Excavating the inner child

A recurring theme in recent conversations has been how those of us who are more heart-centered feel drained by and disconnected to those who are head-focused.

I think we begin life, as children, living from the heart (the joy in watching ants colonize or finding a dazzling pebble), but manufacture filters as we age to protect us. In some ways, those filters begin to insulate us from true feelings and detach us from our bodies and hearts.

Think about all of the axioms we hear:
– Suck it up.
– Don’t be so sensitive.
– Get over it.
– Take care of it yourself.
– Forget it.
– Don’t dwell on it.
– Be a man.
– Grow up.
– Don’t be such a crybaby.

They direct us not to feel, express or explore what wounds us. So we bury those injuries. That does not, however, suggest they dissipate. I think they settle deeply somewhere inside with that hurt inner child.

For me, learning to live through my heart means resurrecting and excavating that lost inner child, opening those wounds, healing them and forgiving ... mostly myself. It’s not easy work and nothing I began short of being forced to out of pain. Of course, I had not idea what was happening at the time, I just wanted to escape the discomfort ... physical and emotional. I think we all have some experience of this. Sometimes it revolves around BIG events and injuries, others, a series of small injustices. That doesn’t matter, but how we respond does.

If we accept the invitation for self exploration and growth, wonderfully hard things can happen. We can begin to experience the heart and tap its deep roots for what we crave: love and acknowledgment.

Otherwise, the initial injury settles deeper with more sediment and, I suspect, excavation is a harder job.

• Where do I dwell, heart of head?
• What’s the difference for me?
• How can I learn to live more in and from my heart?
• What wounds have I uncovered?
• What work is left?


busy, busy head
trying to negotiate,
manage and control

easy, easy heart
open to love,
forgiveness and joy

Learning to live in our bodies

I was sitting in silence this morning during Quaker meeting for worship and wondered why my heart hurt and was so unsettled. I know I haven’t been practicing much centeredness lately. Tough with only 4 schools days of the last 21 and so much family togetherness, which, really, has been a blessing. Then an amazing thought surfaced: permeability works both ways.

I struggle with fibromyalgia and, as a result, realize I have a one-way filter that let’s so much into my body, where it’s trapped and certainly not productive, often at odds with the rest of what’s inside. I have had this thought confirmed by another fibro friend and in reading research. I also think it has a lot to do with personality and the constant barrage of media and messages to which we are subjected daily.

So what if that filter worked both ways ... to let things in and out, perhaps transforming what entered into positive energy within ourselves and as it left? Somehow, I think that’s the real way things should work. I know that exchange is one of creativity.

So, while I was sitting with all of this (mainly unverbalized this morning) and trying to figure out a meditation or prayer to be the change agent, a friend stood and unleashed the pain he held for the 27,000 orphaned boys in Sundan who had walked country to country searching for a home. He did let it out, saying the ONE thing he could do was intercessory prayer. He remembered one boy in the film had said God had been with them.

That’s the other point, sometimes when we think it is ours to do, it’s not. Often our egos tell us it’s or job when it’s too big for us. That’s when we are truly called to prayer.

And in this escape, when this friend was able to share, the whole tenor of the room changed as if each person absorbed a smaller, more manageable piece of what this friend had borne alone. That each sliver would somehow work internally, and re-emerge reconstructed, transformed and better for having been shared.

• What’s my filtering system and is it working the way it should?
• What is the line/my line between doing and praying?
• How do I discern when to do which?
• Can I remember a time I shared and saw that it was the right thing?

my body often knows
things before the rest
of me does

it reminds me over and over

some days I get it faster
some days I don’t get
it at all,
but I am learning
and becoming more
aware, more attune

as someone wise
recently told me:
our job is to learn
to live in our bodies