In a nine-minute Portuguese-language video that has been viewed more than 6.4 million times, the yoga teacher Raissa Zoccal leads a listener through Ho'oponopono, a practice of forgiveness built on four short phrases: I'm sorry, please forgive me, I love you, I'm grateful. The video is less a lecture than a performance of the practice. It begins with breath, moves into a long spoken prayer, and widens its circle from the speaker's own body to the people who have hurt her, then to ancestors, and finally to the Earth. What makes it worth a close look is the direction of travel. The practice asks the person speaking to take responsibility first, and it ends with an apology to the listener for having shared pain at all.
A note on the text: the video is in Portuguese, and the transcript used here is an automatic English rendering with some garbled passages. The quotations below follow that rendering and are close to, not identical with, the original wording. Timestamps refer to the video.
The transcript begins mid-guidance, with a voice narrating a session: "And then Deivison sits comfortably. I'm noticing the natural flow of his breathing. I'm noticing the movement that his breath makes in his body" (0:00). The guide says she is trying to deepen the inhale and lengthen the exhale with each breath (0:25 to 0:33). That ordering is deliberate. Before a single phrase of forgiveness is spoken, the body is asked to slow down, so that what follows is received by a listener who is breathing rather than defending a grievance.
It is a craft choice worth noticing. Many spoken practices front-load the theory and then ask for stillness. Here the stillness comes first, and the words arrive into it.
The auto-transcript spells the practice's name as "Pono Cloth," but the description is unmistakable. At 0:40 Zoccal introduces it as a technique "known worldwide" and makes a strong claim:
"This is one of the most effective self-healing methods that exists because it emits frequencies in hertz that cleanse and cancel emotions that are generating negative situations in your life." (Raissa Zoccal, guided Ho'oponopono meditation, 0:40)
The model behind that claim is a chain of cause and effect. Emotional charge is stored in the subconscious as memory; that stored material "creat[es] and attract[s] undesirable circumstances and situations." If the stored charge is cleared, the circumstances it attracts should change. The video offers the hertz language without measurement or citation, so treat it as the teacher's framework rather than a demonstrated mechanism. What is useful to the reader is the logic: the practice treats emotional patterns, not only events, as the thing to work on.
The keywords are simple, and the video is clear about how they are used. They are "pronounced at any time of day" (1:26), and the guide asks that they be said "again and again throughout my day" to cleanse the subconscious of what she calls its emotional baggage. The four phrases are not four separate instructions. They are a single refrain, meant to be applied to whatever is present.
From a musician's point of view, the prayer is built like a verse with a repeating hook. Almost every clause in the longer passages is followed by the same returning line, "I am sorry, forgive me, I love you, I am grateful." The repetition is doing structural work. It keeps the listener anchored, and it makes the practice portable: the same four words can be said in traffic, at a desk, or in bed.
This is the most demanding move in the video, and it is stated plainly. At 1:51 the guide describes what to do whenever negative feelings arise:
"I ask forgiveness for having created and attracted that particular situation, and I recognize myself as a co-creator of my current reality and assume full responsibility for my problems." (Raissa Zoccal, guided Ho'oponopono meditation, 1:51)
The notion of co-creation is what makes the rest of the practice coherent. If you are the co-creator of your circumstances, then forgiveness is not something you wait to receive; it is something you give, starting with your own part. Readers will reasonably ask how this sits with real injustice. The video does not dwell on that question here. Its position is that responsibility is the ground from which forgiveness becomes possible, and that is a claim a reader can test against their own experience rather than accept on authority.
The circle widens. At 2:39 the prayer extends beyond the self:
"If I, my family, my relatives, and ancestors have offended you, your family, relatives, and ancestors in thoughts, words, deeds, or actions from the beginning of our creation until the present, we ask for your forgiveness." (Raissa Zoccal, guided Ho'oponopono meditation, 2:39)
Here the frame is generational. The offense is not located in one lifetime or one relationship; it is inherited and passed along. The prayer then asks that all "negative memories, blockages, energies, and vibrations" be cleansed and "transmute[d] into pure light." Later the guide declares peace "with all the people on Earth and with whom I have outstanding debts" (around 4:00). The scope is deliberately large, which is part of what distinguishes this from a narrower exercise in forgiving one person.
The hardest case is someone who appears to be harming you now. At 4:23 the guide says:
"I release all those from whom I believe I am receiving harm and mistreatment because they are simply returning to me what I received in some past life." (Raissa Zoccal, guided Ho'oponopono meditation, 4:23)
The past-life explanation is the teacher's belief, and the video presents it as such. What is practically interesting is the reversal that follows. Even while acknowledging it is difficult, the guide says "I am the one who asks forgiveness from this person now." The one who was wronged does not wait for an apology. She takes the first step, in private, with words. Whatever one thinks of the metaphysics, this is a clear inversion of the usual sequence, and it is the reason the practice is often described as relational rather than judgmental.
The video does not confine the work to thoughts. At 6:20 the guide turns to the body directly:
"If my physical body experiences anxiety, worry, guilt, fear, sadness, pain, pronounce and think my memories, I love you, I am grateful for the opportunity to free you and myself." (Raissa Zoccal, guided Ho'oponopono meditation, 6:20)
The body is treated as a place where memory is held. Earlier, the prayer had asked the divine to cleanse "what is contributing to my scarcity," a phrase that links financial and emotional lack to the same underlying charge. The practical implication is that when fear or heaviness appears in the chest or gut, the reader is invited to name it, thank it, and release it, rather than argue with it. Readers with clinical anxiety or chronic pain should treat such a practice as a companion to professional care, not a replacement for it; the video itself makes no medical claims.
The closing turn is the most unexpected. At 8:29 the guide says the meditation is "my contribution to your emotional health, which is the same as mine," and then adds:
"I tell you that I am sorry for the memories of pain that I share with you, I ask forgiveness for joining my path to yours for healing, I thank you for being here for me, and I love you for being who you are." (Raissa Zoccal, guided Ho'oponopono meditation, 8:48)
Earlier in the video, at about 7:25, she had framed the whole practice as a "contribution to the healing of beloved Mother Earth." The closing apology reframes the listener as a co-participant rather than an audience. Healing is described as mutual and measured by how far each person has healed: "it is in the measure that you are healing." For a practice that begins with personal responsibility, ending by apologizing to the person you are speaking to is a fitting last movement.
The video offers a clear method, and a reader can try it without accepting every claim. Start with the breath, as the video does. Choose one situation that carries charge, and set the intention the guide describes: take responsibility for your part, then say the four phrases. Repeat them through the day rather than only in a single sitting, since the teacher asks for exactly that. Keep the distinction between the practice and its explanations clear. The hertz language and the past-life account are her beliefs, and the video does not verify them. What a reader can test directly is whether a repeated phrase changes how a grievance sits in the body the next time it arises.
Watch the full video and follow the breathing passages slowly, rather than reading the transcript as a script. Then try the four phrases for a single day, saying them at moments of irritation, worry, or bodily tension, and notice what shifts. The video's description points to a playlist of guided meditations on the same channel, which is a natural next step for anyone who wants to keep practicing with the same teacher's voice. The practice is simple to begin and asks for patience with the parts that are hardest to say.
