Resurrect Your Inner Child
A tragic loss tends to occur for us as we reach adulthood. We leave behind the curiosity, the spontaneity, the soulful freedom that made us a child. This is more than a simple matter of biology, however. As adults, we are socialized into a different way of being in the world than we were early on in life. The childhood fantasies, the “silliness,” the games, they don't serve us particularly well in the adult world. Lego sets are inevitably shelved for SAT study guides. We have to grow up, after all.
Adult life, it seems, is something other than free. Instead, we use reason, rationality, planning, and agendas to navigate life. And by necessity. We have obligations. We have to pay the bills and secure a future. But, then again, we do get to make “adult” choices now don’t we? We can choose our partners, our hobbies, our diets. We can buy lottery tickets. Some of us get to choose our careers.
So perhaps it’s the naive freedom of a child that has to fall away as we grow. As a matter of course, we shed the inhibiting skin of childhood for something more supple. But, again, are we truly free? Why did we decide on that particular career path? Where does the urge to play the lotto come from?
Modern psychology and sociology would tell us that often our life plans are not really ours. Instead, they are subconscious creations designed for us to fit in. They also tend to compensate for wounds, guilt, and fear we carry with us from our childhood. These defense mechanisms and coping strategies might help us get around in life but only as far as helping us to survive, not to thrive.
“When we encounter the freedom of a child, we can choose to participate in their liberation or we can grow to resent the freedom in them.”
It’s no wonder life in the adult world tends to leave us with tired, cynical eyes. Our self-understanding is narrow, as is our vision of the world. We fall into self-protective patterns of living that limit our God-given potential. The real tragedy? We’ve come to believe this is all quite normal.
Your Childlike Heart Still Beats
There is wisdom from a teaching of Jesus that is illuminating here. He said that becoming “like a child” is the centerpiece of a life of wholeness (Matthew 18:3). These words might immediately bring to mind the child-ish behavior most adults find annoying, but let’s put our cynicism in check for a moment.
Consider instead that the invitation here is to recover a way of being that can unlock the straightjacket we often find ourselves in as adults - the self-defeating self-talk, the people pleasing that leads to resentment, the desperate yearning for love from people who continue to deny us love.
This way of being Jesus is talking about comes from a different center than we’re used to living from as adults. No he’s not asking us to cast our responsibilities carelessly to the wind. The bills will always be there waiting for us impatiently. This is an inescapable truth. But there is a still-deeper truth he’s pointing to than our adult eyes tend to see.
It’s beneath all the defense mechanisms, the neurotic face-saving, the well-intentioned planning. There, below these hardened layers of our coping selves, is the unguarded trust of our still-beating childlike heart.
This is the core of our being and we’ve lost touch with it along the way in life. The vulnerability of a child, their radical openness to the universe, is simply too much to bear for us adults. And often with good reason, especially if trauma has been a part of our personal or family history.
But Jesus is reminding us that we can trust the universe. Not because it can give us what we want, or what we think we need, but because there is a sustaining, loving Someone working in it all and through it all for our good.
The Liberating Power of Wonder
Our childlike heart knows this intuitively because of its primitive attachment to the Divine. We were born with a radical openness to the world. There were none of the adult “buffers” in the way. No programs. No agendas. We were wide open. We had eager eyes. We were in touch with the very heartbeat of the universe, the heartbeat of love. This is our origin point and our destiny.
As adults, when that spark flashes in our hearts just after meeting a special person, we recover a bit of that way of being. Our life plans sort of melt away. Or at least they become a bit more pliable, because something in us rises up that’s stronger than the death-grip of our needy ego.
Think back to when you first encountered your greatest love in life. If it wasn’t a person, maybe it was a hobby. That drum set you got one Christmas as a kid, perhaps. Whatever it was, it made you feel a bit differently about the world, didn’t it? It gave you new eyes to see because love stands in amazement of the world.
“Awareness of the divine begins with wonder.”
You might get entangled in something that would throw off your plans, but it didn’t matter. All of a sudden, those problems in life weren’t the unscalable walls you made them out to be. Or perhaps you realized they weren’t problems after all. Whatever the case, you could go on in life because you just knew it would all resolve somehow. This is the liberating power of wonder and of love.
Becoming Human Again
That spark for life is the very essence of the childlike heart. But the simplicity and purity it requires does not make for naivete. It’s not “puppy love” we’re talking about here. Rather, it makes for the very seedbed of our spiritual lives.
There is a certain intelligence to the childlike heart that transcends the adult rational mind. It can live with mystery with no need for resolution. Its curiosity is open-ended. It can be led without requiring a known destination. It’s not closed off by past regret or an uncertain future.
This innate ability to “live in the now” is what leads to and sustains revelatory moments in life – the truth about who we are at our core, what life is really about, and Who sustains us in it all. These encounters register so deep within us that we often can’t put them into words. How to describe the last sunset that stopped us in our tracks? We shouldn’t even try. Words would only fail. The swelling of our souls is enough to tell us all we need to know.
It’s these experiences of wonder which relax the grip of the ego and allow us to fall into a more spacious sense of self and of the world. You still pay the bills. Your heart still breaks over tragedy and injustice. You still work to steady your life. But your perspective on it all is now wider and your actions are less self-defeating and more compassionate.
You can do this because you know you are not living your life on your own. You’re alive to the heartbeat of the universe, so you can let go. It’s not being child-ish. It’s becoming human again.
Your Inner Child, Your Guide
You can think of this still-beating childlike heart as your inner child. This is a very real part of you that you never leave behind. But it is more than simply your playful side or a collection of childhood memories. Your inner child is also a spiritual reality gifted with radical openness and trust in the universe.
The adult world tells you to ignore them, but your inner child has a special wisdom of their own. Learning to pay attention to them and integrating their intuitions into your conscious awareness is part of your spiritual journey to greater self-understanding and God-awareness. This is the path to wholeness Jesus is talking about.
Getting in touch with your inner child requires you to believe that they have something of value to say to you. It’s not so much a back and forth dialogue about what to do in life, however. This is an ego trap. Instead, it’s a way of being that we’re after. We can learn to see the world through the eyes of a child again and be led through life, as adults, by wonder. This is our true north.
Something very fundamental here is that we come to grips with how impoverished our sense of identity has become. It may be that we’ve come to see ourselves in purely economic terms – measuring our worth by the kind of job we have or don’t have, the amount of money we make or don’t. Or it may be that our sense of self is defined mainly by the criticisms and approval of others. Or it may be that our last success or failure has the final say on whether we believe we’re okay or not.
All these come down to fear. We seek out rational certainty and clearly defined outcomes instead of mystery and wonder. We’ve lost the primal sense of connectedness we had to the universe, that origin point of love. This is the bedrock of our identity. Anchoring ourselves here once again activates a spiritual intelligence that at once liberates us from narrow thinking and guides us down a path of compassionate living.
There were times in our childhood when we were radically attached to the energy of life, when wonder and a sense of the Divine was palpable. For some of us these moments were fleeting. For others they were more constant and sustained. This is not a luxury of childhood, however. It’s a way to wholeness in life, a way of relaxing the demand of our needy ego for a more spacious sense of self, of God. and the world. Let’s get back to that.
What You Can Do
Here are some approaches to resurrecting your inner child. You might try one of these each week on your own and then share your experiences and thoughts with a group of friends. We also have coaching available. To schedule a free session, go to the Contact page on our website or email me directly: seth@thesoulsearch.org.
Whatever you do, keep in mind that these practices are your part in cultivating greater childlike awareness in life. The rest is up to God.
Listen: Our podcast episode “Wonder” (Season 1 Episode 2) takes a deeper dive between the dynamic of wonder and play, and the role they play in our spiritual lives. Journal what came up for you while listening. (Note: Our podcast is available for streaming on all platforms, including Spotify and Apple).
Some prompts for reflection:
What does “play” mean to you as an adult? What role does it have in your life?
What invitations do you sense to make “wonder” more of a habit? What resistances do you feel about it?
In what areas of life is the influence of your “agenda” particularly strong? What might it look like to release some control here? What feelings does this bring up for you?
Remember: Take time to reflect back on your childhood and recall a particularly strong moment when you felt a connection to the mystery of the universe. This might sound a bit over the top, but consider it in terms: of a felt sense of being loved; or awe of Nature, or of freedom, curiosity and openness to the world. A photo of you during that time in life might help prompt the memory. Sit and dwell on this moment for a while. Recall the inner stirrings of your heart.
What did you feel emotionally back then? Spiritually?
Where did the experience register in your body?
What did you feel about the universe then that you’ve lost touch with now?
Know that you can trust that moment as revelatory and true, meaning it has significance for you now just as it did then.
Meditate: Take time in silent meditation to visit with yourself as you were as a child. Pick a time up through grade school. In this exercise you will have a back-and-forth dialogue with yourself. You might ask your child-self about the memory in the exercise above or about some other experience you want to know more about.
What do you want to say to the child?
What does this child say back to you?
For some, this may trigger memories of trauma. Be gentle with yourself here. You’re encouraged to listen to our guided meditation to walk you through this exercise. (Note: Our meditations are available for streaming on all platforms, including Spotify and Apple).
Play: If you’ve ever felt “in the moment” or “in the flow,” having lost a sense of time in some activity you were engaged in, you know a bit about the power of play. It may have happened during a run you were on, or while working a crossword puzzle, or gardening. Whatever it was, you were no longer performing to some external standard, you were connecting with your deeper self. You may have even experienced a rush, but not of anxious energy, the serene kind of focused energy that comes when you and whatever you were doing are “one.” Kids have a natural affinity for this. Take some time to play. Not competitive play, but something enjoyable just for its own sake. You’re encouraged to use our spiritual exercise for some guidance and reflection questions.
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