To be honest, I will speak plainly and just as I am.
For 40 years, I have walked together with this teaching called Ho‘oponopono. But at the beginning, I understood nothing. I barely managed to graduate from high school, and I didn’t like reading, writing, or math. I simply wanted to spend time with horses in the forest. That was my only real interest. Other than that, I thought about wanting children, drifted along with whatever was happening at the time, avoided what I wasn’t good at, or was pushed forward against my will, all the while continuing to search for something.
In the midst of all this, when I encountered the Ho‘oponopono process, I realized that the Unihipili (the subconscious) was the missing piece for me. I was able to accept that there is a child within me—that my emotions were not illusions, nor vague and unreliable things that appeared because I was weak.
Don’t cry. Don’t get emotional. Don’t do that. Haven’t we all grown up surrounded by conversations like these? Yet by meeting the presence called the Unihipili once again, I realized that there was this “missing part” within me, and that I simply didn’t know how to love it, nurture it, or cherish it. In that moment, I was freed from the fear of emotions that might arise irrationally at any time, and from the guilt I had felt toward them.
“I am a precious being.” At the very least, I was able to gently accept this most important part of myself. For the first time, I touched a sense of relief—an assurance that I, too, was one of the precious things in this world.
The morning after I took my first class, while driving home, I tried asking my own Unihipili a question for the first time. “You’re hungry, aren’t you? What should we eat?” Then she—my inner child—said, “Fish sandwich.”
Those words came naturally from within. In that moment, tears flowed. She is very simple. But she has always responded properly, every time. Until then, I had not understood that. At the time, I was 30 years old.
Through the practice of Ho‘oponopono, I rebuilt my relationship with my inner child and came to understand that Divinity exists within us. As a result, the relationship between the world and me also began to change.
Until then, it felt as though everything that could hurt me existed everywhere in the world, and I believed that in order to protect myself, I had to run away from it or fight against it. However, in Ho‘oponopono, I learned that all of it actually exists within me. With that understanding, the overwhelming fear of the world that had lived inside me gradually disappeared.
What appeared in its place was the understanding that everything is a projection of memories being replayed within the subconscious—memories that have shown up so that I can live my true self once again. By repeatedly practicing cleaning, I learned anew how to treat myself, and I was able to take on the most precious work of restoring sacredness to all things.
Peace
Wai’ale’a Craven x
