Ho’oponopono ; The Art of erasing memories.

4 min readAug 13, 2023

What stops us from really achieving our goals and living life to the full are all the ideas in our heads. Situations may always be new, but our reactions are always conditioned by our ‘neurological programming’.

The ego: a void filled with preconceived ideas.

In fact, we don’t react like humans but like robots run by a computer. When we are faced with a problem, whatever it may be, our internal software looks for the answer in our database. The cells in our bodies and our environment are constantly changing, but the applications that manage our daily lives are fixed and logically always produce the same answers.

From where do these ‘rules of life’ which are stored on our ‘mental hard drive’ come from? It’s not hard to work out: many of our parents’ ideas, who often got them from their own parents, etc., ideas from our teachers, our classmates and their families, society… And to consolidate all this,all our life experiences, which obviously reflect exactly the content of our database.

This vortex of preconceived ideas is what we call: me, my personality, my ego… And we’re generally prepared to do anything to defend this fragile territory which is in fact 100% a tissue of illusions.

Opening up to the power of Ikigai

Opening up to the power of the Ikigai, in other words to the Life Force, to inspiration, to the flow of the present… implies a radical change of point of view. No coaching or therapy can succeed through self-inquiry or by adding beliefs. There is no question of re-establishing ‘self-confidence’, because the ‘self’ is nothing. The solution is to regain confidence in life.

You can’t explain ikigai, you can’t analyze it. You have to experience it, you have to feel it, not think it. Waking up in the morning and feeling an inexpressible joy at being there is a manifestation of Ikigai. In Hawaii, the same state goes by the equally untranslatable name of ALOHA. For the Hawaiian tradition, to live in the state of Aloha is to be PONO… Another untranslatable word. The Pono state means being supported by life because you are naturally in harmony with the universe.

Being in harmony with the universe isn’t complicated at all because we’re born in this state… It’s afterwards that things go wrong, with education as it’s conceived. Because we’re not taught the basic rules for sailing with the current. All we’re taught are strategies for resisting the current.

It’s tiring, it’s stressful and it ends up breaking. The flight of birds in the sky leaves no trace, but our identification with our ego, i.e. our memories, means that we lose all our energy on leaving traces.

Welcoming problems

When we run into problems, it’s always because of this attachment. As a result, we can say that a problem is always a chance to reinvent ourselves. In general, the solution can only come from our total lack of beliefs and not from what we consider to be certain.

When a problem arises, it’s always because we’ve stopped being “PONO”. This is why the Polynesians use rituals that enable them to ‘return home’. In Hawaii, one of these customs is called “Ho’oponopono”. Quite simply, it’s a way of rediscovering harmony with oneself and with the universe.

To rediscover the PONO state is in fact to rediscover the power of ikigai within oneself… The boat is once again carried by the current along a path of least resistance.

What is Ho’oponopono and why should you be interested in it?

Installing a new operating system

The starting point is always awareness of the impotence of the “ego”. It is preferable to have tried everything before, without lasting results. The appearance of problems that at first sight look serious is decisive. The unbearable almost always call for mutations. They occur when the survival of species is heavily at risk.

When nothing in life works any more, it’s a clear sign that we’re no longer “pono” and that we’re living outside of our ikigai… The next step is depression, burn-out or outright physical illness that requires us to urgently question our way of life.

At this stage, the only effective therapy is not to add ideas to ideas or beliefs to beliefs but, on the contrary, to erase everything. The simplest way, because it puts an end to all intellectualisation, is the Ho’oponopono, as updated by Morrnah Simeona.

The approach has the merit of being simple and radical. It is based on a natural principle, which is that you need an empty glass to pour fresh water. To use a more technical image, you could also say that to update an operating system on a computer, you have to delete the old version…

Installing a new system then allows you to adapt to an always changing environment… It’s this buoyancy that we call the “state of Aloha” or “Ikigaï”.