Supporting Non-Duality and Awakening in Asheville and Beyond
RESCUING & REPARENTING THE INNER CHILD
© 2009 Howard McQueen
Can we find, in every moment of our life,
the sweet gratitude for just being alive
to experience whatever the moment brings?
Including, but clearly not limited to all the moments held in our past. Such as:
• the unconscious person who crashed their car into us
• the parent or guardian that sexually abused us
• the ex-spouse that mistreated and then abandoned us
• the young children that mocked and made fun of us when we were young
• the supervisor that did not treat us fairly
All those times when we failed to live in our heart and used manipulation and aggression on others.
The world according to how humans currently treat each other can be filled with callous and sometimes brutal behaviors.
I was at lunch yesterday sitting in the bar area. Sports commentary was on audio and the TV facing me was silently broadcasting Jerry Springer and then Maury P???. This was like a silent picture show, so the highly charged emotional human characters were appearing as in a well-rehearsed, outrageous drama. All the characters were inflamed, there faces contorted. This was a cathartic circus!
If we were only to take the time to peer below all these symptoms, what we will uncover is the frightened inner child posing as an adult, wildly trying to protect and defend itself from the inflammation of cruelty, intermittent rage and non-acceptance from elders, and parents and guardians exceedingly inconsistent in their application of unconditional love. The child in most of us adults does not feel that the world is a safe place to exhibit joy or to keep the doors of the heart and mind open to innocence and discovery.
Intellectually, some of us adults can understand this dilemma.
Emotionally, most of us adults are just beginning to grasp the tools that we can wield to assure our own inner child that the world is safe "enough"[1]. It starts with uncovering the suffocating and numbed child within. This child is allowed to cry out in deep fear and despair, its long heralded protests for having been abandoned, silenced, kept at bay.
The frightened child holds on to a set of emotional-mental stored vibrational fragments. Some reflect feelings of being unconditionally loved and accepted. Amongst these fragments also exist inflamed poisons of fear, anger and grief that erode and undermine all sense of safety.
Our innermost adult emotional navigator is this frightened, highly insecure child. Our ability to nurture, create and sustain authentic relationships with others is locked and buried away in our child, the child we essentially abandoned in order to conform to making our way in the world of adults. We abandoned our child seeking the presence of innocence and joy and instead clothed ourselves in pretence and in-authenticity to become adult. Were we to look at the rites of passage that supported this transformation, I believe most of us would acknowledge an absence of reverence or sacredness.
When we look at the behavior of how adults treat adults, we can come to appreciate how thin the veneer of self-love, self-compassion, self-respect. Without deep reserves of appreciation of self, without the constant, vigilant practice of honoring self, we are lost in the reflections of others and flaming the projections of our worst childhood fears, angers, grievances and grief.
THE INNER JOURNEY: RESCUE AND REPARENT THE INNER CHILD
As things have been revealed to me, we have this huge human / humane mission to bring our awareness and commitment to rescuing and re-parenting our inner child.
Until this becomes job number one, we as a species will continue to have our lives ruled by the six year old frightened and insecure child, permanently installed as emotional navigator, actor guild and director. Give that child (now adult) power and money and the child behaves like the politician, or the wealthy egomaniac.
I could go on and on in developing this theme (and over time, I will).
In the mean time, perhaps some of you may want to communicate your own feelings ...
Howard@mcq.com
Cheers,
Howard McQueen
[1] Of course, the external world can never be completely safe, so there is this acceptance needed to trust and allow whatever experience to guide and shape us, during our brief visit on this earth
Can we find, in every moment of our life,
the sweet gratitude for just being alive
to experience whatever the moment brings?
Including, but clearly not limited to all the moments held in our past. Such as:
• the unconscious person who crashed their car into us
• the parent or guardian that sexually abused us
• the ex-spouse that mistreated and then abandoned us
• the young children that mocked and made fun of us when we were young
• the supervisor that did not treat us fairly
All those times when we failed to live in our heart and used manipulation and aggression on others.
The world according to how humans currently treat each other can be filled with callous and sometimes brutal behaviors.
I was at lunch yesterday sitting in the bar area. Sports commentary was on audio and the TV facing me was silently broadcasting Jerry Springer and then Maury P???. This was like a silent picture show, so the highly charged emotional human characters were appearing as in a well-rehearsed, outrageous drama. All the characters were inflamed, there faces contorted. This was a cathartic circus!
If we were only to take the time to peer below all these symptoms, what we will uncover is the frightened inner child posing as an adult, wildly trying to protect and defend itself from the inflammation of cruelty, intermittent rage and non-acceptance from elders, and parents and guardians exceedingly inconsistent in their application of unconditional love. The child in most of us adults does not feel that the world is a safe place to exhibit joy or to keep the doors of the heart and mind open to innocence and discovery.
Intellectually, some of us adults can understand this dilemma.
Emotionally, most of us adults are just beginning to grasp the tools that we can wield to assure our own inner child that the world is safe "enough"[1]. It starts with uncovering the suffocating and numbed child within. This child is allowed to cry out in deep fear and despair, its long heralded protests for having been abandoned, silenced, kept at bay.
The frightened child holds on to a set of emotional-mental stored vibrational fragments. Some reflect feelings of being unconditionally loved and accepted. Amongst these fragments also exist inflamed poisons of fear, anger and grief that erode and undermine all sense of safety.
Our innermost adult emotional navigator is this frightened, highly insecure child. Our ability to nurture, create and sustain authentic relationships with others is locked and buried away in our child, the child we essentially abandoned in order to conform to making our way in the world of adults. We abandoned our child seeking the presence of innocence and joy and instead clothed ourselves in pretence and in-authenticity to become adult. Were we to look at the rites of passage that supported this transformation, I believe most of us would acknowledge an absence of reverence or sacredness.
When we look at the behavior of how adults treat adults, we can come to appreciate how thin the veneer of self-love, self-compassion, self-respect. Without deep reserves of appreciation of self, without the constant, vigilant practice of honoring self, we are lost in the reflections of others and flaming the projections of our worst childhood fears, angers, grievances and grief.
THE INNER JOURNEY: RESCUE AND REPARENT THE INNER CHILD
As things have been revealed to me, we have this huge human / humane mission to bring our awareness and commitment to rescuing and re-parenting our inner child.
Until this becomes job number one, we as a species will continue to have our lives ruled by the six year old frightened and insecure child, permanently installed as emotional navigator, actor guild and director. Give that child (now adult) power and money and the child behaves like the politician, or the wealthy egomaniac.
I could go on and on in developing this theme (and over time, I will).
In the mean time, perhaps some of you may want to communicate your own feelings ...
Howard@mcq.com
Cheers,
Howard McQueen
[1] Of course, the external world can never be completely safe, so there is this acceptance needed to trust and allow whatever experience to guide and shape us, during our brief visit on this earth
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Comment by Howard McQueen on November 10, 2009 at 9:00pm
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This little boy inside is feeling quite vulnerable, and these words you speak are so very reassuring. Tomorrow it is, One who helps to define the felt sense of Preciousness!
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Below are replies from others on another site where I post my blog entries
#1
Of the list, numbers 3 and 4 certainly apply to me - and it is not in spite of those things, but rather, because them that I am who I am... and for that I am grateful.
Your insights about the inner child, and specifically the difference between intellectually and emotionally understanding are important.
It's relevant to note that many emotions become trapped PHYSICALLY in our bodies. So no amount of psychological work will ever fully heal our inner child until we can also release that energy in a physical way.
For some people, combining psychological work with deep tissue body work has been helpful.
In my experience, there's a relatively quick process to release inner-child issues... and this comment I'm writing will probably inspire a full blog post about this topic.
Though simple, it's not easy because it requires being totally present and willing to go into "the hole."
(1) Psychologically identifying the trapped inner child emotions
i.e. "I feel rejected. I have felt rejected all my life. Specifically, I'm angry at my mother for rejecting me."
(2) Physically embodying the trapped emotions.
What does it feel like to be rejected? Do I curl up in a ball? Do I put my hands in my head? Do it.
(3)Psychologically exploring what we intellectually believe to be the healing of those issues.
"I'm not really rejected now. I know my mother loved me the best she could. And the people in my life do care about me. Beyond that, I can choose how I want to be in the world - and I know that people are not rejecting me personally, but that they are rejecting their ideas of me."
(4) Physically embodying that new understanding.
Standing up, arms outstretched. Or flexing my biceps... or anything else that arises -naturally- as an expression of embodying the new way of being.
~~~~~
This type of physical embodiment process is extremely powerful, and is one of the quickest ways to align our "intellectual" understanding of our inner child with an experiential transformation of who we are and who we aspire to become.
It's also 10x more powerful when done in the presence of others... particularly small groups of 5 or 10 people.
#2
Hi Howard....great insight. I resonate with #4. It is the only abuse I ever remember in my young life, and it was mental. My brother constantly told me I was stupid. He was 3 years younger. I forgot about this as I went about my life. As I grew up this affected me in many ways. I was afraid to raise my hand and ask questions, because I did not want anyone to laugh at me. I kept silent and let my mind drift quite a bit. I became social, which I still am. I love people, but I don't like making mistakes, if avoidable. Learning has been a challenge for me in some areas, because I shut myself down, so I would not get hurt. I felt most people were smarter than me.
A few years ago, my husband and I were taking one of the many seminars we took with T. Harv Eker. During a process to unlock obstacles, I had recall of my brother always calling me stupid, and everything clicked into place. He has passed on now, but I forgave myself, my brother, along with the cause, effect and memory of it. You see, I used to hit him because he would follow me around like a puppy and I did not want him to hang around all the time. No one hit in my family, don't know why I did! I hit him in the back - not hard, but it must have devastated him. His only defense was to tell me I was stupid. We were never real close, but we became so when he was dying. He told me the best part about dying, was that he got to know me. That makes me cry even now.
As this all came together for me, I decided to make some changes that would make a difference in my life. I quit telling myself that I was stupid, or could not talk like a college graduate, etc. All that negative monkey mind talk. That is why I started writing and built a blog at Living in Courage. I needed to write all my life. Instead,I hid all of it under the bed. My passion is writing...now I am following my heart. I wrote an e-book and now I am writing my first book. Oh, and I have never hit another person......I send love to my brother Ted now and always.
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