It's you, Sisu

I had an appointment scheduled. I was going to be a "test subject" for a recent graduate of a Human Design course. I was genuinely curious about what the modality looked like in real, practical application, and honestly, I was excited to help someone make that transition from learning to doing.

I emailed her about fifteen minutes before our scheduled Google Meet to let her know I'd be just a couple of minutes late. At 3:03, I was ready and waiting to be let into the call.

And I waited.

And I waited.

As the minutes ticked by, I felt the familiar physical warning signs of a pending rage spiral: heat rising in my skin, breath quickening, that tight panicky feeling in my chest, the twitchiness, the anxiety. I breathed through it; smashed it into a ball and tried to squeeze it into place. I knew better than to let this get the best of me. I didn't always succeed, but absolutely could feel where this anted to go. I checked my email a few times, hoping for some explanation. Maybe something came up? I really wanted to give this girl the benefit of the doubt.

Nothing.

All of the things I could have been doing instead of sitting there waiting to be ghosted started flashing through my head, through that familiar red tint. I took another deep breath.

Twenty minutes in, "annoyed" had become a dramatic understatement. Being in my I declare my boundaries era, I sent her an email expressing my disappointment. I let her know I didn't appreciate being disregarded and having my time wasted.

A few minutes later, my phone pinged. "Technical difficulties." "Haha, isn't technology frustrating." "Links go dead after a while, I texted you a fresh one."

She did not text me a fresh one.

I was trying really hard to not be overcome. I could sense my little goblin doing what he could to rattle himself out of the cage. I sat at my desk, stiff, curling my lips into my mouth and smashing them between my teeth. I was barely breathing. Fortunately, the gaslighting hit my emotional funny bone at that moment. I'd been down this road, it was so stupid obvious to me, and these days it causes my eyes to roll out the backside of my head. I indulged in a bitter giggle, shook it off (or so I thought) as I exhaled and stood up out of my desk chair, and got my dogs ready to go out back for a walk. I needed some fresh air just as much as they needed to go for a run.

Now, I got about 400ft down the trail behind my house, and I realized this shit was just spinning around in my brain. It was like the hamster wheel of reactivity patterns. Just going and going and going. Around and around and around my angry little thoughts went. I found myself replaying the entire email conversation in my head over and over. I was sucking in the random, sharp panic breath with every replay, shaking my head in an attempt to get it to fall out. I had nothin' on the madness, but it certainly had me.

I didn't know it yet, but this walk was about to become an exercise in transformation.

I decided to do some visual breathing, imagining the negativity being pushed into the earth, breathing in healing. It helped a touch. It allowed me to be a little more present. But I was still pissed.

I tried slow, deep belly breaths. Long inhale, slow controlled exhale through the mouth. Surely I could get my vagus nerve online, activate my parasympathetic system. Right? 

Le sigh. Still irritated. It was too beautiful of a day to feel this itchy. I was getting aggravated about still being aggravated, which had its own kind of comedy. At least I was calm enough to just sit with it. But I wanted it gone.

And then it hit me: yo, ho'oponopono.

I started studying the Hawaiian practice of ho'oponopono about eight months ago. I came across a course offered through the same people I'd received some of my Reiki training through. At the time, I honestly thought it would just be a nice differentiator for my practice, another tool for the skillset. What I wasn't expecting was for it to become one of the most profoundly healing journeys of my own life.

In this modernized version of the practice, developed in the early 20th century by Morrnah Simeona, there are four phrases at the core: I'm sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you. They sound simple, and on the surface, they are. But simple isn't the same as easy. 

When you apply them with real intention, each phrase starts peeling back a layer. The further you go, the more the layers fall away, and the closer you get to the deeper, darker, more honest parts of yourself. The parts that have been hiding in the dark for a very long time. This prayer takes you down. It places you face to face with what's been hiding, and gives you the opportunity to recognize it, meet it with compassion, and finally let it go.

My biggest personal takeaway from the course was a striking drop in my own propensity for anger, bitterness, spite, and dysregulation. I had battled a rage goblin inside of me for as long as I could remember. From being an angry teenager with a permanent resting bitch face, to being the person who gets mad standing in line simply because other humans had the audacity to exist nearby. Over the years, I'd engaged in a wide range of healing modalities: therapy, inpatient treatment, counseling, yoga, breathwork, 12-step programs, plant medicines, and finally energy work. I'd come a long way, and I was genuinely a different person than I'd been a decade ago.

But the rage goblin had survived, nonetheless.

The most I had been able to do with my little rage goblin was increase my success rate of keeping him in the cage, pushed down into the corner of my lower abdomen. That was never guaranteed, however: just over a year ago I found myself standing in the middle of the street, having left my vehicle at a stop light to verbally attack a man that wouldn't let me over in traffic. No joke, the rage goblin had a permanent residence in my inner world, and he made his appearance more often than I would like to admit.

Within a few months of consistent ho'oponopono practice, my reactive patterns had quietly, almost sneakily, started to dissolve. I stopped getting triggered by people standing too close to me. My road rage identity largely evaporated. I found myself laughing through moments I knew I would have previously been losing my mind over. The rage goblin had downgraded, transformed into the mildly-to-moderately irritated goblin, with a side of eye rolls and deep breaths. This was enormous. And the changes had mostly snuck up on me. Previous to this, I had genuinely come to believe I would just co-exist with my little goblin pet forever.

Anyway. Back to the forest.

So, there I was, walking through the snowy woods with the dogs, the first beings to break trail behind my house after the previous night's snowfall...

Irritated as all hell.

I really wanted to enjoy the day, to get out of my head. But this girl...

There was a beauty to it, though, seeing nothing but a field of untouched snow in front of me for as far as I could see. A calmness to it. The snow-covered trees muffling the air into a beautiful silence. The snow glistening against the clear blue Arizona skies. The ponderosas rising into the sky, myself humbled against their size. Maybe it was that hypnotic energy that helped me get into my heart the way I did.

I knew what I needed to do. I started the prayer.

"I'm sorry." To myself, and to the universe, for whatever I had done, in this life or lives past, that kept inviting these patterns in.

And in that moment, I recognized it: this was a pattern. This wasn't the first time I'd been ghosted on a video call recently. I'd even had a whole ass class simply not be there when I logged in a few weeks prior. As I considered it more, with the energy of the prayer doing its work, I realized it had actually been a pattern in my real-world life as well, so much so that I had honestly stopped really trying to get people to go out. Even agreeing to meet up with others had become anxiety inducing. The plans regularly fell through, and it was usually me left feeling badly for being canceled on, once again.

As the recognition moved through me, a layer fell away.

"Please forgive me." For carrying the energy that keeps allowing this. For not seeing it sooner. For letting it quietly shape parts of my life. I deserved to have people show up for me. I needed to own that.

And then something snagged. I felt it, a stutter in my thought pattern. Something wasn't quite landing true. I couldn't put my finger on it, but I kept going.

"Thank you." For showing me right here, right now, that this is an energetic pattern that needs to stop. It stops now.

And then I stopped.

I stopped walking. I stopped breathing.

I felt the revelation move through me from my feet to the crown of my head. The whole onion fell apart at once.

Like a brick to the face: You don't show up for yourself. You can't depend on you. It's you, Sisu.

Holy shit.

Ho'oponopono had done it again. Every time I'd worked through this practice with genuine intention and openness, layers had peeled back and the truth had surfaced. I'd found pieces of myself. Connected to parts of my history. Seen who I really was on the inside, in the most intimate of ways.

I didn't show up for myself. I broke promises to myself constantly. I set goals, and made excuses not to move toward them. I redirected my energy into things that didn't serve me, things misaligned with where I actually wanted to go. Of course the universe was reflecting that back to me. If I wasn't showing up for myself, if I couldn't even depend on myself, why would I expect anything different from others?

For years and decades, I had been sending the signal that I didn't deserve follow-through. That I didn't deserve dedication. I had been broadcasting that quietly, through every promise I broke to myself.

It was a bitter truth. And it had been waiting a very long time to be seen.

I took a breath. I watched my dogs weaving their joyful, winding tracks through the fresh snow, glistening in the winter sun. Magic, just like the moment unfolding inside of me.

As within, so without.

I took another breath. Let it out.

Let's do this.

I started the prayer again, clearly this time, with confidence. I spoke it into the path in front of me. With intention. With purpose. With resolve.

"I'm sorry for being the person I can't depend on. I'm sorry for not showing up. I'm sorry for not following through. Please forgive me for getting in my own way, through inaction, through abandoning your own ideas before they had a chance to breathe. I want to begin sending the signal that I am worthy of being shown up for. That starts with me showing up for myself first.

Thank you for opening up. Thank you for showing me that the work is mine to do. Thank you for being honest. Thank you for being open enough to receive this.

And thank you, universe, for this moment, for this chance to learn something true about myself, and to begin healing what's been broken.

I love you. I love all of you. I love you for your dedication to others, and now we turn that dedication inward. I am dedicated to showing up for myself."

The dogs and I kept walking. They played in the snow, snuffling out critters, gleefully rolling in the drifts. I took in the beauty of the day, untainted now, grateful for what I'd just learned, and genuinely excited about what it meant for what was ahead.

This is the work.

Not the big, dramatic breakthrough moments, though those happen too. It's the unsuspecting afternoon moments on a snowy trail, when something small cracks you open just enough to find what's been sitting underneath all along.

So to the girl who didn't show up that day: thank you. Genuinely. You have no idea what you gave me.

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