The World According to your Inner Child
By Sandra Couts

 Three children are playing together in a sand box. Two are girls. One is a boy. All of them are four years old. Toy cars, miniature furniture and small plastic people overflow their sandy playing area. Giggles and imaginary conversations between the make believe people fill up their world. So engaged are they in their play world, little attention is given to the three adults, their mothers, who come to get them. The adults join them in their world to help them successfully transition to leaving the play area. They say good-bye to each other as they go their separate ways. This time of fun and enjoyment is now a pleasant memory stored in their sub conscious, the foundation of their inner world.

What does it mean to have an inner world, to have an inner child? Your inner child is a term that describes a part of you that resides within your conscious and subconscious. You came into this world with an inner child, a part of you that is pure innocence, pure creativity and pure joy. Your inner child resonates with the essence of wisdom, playfulness, fun and creative problem solving. He or she is a master at finding balanced solutions, practical thinking and spiritual resolutions. Your inner child knows how to use the imagination as a way of enjoying life. She or he knows the importance of connecting with others from the heart by being true to him or her self.  Your inner child is able to retain a spiritual understanding of different events and experiences at different ages in your life by its connection to your subconscious, the gateway to cellular memory and to its connection to the divine source of energy that exists in the world.

The term inner world describes that part within you that encompasses your thoughts, your beliefs, your memories, your imagination, your emotions, your creativity, and your spirituality. Your inner world provides a safe haven to think, create, meditate, and connect with the different parts of your self, especially your inner child. Having an inner world is a natural part of your human existence. It allows your inner child, at any age, to exist. The existence of your inner child plays an important role in allowing yourself to grow spiritually and emotionally.

 As you know, having emotions is a natural part of being human. Because children see the world through child-like eyes they often do not understand the actions and behaviors of the adults around them. Their tummies may hurt if their Mom and Dad are having a heated argument. Shaming words can feel like a slap in the face. The result can be an emotional wound. Children do not always know what to do with the emotional hurts, the wounding. What can happen is that the wounds get stored in the subconscious as a form of constricted energy. The inner child feels the impact of this stored energy, wanting to be healed from it. Your inner world holds an energetic space that promotes the healing of these emotional hurts and wounds that your inner child feels so deeply.

Thus the benefits of deepening your understanding of your inner world and connecting with your inner child include:

• Opening the gateway to your creativity
• Allowing wounds from the past to heal
• Learning to live from wholeness
• Embracing the playful part of yourself
• Honoring your ability to problem solve
• Supporting you in living your life as a creative, smart, capable person
• Finding ways to connect with divine energy
• Loving and accepting all of you
• Creating a consciousness that supports your dreams and visions
• Connecting with others from a place of truth and acceptance
• Seeing the world according to your inner child which includes the imagination, innate wisdom, spiritual understandings and a loving heart.

Next month’s article will provide tips on becoming acquainted with your inner child and your inner world. Stay tuned.

A Love Story
By Jennifer MacLellan

I have a love story to tell. One that starts fairly typically as modern romances go but has an ending this eternal romantic never saw coming.

I met my husband at a wedding.  I gasped aloud when I saw him stroll down the aisle in preparations for his duties as best man.  He amazingly noticed me too, making his way over to me to introduce himself after the ceremony. Many who hear about the first thirty-six hours that followed often swoon in the details of what seems like a fairytale romance.  I swoon in the details of how we have managed to be more in love with each other than the day we first met.

My Prince Charming is tall, strong and beautiful.  I love to watch him move so confident and at ease. Most people don’t know this about him, but he is a poet, his verses as deep and eloquent as any I have ever read. The best part of any day is the time I see him; making him laugh is one of my greatest joys. Thirteen years after our first meeting, I can still catch him across the room, looking at me tender-eyed. I feel very loved in his presence. I always have.

Three days after we met, he phoned from across the country to say that something special was happening and he wanted to be with me. After nine months of flying back and forth to see each other, we moved to the same city; eighteen months later we were married.

Our love was sweet and strong. Every day I would say a prayer of thanks for this incredible loving presence in my life.  I had finally found someone who loved my goofy sense of humour, my hyperbolic rhapsodies of ordinary events, and my tears that could come as easily for a sad movie as they could for a telephone commercial. He was someone who appreciated what I had to offer to him and others.

I don’t know exactly when I started to feel sad, but slowly discontent spread into my life and the melancholy crept in, emotions I had experienced in other relationships. My explanation had been consistent: I had chosen the wrong guy.  But how I felt for my husband was different than what I felt for the others.  Still the sadness persisted and once again I blamed the man in my life for my feelings.

A troubled childhood and adolescence had led me down a path where I sought answers to the questions about why I had had so many painful experiences in my life.  I saw myself as a person working hard to understand what it meant to live a spiritual, enlightened life. I read the books, I wrote the affirmations, I practiced meditation.  I loved my job and felt energized with my clients but spent time at home contemplating this deep unhappiness.

Believing I was doing all the right things, I looked at my husband, who acted quite content with his lot in life, and told him he needed to change.  I started to analyze his life and concluded he had a lot of issues to address. He became my focus, my thoughts leading me to the conclusion that if he adopted a more spiritual life, then I would be happier.  He listened to my words, but I didn’t see the changes I wanted. I felt us growing apart and wondered how this could be happening.  I had that fairytale type of love I was told.  But what ever happens to the fairytale couple after their love is professed?  That part is never revealed. Does Cinderella’s “happily ever after” include her bouts of depression or episodes of intense anger?  When the prince doesn’t meet her needs, does she request that they go to counselling or call it quits?

I wish I could say that at my lowest point a fairy godmother stepped in, waved her wand and my problems went away.  However, a certain client did show up at a time when I was ready to hear a message that has profoundly shaped my life.

It happened on a typical Tuesday. Stephanie, a sixteen-year-old client of mine, was rapidly relaying the details of what she saw as her boyfriend’s inadequacies. She knew he was a good person and loved her deeply, but she blamed him for making her feel so bad about herself. She continued to complain about all she had sacrificed in the past twelve months in order to spend time with him. She stopped seeing her friends and organized her life according to his schedule.  She said that she had given her all to him and that loving him hurt too much, so she thought she might be better off with someone who appreciated her more. Knowing Stephanie’s background and the issues she was grappling with, I realized that each pained word about her boyfriend was a projection of how she was feeling about herself.  He didn’t respect her; she didn’t respect herself. He never spent time with her; she didn’t allow time for herself. He didn’t love her enough; she often talked about what she despised about herself.  

I gently pointed out this martyr attitude that she embraced so wholeheartedly, telling her that he was only giving her the love, attention and respect that she gave herself—very little according to what I had heard. I explained to her what the word “projection” means and how she might be projecting, attributing her own feelings and attitudes, on to her boyfriend. She had created this relationship so that the lessons she was to learn would become apparent to her.  She was not a victim of picking the wrong guy.  She had picked the perfect person to teach the lessons about self-love, self-respect and self-awareness that she needed to learn. I encouraged her to spend more time doing the things that she loved, concentrating on making herself feeling good, so that she did not hold her boyfriend solely responsible for her emotions.

A light bulb went off as I suddenly saw her situation incandescently reflected in my own life. What was my relationship mirroring about my personal issues?  My mind raced with all the comparisons. I blamed my husband for escaping from his issues through self-destructive behaviours, yet I exhibited escape behaviour, just differently than he. I accused him of not wanting to face certain areas of his life, yet I failed to expose those parts of my life too painful to admit. 

I began to scrutinize my life. Norman Vincent Peale once said,  “It is practical value to learn to like yourself. Since you spend so much time with yourself you might as well get some satisfaction out of the relationship.”  And so I began there, doing more of the things that inspired me. I started to reconnect with my friends and went out for lunches. I made the trip to my favourite bookstore or took a walk in the park. Sometimes my husband came with me and sometimes he didn’t. If he was watching TV and I felt restless, I would take a bath and read something uplifting.

Th e more I honoured myself and my emotions, the less I was affected about what my husband was doing and eventually stopped holding my husband responsible for my feelings. I have learned to respect his way of walking his path, as he has always respected mine. Now when a strong emotion arises, I look at the person and the situation that I think is causing my reaction and ask how I am mirroring that emotion and situation in my own life.  

I laugh at the irony of how often I had looked to the gurus of our time to enlighten me, yet here my husband, whom I thought was lacking a spiritual approach to his life, has ended up being my greatest teacher.  My relationship with my husband changed and our love transformed. By holding a mirror directly in front of me, I have learned to give the unconditional love I had received from my husband to myself.  I thought I loved him well but realized that I could not love him the way he deserves without loving myself well first. 

Jennifer MacLellan, B. Ed., is an intuitive and an educator who is passionate about laughing, love, spirituality and the power of words. For any comments or questions, please contact her at jennnymac@shaw.ca.