“I’m paying attention to you. I am doing the best I can. I want to take care of you. I’m here for you.”
For those of us who have been in any kind of talk therapy, it is likely that we have worked with the voice of our inner child. Our inner child is usually a pretty striking image, with a specific age, dress, a manner of talking, and a unique understanding of his or her world. The inner child remains in us as the years pass us by.
This inner child is often responsible for a lot of our unconscious desires and intense emotions. When we meet people we are highly attracted to, they often reflect the desire of the inner child to fulfill his or her unmet needs. Our child self is looking for connection, is longing to be seen and accepted for who she is and is searching for someone to hold her tight. For many of us it is easy to intuit that our adult lives are deeply impacted by our experiences in childhood, especially the earliest years, which are out of the grasp of our conscious memories.
As we begin to practice yoga, it starts to unravel years of chronic tension and disassociation in the connective tissue. We begin to confront lost parts of ourselves, and this process often can be very uncomfortable. Emotional pain can hide deep in the core of our body, including our bones and organs. The mat and our practice becomes a holding space for the inner child who needs witnessing, acceptance, love, and connection. This cannot come from any other source except from us.
“Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced – even a proverb is not a proverb till your life has illustrated it.” John Keats
To truly know something we must go beyond a mental or intellectual understanding of it. Talking about my inner child, or even visualizing her, is not the same as knowing her. For years I have been reading about the importance of kindness, especially towards the harsh critical voice I use towards myself. And yet, it is only now, after years of “trying,” that I know what it means. It means to slow down, listen in, and touch my heart and say “it’s ok, I’m sorry this is hard.” Finally, I have arrived at a source through which I can shine light onto the unmet needs of my inner child: having self-compassion.
Paradoxically, it is the same life experiences that have toughened me up through which I have learned how to soften. Similarly in yoga, it is pain and injury that have taught me to move slowly and with awareness. When I started practicing yoga, I miraculously found space to feel. Not to think about my feelings, or talk about them, or write about them, but to feel them. A seed was planted and now years later, there are some flowers in my garden. Practicing kindness to my body has gifted me with a deep knowing, a felt sense in the body, of self-compassion; previously just a word, a wish, and an abstract concept.
Moving through the tangled weeds and dense mud around the seed of self-compassion has been one of the most challenging lessons I have learned. In this season of my life, it is my children who have further opened the doors of my consciousness to the little girl in me. And yet it is in my marriage that I am most intimately confronted by the chaotic world she lives in. My childhood trauma is not just a story about my past, because it continues to live in the remnants of my inner voices, and the felt-experiences of my body. This work is not easy, and to arrive to the roses, we must bear many thorns. Most importantly, when you contact an area covered with grief and loss, it is important to have resources and to have pathways that you have practiced. Not through the mind, though the mind can be a support, but through the felt-sense of the body. In neuroscience this is known as neuroplasticity, reorganizing our habitual neural networks into new neural connections. In the experiential realm, practicing these pathways lets us feel home in our bodies. Home is an inner place of safety, comfort, ease and belonging.
“The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents.” Carl Jung
When I became a mother, I knew that everything I wanted to be different about my son’s childhood had to begin with me. My “unlived” life is not the dreams or hopes of an outward creation, but the life inside me that I was (and am) “unwilling to feel” (Tara Brach). With self-compassion, I not only take care of my present, but I also take care of my past. Most incredibly, I witness the unfolding of a mysterious and yet palpable process of acceptance and kindness, by slowly gathering what I’m unwilling to feel in a gentle embrace.
To move from a mind-based, intellectual experience of my inner child to a felt-sense experience of her has taken patience, slowing down, and seeing things as they are by focusing on connection, acceptance and kindness. As with everything, we cannot manufacture an authentic experience. We must simply start where we are and let go of any desire for a specific outcome.