities. Vashon Island, with its diverse cultural and artistic nuances, is our home, and our neighbors are our friends. We have to remember that.
We’ve been fed scenarios of good and bad for so long that we tend to take team sides, like high school football. Shouldn’t we be paying attention to the players and their talents instead of taking sides? At a high school football game, we’re just enjoying the sport and how it’s being played, and that’s what we should be doing with each other.
It’s important to pay attention to the quality of the messages that we focus on. For me, music, art, meditation, and visualization are key instruments. They move our hearts in the love and compassion that unifies us as humanity.
This is embodied in a kahuna prayer of forgiveness called Ho’oponopono. When we ask for forgiveness, it’s not from anyone above us, or around us. It’s about forgiving ourselves and taking responsibility for and learning from our experience. Without true forgiveness of our actions and reactions, we can’t let go of our ego. Forgiving ourselves leads to understanding with compassion.
When you witness the results around you, you realize that forgiveness is quite powerful.
Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len’s life story is an example of changing the world around us through self-forgiveness and taking responsibility for our perception of life around us. Hew Len was the director of an institution for the criminally insane in Hawaii. Just by doing this act of forgiveness in his office, Ho’oponopono, all 38 inmates were eventually released back into society. These results had never been been witnessed in any other institution for the criminally insane.
Here is the Ho’oponopono:
I love you
I’m sorry
Please forgive me
Thank you
The words of the Ho’oponpono are intentions for clearing the energies that surround us in a negative way, opening up the door to compassion for ourselves as well as others.
When we pay attention to clearing and cleansing our thoughts and intentions, there is a collective weight lifted from our hearts and souls.
I encourage you to read or go to YouTube to hear, watch, and learn from Dr. Hew Len’s and others’ examples of inner change that changes the outer appearance of how we see ourselves, which in turn, changes the world in which live. When we don’t see the love that we are, we are looking for love elsewhere. When we are looking for love in others, we are forgetting that we are the love that we are seeking.
Love is that water of life in each one of us. Just as water flows from a spring, love flows downhill into the sea of humanity where it is collectively felt.
We discover: I don’t have to put myself through negative emotional potholes. I can take the smoother road.
I hope these articles help lift your hearts to a different level. May we no longer feel like an Island isolated by the heavy gloom of fog, but an Island that has the fog broken up by the sunlight that surrounds us.
Heart’s Desire
I am the pebble of Love
and Peace, dropping into the
world’s conscious desire. Its pond
rippling in its effects
changing its surrounding shores
This is the heart of my
beating drum’s music
This is the color of
my palette of peace
Join each other to
create a new picture –
The canvas is yours.
~ Daniel Hooker
