Finding The Secret Key To Healing Part 2
In "Part 1" of this article we discussed the idea that children may be examples of some of the world's greatest self-healers -- especially in light of their innate and brilliant ability to deal with the upsets that arise in their daily lives. Somehow, despite the tremendously challenging circumstances they encounter day-to-day, they manage to quickly release virtually all of their emotional burdens, finding their way back to a state of youthful lightheartedness and joy.
Some may believe that this is because children don't have to deal with the kinds of pressures and difficulties we find in life as adults. But just for a moment, let's think back to when we were children... Can you recall the immense worry and nearly all consuming fear we used to feel when mom would say she's leaving the house just to go shopping, or the terror we often endured when meeting towering strangers, or the level of torment we could experience by being teased or mocked by others? Recalling the intensity of such challenges of simple day-to-day living in childhood, isn't it true that children often deal with much more overwhelming emotional ups and downs then we encounter now as adults?
Let us consider, then, why is it that children are such good self-healers. How are they able to return back to a state of lightheartedness and joy so quickly in the face of all that they confront? Here are some observations which perhaps might help us to rediscover the secret of how we can re-learn to more effectively deal with our emotional pain and burdens as adults ...
CHILDREN ARE BETTER SELF-HEALERS BECAUSE THEY HAVEN’T YET
LEARNED TO DISCONNECT FROM THEIR EMOTIONAL BODIES...
It takes us so many years -- throughout our childhood, teens, and early adult life -- to gradually learn how to disconnect from, repress, mask, and even discount our emotion nature. As we mature, emotional sensitivity is often looked down upon and seen as a weakness by our parents and our peers – at home, in school, in sports, and especially later when we enter the business world. We learn that it is very beneficial to cultivate the ability to maintain a cool, calm, and apparently pleasant exterior in order to bring about approval and reinforcement from others. Staying “cool” is rewarded as being “cool” in social circles. Many of us also adopt a conscious philosophy of trying to stay "positive" to help keep ourselves on track to achieve our outward goals. In the process of seeking approval and seeking success, however, we end up disconnecting from and suppressing large amounts of emotional pain and upset around experiences and issues that we never fully faced and released.
Some of us even lose the ability to get in touch with the way we feel, such as losing the ability to cry, or even the ability to experience the same ‘highs’ we used to, and to laugh whole-heartedly. On the flip-side of the coin, this often includes becoming more numb to — or discounting — the feelings of others. Thus, even after achieving one or more of our outer goals in life, it is not uncommon to find that we still have not achieved the sense of inner joy and peace we hoped would accompany our outward success.
Emotional pain and upset which we do not release stays stored in us and can exist like buttons which can be triggered easily by more and more people and experiences as time goes on. As our emotional buttons mount up, we seek to further narrow our lives, and may even try to numb our ourselves through alcohol, drugs, food, and pleasure seeking habits whose return is only short-lived, and possibly even self-destructive.
So as we grow into adulthood, we may gain a greater ability to get more approval and more of the outer things we want, but we may lose our childhood ability to experience a true sense of inner happiness which we used to have when we lived connected to our emotional bodies, and innately released our emotional upsets daily.
CHILDREN ARE BETTER SELF HEALERS BECAUSE THEY DON'T
JUDGE THEIR FEELINGS...
As we've grown up, weren't we given messages that we shouldn't feel certain things like anger, hatred, jealousy, fear, worry, etc.? These feelings, however, arise quite spontaneously and naturally in children — and are even present in the most innocent of babies and even animals like puppies. However, we are told we shouldn't cry, we shouldn't be sad, we shouldn't feel ungrateful, we shouldn't be afraid, we shouldn’t feel jealous, angry, etc. We get the idea that certain feelings and thoughts are 'good' and 'appropriate', while other feelings and thoughts are 'bad' and 'inappropriate'. Some of us are even told that God will punish us for having certain feelings and thoughts!
So when any "negative" thoughts and feelings arise, they are often held in check or covered-up by denial -- and we judge ourselves quite harshly based on them. This becomes a major obstacle to expressing and releasing our emotional feelings and pain -- even in private – especially in the way we freely used to do when we were children.
CHILDREN ARE BETTER SELF-HEALERS BECAUSE THEY AREN'T TOO FAR REMOVED FROM THEIR TRUE BIRTHRIGHT — INNER LIGHT AND JOY!
Most of us have forgotten what it feels like to live in our true innocence and the inner light & natural joy we see in children. It is kind of like what happens when we haven't been in love for a while, we may eventually just get used to not feeling love in our life, and fall into becoming rather numb. But what happens when love finally comes again? We can easily get addicted to our new ‘high’, and may soon feel like we just can't live without it.
So as adults, we tend to become more numb or jaded, and we learn to settle for something less than our early childhood ‘high’ and happiness ... Our day-to-day life becomes something just to be 'tolerated’. How many of us continue to set the ‘high bar’ for seeking the kind of light & joy we used to experience when we were kids? Instead, we ultimately become far removed from the memory of living in such a light-hearted manner, as we gradually habituate to a more stressful, anxiety-filled, weighed-down, and unhappier day-to-day existence. The few of us who do remember, and have not abandoned the search for that ‘high’ we lost from our childhood long ago, may look for it in a spiritual quest. However, most of us instead pursue different worldly pleasures to mitigate our unhappiness, which are short-fixes for our inner problems at best. We often spend our days looking forward to weekends and vacations, which usually fail to bring the true ‘break’ and happiness we hoped for. In searching for a solution to life’s stresses, others of us may turn to prescription drugs, recreational drugs, or alcohol which only hide our pain, bringing us so many undesirable mental and physical side-effects.
If we observe kids, however, we see they haven't forgotten the taste of their inner joy. They innately know that when something upsets them, until the "nth degree" of that upset is fully expressed, they can't completely return back to the clarity, lightness, and happiness they know as their natural and inherent state. Therefore, kids spontaneously cry or tantrum, or in some way express every bit of their internal disharmony -- until they regain their preferred state of light-heartedness and joy. This is the inner wisdom we have lost: how to truly face our challenges in life, and fully release the upsets we experience day-to-day, in such as way as to completely let them go so we can grow, and find our joy again and again.
Through understanding better how we used to be among the “world’s fastest healers” as children, it can help us regain the ability to live life light-heartedly again, and never stray too far from our inner joy! This is what I teach all of my healing clients, and the turn around in their lives is often rapid and remarkable!
