My Dearest Little One,
Rest now, in my arms, you are safe and you are held. I see you, I hear you, and I am here with you. I am you. There is no longer a need to be other than you are, or to seek from the outer world what only I have ever been able to truly give you. Breathe, my darling we are one we are whole.
The word inner child has always given me the ‘ugh’s’, it felt fluffy, new agey and somehow a little off. And yet, my work with clients and students has always drawn me here. We work together through the psyche, the body and the breath to acknowledge and reclaim the parts of the self that have long been rejected and relegated to the shadows.
I have always known that this work is essential for us to heal. What evaded me until recently, was that my reactivity to the word itself was driven by the armor I had put in place that made the most vulnerable aspects of my own little one inaccessible to me.
Over the past few months the universe presented me with what appeared to be a challenge, but as always was a gift in disguise. I was taken from the known world into the unknown, away from my home, my friends and community. I was granted the time and space to be quiet, to go inside and to feel discomfort without my usual distractions. The truth is, I was being pushed to turn all of my attention inward and face myself rather than looking outward or projecting my discomfort onto the world around me. I was finally giving myself the attention I had always granted others.
The more I turned toward myself, the more my awareness grew. I came to understand viscerally that my need to be seen, heard, and understood by the world around me was a hunger that could never be satiated. What I had been seeking my whole life could not come from out there, because it was me that I had been longing for.
The story that I had unconsciously spent a lifetime buying into was that to be worthy of love I needed to be special, to sparkle, and to shine. My natural go to was to serve. It was my armor, and my mask. My wounding was protected by my gifts, my talents, my strengths, and served to build an ego structure that tied my worth to my work.
In the dark, quiet, and let’s be honest, brutally uncomfortable space of the cocoon that I had woven for myself, I came to see the wounded little girl who just needed to be told that she was enough. She needed space to heal, to be held, and felt, to be heard and understood. She needed everything that I was giving to everyone else.
Through this long pause…I built trust with her, befriended her, and most importantly remembered her. All the practice I had in serving others was perfectly designed, because it was these very gifts that I needed to find my way home to myself.
Today I am practicing being no one, and in the process am feeling my connection to everyone and everything. Today I choose her first, and I can breathe.
With Love,
Jacqueline
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