How Forgiveness Can Help Your Mental Health

Heal your life with the Hawaiian practice of Ho’oponopono.

The act of forgiveness can help improve your physical and mental health. Studies have found that forgiving someone can lower your risk of a heart attack as well as reduce blood pressure, depression and anxiety.

You as a living, breathing person walking on this Earth have probably had to forgive someone who has wronged you.

Sometimes forgiveness can be hard and there are some things that might seem unforgivable. But for your mental health, it is worth a shot.

When you do forgive someone, remember that you don’t have to forget or let that person continue to do you wrong.

“To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.” — Lewis B. Smedes

Sometimes a part of forgiveness is allowing yourself the ability to move on for your own sake and your own sanity.

Forgiving yourself is also as important to your mental health. The mental load of carrying around shame and guilt is often too heavy for us to carry.

Healing with Ho’oponopono

Ho’oponopono is a Hawaiian practice of forgiveness through the repetition of four phrases:

I love you

I am sorry

Please forgive me

Thank you

When you repeat these phrases to yourself, you are focusing on asking for forgiveness for the role you may have played in the chaos in your external world. Your past experiences can contribute to your perception of what is happening around you.

There is a story about Ho’oponopono in the YouTube video below where a therapist, Dr. Hew Len, healed an entire ward of mentally-ill criminals through practicing Ho’oponopono.

Dr. Len focused on “cleaning” himself by asking forgiveness for any responsibility he played in the prisoners' behavior. Instead of blaming or shaming his patients, Dr. Len took responsibility for whatever role he played in how his patients were acting and sought forgiveness from a higher power. As a result of this practice, the prisoners significantly improved and many were released.

When practicing Ho’oponopono, you are minimalizing any potential triggers that can come about based on perceptions you have about other people or even yourself. You are no longer focusing on any negative thoughts. You are no longer thinking about shame or guilt. You learn to let go of whatever negative thoughts that are no longer serving you.

Learn About Your Triggers

Think about a time when you were in a bad mood. Were you tired? Hungry? Bored? Sick? Then imagine that someone you don’t get along with very well tries to have a conversation with you while you already have a short fuse. Chances are that the conversation wasn’t very productive.

Why didn’t the conversation go well? Was it that person or was it your perception of that person?

The problem in most cases can be within you and Ho’oponopono helps you let all those negative emotions go.

Practicing saying, “I love you, I am sorry, please forgive me, thank you” to yourself might help remove that defensive wall because it could really be your own thought pattern about that person that is triggering you.

How H’oponopono Has Helped Me

It wasn’t until I started to reflect on my reaction to certain triggers that I realized that defensiveness is a complicated emotion.

When I see a defensive person, I now understand that the main cause of that emotion could be anxiety or even grief.

I now have more patience with other people because I consider their side of a story. I have stopped taking many things personally.

I can even feel the air becoming lighter when I take a few moments to pause and reflect on forgiveness.

If you need more examples of how to practice forgiveness then think of nature. The moon doesn’t get upset at the sun for shining bright during the day, the moon takes its turn to shine at night.

Squirrels don’t get angry that it is cold outside, they simply gather and store acorns away for the winter when the seasons start to change.

Yet, we humans are much more complicated. There could be a million reasons why we are upset today, and certainly, the pandemic has not helped.

How many of us get mad when we step into a busy restaurant that is short-staffed? Quite a few. Maybe if we practiced saying to ourselves, “I love you, I am sorry, please forgive me, thank you” then we would be able to have a little more patience when waiting for our meal.

When you focus on love for yourself and others, you can change the world around you. Before Ho’oponopono, I never thought about the role I played in my external world. My sometimes false perceptions about my external world were diminishing my mental health. Learning about how to let go and seek forgiveness has helped me tremendously in my relationships with people as well as with the relationship with myself.