Must--read story of amazing change

The Blind Side

In the April issue of HDClarity, I introduced you to Ho'oponopono, the Hawaiian Shaman concept that we are individually responsible for what happens to us and everything that surrounds us. The Michael Oher story, told in the movie The Blind Side, is a very real and very current example of how we as individuals can affect our environment.

Michael Oher was just another homeless black kid from the wrong side of the Memphis tracks. One of twelve children born to Denise Oher, a crack cocaine addict, Michael received little constructive attention during his formative years. His father, a former cellmate of Denise Oher's brother, was murdered while Michael was a senior in high school.

Michael had been in and out of foster care most of his life. His education was nonexistent. He repeated both first grade and second grade, and attended eleven different schools during his first nine years in the Memphis public school system. He also alternated between various foster homes and periods of homelessness before he was sixteen years old.The individuals who surrounded him (parents, teachers, neighbors) allowed him to fill their preconceived model of what Michael was.

By a quirk of fate, Michael found himself at a private high school in Memphis, where he continued to drift from home to home, sometimes even sleeping in the school's gymnasium. Eventually, Michael was adopted by a wealthy white Memphis family. We can question why the Touhy family decided to adopt him, but not how things worked out.

Michael went through a cataclysmic change from a homeless kid in shorts and a T-shirt wandering the streets of Memphis in the snow to a privileged private high school student. His new rather WASP-ish environment could easily have looked at this silent, black giant and been afraid, or distrustful, or angry. But mostly they just looked at him as a human being in need of a new identity.

A formative underpinning of Ho'oponopono is the idea that we connect with the whole world around us (with an assumption that we are all connected and responsible for each other and everything that happens to all of us). While not even aware of any Ho'oponopono lore, the Touhy family placed Michael in an environment that repeatedly told him:

      I love you.
      I'm sorry.
      Please forgive me.
      Thank you.

When Michael left the public school system for private school (on a scholarship), he possessed a 0.6 grade point average. He had been pigeonholed because everybody in his world knew who he was and how he would turn out.

Is this paining you yet? Even a little?

The rest, of course, is history. Michael Oher withdrew his name from the 2008 NFL draft to finish his senior year at Old Miss, graduating on the honor roll with a degree in criminal justice, and signed as a first round draft pick with the Baltimore Ravens for $13.8 million (for those of you who measure success by that ruler).

Consider for a moment that we might just be what people say we are...performing up to or down to their expectations. And beyond that, without direct conversation to confirm or deny those measurements (Clarity?), we might well be what we think people say we are. Without human stroking--affirmation--we remain the Michael Oher of the Memphis streets...or whatever we are now that we're not totally satisfied with.

Look around you. Who's at your office...at your school...at your church who you have some concrete opinions about? Are they really that way? Really? Or do you make them that way by your thoughts, possibly aligned with the thoughts of others? Could you hear yourself repeating the Ho'oponopono mantra to them? What would change?

You're responsible.