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.”

— Cole Arthur Riley

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.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

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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An Invitation to Let Go

The second Friday in January is affectionately known as Quitters Day, when most people are likely to have abandoned their New Year’s Resolution. If you make it past the 14th of this month without having already given up, congratulations to you, you’re no quitter (although you still have the rest of the year to become one, apparently). 

The fact that our hopes for self-improvement tend to last only a couple of weeks alone should give us pause, but the real issue here might be why we make any resolutions at all. What is it, in the end, that we’re chasing?

Plenty of resolutions have to do with fitness or health objectives. Hard to argue here. But let’s suppose you don’t give up and that sometime this year you become as fit or as thin as you dream of being today. Then what? After all is said and done, you might look at yourself in the mirror and think you’re probably not fit enough. You can always be fitter and someone else is certainly fitter than you, so back on the treadmill you go.

Or, say you “quit” two weeks in. It only reinforces the negative self-image that you can never be the person you think you need to be in the first place. Either way you’re likely feeding a hollow version of yourself. This is not to say that goal setting is harmful. It has its place, to be sure. But if we’re to be healthy in any respect, fitness or otherwise, it needs to be first rooted in a compassionate view of ourselves. 

Shame sells 

Whether or not we’re aware of it, every one of us has some form of emotional pain or wounding we carry around in life. It leads to all the nervousness and anxiousness and restlessness we tend to live with. And it’s this sense of incompleteness and lack of closure that causes us to be susceptible to easy fixes. “If I am more fit, I will be complete,” is one. 

Our success-addicted culture is no help here. Every day, bright images about who we are supposed to be, what we are supposed to do, and how we are supposed to look flash before our blinking eyes. Without our consent, these become the external, objective standards we use to judge ourselves. We often do this without mercy, which only feeds the anxiety.

Meeting these standards become internalized demands and burdens we place on ourselves. You don’t want to “improve” yourself unless you feel the pangs of a lack somewhere in your life. And, God forbid, you give it a go but stop somewhere along the way. Well, then you're nothing more than a quitter, or so the story goes.

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul.”

— Carl Jung

What’s ironic and sad, is that it’s the very attempt to achieve satisfaction on our own terms that leaves us dissatisfied with life. We’ve become so committed to pushing away what we don’t like about ourselves that we’ve become out of touch with who we really are.

The only way off the treadmill, so-to-speak, is to come to terms with what it means to be human.

Beauty in the flesh

In the Christian tradition, there is no clearer example of what it means to be human than in incarnation of Jesus. The beginning of the Gospel of John describes Jesus’ coming into the world in highly symbolic language. It was as though light was beaming down into the darkness. A familiar verse in the opening says, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory … full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).

This is a way of saying that God’s presence or wisdom was embodied in Jesus. It hints at the inseparable connection between the divine and physical intimacy. This glory is not in the abstract. It’s experienced. It’s taken in. Like a beautiful work of art, it penetrates you. It moves you. It reveals something about the world you might not be able to put into words, but deep in your heart you know is true.

In the incarnation, then, God says that physicality and intimacy and presence - the “stuff” that makes us human - is good, very good. And in doing so, of course, God submits to the physical demands of space and time. The writer of the letter to Hebrews says Jesus became human “in every way” (Hebrews 2:17). 

Being “in the flesh” is a fragile reality but, strangely, it also reveals light. 

The Light /Darkness Equation

Fully-human does not mean superhuman. There’s a difference. We can draw out a simple contrast of the two to make the point.

 In the quality of life Jesus lived, there are a few characteristics that stand out: 

• Limits: Jesus accepted limits. He got tired and dirty and hungry. He couldn’t be in two places at once. He had to narrow his focus. And despite the Renaissance renderings of Jesus as a Norwegian male with perfect skin and a trim beard, he probably wasn’t anything near the standards of conventional beauty.

• Weakness: Jesus experienced weaknesses. He had an emotional and spiritual crisis in the Garden of Gethsemane, the night before he was crucified. He had all these emotions swirling around inside him. And they were tough to sort out. He was anxious. He bled. He cried. He didn’t want to go on.

• Vulnerability: Jesus took the risk of being rejected and he was - by his family, his hometown, his religion. He was open to others and suffered, because that’s what love requires. It’s a risk we often shy away from, but he didn’t.  

Limits, weakness, vulnerability - these are important aspects of our humanity. But we’ve been conditioned to see them as darkness, aspects of our lives we’re to avoid, to not show the world.

Instead we think being human means something entirely different:

• Limitlessness: We fantasize what it’s like to live without limits. Even Christians often use the words of the apostle Paul, “I can do everything through Christ who strengthens me” as license to try and do everything without rest. And what ends up happening is that there is no reservoir for what really matters--other people, relationships.

• Strength: Because we’re taught that you’re only valuable when you’re doing something well or accomplishing things. We hide behind masks, showing people what we want them to see, so that people will accept us. We’re afraid we’ll be rejected if people find out the truth about who we are. But God says, “My power is made perfect in weakness (2 Chornintians 2:9.)” There is something about human weakness and frailty that God uses. Why? Because the ego has to get out of the way. It’s no longer about “me” anymore.

• Protection: We want to protect ourselves, our interests, our life plans because we tend to have a fundamental distrust that God’s universe can’t provide for us what we need. We’re scared and anxious people. So we don’t let go and receive. Instead we invest emotional and spiritual energy in grasping at things, in controlling and holding on.

Limitlessness, strength, protection: we tend to think of these as light. We want to live in the warm glow of looking good, having it all together, making it, never failing, putting up our best face. It’s how we’re supposed to be, how we’re supposed to live. It’s the stuff we should all aspire to. And we get stuck into believing there’s no other option for us in terms of how to measure our self-worth or the kind of life that’s worth living.

But the incarnation of Jesus flips that script. The goal in life isn’t to cover up every weakness you have, to be a perfect looking person, or to have the world’s most magnetic personality. You’ll just end up being a slave to it all. And life shouldn’t be about feeling bad about the things you don’t have, don’t do well or can’t do at all. That, in fact, is darkness because there is no freedom there. We waste so much of our lives with this.

In all of his teachings, Jesus never said to be successful. He tells us, instead, to be “fruitful.” And to bear fruit, in the biblical language, is what it looks like to grow in love:

• Allowing people in.

• Being open to others.

• Living with an open hand.

• Receiving life as a gift instead of making demands of it.

It’s not that accomplishments don’t matter. It’s just that accomplishments are not all that there is.

What the incarnation tells us, is that the human body in all of its frailty has this unique, tender, remarkable capacity to give and to receive love. 

Jesus perfected love in human form. It’s what we’re made for. But to do that, we have to be in touch with our limits. We can’t see them as imperfections. We have to explore them, to see them as a vital part of who we are. It puts us back in touch with ourselves.

Jesus did this.

Isn’t it good to know that he accepted all of his humanity? And that it was good? As the writer of Hebrews points out, “We have a high priest who can sympathize with our weaknesses” (Hebrews 2:18). It makes it much easier for us to accept those things about ourselves too.

An Economy of Grace

How we measure ourselves tells us quite a bit about what kind of world we believe in. Is the world a place where I need to create my own identity using measuring sticks to compare myself to others? Or is it a place of grace where who I am isn’t determined by anything on the surface of life? Is it a place where even the “quitters” win?

The logic of grace is that more effort doesn’t necessarily translate into “better.” This might be a tough pill to swallow for many of us overachievers. Grace, instead, is a gift that comes unexpectedly in the midst of the messiness, the unpredictability, and the failures in life. It’s a light that shines in what seems like darkness, not for shame, but to remind us that we are, in fact, good.

This puts us in touch with our deepest self and it opens us up to the world. To accept our own limitations and disabilities, whatever they may be, allows us to accept those things in others. It helps us to become light to them.

You Are the Light

This seems to be what Jesus was getting at when he said, “You are the light of the world”  (Matthew 5:14).

When he spoke those words, he was in the Galilean countryside talking to peasants, subsistence farmers, indentured servants. He wasn’t in Jerusalem talking to a crowd of religious elite or the upper crust of society. 

He was talking to people who didn’t know if they’d get by - just frail people. Limited. Weak. Hurting. People who had to deal head-on with brokenness everyday.

They had no trophies or anything to hide behind. They had to be open to grace.

It’s also important to keep in mind that Christ wasn’t born in the bright lights of Herod’s kingdom or in his palatial hotel. He was born in the manger. The place no one wanted to be was the very place Christ was born. 

This can be taken as a beautiful analogy for our own lives. Whatever you cover up, whatever pain and struggle and anguish that gets hidden beneath all your anxious striving, is the very place God’s light is waiting to be born in you.

Grace helps us to see that life, the human experience, with all it’s pain and struggle is worth living. But we have to believe it’s possible if we’re going to recieve it.

The Invitation

So as we begin this year, be brave. Reclaim yourself. Don’t take the bait in believing that there are five things you need to do to become a better person. Get in touch with who you already are. It’s only then that you can decide where you need to go or what you want to work on. 

If you’re to commit to anything in 2022, let go of one expectation or demand that you make of yourself. 

In other words: 

• How can you be more self-forgiving?

• Where do you need grace?

This is an invitation to dance differently this year, to wait patiently for grace with a calm assurance that you are good, and that in letting go, you’ve already won.

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