Mental Cleansing

Years ago, scouring the internet for information about how to heal from trauma, I read an article about a doctor who healed people locked in a mental ward just by meditating while looking through the patient's charts. Today, I finally found an article talking about this...so now I know I didn't just imagine it, and I thought I'd share.

The meditation is quite simple:

I love you
I'm sorry
Forgive me
Thank you

Basically you hold each thought, and really *feel* the love, then move on to the next part. Repeat for as long as you feel is necessary.

I have used this technique over the years when I feel stuck and no amount of 'thinking' seems to help. It also helps when I feel really overwhelmed.

It comes from an ancient Hawaiian form of 'mental cleansing'.

From Wikipedia:
I think taking total responsibility is one of the key ideas, and that is not necessarily an easy thing to do, nor something that is encouraged by western society. But, it is also a very empowering thought -- that regardless of what has happened in our lives, we STILL have the ability to change and heal.

I do *try* to take personal responsibility, but some days it is a bit much to wrap my head around.

Important Note:
Whenever doing any personal work, I believe the most important gift we can give to ourselves is that of compassion. Although I didn't know it before today, the ideas of h'oponopono are very much in-line with my personal beliefs. Every single one of us is perfect, just as we are. If you can approach your own healing with as much 'unconditional positive regard' (to use a psychological idea), it makes everything easier.

a doctor who healed people locked in a mental ward just by meditating while looking through the patient's charts

Wait a minute! The doctor healed the patients by his meditating? The patients did not have to do anything?

Total Responsibility advocates that everything exists as a projection from inside the human being.

Sounds like solipsism, an idea tossed around by philosophers for hundreds of years. Everything is a projection from inside humans? How about the sulfuric acid clouds on Venus? How about the galaxies far, far, away that no one knew about until the last 80 years or so? They are human projections?

I don't think so.

I once went to a place called the DC Institute for Mental Hygiene. Clean up your dirty mind! Sounds like a name left over from decades ago when it was thought that people were responsible for their own mental illnesses because they thought dirty thoughts...

I agree with you on the skepticism. It does seem apocryphal. I personally don't have enough evidence to conclude whether it is true or not, but it was the idea that was a 'spark' for trying the meditation *myself*.

My own experiences with it make no claims of impacting others, simply of helping myself heal.

Again, I agree that there is an 'objective' physical reality.
I make no claim that I am 'responsible' for the sun coming up each morning. I understand there are physical principles at work that govern the solar system.

However, I *do* believe that I create my own emotional reality..my own *subjective* experience of the 'objective' world. I know that the brain receives way more input than is ever consciously processed. We can train ourselves to become more aware of things, and as such start to 'notice' them when before those things existed outside of our consciousness. They were there the whole time, but it was only because of our emotional attunement to them that they made it into consciousness.

(The current leaps forward in neurobiology are taking a look at a lot of these questions. For example, we know the brain can and does receive perceptual input every ~20-50ms. How does the brain sort that info, and most importantly *how does the conscious mind attach meaning* to that information?)

If I can take total responsibility for my subjective reality, then it gives me permission to examine what bits of data are making it through the conscious filter, and what bits of data are being discarded. Perhaps there is some 'filtering' rule that is not helping me, and *only by becoming aware of it* can I begin to change it. IMHO, I find that incredibly empowering.

Hope that makes more sense, and am always open to a few more challenges! Thx for the response, pachy!

It can be, if you can stand the fear that becoming aware of "it" may produce.