A library of wisdom
Hoʻoponopono — Quotes
In the late 1970s a Hawaiian woman named Morrnah Simeona took the ancient family-reconciliation practice of hoʻoponopono and stripped it down to a self-administered version with fo A curated set of 30 quotes from the Hoʻoponopono tradition.
“I am sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you.”
“The only place you can change anything is inside yourself. The outside world is the printout.”
“I am 100% responsible for everything in my life — including what I do not like. Especially what I do not like.”
“Hoʻoponopono is not a technique. It is a way of being. The technique is a doorway.”
“You do not have to know what the problem is. You only have to clean.”
“Memories play. Inspirations come. The work is to choose which one you live by.”
“Peace begins with me.”
“When you say I love you to your body, it remembers it was loved before it was hurt.”
“Hoʻoponopono — literally, to make right, to set right, to correct. The Hawaiian way of family.”
“In the old way, when one person in the family fell ill, the whole family came together to clean — because illness was understood to live in the broken relationships, not in the body alone.”
“Pono is right relationship — between self and self, self and family, self and land, self and the unseen. Everything restored to its proper place.”
“The four phrases are not magic words. They are a stance. The stance is: I see, I am responsible, I am grateful, I love.”
“Dr. Hew Len was the staff psychologist at Hawaii State Hospital for criminally insane patients. He never saw the patients. He sat in his office and read their files and ran the four phrases on himself. The ward emptied.”
“The ego loves to blame. Hoʻoponopono takes the blame away from everyone — including yourself — by saying: this is a memory playing. We clean the memory.”
“Aloha is the breath of life. Alo, presence. Ha, breath. To greet someone with aloha is to share your breath with theirs.”
“You are made of three selves. The Unihipili is the child within — your subconscious, your body, your memories. The Uhane is the mother — your conscious mind, your decisions. The Aumakua is the father — your higher self, …”
“When the three selves are aligned, you are pono. When they are at war, you are sick.”
“I love you is a sentence that does the work of a lifetime, if you are willing to mean it.”
“Forgiveness is not for the other person. It is the act of removing the cord that has been pulling you backward.”
“When something repeats in your life, do not ask who is doing this to me. Ask: what memory in me is playing this scene again?”
“Thank you is the phrase that turns the heart toward what is already given — which is everything.”
“The body is a perfect record of what has not been forgiven.”
“In the original family hoʻoponopono, the elder gathered everyone, the wronged spoke, the wrongdoer spoke, both said the four phrases, and the matter was placed in a stone and buried at sea. It did not return.”
“The ancestor cleans through you. You clean for seven generations forward and seven generations back. That is the math of the family tree.”
“I am sorry — not for what I did to you, but for whatever in me drew this scene toward me. That is the difference.”
“To be pono with yourself is the first responsibility. Without it, you cannot be pono with anyone else.”
“Mahalo nui loa — thank you, very much. The phrase is not a politeness. It is a recognition that everything in your life has been given.”
“The strawberry, the blue solar water, the dewdrop — these are tools the Unihipili likes. They are not the practice. The practice is the willingness to clean.”
“When you say I am sorry, you are not confessing guilt. You are taking responsibility for the data that has been playing through you.”
“Aloha au ia ʻoe. I love you. The shortest hoʻoponopono. Said to the self in the mirror, the body, the work, the child, the ancestor — it works in every direction.”