2026/08/30: IZI Online Lecture

＜You Don’t Have to Force Your Family Relationships to Change＞

When something goes wrong in our family relationships, we try hard to change the situation.

We want to be understood.

We want to clear up the misunderstanding.

We want to go back to how things were.

Yet the harder we try to be understood, the more tightly the relationship can close.

Here I would like to share what Cleaning showed me through a long-awaited reunion with a nephew from whom I had grown distant.

I have a nephew who is now 36 years old.

His father was my elder brother. My brother passed away when my nephew was just two years old. Afterward, his mother remarried, and my nephew grew up with a new father.

I loved my nephew, but I felt I should not interfere as he built a new family together with his mother and the man who was becoming his new father, and that it was better not to become too deeply involved. Before I knew it, a natural distance grew between us.

I stayed in touch with his mother, but my contact with my nephew himself was very slight. There were years when we did not reach out even once, and there were stretches of three or four years when I sent no messages at all.

This was not because I did not care about him. Rather, it was because he already had a new family and a life of his own, and I wanted to respect that.

There had been no great quarrel. But I can see now that many wordless memories had been replaying within me — events such as my brother’s death and my sister-in-law’s remarriage, along with my wish to respect their new life, and the care and the sorrow that lay within it all.

Once grown, my nephew left Italy, lived in London, and now lives in Rotterdam. He had married a woman from China, and the two of them were building their life together while working side by side.

They came back to Italy from time to time, but for a long while there was no occasion for us to meet.

Then one day, through his mother, word came that my nephew himself wished to visit me.

And so my nephew and his wife came to see me.

To be honest, at first I was not very eager. The world they lived in, and the field of business that interested them, felt so far from my own that I found myself holding back.

Cleaning on that, I simply let the day come.

When the two of them came to the house, I offered them a glass of water and began some easy conversation. I was not trying to talk about my brother in particular, nor was I trying to deepen my relationship with my nephew.

I simply stayed present and welcomed them.

Then my nephew’s wife asked me about my work. Having heard about it, she wondered whether there was a workshop she could attend.

As it happened, the very next weekend I was scheduled to hold a workshop on the theme of dreams.

Yet I had never imagined that my nephew — always busy, and logical and practical in his thinking — would take an interest in that kind of inner exploration.

There too, I simply kept Cleaning and did my best to return to myself. The distance between us, and the judgments and hesitation within me — I cleaned on all of it as my own memories.

And in fact, my nephew and his wife did attend my workshop.

The workshop was held in the house where my brother and I had once lived. For my nephew, it was also the place where his real father had lived.

After the workshop, I had time to talk with my nephew.

There he told me that, for the first time in his life, he felt he wanted to know about his real father.

This was unexpected for me. For as far back as I could remember, my nephew had spent most of his life with his new father, and to everyone in the family that had seemed entirely natural.

And I also realized that, in order to keep that shape of the family feeling natural, each person involved had been quietly caring in their own way.

Because my nephew lost his father at the age of two, he has almost no memories of his real father.

Even so, perhaps something remained within him that even he had not been aware of.

Looking at the house, my nephew said that he felt as though he remembered having been there.

As I listened to him, I realized that, without knowing it myself, there had been a part of me that I had kept firmly closed. At the same time, I felt that firmness slowly beginning to soften.

This was not something anyone had arranged to make happen. It simply appeared at the end of a natural opening.

My nephew and his wife took interest in something I had never imagined, and they enjoyed the workshop with genuine delight.

And my nephew, as a son, had an experience of meeting his father anew. Watching him, I found myself quietly healed.

None of this was something I had expected or arranged in advance. At the end of simply staying open, each of us came upon new discoveries and experiences.

I was grateful for all of it.

We had never been in conflict to begin with. Ours was, in fact, a peaceful relationship.

And yet, through this experience, a new layer was born in our family relationship.

The relationship that had drifted apart did not return to its former shape. Whether we will see each other often from now on, I do not know.

Perhaps we may not even meet again for the next ten years.

Even so, through that single span of time, a relationship that had not existed before came into being.

It was an experience of touching the richness of life.

My nephew, who lost his father.

His mother, who raised her son for many years.

My nephew’s wife.

And myself, who lost my brother.

For all of us — no, for every being connected to this, beyond what the conscious mind can grasp — I truly feel that this reunion became a form of healing.

Through all of this, I did not persuade my nephew of anything, nor did I teach him that he ought to learn about his real father, nor did I give long explanations about Ho’oponopono.

Nor did I make any plan to win back my relationship with him.

I simply welcomed them into my home, offered water, and talked with them, responding — through Cleaning — to the flow that appeared before me in that moment.

Even when the mind insists that we must do something right now, somewhere in the heart we may sense that now is not the time to move.

Following that sense does not guarantee any particular outcome.

And yet, even while we cannot arrive at an answer right away, we can still remain open to our own life and to the other person’s.

“Do not swim against the current”

In the sea, even when we believe we are swimming straight toward the shore, the current can carry us little by little to a different place.

We try to return to where we first were.

The family relationship as it was before.

The sense of security we once had.

The ending we had pictured for ourselves.

But the shore we are meant to reach now may be different from where we first were.

When a family relationship changes, there is pain in it.

The mind protests: “This is wrong,” “We have to go back to the way it was.”

Yet the flow of life may be trying to carry us to a place we never expected.

Opening our heart not to the other person but to the Divinity is something we can always do through Cleaning.

When we are hurting in a family relationship, opening our heart to the other person is not easy.

To be told simply to open our heart to someone we feel we cannot trust, or who has directed harsh words at us, can end up meaning that we ignore ourselves.

Opening the heart does not mean making ourselves defenseless and accepting every demand the other person makes.

When we cannot open our heart to the other person, we first open our heart to the Divinity.

Rather than trying to change the relationship right now, simply turning our attention toward letting go, for a moment, of the answers we think we know, and toward restoring our connection with the Divinity — even that alone gives rise to a change in the flow.

Cleaning is not a means of manipulation for obtaining the outcome we wish for.

It is not for changing the other person, nor for returning a broken relationship to its former shape.

It is to let go of the expectations, the fears, and the attachment to being right that live within us, and to open ourselves to possibilities we do not yet know.

And to receive the flow that appears when it is needed.

Even through years when nothing seems to be happening, through Cleaning, something may be being prepared where we cannot see it.

We do not have to force our family relationships to change.

We do not have to return them to the shape we believe is right.

What we can do now is to return to ourselves and keep our heart open to our connection with the Divinity.

The door we need can open quietly, in a way we never imagined.

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