Hoʻoponopono to learn German or French

Hoʻoponopono is an ancient Hawaiian practice of reconciliation and forgiveness. The term roughly translates as trying to right a wrong or put things right. It is traditionally performed by Native Hawaiian healers, often within extended families. Today, Hoʻoponopono is practiced individually, focusing on personal forgiveness and emotional cleansing. It has become popular worldwide as a tool for spiritual growth and emotional healing. Commonly repeated phrases include, I'm sorry, please forgive me, thank you, and I love you. However, other nonsense phrases can be used, which we will explore later. Some of the benefits attributed to the practice of Hoʻoponopono include greater inner peace and emotional well-being, increased self-love and self-esteem, the release of negative emotions and past traumas, improved relationships, increased mental clarity and focus, and reduced stress and anxiety.

Although it is a simple practice, it is a powerful one that can be used in a variety of life situations to promote healing. As we mentioned before, Ho'oponopono has four key phrases, however, others can be repeated, for example, like "flypaper." Yes, the phrase "flypaper" seems meaningless. However, the exercise is about repetition. This is driven by intention, and what repetition achieves is to focus the mind on a state of healing and openness, transcending the problematic situation. Now we can complement this with hydration. Often, a state of dehydration leads to stress in the body. Therefore, even in problematic situations, it is advisable to accompany this with proper hydration.

But let's delve deeper into why it works. In psychology, especially cognitive psychology, there's a law called the law of substitution. When faced with a problem, a situation that becomes stressful, problematic, or involves negative or unpleasant emotions, what we're told is that we must replace it with another emotion. Why does it work? It's assumed that emotions and thoughts in the body, in the central nervous system, can't have two at the same time. In other words, to avoid the unpleasant one, we must replace it with another.

Let's get into how Ho'oponopono can be used to learn English, French, Italian, whatever language you need. To do this, we'll turn to Ferdinand Saussure's concepts: the sign. He saw words as signs that had both a meaning and a signifier. The meaning was what it represented or what it replaced. For example, the word "house" is a sound, but in a mind it evokes a place where one lives. That is, the meaning is the referent or sense of the word or phrase, and the signifier is the sounds. So, properly speaking, we'll see that the sounds will be different in each language—in English, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, etc.—that's why our proposal here is to work from the signifiers. Why is this so? Because many times we've all had experiences where we achieved a certain level of mastery in a language. That is, we can read and write, but we can't hear. And this is due to the traditional ways in which language is taught, which focus on grammar. Okay? So, as children, we learned a language by listening. Between the ages of 1 and 5, we were primarily immersed in the language, with our families, in the press, etc. And what was important was what we heard. We approached a language, let's put it that way, not through meanings, but through signifiers. So, first, a sound imprint or a trace is constructed where a sound is memorized and then endowed with full meaning.

First, the sound, and then we are able to give it content, meaning, reference, and significance. This practice we propose has both aspects. On the one hand, the issue of working from signifiers toward meaning. An initial justification for this is to see it as a Ho'oponopono; where there is no meaning or positive or negative connotations; they seem like sounds devoid of any memory. On the other hand, it is the way in early childhood where a language is learned by first constructing signifiers. In the central nervous system, specifically in the brain, mental engrams are built, that is, neural networks that one associates with sound. As one becomes more comfortable with sound, it will be easier to provide content. The exercise consists of listening to audio from the playlist https://youtu.be/VK-0kBz1Fr4. The procedure is as follows: listen to a phrase while it's playing, mentally repeat it, listen, mentally repeat it, and mentally repeat it until it's complete. Through repetition, we begin to internalize the sounds, and then we'll listen to them naturally.

Supposedly, to make it even easier, song lyrics are extracted from hit songs so we have a way to check our progress. The more you recognize the lyrics when listening to your favorite song again, the better, the better; this is an indicator of progress in the second language; this way, we'll recognize how much we've improved in the language. Agreed? The recommendation is not to obsess over the meanings. I mean, many times we hear a word in English—I don't know, for example, the word "power"—we want to know what it means. That's not the way to go because it leads to the habit of trying to translate, of relying on our native language, like a child who won't let go of the edge of the pool. First, consolidate the meanings, the sounds, and understand the general meaning of the song's lyrics, and then assign meaning to each sign.

Why It Works

Okay, now we move on to the question of why it works. Why does Ho'oponopono work for learning English? The first thing to look at is the brain's electrical activity. Normally, when performing an intellectual task, the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere work almost equally, and their passage through the corpus callosum synchronizes the electrical activity. The brain's electrical activity in the right hemisphere is associated with more creative aspects, while the left hemisphere tends to be more logical, calculating, and organized. It's also important to look at the waves or wave frequencies our brain produces. We find beta waves, which are fast-frequency and represent normal activity in a brain that is alert, that is, awake. There are also alpha waves, which are slower and are associated with moments of recollection, and theta and delta waves, which are even slower and focus on the sleep phase. Theta waves are associated with the REM sleep phase, which is understood as the "Rapid Eyes Mobile." So it's important to remember that memories are consolidated during sleep. But, for example, in a stressful situation, such as beta waves, they are also useful because of the way Ho'oponopono is designed to overcome stressful situations.

If we analyze our way of thinking, when we fall into a situation of deep anguish or stress, our thinking tends to become circular and obsessive. Agreed? Notice that this is how Ho'oponopono works: in a repetitive manner. But then, instead of wasting our creativity and mental energy on undesirable things, such as a bad time caused by someone's envy or someone's misdeed against our peace of mind, we take advantage of that electrical activity. In the end, that's what interests us: learning and consolidating a foreign language.

What is learning?

Learning is the assembly of new neural systems or plastic neural networks, right? These are governed by the use-and-disuse hypothesis, devised by Tanzi and refined by authors such as Ramón y Cajal, Hebb, and Bindra, among others. However, each thought is not a fixed spatial location in that neural network; rather, it can be itinerant or changing, which is why it is said that they form an equivalence class. That is, it is not a fixed network. When we think about, say, something about the apple, it doesn't mean that the same plastic neural network is always activated in our head, exactly the same, but rather they can be different. In this way, we weaken what we don't want, and strengthen what we desire at the neuronal level. This impacts the mental health of each of us.

It is also important to recognize Jennifer Aniston neurons, which are neurons that capture the most general or abstract aspect of an idea. In other words, when we see frames, we can see wooden frames, aluminum frames, iron frames, fabric frames. But the general idea of ​​frames, according to the authors, for example, Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, establishes that "Jennifer Aniston" neurons are activated.