Practical Magic | Soothe Your Inner Child, Unblock Resistance
What if your resistance is absolutely legitimate? All children need to feel safe, approved of and protected by boundaries and healthy limits...including our Inner Child. This simple tool will help you hear what your Inner Child wants from you today. Unblock resistance that's holding you back from making bold, grown-up moves in life and business.
Unblock Resistance by Soothing Your Inner Child
If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, you may remember Episode 5, The Inner Mentor Visualization. The Inner Mentor Visualization was a tool that I shared on behalf of Tara Mohr. It's a brief meditation that connects you with the deepest knowing inside of yourself so that you can hear that source of guidance and find a home within you no matter how unsettled or uprooted you feel.
And as a foil to the Inner Mentor, I want to introduce another part of you today. And that part of you is the Inner Child.
Now, we can imagine that the Inner Child and the Inner Mentor hold the north and south poles of your deepest being: who you've been and who you’re becoming.
Our Inner Mentor is that deep part of us who is calling us to remember who we are becoming so that we can make the right actions today.
Our Inner Child also has a very important role because they are here to remind us how we go about doing that.
This topic came to me when I was in a coaching conversation with a business owner. She shared how she was trying to lean more into her entrepreneurial side; she wanted to make bigger, bolder moves in her business but was meeting a lot of resistance. I asked her to consider whether there was a part of her who was trying to be heard but didn't feel safe, and that's where a lot of the resistance was coming from.
When you observe a young child – a child who has grown up in a secure and stable environment, a child who is lovingly encouraged to explore their own needs, wants, and desires – but a child nonetheless, you can see very clearly that this person did not come to earth as an empty vessel. This person came fully formed, already carrying the seeds of their genius and unique desires, and they have no problem expressing them.
We should all hope to carry the authenticity of the child with us throughout life.
Except in many cultures, including mine, it's very common for the natural authenticity of the child and their needs and wants to be trained out of them in the name of socialization, education, polite behavior, and compliance.
This Inner Child calling-in exercise is not so much a visualization or meditation as it is a framework to guide you when you meet moments of great resistance when no other tool is working. Why am I not able to take action on these things that I want?
Start by reflecting on:
What does a child want? This child that still lives inside of us, what motivates them, what drives them? What are they calling for?
7 Essential Categories of Our Inner Child’s Needs and Desires
We can collect most of the needs and desires of our Inner Child into 7 essential categories.
1: A child needs to feel safe.
Every child and adult longs for predictability and control.
Not in every single area of their life – that would be boring – but certainly in a few key areas. It is essential for us to feel like we know what's coming next. A good way to nourish and honor that part of us is to have some kind of routine, structure, schedule, or framework that we are following. This gives us some sense of predictability and stability in at least one area of our lives so that we feel grounded enough to take a risk in another.
2: A child needs emotional validation.
Every child needs their existence to be approved of. The high-energy, joyful states; and also the darker ones, the overwhelming moods, the frightening emotions. These are all part of a child's experience. When we gaslight them, reject them, and shame them for their emotions, we disapprove of them.
The Inner Child inside of us is also seeking emotional validation. They want to be accepted. They want to be seen.
How are we talking to ourselves? Have we made the space to listen, honor, and decipher those tricky, sticky emotions that are arising for us? Or have we tamped them down? Have we told ourselves that we shouldn't be feeling this way?
Are we giving our Inner Child the emotional validation that is so essential for them?
3: A child needs love.
Every child needs love, nourishment, and attention.
4: A child needs presence.
This presence can come in the form of time and space, or being given the room to process emotions, emotional experiences, and things that they are learning.
I for one certainly remember feeling resentment as a child for feeling like I was always rushed on to the next thing, another activity. I craved a quiet space that was not filled with something already.
The gift of presence is something that we often forget to give ourselves as adults, and our Inner Child is so craving it. It's a very common reason why we're resisting; we often haven't given ourselves time to digest the thousands of things that have happened to us before we launch a new project, make a bold move, and take yet another thing onto our plates.
5: A child needs free play.
No structure, no rules, no time limit, no instruction. Just them, their imagination, and whatever else is around them.
Who gives themselves a moment of space to free play in their everyday lives as adults?
I think we are very few.
6: A child needs boundaries.
One of the ways in which children can become extremely anxious, not to mention resentful, is when they're exposed to experiences before they're ready. Before they have the right level of maturity, before they have resilience, and before they have the tools to manage it. Yet, especially as entrepreneurial people, how much have we internalized this idea that everything that is good on Earth exists outside your comfort zone?
What happens when you are pushing outside of your comfort zone relentlessly, day in day out, month after month, year after year?
That sense of fear, exhaustion, resentment, and anxiety grows and grows because we never give ourselves boundaries or limits, like a container to hold us in safety.
7: A child needs choices.
While a child needs boundaries to protect them, they also need choices. They need to feel free to choose within a limited range of options so there is an exit strategy.
Very often, our bodies are deeply resisting our decided plan of action because we haven't given ourselves any choices. We haven't given ourselves the possibility of an exit strategy. We haven't put a fixed time limit on something. There's no way out.
Without choices, there's no freedom.
Wasn’t freedom what we all thought we would get as we grew from children into adults? Yet for many of us, we feel nothing of the kind.
Ask yourself, are you giving yourself enough choices?
Resistance to moving towards our dreams, taking action on a project, saying yes to something, or getting started can arise when we're not giving our Inner Child any of these seven things:
Safety
Emotional Validation
Love
Presence
Free Play
Boundaries
Choices
How could you expect the cooperation of a child without these things?
How could you expect the cooperation of yourself without these things?
But how do you know? How do you get clear?
A Powerful Tool to Reflect on What Your Inner Child Needs and Wants
I'd like to share a powerful tool that was given to me by Julia Cameron, creative teacher and artist behind the fabulous book, The Artist’s Way.
During a Writer's Workshop, she instructed us to write a letter from our inner eight-year-old to ourselves today. The purpose of this letter was so that our inner eight-year-old, our Inner Child, could tell us specifically, in the concrete language that children use, what they want from us right now.
This letter does not need to be long, according to Cameron, it just has to be honest.
It may help to begin this letter by meditating for a few moments to try and connect with that childlike, original, and honest part of yourself and then begin to write.
You can start your sentences at the beginning with ‘I want’ or ‘I want you to remember’. Write from , this is your inner eight year old writing a letter to you today at whatever age you are.
Before I recorded this episode, I looked back on the letter that I wrote from my inner eight-year-old to who what was at the time my inner 29-year-old a couple of years ago now. And what really struck me was that in the time in between, I have given my inner eight year old and thus myself most, if not all, of the things that I was asking for.
What my inner eight-year-old wanted from me:
To spend more time outside.
To read more fantasy and sci-fi novels.
To dance at least weekly.
To create altars, shrines, and make offerings to my local nature spirits, which was an activity that was a big part of my life as a child and that I’d completely lost touch with.
More time and space to imagine.
Presence. Time and space to process, feel, and imagine impossible futures. This was important to me as a child and something that I had lost touch with as well.
Real freedom from arbitrary rules. Despite the fact that I was grown, running my own business, and completely independent, I was still following rules that were completely unnecessary, and that I did not set for myself.
By listening to my inner eight-year-old and giving her the things that she asked for, my life feels far more magical.
Your Invitation
What does your inner child (your inner six-year-old, eight-year-old, or 10-year-old) want from you?
What do they want you to understand?
Where do they feel unsafe, rushed, shamed?
Where do they feel they never have any fun?
Where do they feel unloved, unappreciated, unseen, or overexposed?
Where do they feel unbound, buried, or choiceless?
Where do they need to feel more stable and secure?
Reflecting on the 7 needs of your inner child may reveal:
Before you make this big move or take this business risk, you need to do a full overview of your existing resources.
You need to create time to process your emotional wave and give yourself choices before you act.
You need space alone to figure out what this means to you.
You need more validation.
You need to feel held by your relationships and community.
You need more predictability in your schedule; you need to create more constraints, you need to block out time, you need to give yourself a structure that holds you tight but not too tight so that you can feel safe to get things done.
You need to lower your expectations of yourself. You’re pushing yourself out of your comfort zone too much all the time and it's making you scared.
Getting in touch with, listening to, and acting on the needs and wants of your Inner Child is not about resigning yourself from having a grown-up, free, and expanded life. However, we must understand that there are tender parts of us that need attention and re-parenting.
Building a foundation of resilience, trust, courage, safety, and boundaries is the foundation from which we can make big moves solidly and sustainably and without creating unnecessary consequences like burnout or relationship breakdown.
I invite you to try writing a letter from your inner eight-year-old, your Inner Child. If you haven't done so yet, I also invite you to listen to Episode 5, to meet your Inner Mentor. See what your Inner Mentor and your Inner Child have to say in common. See how they see the world differently.
When you can honor who you once were, who you are becoming, and who you are now, simultaneously, we call this alignment.
And this is a very magical way to live.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Episode Resources:
EP 5. Practical Magic | The Inner Mentor Visualization
The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
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