The Body Remembers. Can It Forgive?

Krm Carmen

The body remembers 

what the mind cannot. 

On forgiving our own parts, 

forgiveness before justice, and 

what hoʻoponopono and lōkahi teach 

about restoring balance.

Remembering is the healing

We have been handed a mechanic’s idea of healing. 

Something broke. Find the part. Fix it. 

Return to how you were before.

Twenty-five years of sitting with people at the edge of what they could bear has taught me a different story. 

Healing begins with remembering — with the mind when it can, and with the body, which kept the record when the mind could not.

Then comes troost — that beautiful Dutch word for ‘comfort’ that English never quite holds. 

A troost-ing hug. 

A troost-ing warm room, blanked or cuppa tea. 

Someone who stays.

Then grief — for what happened, and for everything that never got to happen.

Then forgiveness.

And then the quiet, unglamorous courage of standing exactly where you are — scarred, softened, a little wiser — and taking the next step from here. You walk on as the one you have become.

The body remembers

Some memories arrive as stories. Others arrive as a tightening throat, a sudden chill, a heart that races when someone raises their voice in the next room. 

No words. Just the body, saying this again.

Psychology calls this implicit memory.

The amygdala — the brain’s early-warning centre — matures long before the hippocampus, which files our experiences into time and narrative. So what happened to us before we had language, or in moments too overwhelming to process, is often stored as sensation and reflex.

Stress hormones press those imprints in deeper. 

Years later, a smell or a tone of voice opens the file, and the thinking brain quietly goes offline while the body prepares to fight, flee or freeze.

This is what Bessel van der Kolk meant when he wrote that the body keeps the score. 

It is why Peter Levine, Pat Ogden and so many somatic clinicians ad workers, including myself — work with sensation and movement too, rather than words alone. 

Talking about the wound matters. The body also needs to finish the gesture it was never allowed to complete — and to learn, slowly, that the danger has passed.

The Hawaiian teachers and elders I am learning from would not find any of this surprising. In their tradition, thought and feeling both rise from the naʻau — the gut, the viscera. Truth is something you feel right there. 

And when a body falls ill while a family carries unspoken conflict, the illness is read as a message that something between people, ancestors and land has fallen out of balance.

Forgiving the body

Here is something I hear in my practice frequently: 

‘How do I connect to my body, and — trust my body again?’ 

or something like: 

‘My body betrayed me…’

It froze when it should have run. 

It went numb. 

It left myself. 

It said YES when everything in you meant NO. 

It got sick, gained weight, stopped bleeding, stopped sleeping, kept shaking long after the danger was gone.

And so we turn away from the very home we live in — unconsiously, for years. 

We punish it, override it, ignore its signals, treat it as the accomplice to what was done to us, oftentimes without consciously realizing or choosing to do this.

Polyvagal theory gives us a gentle explaination. 

Freeze and collapse are ancient survival intelligence — the nervous system choosing the response most likely to keep you alive when fighting or fleeing was impossible.

Your body did what it could.

It got you here.

Forgiving the body is an embodied act.

It happens below thought for example:

• Place your hand where the old story still lives — throat, belly, chest, jaw…

• Invite the breath to that place without needing it to change.

• Say to yourself, softly: ‘You did what you could. You kept me alive’.

• Allow whatever wants to move — trembling, warmth, tears, a long exhale. This is grief finding its way out through the tissues.

• Stay until something softens, even slightly. Then stop.

In IFS language, we are thanking the protectors — the parts that braced, numbed and froze — and releasing them from a job they took on far too young. Something unwinds when the body is no longer held as the culprit. Often, that is when the deeper forgiveness becomes possible at all.

An unpopular opinion: forgiveness before justice

I will say it plainly, knowing it may sting. For healing, justice matters less than we think.

Boundaries — yes. Absolutely, fiercely, yes. Protection from people who harm you, and from those who would harm others — yes. 

Courts, accountability, consequences — these belong in a just society, and some of us will rightly spend years fighting for them.

And still. When our healing waits for the other person to admit, apologise, pay, or finally be seen for what they did, we hand them the key to our own recovery. The hunger to be proven right — the Dutch have a good word for wanting to get even, terugpakken — keeps the nervous system in fight mode. It keeps the story alive and the body braced. We stay tied to the one who hurt us, often for decades, or even generations.

Forgiveness asks nothing of them. 

They never have to know, and you never have to let them back in.

A caution, because I have seen forgiveness used as a weapon: it cannot be forced, and it cannot be rushed. Forgiveness that are only words, that skips remembering, feelings and grief is a bypass — and the body will know. In the tradition I turn to next, 

forgiveness only counts when it comes from the heart. 

The order matters. 

1. Remember. 
2. Comfort. 
3. Grieve. 
4. Then forgive.

Hoʻoponopono — making things right

I want to be careful here, because this is not my tradition. 

What follows is what I am learning from Native Hawaiian elders and authors — above all from my teacher, Kumu Kawika Forster, a 51st-generation teacher from Molokaʻi, and from the teachings of Mary Kawena Pukui, known with love as Tūtū Pukui, recorded in Nānā i ke Kumu (”Look to the Source”) with Dr. E.W. Haertig and Catherine Lee in 1972, and carried forward by the Liliʻuokalani Trust, Aunty Malia Craver, and Aunty Lynette and Uncle Likeke Paglinawan. 

The authors of the third volume are clear: any teaching of hoʻoponopono that is not grounded first in Hawaiian culture, through a Hawaiian practitioner, is misappropriation. 

I honour that. I share this as a student, to point you toward the source.

Hoʻoponopono means, roughly, to set right. 

Traditionally it is a family conference, guided by a respected elder or practitioner — the haku — and held when conflict, illness or unspoken hurt has disturbed the household. 

It came close to disappearing after missionaries branded it heathen; 

Tūtū Pukui spent decades bringing it back.

The stages she described unfold roughly like this:

1. Pule — an opening prayer, asking God and the ancestors to guide everyone present. 

 

2. Kūkulu kumuhana — pooling the family’s strength toward a shared purpose, and naming the problem. Everyone must truly agree to take part. 

 

3. Mahiki — peeling back the layers, like bark from a tree or the skins of an onion, until the real hurt is reached. 

 

4. Hoʻomalu — silence, called by the haku whenever tempers flare or people need to turn inward. 

 

5. Self-scrutiny and discussion — each person looking honestly at their own part, guided by the haku’s questions. 

 

6. Mihi, kala and ʻoki — repenting, forgiving and releasing, and cutting the entanglement loose. 

 

7. Pule hoʻopau — a closing prayer. 

 

8. Pani — sharing food together, in a spirit cleared of grudges.

What strikes me most is how mutual it is. 

In the case story the Paglinawans tell, a young woman’s swollen eye leads her family into hoʻoponopono. The relatives who had been dodging their share of the household work apologise. So do her parents, for not speaking up. And so does she — for letting resentment harden into a grudge. Everyone owns their thread of the knot. Then everyone releases everyone, and the hurt is sent, in Aunty Lynette’s image, into the deep blue ocean, never to rise again.

Truth sits at the centre. The Hawaiian word ʻoiaʻiʻo means the flesh of truth — truth you feel in the naʻau. It must be told fully, and without any wish to wound.

And notice ʻoki. Tūtū Pukui describes how, when a relationship truly could not be restored, a formal and clean break was made. 

Boundaries were never foreign to this tradition. Release can mean reconciliation. It can also mean a clear, held, respectful ending.

The lōkahi triangle, adapted from Kaʻiulani Duponte (2010), 

as presented in Nānā i ke Kumu, Volume III (Liliʻuokalani Trust).

Lōkahi — the triangle of balance

At the heart of the Hawaiian worldview sits lōkahi — unity, harmony, balance. 

It is drawn as a triangle. 

At its peak, Akua and nā ʻaumākua: God, the gods, the ancestral guardians. 

At one corner of its base, kānaka — humankind. 

At the other, ʻāina, moana and lani — land, sea and sky. 

Lōkahi lives in the centre, holding all three in relationship.

On the most isolated inhabited islands on earth, there was nowhere to run from a conflict and no margin for waste. The ancestors replanted what they harvested. They netted only the fish the family needed and shared the catch. When gathering feathers for a coat, they plucked only what was needed and let the bird fly free. Harmony with people, ancestors and land was survival/ living itself.

A person whose naʻau, mind and body are aligned is pono — in right relationship. 

Hurt, grief, stress, or failing to carry one’s part leaves a person out of balance, and that imbalance ripples outward — into the family, toward the ancestors, into the community and the land.

This is why I keep lōkahi. (Fun fact: this is a word I tattood on my arm).

Most Western trauma work tends one corner of the triangle — the individual, sometimes the family. 

Lōkahi reminds us that a wound is also a rupture with the sacred and with the earth, and the mending has to reach there too. A hand in the soil. Salt water. A prayer to those who came before. These are medicine for the other two corners. This is at the heart of Terrapy, the name I gave my ways of working, now you may start to understand more and more why.

Why you won’t find the four phrases here

I am sorry

Please forgive me

Thank you

I love you

If you have searched ‘hoʻoponopono’ online, you have met the four-line mantra — four short phrases of apology, forgiveness, gratitude and love, repeated silently to clean the subconscious. It is everywhere: on YouTube, on Instagram, in self-help courses that promise a ‘frequency reset.’ 

I have chosen to leave it out of this article, and I want to tell you why.

Here is why:

• It comes from a different lineage. The mantra grew out of a modern, individualised adaptation of hoʻoponopono, developed in the late twentieth century and spread worldwide through Ihaleakala Hew Len and Joe Vitale’s 2007 book Zero Limits. It has its own history. It is a long way from the family practice Tūtū Pukui documented, with its haku, its circle, its prayers and its shared meal.

• The keepers of the tradition have asked us to stop. The elders writing in Nānā i ke Kumu name teaching of hoʻoponopono cut loose from Hawaiian culture as misappropriation and exploitation. My own kumu, Kawika Forster, is just as clear about this. Tūtū Pukui herself grieved how the practice had come back in fragments and grafted-on inventions. When a people tell us how they want their sacred practice handled, listening is the least we can do.

• It skips the hard middle. The traditional process asks for truth told in full, layers peeled back, each person owning their part, silence when needed — and only then, release. A mantra repeated alone in your room can leap straight to love and gratitude while the anger and grief are still waiting at the door. Tūtū Pukui warned that without sincerity from the heart, the ritual becomes form without substance.

• For trauma survivors, it can wound. Asking someone who was harmed to apologise, again and again, for the pain they carry risks folding self-blame back into the very place we are trying to heal. And there is something my kumu taught me that I keep returning to. Once the pōhaku — the stone — has been released, we stop speaking of it. That need not mean it can never be mentioned again. It does warn against reciting the same words over the same wound, day after day — a habit that keeps hauling the stone back up from the deep blue ocean. Mantra japa, the devotional repetition of sacred sound, has its own place and purpose, and I will write about it separately. It is a very different practice, held for a very different reason.

So I offer you the tradition’s essence — truth, mutual accountability, release, restored relationship — and an invitation to learn it from the people who carry it, like kumu Kawika Forster 

Standing where you are

I am not Hawaiian, and I will not teach you hoʻoponopono, my teacher will. 

What it has taught me is that, 

we heal in relationship — with each other, with those who came before us (the ancestors), and with the land that holds us. 

We heal by telling the truth, owning our part, and letting go of what we were never meant to carry forever.

 

Some questions to sit with, slowly, perhaps with a hand on your belly:

Where in my body do I still hold the case against myself?

Whose apology am I still waiting for — and what does the waiting cost me? (Such a common topic in therapy!)

What part of this knot is mine to own?

Which grief have I not yet allowed?

Who, in my life, could hold a circle of truth with me?

What would one small step look like, from exactly here?

And some for the harder middle — truth and kuleana. 

A gentle word first: 

owning your part never means carrying what was done to you. That weight was never yours.

What is the truth I have not yet said out loud — even to myself?

Where have I told the story in a way that keeps me safe from my own part in it?

If my naʻau (gut) could speak, what would it say about this?

What did I do, or leave undone, that added to the hurt?

What would it ask of me to say I’m sorry — and mean it all the way down?

What promise have I broken, to someone else or to myself?

What am I still holding onto because letting go would mean admitting I was part of it?

Go gently. If the old story is heavy, do this work with someone beside you — a therapist, a trusted elder, a circle. Healing was never meant to happen alone.

1. Remember. 
2. Find comfort. 
3. Grieve. 
4. Forgive — the body first. 

Accept where you stand. 

And then, with whatever courage you have today, move.

Anneke Sips

in, Wisdom of Psychosis