Inside each of us are broken pieces of our whole-self that hold keys to addressing many of our worldly challenges. We call these parts ‘inner children’ because they were almost always fragmented at an early age and thus associated with childhood events. Unless we discover how the resulting psychological and emotional programming has determined many of the circumstances we face, then we are going to remain lost for real solutions.
Solutions exist in the fundamental practices that many of us find along our path. Being guided to go deep enough to meet the broken, lost inner children is essential when we have not contacted them directly. Truly deep inner child work is called Core Work and is not something most of us can go through alone. What has often kept us away has been lack of safety and trust. Yet it is the very act of trusting someone that is required to go deep. There is a challenge finding the will to push through one’s fear and risk trusting another.
When one enters into core work, the shadow is very strong. Even a healer has a shadow. It takes great skill to be able to navigate another person’s shadow emotional process without becoming their shadow reflection. If anything fails within this arena (with a healer) it is often enough to keep one from completing the work for a long time. I have met many people along the journey who have had this happen. As a healer, I have found that my practice of deep listening is essential to effectively guide people toward whole-self healing. Creating a safe ‘container’ space for someone to move through their process is all-important.
Our patterns govern much of our behaviour. When our inner children, who long for certain fulfilment never allowed or taken from them, begin to demand our attention, things can go very much sideways in our life. We may act-out in a relationship, or prevent ourselves from having love. We may sabotage a good job because we don’t believe we deserve such a blessing in our life or feel that our fulfilment lies elsewhere. A restlessness and unsettled feeling can dominate our lives. Yet, when we consciously direct even a small measure of loving-kindness toward these parts of our psyche, we will discover immediate and measurable results.
For 26-years, I have helped hundreds of people rebuild their inner lives by reuniting their broken parts with the Whole-Self. We can compare this to rebirthing because when we reclaim these parts, new energy and vigour return to our being. We may experience emotions we forgot were possible because our wounded self was blocked from having this connection to life energy. Indeed, by taking these powerful steps we can achieve many of the goals and purposes we originally intended for ourselves or begin new directions in our life. Both personal and professional confidence can return and abundant generosity of spirit will grow within us. I know this work is transformative because I have seen it positively affect entire families even if only one member receives the healing.
What most concerns me as a healer is that the awareness of our inner children’s influence becomes more widely developed. If we spend little or no time opening the doors barred to us for years, we may grow further dissociated and therefore lose opportunities to strengthen all parts of our life. It is my commitment to ensure this knowledge is made available to all people seeking a deeper healing connection to their Whole-Self.
A simple example of a rather basic inner child healing process is: When we were 8-years old we really wanted to be a tap-dancer and the neighborhood kids were very critical of this because it was considered stupid or some kind of ‘sissy’ activity. Therefore, we stopped aspiring towards something we actually longed to do and just filed it away later in life as a mere whim. Yet an unfulfilled part of us (the would-be tap-dancer) is still in there wishing to be realized.
Of course, we can conjure even more dire examples like: We lived in the inner-city when we were young and saw much poverty, violence, crime, and drugs. Even our own family was touched by these ills. So, we vowed to never allow our lives to be dominated by these conditions. Instead, we became extremely ambitious and even forsook some of our truest life dreams because we were driven to work, furiously improving our material circumstance. Only later in life do we discover, in such cases, that our authentic self was made subservient to the counter-script our youth had inscribed upon us.
Yet what we forget is that these patterns become superimposed upon the entire culture we share as planetary citizens. We think that we must succeed at any cost, even if we have to ignore gross disparities in the world. Well, for a holistic person, this just cannot be tolerated in the long-term. When we ultimately see how our own inner condition (fragmentation) is directly influencing the path of human society, we can begin to take responsibility for what may be called the Cultural Threads we thereby create.
How, for instance, may consumer society be positively changed by addressing the inner child who always wants it to be Christmas, awaiting Santa to bestow the great gift of perfect wish-fulfillment every moment, forever… Our adolescence as a culture (with such ecologically untenable material wants) cannot be sustained. Therefore, healing of the culture itself must be directly tied to our Core Work of inner child rebirthing and integration. Otherwise, the shadow will remain a pervasive force in our world. It is time for a change in the weather, don’t you think?
Yes true joy comes from living from the inside out and to do this in a conscious way we need to understand our inner world. Thankyou so much Kelley for sharing this valuable and life-enhancing work.