Voices of the Inner Child
"Realizing Goodness as the Indestructible Core of your Being":
"Self-compassion is approaching ourselves, our inner experience, with spaciousness, with the quality of allowing which has a quality of gentleness. Instead of our usual tendency to want to get over something, to fix it, to make it go away, the path of compassion is totally different. Compassion allows." ~ Robert Gonzales
Awake Seeing
"I remember sensing the bliss and purity of my open heart as a child, the complete openness to life and the joyful desire to interact with it. Then the profound pain of years of trauma seemed to obscure access to that pristine part of me. I remember the years of protecting myself as an adolescent and young adult. I recall the anger and sorrow that emerged as I healed and acknowledged in therapy the storehouse of pain that had been suppressed. Control, defensiveness, and politeness were the strategies I used to prevent future harm, rejection and loss.
I had to learn the story of my inner child and what happened, what needed to be looked at, what needed to be processed. I needed to hear her story. The bulk of time I spent in therapy was assuring her that she was not 'Bad', that the black hole that she had within was not hers, it was transplanted there through traumatic events. What was needed most of all was to assure her over and over that she was indeed 'Good' to the very core, exactly as she was.
The time I spent assuring my child and examining what beliefs and conditioning I had learned through those childhood experiences was absolutely invaluable. Realizing that my core is goodness and that I do not have to define myself by the trauma was the real gold of therapy for me. It is mined in the depths; in the dark, but the reward is beyond measure.
~ Bhagavan Nityananda"The heart is the hub of all sacred places. Go there and Roam."
Now I am recognizing that which has never been traumatized, what has never, nor could ever be harmed. By discovering and interacting with my inner child, I learned that the awakened, vulnerable, innocent heart of awareness is not a moment in time, not a point in history, but truly the essence of my being. That purity, vulnerability and innocence is actually the eternal, most basic part of me and the essence of life itself. Not really a 'me' in the personal sense, it is consciousness, empty, open, and aware. This consciousness is unchanging, the pervasive 'is ness' that always is. My core has been the same since I was an infant, a little girl, a young woman. And it will be the same when I am an old woman. It is the background, behind my thoughts, perceptions and beliefs. It is the ever-present open space in which all my perceptions appear and disappear.
Love is the willingness to be hurt, to be open in the face of death. Through knowing myself as the unconditional openness of awareness, I realize that I can never truly be harmed. All that dies, all that changes is not what I am. Things that arise and pass away are not ultimately real. They are the temporary forms that pass through me as open, spacious consciousness.
Being open, vulnerable, awake and willing to experience pain, is trusting in Self, knowing Self as the eternal, as the One. It is the beauty of life, of Being, of knowing Self as love itself. Having gone through this process, I feel that I can truly trust life, that the force that animates and sustains me is trustworthy. I see more often that it's okay to let go of clinging, of past and future. This moment is sacred, is life, is Self. I am learning that there is no way I could be truly separate from peace, from love, because these are the essence of who I am.
I feel that I could not have learned this sense of Being any other way than through discovering and healing my inner child. We must start with having compassion for ourselves, for the child we were, and then this compassion naturally extends to all of life. I believe this is what is meant by Jesus saying something like: 'To enter heaven, be ye like little children.' To know Truth, enter yourself, and discover your awakened, indestructible innocence and love within. It is there, underneath the thoughts and emotions, the beliefs and patterns, it is there, and it is peace."