Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

Deepening the Ho’oponopono Prayer—by Elliott Robertson

by

An acquaintance and colleague of mine, Elliott Robertson, contributed the piece below, which I am pleased to share with you.

In delving more deeply into Elliott’s exploration of Ho’oponopono, I am finding it to be a powerful practice in healing my relationship with Mother Earth and my kindred species.

I encourage you to discover how this practice might bring healing to various relationships in your own life, inner and outer.

~Patricia

I’ve been turning to Ho’oponopono frequently over the summer. For me, this prayer from the Huna lineage is healing.

The practice was popularized 15 or 20 years ago. Unfortunately, many of us were introduced to the practice as a set of words. Some of us committed the words to memory and may have repeated the four sentences of the Ho’oponopono prayer by rote from time to time, and rote prayers are usually quite shallow. It wasn’t until I started designing exercises for workshops that I discovered the power and depth of this prayer. It invites us to dive into cleansing waters.

The four sentences of this prayer are:

I’m sorry.
I love you.
Please forgive me.
Thank you.

The brevity of the prayer gives it a universal application. Over the years I’ve used this prayer to ask my heart to forgive me for dismissing and discounting her, and after my father passed away, I addressed the prayer to my father asking his forgiveness for some insensitive remarks from the past that I regretted. I’ve also asked the collective to forgive me for the corruption on the world stage, for Ho’oponopono invites us to take full responsibility for what we encounter.

As I write this, I’m in the middle of a 33-day practice I’ve designed for myself, a practice of giving my attention to my inner child every day and telling him I’m sorry for neglecting self-care over the years, reassuring him of my love for him, asking him for his forgiveness (he always grants it), and thanking him for forgiving me.

The prayer begins with a powerful statement. One that can help us not only tap into our feelings of sorrow, but also to take ownership for everything in our lives. When I say, “I’m sorry,” I’m admitting that I’ve been off-course and that things are askew, ugly, corrupt and messy because I’ve been living in a lower vibe. I’m admitting that things might have been more beautiful and divinely ordered if my expressions had represented the perfect love that I am in Truth. Depending on the context, I might apologize to my higher self, to the collective, to my inner child or to my heart.

I think of “I’m sorry” as coming from the sacred masculine within me as he stands in his integrity. The next sentence of the prayer may come from the nurturing divine feminine within: “I love you.” With the second sentence of the prayer, we are noticing the caring, love and tenderness that sit underneath the apology. We may experience ourselves going into a deeper state or we may find ourselves open to a greater intimacy when we say this second sentence. As with every sentence in this prayer, I sometimes find myself repeating this sentence a few times. “I’m sorry; I’m so sorry” may be followed by, “I love you; I love you; I love you; I love you.”

From there, the masculine takes the action of asking for forgiveness. Sometimes it seems appropriate to add some specificity to the request for forgiveness. Earlier today I found myself saying to my inner child, “Please forgive me for neglecting self-care.”

The receptive feminine receives the forgiveness by thanking the higher self or inner child (or whomever I’ve been in dialogue with).
I generally follow this first cycle of the four sentences with at least one or two repetitions of the prayer, and occasionally, I’ll lie down, take a few full breaths before starting, and move slowly through several repetitions.

I wonder if we as humanity are being called to take up a daily practice, a practice that will deepen within us over time and establish a safe harbor for us to turn to when we’re at the end of our tether.

I’ve always encouraged those with whom I’ve worked to focus on the personal when praying Ho’oponopono as a rule of thumb. We all have different wounds that need to be healed. While I sense a need to ask for forgiveness for the imbalances that have come about due to my placing self-care at the bottom of my list, Jane may sense a need to ask her inner child to forgive her for not trusting her intuition, and John may choose to ask for forgiveness for failing to step into his sovereignty especially around health matters.

These are a few of the things I’ve discovered as I’ve experimented with this ancient prayer. I invite you to make your own discoveries about the power of turning to Ho’oponopono. Sometimes the smallest practices can make a world of difference.

Elliott Robertson is a former staff-writer for Daily Word and a former Spiritual Growth Coach. His articles have been published in Science of Mind, Miracles, and The Embrace. You can contact him at Robertson.0226@yahoo.com

Like what you read?

Sign up for more.

Sign Up Now

Beautiful You Are

by

In honor of Pride Month I wanted to share a song I wrote and recorded many years ago. It was my way of responding to the deep, suicidal pain of someone I knew whose sexual orientation was an abomination to their church.

In this time of intensifying attack on those who do not fit conventional gender or sexual orientation norms, may we continue to stand in the truth of Love. May we celebrate the prism of diversity through which the divine Light expresses itself. May we bow to the beauty of every soul.

Beautiful You Are

How can I break through the pain
To tell you how beautiful you are?
How can I vanquish this cruel false god
To tell you the Universe loves you?

Who cast the stones that broke you
With their anger so righteous in their cause so divine?
And what did they say to convince you
That your Being is shameful and your loving a crime?

How can I break through the pain
To tell you how beautiful you are?
How can I vanquish this cruel false god
To tell you the Universe loves you?

Who was this god that they taught you
Who demanded your love, but detested your kind?
And how could they use sacred scriptures
To torture your spirit and torment your mind?

How can I break through the pain
To tell you how beautiful you are?
How can I vanquish this cruel false god
To tell you the Universe loves you?

That you are a diamond, a snowflake, a star,
That you were created to be who you are.

How can I shatter the lies,
To unbind your soul,
To soothe your wounds,
To see you whole?

Music, lyrics, guitar and vocals by Patricia Pearce

Setting Aside Our Human-Centricity

by

The haze of our ignorance is beginning to lift.
There was a brown-gray haze cloaking the city skyline, and the sun was rising red when I went up to our roof deck early this morning to do my morning journaling. I had already seen on my weather app that the air quality was “Unhealthy,” but I decided to go up anyway. After all, all I was going to do was sit and write. Nothing strenuous. But when I saw with my own eyes what “unhealthy” air quality looks like, I thought, “I can’t be up here today.” Much as I love to start my day outside. Much as I enjoy being surrounded by the flowers that are blooming spectacularly right now in the pots lining the deck. So I gathered up my journal and my pot of tea and was just about to go back inside when I noticed the chimney swifts flying overhead. “They have no place to go,” I thought. No indoors they can retreat to. No N-95 masks they can don. They have to endure the smoke that is pouring down from the wildfires in Canada. They live their lives completely vulnerable to what we humans do or don’t do in response to the climate emergency. Watching them, I wondered: If air quality like this can cause respiratory illnesses in humans, what does it do to the tiny lungs and body of a bird? That’s when I decided not to leave. I decided for that one hour to set aside my privilege as a human with a house and have myself breathe the air that all the other creatures have to breathe day in and day out.

Our Human-Centricity

The news is filled with reports about the over four hundred wildfires burning in Canada right now, and they all focus solely on the air-quality risk to humans, which in itself tells us all we need to know about what has led to this climate crisis. Our human-centricity has been our unique form of ignorance, and it has overshadowed by far any fantastical misinformation that has ever flown across the internet. This idea that we exist as a separate and superior species, exempted from what befalls the rest of life on Earth, is the lie to end all lies. And I mean that literally. It is the lie that has brought us to this moment of reckoning when are being forced to abandon our illusions and accept that we exist, and always have, interwoven into a vast and intricate web of life.

Opening to Other Ways of Knowing

Every morning before I begin my journaling, I read a poem by Mary Oliver. I cycle through her books poem by poem, year after year. Today’s poem was “The Dipper.” In it, Oliver shares an experience she’d had fifty years before while in Colorado. She was beside a river, and there she encountered a bird she’d heard about called a dipper. In her desire to take in the essence of his language-less song, she found she had to “bend forward” into his frame of mind. The experience changed her forever.

. . . since that hour I have lived

simply,
in the joy of the body as full and clear
as falling water; the pleasures of the mind
like a dark bird dipping in and out, tasting and singing.

It made me wonder how I might be changed if I could bend forward into the frames of mind of our kindred species. What wisdom would open up within me? How would the encounter transform my mind? What fierce and loving lengths would I go to to protect the chimney swift overhead who just wants to feel its body dipping and swooping in the clear air of a cool June morning?

Like what you read?

Sign up for more.

Sign Up Now

Love’s Default

by

The default setting is Love.If you have followed my work for any period of time, you’ll know that I sometimes look at global events through the lens of dreamwork. It is a helpful way to understand at a deeper level what we are experiencing collectively, because this human drama is a type of dream in which we are playing out an utterly implausible scenario, namely, separateness.

In this dream of separateness we are unaware of our eternal union with Love. Asleep to the interconnectedness of all Being. Oblivious to our own divine nature. You could say we humans are on this planet dreaming our impossible dream.Continue Reading

My Teachers, the Birds

by

The other morning, as I was on our roof deck doing my morning journaling, I noticed a pair of birds land in one of the planter boxes where we grow vegetables. While I watched the leaves of the bok choi and Swiss chard tremble as the birds made their way among them, I wondered what they were up to. Were they finding bugs for their morning breakfast? Were they sampling the tender leaves of the cilantro and parsley?

I soon had my answer when one of them, then the other, flew off with a beak full of twigs and dried leaves. They made several trips from wherever they were building their nest, each time carrying off ample nesting material. I felt so happy that our roof deck garden was providing them with what they needed for the home they were building for their young ones, and I had such a deep appreciation for how they made use of what nature readily offers.

Birds have my deepest respect for the risks they take in learning to fly, and the truth is that not all of them make it. During fledgling season, while on my walks through the neighborhood, I sometimes see dead baby birds on the sidewalk, little birds who didn’t quite get the knack of flying, though far more often, tiny baby birds who were blown out of the nest even before they had a chance to try. That, I guess, is the nature of nature that one just has to accept. Lives end. Life goes on.Continue Reading

Our Make-Believe World

by

We built a whole world on one wildly imaginative idea.

The other day I was out for a walk in our neighborhood, enjoying the extroverted exuberance of the daffodils and pausing now and then to breathe in the mind-altering fragrance of a grape hyacinth. Along the way, I passed by a man and his young daughter who were headed in the opposite direction. As we passed one another, I heard the little girl telling her father about the things that were falling from the sky of Middle Earth.

My immediate response was delight at the imaginative capacity of children. They can create whole worlds in their minds, and their spirits haven’t yet been straightjacketed by the realities we adults have to manage.

But in the next instant I almost burst out laughing as I recognized that we adults dwell in our own fantasy world, one that we take so seriously that we have brought it forth in the dimension of form—and perhaps ours is the greater imagination, because we are utterly convinced that our fantasy is the “real world.”Continue Reading

Being Human: Containing Multitudes

by

As we make space for our complexities, we know ourselves as Love.

In the daily online WeAwakening meditation group that I facilitate we have a very simple format. We begin by getting centered and open, and then I draw an Angel Card that has a word on it which we bring into our meditation time. As we meditate, we don’t think about what the word means. Instead, we let the thinking mind rest as we open ourselves to the energy of the word, letting ourselves feel how it feels. We allow its essence to become activated within us. This week one of the words was Faith.

As I opened myself to the essence of Faith, I felt its serenity, its certainty, its assured calm. I felt it as an intrinsic quality of the eternal Self that knows no death, no danger, no fear. I could feel how the divine Self doesn’t have faith. It is Faith. What else could it possibly be, knowing, as It does, the Love that is the Source of Its being?

It was a beautiful, sublime experience.

But then, that afternoon after the meditation was over, I found myself feeling an amorphous dread. It wasn’t related to anything specific. Rather, I was experiencing the energetic essence of fear—the inverse of Faith.

The contrast between this feeling and that of the meditation couldn’t have been more extreme. And I had a sense that it was precisely the intensity of the Light I had experienced in the meditation that had flushed out of the shadows of my psyche the energy of fear.

Facing Fear

In my life I have had many opportunities to face fear, and there are two things I have learned about how to respond to it: not to be afraid of it, and not to try to banish it.

So when this fear arose, I made space for it. I let myself feel it, making no attempt to chase it back into the shadows. I allowed it to reveal itself; I cradled it in kindness, acceptance, and compassion.

As all of this was taking place, I sensed that what I was experiencing was a microcosm of what is happening on the planet right now. The intensity of the Love that is now flooding the Earth is flushing out of the shadows of our psyches everything that is contrary to Love and which we had judged ourselves for and tried to drive away. Our task now is to stop doing battle with any of it and make space for it, holding it in all compassion.

Containing Multitudes

Walt Whitman famously said: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.” For me this sums up what it is to be human.

Being human is a tall order, and we ought to bow to ourselves for our willingness to take it on. It requires that we navigate this world of form in a body that is hardwired for survival (which can never be achieved, since form, by its nature, is transitory—hence the fear), while at the same time carry the awareness of our eternal divine Essence and of the Infinite All which dwells beyond time and form.

It’s a big ask. But that’s what this cosmic experiment is all about: joining the awareness of boundless, timeless Love with the finite fleetingness of form.

At this moment on this planet, we humans are growing increasingly aware that we contain multitudes, and we are facing unprecedented opportunities to grow in our capacity to make space for the complexities we carry within us. This, after all, is what it means to be whole: ceasing to reject any part of ourselves.

As far as the fear goes, what I find is that the more I make space for it, the more I am able to recognize that it has no substance. The more I hold it in Love, the more I come to know myself as the Love I truly Am.

Like what you read?

Sign up for more.

Sign Up Now

Love: The Fork in Our Road

by

bent fork in the road
A Fork in the Road. Collage by Patricia Pearce.

Some years back I did something that was pretty out there for me: I attended a spoon bending class. Well, actually it was a fork bending class, because forks are a bit more challenging, but it was the same idea.

A friend of mine and I were planning a trip to Sedona where we would be attending a retreat, and the spoon bending class was being offered by the retreat leader the evening before it was to begin. My friend had taken the class before and was interested in doing it again, and she asked if I’d like to go with her. It was a bit out of my comfort zone, but it sounded intriguing, so I said yes.

We gathered in the room that evening, about 30 of us, and when the class began, the teacher, Gene, assured us that before the evening was done each of us would succeed in bending at least one of the forks he would give us. He then named the thought we were all thinking to ourselves: “I’m going to be the only person here who won’t be able to do this.” We all laughed. It’s like he was reading our minds.Continue Reading