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We are living in a society which, from a very young age, told us to grow up, not to act in a childish way, prompted us to become adults. So, we learnt to hide or deny the child within us, in order to avoid being vulnerable or weak... As a result we have become emotionally ill and our relationship with ourself is tenuous and shaky.
If we don’t learn how to release our emotional energy in a healthy way, it will transform in another form, such as cancer. This is why it is imperative to behave with love and compassion to all the “parts” of ourself. We can release the sorrow, the anger, the shame and the pain that were created from the traumas of our childhood by accepting, nursing and loving our inner child.
There are a couple of exercises we can use in order to communicate with the child within us and to establish a new strong relationship with it, a relationship of understanding, acceptance, affection and love. Love is the greatest healing power because it brings the light even to the darkest recesses of our existence.
A well-known exercise is the following:
We take a blank piece of paper and write, with our dominant hand (for example, the right hand for the right-handed people), a question for our inner child to answer. We can ask “How do you feel?” or “What do you need?” Then we transfer the pencil into the other hand (if we are right-handed we keep the pencil with our left hand). We take some deep breaths; we relax and let our hand write the answer in our question.
Another exercise is as follows:
We sit comfortably in a quiet place, away from distractions and interruptions. We take some deep breaths and we feel our body beginning to relax. We close our eyes and focus our attention to every part of our body separately. We start from our face and relax our forehead, eyes, cheeks, jaw and our tongue until we feel all our muscles totally relaxed. As we proceed we feel our breath becoming more calm, easy and deep. We continue by relaxing our shoulders, chest, back and the whole of our spine until the tension flows away. We keep relaxing all parts of our body, which become loose and limp, to the toes of our feet. All worries and problems have disappeared, our mind is quiet and our thoughts are calm and peaceful. We focus on our breath and count back from 10 to 0 in our thoughts. Now, we think about a specific time in our childhood that bothered and traumatized us. We visualize ourself as the child we were and we observe what we are wearing, our hair, our expression… Then we visualize ourself, as the adult we are now, approaching our child self. We introduce ourself; we tell the child that we love it exactly as it is and that there is no reason to fear any longer because now we are powerful enough to protect it… We hug the child or we hold their hand, if it is o.k. and we meet no resistance. We ask “Is there something you would like to tell me?”, “What do you need?” and we listen with care and respect. We answer any questions it may has and we assure the child that we will help and support it in every way… When it’s time to leave, either we hug, or kiss, or just say goodbye to the child, whatever feels natural, and ask them to call us whenever they need us. We count back from 10 to 1 and we return back to our place fully awake.