Why We Need to Forgive

I was interested to read the June 2006 Huna Work article on Ho‘oponopono before I attended a refresher course on Laser Reiki energy healing last fall. It seemed a strange coincidence – or was it the universe at work? – that the main focus of this energy healing training session was on forgiveness. The teachers of the group even referenced an article on Ho‘oponopono written by new age guru Joe Vitale that ran in alternative journal “The Open Line” (Vol. 20, issue 10, 2006).

In it he tells the story of a therapist who cured a ward of criminally insane patients – without seeing any of them – through the process of Ho‘oponopono, or forgiveness.

As an energy healer who practices Laser Reiki and Huna, I’ve found that many of the blockages my clients have are the result of the hurt, anger, or even hate he or she may be carrying from a past event. And sometimes, no matter how hard I try to clear the blockages energetically, they won’t budge. That’s usually when I ask the Life Manager (the client’s subconscious self) if the client needs to forgive someone, or even him- or herself. Almost always the answer is yes.

Forgiving someone who has hurt us deeply is extremely difficult for most people. I think the reason is because we’ve been raised to believe that when we forgive someone, we make what they did okay.

But if we look to the Huna beliefs of the ancient Hawaiians, we see that forgiveness, or Ho‘oponopono, is really about letting go of our hurt and anger and loving ourselves in order to heal.

On the energy plane, negative emotions are like hooks in the energy field that tie us to the person who wronged us. The more emotion we give to it, the stronger the hooks and the trauma get. By forgiving the person who wronged you, what you are really doing is draining the emotional charge from that incident or relationship. It sends a signal to your subconscious that you are ready to let go of it and move on. When we can let these deep hurts and angers go instead of hanging onto them, we free ourselves for new and better experiences. When we hold onto this stuff, we tend to relive the pain and then we fear it will happen again. The more we focus on it and worry about it and put emotion into it, the more we tend to attract it into our life. This then becomes a viciously repeating cycle of reinforcement.

Now comes the really difficult part for most of us to accept – if everything is energy and intention and we can create our reality – then on some level (karmic or otherwise) we chose to have that experience for our personal growth. This is hard to take, because who would consciously choose to have painful events in their life? If there is an afterlife and we’ve all lived before, then maybe we made those choices so that we could experience the entire spectrum of human triumphs and failings. Maybe in a past life we were the aggressor and we now want to see what it feels like to be the victim. Or maybe we made a contract to overcome trauma in this life, so that we could gain strength and the wisdom for future greatness. That is why it is so important that we also forgive ourselves for choosing to do this.

By forgiving yourself and others for your experiences, you acknowledge that it happened but you are choosing to let it go. You alert the subconscious that you choose never to experience this again. When you do this you open the way for positive energy to enter your life and for you to create better experiences for yourself in the future.

-- Kris Larson

Huna Research Associate