Reframing Our Inner Child As Our Current Growing Seed-Self

We often think of our inner child as our 6-year-old naive, innocent, vulnerable, and sometimes wounded self, and there may be times when this is true. However, our inner child also represents our current growth edge. We cannot genuinely grow beyond the abilities of that inner self. So, when we want to expand our lives, we are challenged by wherever that child-self is.

Let's explore the inner child like a stem cell of our adult growth edge.

Transcript

So today we're talking about redefining the inner child,

Kind of like a seed self,

Like a stem cell.

And the reason is,

I was teaching a class a little while ago and we got talking about our inner child and what does it take to heal our inner child and how people have been doing inner child work for so long and sometimes it was the inner teenager that was getting in the way and sometimes it was the the wounded six-year-old and there was all this discussion.

And there's a lot of really good inner child work out there.

There's a lot of really great techniques,

A lot of great things that can really help heal,

Especially when things that happened in our child have gone unspoken.

That's when they tend to grow,

That's when they tend to do the most damage,

When they're running in the background and we don't even know they're there but we've been adapting to them our whole life.

But sometimes we become aware of things that have happened in our childhood and we do all kinds of work trying to heal that inner child and it doesn't get healed.

It just haunts us and now that we know it now we have a story about it and we repeat the story and we keep telling the story.

It almost is like the story is now in our present life even though it might have happened 50 years ago.

But it doesn't heal and it doesn't help us in our current day.

Part of the problem with it,

There's a few problems with this,

Is that we often think of our inner child as being innocent,

Wounded,

Powerless.

And when we go into that state we are innocent,

Wounded and powerless.

That's a hard place to heal from.

The other part that's really a challenge is all of our wounded child or all of our inner child issues are in the past.

Now we can spend a lot of time talking about past,

Present and future and the nature of time and what does that mean.

And it's all very philosophical.

But bottom line,

The past that we remember for the most part is a fiction.

And it isn't that it didn't happen.

It's not like that.

But we have actually recorded very specific parts of the past and those parts have become a whole story.

Those pieces have actually become a story that we wrote in our minds.

They aren't the whole story.

We didn't record the whole story.

We recorded portions of it.

So now we have this book that was written in the past that we are reading.

And you know what's really crappy about a book that we wrote in the past?

And again I'm not saying I wrote it that it didn't happen to me.

It did happen.

It did.

And it hurt us.

And it wounded us.

And it clipped our wings.

This is all true.

The problem is is when we look at the story in the past there is nothing we can do to fix it.

There's nothing we can do to change it.

We can't change who we were raised by.

We can't change our circumstances of birth,

The society we were raised into,

Whether we were accepted or belittled or whatever.

We can't change any of that.

And this is the other part of the past not actually even existing.

And again the discussion of what time is is a much greater topic than what we are going to look at today.

But imagine in the land of what's practical the past doesn't exist.

The past was simply once a current moment and then there was another current moment and another current moment and another current moment.

The only thing that ever exists is this current moment.

So the question is and what we're going to talk about today is how to bring that past story into this current moment to not only heal and allow ourselves to grow and actually walk forward.

But that story actually will disappear.

It might still exist as a story but it won't have any charge on it.

It won't affect us anymore.

It won't stop us anymore.

So now I want us to look at the idea of a stem cell.

So within our bodies we have stem cells and now you can look at this energetically.

You can look at it physically.

They have certainly physically found stem cells that hold our DNA sequence,

Our signature.

But you can also look at this energetically.

What is our energetic blueprint?

When those two,

That sperm and that egg came together we were created with a very specific energetic blueprint that created this incarnation very specifically.

And all of those little cells became hair and eyelashes and noses and fingers.

Very specific.

Based on that blueprint,

Every time I cut my hand and it heals,

It knits everything back together based on that energetic blueprint,

Based on those stem cells,

Based on that definition of self.

I don't have cells that grow with your DNA signature.

They're all mine.

Every cell in our body is replaced over the course of seven years.

All based on that energetic DNA sequence.

So now let's imagine you are a child and you can even imagine yourself as a tree if you want.

Sometimes trees are excellent metaphors for this.

So here you are in your perfection.

You are growing and growing and then all of a sudden something happens.

Maybe you're abused.

Maybe you're simply born to a family that doesn't actually understand who you are.

Maybe you're actually an oak tree but you live in a family where everything has to only grow two feet tall.

So all of a sudden you're an oak tree but you have to start to bend.

It's not even evil.

It's just simply not you.

So now you're an oak tree but you're growing sideways.

So things happen when we're children and we start to shift and change.

Maybe even we had a branch or two cut off.

Maybe we had a root that was damaged.

Maybe we even had an infection of some flavor and that infection could be anger,

Hurt,

Woundedness,

Fear,

Shame,

Guilt,

Anything that somehow got into our system and got stuck there.

So then you go on through life because we just continue.

Human beings survive.

We are based in a survival mechanism that no matter what we're going to keep walking forward.

So even though energetically and maybe even physically we're kind of limping,

We're trying the best we can.

Maybe it's like our arm was tied behind our back as a child but we didn't really know there was anything weird about that because we look like everybody else.

Emotionally maybe our arm was tied behind us.

So we still look like everybody else and yeah we're a little messed up and yeah we kind of struggle to connect with people and I'm kind of plagued with the belief that I'm stupid and I can't do stuff and I'm never going to get ahead.

But you know what?

It's normal.

This kind of dysfunction is so normalized in our society.

We see it in Hollywood movies.

We see it everywhere.

So we don't really blink much that we have issues,

That we struggle or we're afraid or all that.

It's like everybody's afraid.

Everybody's messed up.

Everybody's unhealthy,

Right?

We just compare what medications we take and what surgeries we've had and what our aches and pains are.

Like it's totally normal.

So we keep going forward with this sort of inner woundedness and then all of a sudden something happens.

This house of cards that we've been placing in our lives to kind of try to seem like we're normal or healthy or whatever,

Something happens.

Crisis happens.

Illness happens.

A loss of job happens.

A loss of relationship happens.

Something happens.

We lose someone and all of a sudden everything comes crashing down and we find ourselves quite raw.

Where do we go at that point?

Where do we fall to?

Well we likely fall to that place where we were first injured because all the things we built up from that place were kind of hodgepodgey.

They were kind of like twisted and strange.

Well then eventually we realize that all these twisted and strange things don't really work for us because it's not really who I am.

So the key is to then go back to that first place where we were hurt and this is where we start doing inner child work.

And we realize that,

Oh my god,

It started here.

That's when I lost faith in myself.

It started here.

This is when I stopped believing that I could trust other people.

It started here that I believed that I had to do everything in life because you can't trust anyone else to ever be there for you.

This is where I stopped trusting men.

This is where I stopped trusting women.

This is where I stopped trusting authority.

This is where I started to believe that I was a loser.

Whatever.

So we go into this inner child work and sometimes it's really really helpful just to kind of realize,

Okay,

I'm not crazy.

There's some real stuff.

I actually have a broken leg and so of course I'm limping.

Okay.

And sometimes that's all we need or sometimes we need scream therapy or we need somatic work or we need.

.

.

There's a lot of really good stuff out there to help us.

But what if we can't actually completely heal it?

Then what?

So this is where we want to come into the present moment.

We want to ask ourselves,

Why are we looking at this inner child stuff?

Really.

What are we really doing?

Well,

Very often we start looking at inner child things,

Whether there's crisis or not,

Because we actually want to move forward in our life in a way that seems very difficult.

For example,

Maybe you've met someone who actually is a very good person and they are genuinely kind and they haven't actually done a single thing to show you that they're going to hurt you or use you or cheat on you or whatever.

There's nothing.

They haven't done anything.

But you are so pre-loaded for this thing to happen.

You are just just waiting for it.

You're snapping at them and you're mean or you're withdrawn and you're giving them the cold shoulder or whatever or you're talking to your friends about them and you're not actually talking to them or whatever and you're sitting there and finally you realize,

If I don't smarten up,

I'm going to lose this person.

This is where we go back and we go back into our life and we ask ourselves,

Where is the point in my life where I started believing that I couldn't trust someone?

Maybe it started in a previous relationship as an adult.

It's possible,

But I doubt it.

It likely started much earlier because ideas that sort of come to us in our 20s or 30s,

We had decades before that with a much more solid foundation.

So if we go into the inner child and we ask ourselves,

Where did this start?

And again,

We're only looking at it because I want to move forward because here is my growth edge.

I want to now trust people.

I don't want to live as this twisty version of myself that I've lived up until this point.

I want to straighten this road.

So we start to go back down and we find the point and we say,

Aha,

This is it.

Is the person I'm with that person?

Whatever.

Maybe this is where you do somatic work.

This is where you find a good counselor.

This is where you do whatever and you unpack it,

But you unpack it with the intention of being able to trust this new person.

You have a different place.

You're not just unpacking it so that you can,

I don't know,

Find forgiveness for your parents or you find whatever for try to understand why this person did something to you,

Which you'll never understand.

The bottom line is most people who suffered neglect,

Abuse,

Or simply indifference as children,

We were raised by children.

Just because people had sex and got pregnant doesn't mean they're full-grown adults and that doesn't matter whether they're 20,

30,

16,

Doesn't matter.

Our society does not train us to become emotionally healthy people and they certainly didn't 20,

30,

40,

50,

70 years ago.

Our grandparents,

Our parents lived in generations where they hadn't even coined the word stress yet.

There was a complete unconsciousness to what was going on.

For all intents and purposes,

Many of us were raised by people who emotionally might have been about five and they blew off that like they had temper tantrums and freaked out and went off and they absolutely never matured past a certain age for all the same reasons that we're talking about here.

Their inner child is literally sitting in the basement banging at them and they have no idea what's going on because no one's even talked about this.

So the bottom line is we can analyze what happened to us as children all we want but if our parents had known better they wouldn't have done it and that means they didn't know better.

They were emotionally stunted in all the same ways that we find ourselves stunted and we just were the children.

We were just the ones living being raised in kind of a lord of the flies situation so instead we look at it and we say all right and we put our intention towards saying I am going to trust people and it's almost like what we're doing is here's me in the present here's me say before something happened in the past that stunted my growth this is my seed cell my stem cell my original blueprint this is me before and this is me now these two things are the same or at least my current self is heading towards the blueprint in between here is a trauma is a difficulty and what we're going to do is we're going to look at that trauma and we're going to look at the blueprint behind it we're going to look at the blueprint that we really want to do going having our lives going forward and we're going to let these two things resonate together we're going to bring ourselves bring our old self that original self into the present moment and what's going to happen to that trauma it's going to weave itself into our consciousness but not as a loaded thing that we are a powerless innocent child we are a 54 year old person bringing our original blueprint forward and from that place there are things that happened but i'm experiencing it now as this person as this 54 year old person that's who i'm going to experience it as and this is an entirely different experience and then all of a sudden i can now bring that into my current relationship and say hmm i'm really getting triggered here these are all the same words we use in our current pop culture but i recognize where it's coming from so i may have to just take a breath here for a second and i fully get that it's not you because i'm now i've brought that here into my current consciousness it doesn't even live back there anymore i've now brought it here and this changes everything because not only this moment that i'm living this growth edge this gives me a reason to figure that out back there it's kind of like let's just say you say like oh i i really want to lose weight i really want to be thin i really want to be fit in some ways this is a little bit like trying to heal your inner child for no reason other than the fact that you're uncomfortable i mean why do you want to lose weight well my knees hurt and i feel crappy in my clothes i'm just uncomfortable so i really i'd really like to do that it's the same thing you know i've got this i'm always sad and i'm really struggling with depression so i really want to heal this inner child stuff trying to heal because i'm uncomfortable isn't that powerful but what let's say instead i said to myself you know what i'm gonna run a 5k i don't care if i have to walk it i don't care what it is but i am going to complete a 5k race this year well then all of a sudden we start to look at our body very differently we go oh well then i i'd better start drinking more water and i'd better start walking well now that i'm walking i need to feel myself differently and all of a sudden you have this goal in the present you have a current reality that you would like to shift and suddenly everything every habit you've ever had that brought you to this place of maybe being sedentary or overweight or whatever is now saying okay we're gonna point all the guns in one direction i apologize for the gun analogy but we're going to point all of our guns in one direction and we're going to set our focus on this 5k that's a very different experience it's almost like it shifts the entire journey of health it doesn't become this ambiguous thing it becomes here's what i'm going to accomplish maybe you decide that my growth edge in this moment is i'm going to start this new business that i've always wanted to start not just i want to start my own business i have an idea i've always wanted to have a pottery store because i am passionate about pottery but i've always been afraid why why have i always been afraid and now we start cycling back oh right i remember that time that teacher said that you'd better work for other people because you're not smart enough to do your own thing i remember when my dad when he lost his job and we all we never had enough money oh that's that's pretty frightening and all of a sudden we remember all these little things that are actually standing in the way of my growth edge today that i want to open with this business of a lifetime that i've always wanted to do so now again we bring all of those little pieces forward we bring them forward into this present moment into this conscious aware human in 2024 where the consciousness is radically different than it was 50 years ago when these things happened or 20 years ago or whenever and so we look at them and we say okay i get it growing up there was a fear of not having enough money all right then i'll make sure i have a fallback plan and i'll make sure i have this and this and this in place and so we won't have to worry about that okay well this person told me that maybe i'd likely fail will i maybe maybe not but in the meantime i am going to meet some amazing artists and artisans and i'm going to meet other people who love pottery as much as i do you know what i really want to do this and i'm going to do it anyway because we've brought everything here to this growth edge and this is so important because in this moment we can do anything anything regardless of our past the past doesn't exist in this moment i could choose to do a hundred different things this afternoon a hundred different things i could write down a hundred different things i could do this afternoon it has nothing to do with my past unless there's something i desperately want to do and something's holding me back then we figure out what's holding us back and we take a step forward it's so important to be stepping forward this way what is the growth edge it's an english phrase that we say that it's like imagine a tree and a tree every year is always growing new bark that is their growth edge that is where they're always growing this is where they're growing new leaves new branches and the inside of the tree are all the beautiful rings of all the years past but then there is the growth edge at the outside this is really important because some of us have lost our growth edge sometimes whatever life has just kind of kicked us around too much and we're like i'm just surviving and if we're just surviving we don't really heal anything we just tend to become buried in it we tend to swirl in it but if we stay alive right now and we say today what do i want to do what does this soul want to do and if there's anything in the way we can look backwards bring it forward and look at it and then we take a step and this changes everything i'm gonna put my glasses on and if you have any questions i'd be happy to answer them so with regards to what has been talked about here in this live can triggers be teachers totally because the trigger tells us that there's something amok in the foundation it's kind of like you're walking along a road and you see where you're what you want to go you know there's a saying that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line so you see the point ahead and you're i'm walking towards the point i'm walking towards the point and all of a sudden there's a dip in the road and you trip and you're like what was that that's a trigger now imagine you weren't wanting to get to a point ahead of you and you just fell into the rut and you stayed there because maybe you were just wondering you might end up staying in that rut for a long time but you're like no no no i'm going somewhere i'm going somewhere over there and so now you're like okay i gotta i gotta find my way out of this rut now because i gotta go over there that creates action it creates intention it's an entirely different journey so even if that rut in the road was that at some point someone told you that you know painting's stupid you should become something successful and important and all of a sudden you sit there and you go wow in the rut i love painting i'm supposed to be painting and you crawl yourself out of the rut and you continue your job your journey towards that point that's a trigger triggers aren't supposed to leave us in the rut we're supposed to use it look around see what's going on so that we can continue forward why is running a 5k more powerful can you explain more is it because it's more specific totally and it may not be a 5k for some people it might be doing a half marathon or a marathon or an iron man ultra iron man or whatever they call it it's whatever that thing that is asks us to go beyond so i teach yoga teacher trainings and it's it's recommended to do a yoga kriya every day that is like training for a 5k some days because it's like sometimes it's just really hard because you're just super busy but sometimes you actually can fit it in but you don't and you kind of sit there and go why don't i what happened when did i lose that ability to say i'm going to do something and do it when did i lose that confidence when did i lose that connection between my desire and my action and then you go back in time but of course the only way we do it is actually by doing the yoga and actually feeling that real uncomfortable place in between in yoga they call it sadhana sadhana is some kind of practice that you do to expand yourself spiritually so your morning sadhana isn't something that you want to do anyway it isn't just oh well i just i love to stretch i love to do it's something that you do as a challenge that actually asks us to push ourselves a little out of our comfort zone because then what happens we have to heal whatever is behind it in order to move forward we actually have to be clear it's very very healing if it's not too off topic can you talk about money blocks and all of this like i always feel like i let this take over and put me back in my rut you know the hardest thing about money is that it's not even real and don't get me wrong i get it we have to pay rent we live in a world run by money but for all intents and purposes people who have a lot of money if you put them all into dollar bills they would sit there and you would have all of these dollar bills in a closet somewhere and the more dollar bills you had the more they would be all around your house in little stacks of all these dollar bills all over the place or hundreds whatever they are they're all over your house and the weirdest thing is they're just pieces of paper it'd be like what if the world ran on apples and if you had a lot of apples in your house like you had more apples than you could ever eat and you just had all these apples nobody would look at you and think oh wow look at you you have so many apples wow it's too bad most of them are going to rot because you're never going to use them but look at all the apples you have like it's the same question and so i find that because we take this idea of money which is really just literally a currency you know it just makes bartering simpler but it's a nothing it's a nothing and yet our society is based on this nothing and it's based on accumulating the nothing charging the nothing and then moving it all around like it's so weird and so one of the hardest things is when we say i have a block about money how can you have a block about nothing so then the question becomes what do i really have a block about that's the question because i think when we think about money it's like so i have this total issue with blue unicorns and i mean i just can't stop thinking about blue unicorns on surfboards like it's not real so then all of a sudden the question is i'm struggling to pay my rent i'm struggling to be able to go on holidays when i want i'm struggling to be able to help my kids get braces so the question is how can i pay the rent and what is stopping me from paying my rent is it a struggle to actually find work that means something to me that makes me excited to get up in the morning and go there am i being underpaid for what i am doing like what is the real problem do i believe there's a glass ceiling of success for me you know for me personally i don't know whether it's because i come from a long line of preachers and teachers but i've definitely been hit with kind of a mother theresa idea and not like a catholic idea but uh that there's something wrong with success not just money but real success in life that i'm actually afraid that my success might make someone else feel badly about where they are so you just keep yourself a little small just make sure you don't do too well you can do okay but don't do too well is it really about how much money people make or is it about perceived success that's the question do i have a do i believe in abundance or do i believe in scarcity do i believe that this life is supposed to be easy or do i believe it's supposed to be hard these are the questions that i think are interesting to ask ourselves and to the point of our discussion today are those issues that we learned as children are these issues we learned in school and if we can go all the way back to the point where that started and bring it forward and say all right i do believe in abundance then that entire memory will disappear it just flatlines it it's very cool and then one day someone will say someone will say wow you're like so successful how did you get here and you'll literally say i don't know it wasn't always like this i think there was a time that i struggled but i don't know everything seems easy now the memories will have disappeared for you because you energetically will flatline them because you no longer believe that it's amazing so thank you so much for being here and i hope you have a wonderful day