The Door to Your Inner World and Your Inner Child
By Sandra Couts

Two female friends are having lunch together. One friend becomes angry as the other friend declines an invitation for the two of them to go to movies that evening. The anger in the one friend begins to rise from the middle of her chest and travels to her throat where it gets stuck. Tears of rejection and hurt swell up in her eyes. She can barely talk. Suddenly her tears explode. She abruptly stands up and tells her friend she has to go, hastily throwing money on the table to cover her part of the bill. Her friend begs her to stay. “What’s wrong? “She pleads.  “Don’t go. We can work this out”. No acknowledgment of these words is given. The angry friend rushes to her car and once in the drivers seat, weeps ferociously, baffled by her strong emotional outburst but unable to stop the tears.

Back in the restaurant, the hot soup beckons to be devoured. Instead the soup becomes cold as the friend left in the restaurant is no longer hungry. She does not understand what just happened. Why was her friend crying? Why would she not talk to her?

Three weeks later the two friends meet again for dinner due to the prompting of a phone call from the friend who left the restaurant in tears. She shares with her friend the following information. “Our friendship is extremely important to me. I offer you my apology for leaving without explaining what was going on with me. I contacted an Intuitive Counselor and I have been working with her to understand why I reacted so strongly yet could not talk about it. I discovered that I reacted to an emotional wound experienced when I was eight years old. I am the youngest of four children all girls. I had a tap dance performance in three days. Everyone in my family said they would come. As the date drew closer, one sister after the other found a reason not to come. Being eight years old, I did not understand how much I wanted them to be at the performance until no one came except my mother. Before the performance, I secretly wished that my sisters and father would surprise me and be in the audience by the end of the performance. They never made it. However, I performed very well, receiving a standing ovation. The disappointment of not being able to share my moment of glory with my father and my sisters unexpectedly devastated me. This pattern of my family not coming to other events where I was the star continued throughout my childhood, causing a small emotional wound to fester into a deep wound that got triggered during our dinner together. Unbeknownst to you, just before our planned dinner three weeks ago, my sister called me to tell me that she could not come to visit me, cancelling plans we had made to see each other several weeks ago. Her call coupled by your declining my invitation to go to the movies, opened the buried wound from the past. My intuitive counselor helped me to get into with that wound by showing me how to connect with my inner world and with my inner eight year old who has been carrying the hurt, resentment and rejection with her for a long time. I took your saying “no” to going to the movies personally because it triggered deep feelings from the past.” She continues to share, listening to her walking away without talking affected her friend. Their honesty and willingness to let go of the misunderstanding and hurt between them, rekindled their connection and their friendship is renewed.

The following information leads you to the door of your inner world- a place within that holds memories from past experiences, feelings, thoughts, cellular memories, the imagination and divine inspiration.

• You can connect to your inner world by watching your thoughts.
• You can connect to your inner world by noticing any emotions or feelings that arise during or after an interaction with others.
• You connect with your inner world when you allow your imagination to color, draw, write, sing, dance or express your creative self.
• You can connect with your inner world by letting yourself journal about your thoughts, feelings, dreams and memories.
• You can connect with your inner world by working directly with an intuitive counselor, life coach, or energy healer.

Your inner child lives in a place within your inner world. Connecting with your inner child allow parts of you to be expressed and reclaimed. Working with your inner child is one way of healing emotional wounds from the past that interfere with your ability to live from a place of wholeness, truth, and vulnerability.

The following tips can assist you in simply connecting with your inner child.

• Decide on which inner child you wish to connect with-your one year old, ten year old, teenager etcetera.
• Find a quiet place where you will not be disturbed or interrupted.
• Bring with you all or some of these items-blank paper, a pen, crayons or felt pens.
• Get comfortable in a sitting position.
• Close your eyes. Imagine that your inner child is sitting directly across from you.
• Say your inner child’s name out loud three times. Use the name you were called at that specific age, such as Eight year old Ruth. Invite your inner child to be with you today. Reassure him or her that she or he is safe and you just want to connect.
• Let your inner child speak out loud. You can also change your position and sit where your inner child is and speak from that place.
• Another option to speaking out loud is to allow your inner child to express him or her self by writing their words on the blank paper with your less dominate hand or by drawing a picture.
• The purpose of this exercise is to merely connect with your inner child who is a part of you. For deeper work that involves painful memories or painful past experiences, get support from someone qualified to assist you in feeling the pain and moving through it, such as an intuitive counselor or healer.
• End your time together by telling your inner child that it is time to end and ask what she or he wants to say to feel complete for the day. Ask for any suggestions, words of wisdoms, and what is needed to stay connected.

Connecting with your inner child is just another way of connecting with yourself. It is another way of claiming your uniqueness, embracing all of you, and living from a place of wholeness. The more you acknowledge and accept all parts of you, the more you can accept and acknowledge others. Understanding your inner world and connecting with your inner child assists you in responding rather than reacting. You may want to leave the restaurant as the old hurt is triggered but you might choose to stay long enough to share your feelings and get support. Connecting with your inner child and your inner world does not take away the hurts and pains that come with life. It can, however, heal them and empower you to just be who you are without causing more hurt and more pain for yourself or anyone else.

Sandra Couts MSN, RN, CNS is an Intuitive Counselor, Certified Full Wave Breathing Facilitator, Author, and a Certified Parent Coach.  For more information about her services or to make an appointment for a phone session call her toll free at 1-866-501-2555.

Affirmations-A Way to Use Your Thoughts to Your Advantage
By Sandra Couts

Hundreds of thoughts come into your consciousness daily sometimes randomly, sometimes with purpose. Advertisements on billboards, on the internet and in magazines all have a common goal-to get you to think a certain way in order to buy a certain product. The world of marketing is based on a universal law that states that our thoughts create our reality. Many books have been written explaining how thought process work to our advantage as well as to our disadvantage, including Heal Your Body by Louise L. Hay and Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. Although your thoughts are not the only component that creates your reality, understanding how to work with your thoughts is an important step in realizing your potential to create your reality. This article elaborates on using affirmations as a way to use your thoughts to your advantage.

Affirmations are positive statements stated in the present tense, such as I love myself or I choose a life of happiness.  Sometimes people become frustrated when using affirmations because the affirmations do not seem to create the changes they seek. One reason that an affirmation may not be creating the desired result is the way the affirmation is written or stated. If you say an affirmation that you believe is not true, it is difficult to keep repeating it. You feel that you are lying to yourself and will want to stop using it.  Instead of giving up on the affirmation itself, reword the affirmation so that you can resonate with it and work with it.

For instance, if you say, “I am a millionaire”, yet your bills are overdue or the cash flow is not there, saying I am a millionaire seems too unbelievable. You can reword your affirmation to state ‘I have decided to become a millionaire’, or ‘I willing to have thousands of dollars come to me quickly and easily’. Or ‘I am in the process of becoming a millionaire’. Thanks to Michael Losier, the author of the Law of Attraction for this insight. Affirmations are a delightful way to empower yourself by using your thoughts to your advantage. The following information is provided to assist you in this fun process of using affirmations as a way to create, restructure, and affirm who you are while responding to life from a positive perspective.

Guidelines when using affirmations

• Use the present tense. The past is over and the future tense will prevent you from having what you want now.
• Use positive terms.
• Keep them short and specific.
• Personalize them with your name when using the first, second, or third person.
• Repeat them.
• Use words that are believable and promote a positive feeling.

Suggestions for using affirmations

• Say the affirmations while looking in a mirror.
• Say the affirmations in the first, second and third person. I, Alice am lovable. You, Alice, are lovable. She, Alice, is lovable.
• Meditate on one affirmation.
• Visualize the manifestation of the affirmation.
• Use Full Wave Breathing to anchor the affirmation.
• On a piece of paper, have one column for the affirmation and another column for the response. Write the affirmation under its column and the response under the other column. This brings awareness to what the mind is saying that could be interfering with the positive results of the affirmation. For example:

The affirmation is “I am powerful”. Response “Says who”. Keep working with the affirmation until the mind no longer has a negative response. Burn, tear up, or throw away the list when finished.