Ho'oponopono

A practice card

A Hawaiian word for 'making right.' It names three different things: a family practice of reconciliation, a 1970s individual adaptation, and a modern four-phrase practice said alone.

When

When a relationship needs repair, or when you're carrying blame — your own or someone else's — that you want to set down.

What's actually happening

In traditional Hawaiian practice, documented by scholar Mary Kawena Pukui, ho'oponopono was a family gathering where a problem was talked through until it was resolved — not a private ritual. In the 1970s, healer Morrnah Simeona adapted it into something one person could do alone. The four-phrase version — 'I'm sorry, please forgive me, thank you, I love you' — is a later, modern simplification.

What to change

Bring someone or something to mind, and say slowly: I'm sorry, please forgive me, thank you, I love you.

Say the four phrases silently to yourself, as a private practice, without expecting the other person to know.

Write plainly, in a sentence or two, what actually happened and what you wish had gone differently.

Before asking anything of the other person, name your own part in what went wrong, plainly and first.

Go to the actual person, in the tradition's original shape, and talk the problem through until it's genuinely settled.

Where to start

roughly placed — the four phrases come first

Pick one

Five at once is how these lists fail. Tap a number — the ones up and to the left give the most for the least.

What to expect

None of these fixes a relationship by itself — the four phrases can settle something in you even when nothing outside changes, but they're not the same as an amends actually made. Pick one version and try it for two weeks, on one real relationship, before deciding what it's done.

choose one, and the fortnight starts