Monday, October 23, 2006

Ho'oponopono healing

I came across a very interesting blog post here.

It had to do with healing others by healing yourself. The story is about a therapist (Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len) in Hawaii who cured a complete ward of criminally insane patients--without ever seeing any of them.

Now let me make something perfectly clear here -- I'm not one to have any strong opinion about the fixing of the physical afflictions of the human body. Through personal experience, I have great doubts about the "all-knowing" capacity of modern doctors, no matter if they are Harvard-trained Mayo clinicians, or if they are Tibetian mystics.

I remain a steadfast skeptic. So I'm not advocating for any method of medical treatment.

But I thought it interesting in the article, from the point of view of this blog, about some of the comments Dr. Len proposed about the concept of healing.

When an interviewer asked how he effected change in his patients by merely focusing on himself, Dr. Len commented:

"I was simply healing the part of me that created them," he said.

The interviewer went on:

"I didn't understand. Dr. Len explained that total responsibility for your life means that everything in your life - simply because it is in your life--is your responsibility. In a literal sense the entire world is your creation.

Whew. This is tough to swallow. Being responsible for what I say or do is one thing. Being responsible for what everyone in my life says or does is quite another. Yet, the truth is this: if you take complete responsibility for your life, then everything you see, hear, taste, touch, or in any way experience is your responsibility because it is in your life.

This means that terrorist activity, the president, the economy--anything you experience and don't like--is up for you to heal. They don't exist, in a manner of speaking, except as projections from inside you. The problem isn't with them, it's with you, and to change them, you have to change you. "

I thought a lot about this. And although it made for some wonderful pondering on my way to and from work, I thought about this on a practical level. How much of our media we listen to is part of the problem? How much influence to we have on the media around us? What is our interacting with how we obtain news and information? On issues such as Belief and Faith, topics which can often incite people into action, and in an age where people form opinions on such topics by the multitude of information sources available, I think we should take great care as to actively engage in deciding how information is being presented to us.