I’ve enjoyed reading Reconciliation: Healing the Inner Child by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh and thought I’d honour his recent passing by sharing what I’ve learnt about applying mindfulness for healing the inner child.
Connecting with The Energy of Mindfulness
“The energy of mindfulness is the salve that will recognize and heal the child within.” Thich Nhat Hanh
In Buddhist psychology, there are two parts to consciousness, the mind consciousness and the store consciousness. Mind consciousness is our active awareness for everyday living while store consciousness is often referred to as the “unconscious mind” where our past experiences are stored. In some situations, we go through life without engaging our mind consciousness. For example, when we drive without actively thinking, we are using our store consciousness.
As I’ve discovered, self-love is not just a practice but a mindfulness one.
This means that loving ourselves is not a mere one-time or a short-term exercise; whether we are going for a therapy session, a singing bowl meditation to heal our heart chakra or buying ourselves a branded bag so that we can feel better.
Self-love is much more than any of these.
Some of us may have the expectation that self-love can happen magically overnight. The truth is that for those of us with trouble loving and accepting themselves unconditionally, it takes consistent work. It’s certainly been my experience.
Over the years, life would throw me a new challenge again and again and due to being triggered, I’d find myself reverting to the same pattern of feeling unlovable and unloved. At first, I felt disappointed and bitter that none of the healing I did appear to have worked. It would seem that doing inner work was pointless.
Yet, upon review, I realised that my early efforts were sporadic to begin with. Eventually, after seeing how I was caught in repeated patterns, I began to realise that self-love is not going to be an overnight or a one-time healing thing. It finally occurred to me that if I am interested to have enough of a breakthrough, I need to regard self-love as being more of a practice.
EFT tapping for inner child healing involves using our fingertips to tap on specific meridian points on the face and body for addressing childhood wounds. As our physical reactions today could be tied to issues that stem from childhood, applying EFT is effective because unhealed emotions can get trapped and the body keeps the score. Even though the past is long gone, it is possible to heal in the now by applying tapping.
Women often approach me for help to deal with their stress. Their stress can be anything from dealing with a money or work-related challenge, relationship problems, not feeling “good enough”, low self-love to anxiety issues.They would have been holding on to anger, worry, insecurity and frustration for a long time before asking for help. (Understandably, most of us face resistance with getting assistance.)
Some would share about experiencing the same repetitive themes of abandonment and rejection in their lives. Thus, when we get together in a session, we usually begin by patiently peeling off the layers to determine the root cause of their issues. Invariably, we would find out that these issues stem from their past – primarily in childhood. As a result, we are led to working on healing their inner child.
When we clear unfinished business, we are better able to reset our energy system or even rebooting it – so that we can invite in new possibilities.
What does it mean to clear unfinished business?
Clearing unfinished business involves letting go of old attachments, meeting unfulfilled promises, and honouring what we said that we would do. We work on clearing unfinished business because these outstanding items can create a drag in our energy system and can potentially be a stopper for starting things on a clean slate.
In terms of agreements, these could be contractual ones that we have made with an external body; such as getting into a housing loan agreement. Or they could be simply promises that we have made to our loved ones and even ourselves. Examples include
making a commitment for fidelity
saying “yes” to accompanying our partners for an engagement (even though we are not that interested and prefer to stay home)
offering to help out a friend
returning a small debt owed to our parents or relatives
agreeing to pay our share for a split restaurant bill
doing our share of household chores etc
It’s easy to forget the “smaller” promises that we have made but over time, these could add up and weigh on us. We repel abundance when we consistently don’t honour what we said we would do. Our promises don’t count if we have no intention of following through.
Unfinished business also can include grievances, hurts and conflicts that have been left unresolved. These create emotional debris. Even though we may not be conscious of them all the time, they take up space in our energetic system.
Learn more about Clearing Unfinished Business Below
Positive Outcomes from Clearing Unfinished Business
There are benefits to clearing up unfinished business as quickly as possible. We wouldn’t want to wait till we are on our deathbed to recall the promises that we’ve not yet kept. It certainly doesn’t serve us to hold on to any outstanding item year after year.
We even up any score that is left hanging at the back of our subconscious minds when we work on meeting our obligations. At the same time, we also prevent self-sabotage from taking place. In the physical dimension, we follow through with clear intent and action. We are in congruence – body, mind and spirit.
Our relationship with money improves. Not forgetting, many contracts and agreements involve money. When we keep to the terms of our agreement, we are in integrity. As a result we raise our energetic frequency that brings about more expansiveness, which also supports our ability to attract abundance.
Relationships with our partners also improve where we honour the promises that we make. Trust increases. We feel more grounded and secure in relationships where both parties keep to their word.
By releasing old attachments to the past, we create space for new relationships or to rejuvenate existing ones. Clearing unfinished business may require us to cut cords with negative or toxic people in our lives, let go of old grievances, practice forgiveness and move on to creating new and more fulfilling relationships.
What To Do Next: Create a List of Outstanding Items for Unfinished Business
Here are some reflection questions for you…
What are the promises that you have made to yourself or others that you haven’t quite met?
Are there any contracts or agreements that you have said “yes” to but there are remaining terms that you have not quite followed through on?
Any outstanding debts or loans to attend to? How is your plan to meet your obligations like?
Any old relationship ties that you need to say good-bye to?
Any grievances or grudges to resolve?
What past emotional baggage does it serve your highest interest to let go of?
Once you’ve created a list, prioritise the items according to how much lighter and freer you are going to feel as a result of clearing it. Create an action plan for working through the list and also specifying dates and timelines. Check off your list as you complete the items.
Clearing unfinished business is one of the modules in my course on Changing Your Relationship with Money. Alternatively, apply for a discovery call if you need personal help to work on clearing unfinished business.
Create more energetic space to invite in the new!
Love and abundance always, Evelyn Abundance Coach for Women Solopreneurs
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When connecting with our inner child for the first time, we may feel at a loss about what to say or what to do. It’s possible that we feel weird because it is as if we are talking to ourselves. After all, our inner child exists in the mind and no one else can see her (or him) but us. Also, what words can we use to support healing?
According to psychologists, our inner child is described as the hidden part of our personality that is characterised by playfulness, spontaneity, and creativity usually accompanied by anger, hurt, and fear attributable to childhood experiences.
Through our mind’s eye, we connect with our inner self from tracing back to our earliest memory on when we felt the same (negative) way. We get a sense of how old our younger self was and the situation she was in. She may be our 3-year old, 6 year-old or whatever age and she is holding on to hurt, anger, helplessness or any unresolved need. It is when we (our adult self) enter the memory to meet her.
Next, we may encounter the situation of not knowing what to say to her. We have grown in chronological age but we could have left her behind. In fact, I’ve observed how emotional it can be when we do inner child work for the first time. It was that way for me too. The great news is that once we start healing, we gain a sense of well-being like never before.
I was helping a client (let’s call her Nellie, not her real name) clarify the ideal client that she’d like to work with, when we discovered that she was having some limiting money blocks about people who are wealthy.
Nellie’s line of work requires her to service the needs of wealthy individuals or at least people with excess funds. If she releases her subconscious blocks, client attraction can potentially happen with greater ease. It will certainly help Nellie to have more clients as the extra income that she gets can go a long way to supporting her family with two young kids. Since her beliefs could be in the way for client attraction and business sales, we proceeded to work on releasing the limiting money blocks.
Childhood Situation that Created Limiting Money Blocks
When I asked Nellie what some of her discomfort was reminding her of, she recalled two childhood incidents when she was 11 years old that had left her feeling lousy, disgusted and ashamed.
A childhood wound is an emotional pain or a negative belief that a part of us internalised due to a traumatic past event or the relationship we had with our parents or caregivers when we were young.
As I have discovered, unresolved childhood wounds can adversely affect the quality of life in our adult years. Indeed, they have an impact on our personalities, beliefs, career choices, and relationships. We can also be passing on our childhood wounds to the future generations.
Our wounded child is acting up if we often find ourselves in self-sabotage, making poor choices or having over-the-top reactions to triggers. She or he is crying for attention of unhealed emotions. If we choose to ignore our wounded child, we can be stuck for years.
Emotional bypassing happens when we don’t allow ourselves to fully process our negative feelings. Instead, we sweep them under the carpet or we gloss over them by “willing” the mind to think positively. Say, something traumatic happens to us. We don’t face it because we fear feeling worse off. Thus, instead of grieving or upset, we simply put on a brave front and pretend that all is fine.
In another instance, we guilt-trip ourselves for feeling negative when we ought to be grateful. We believe that we have no right to complain about feeling poorly where someone else is at a more disadvantaged situation. And so we stuff our feelings inside.
Emotional bypassing is often referred to as spiritually bypassing. It was the late psychologist John Welwood who coined the term spiritual bypassing to describe what he saw in a Buddhist community. He describes it as the “tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.” In the practice of non-attachment, many Buddhists deny what they truly feel.
When you are caught in anxiety, do you observe an unsettling or discomforting feeling in the stomach?
Well, anxiety and the stomach are said to be connected. According to Traditional Chinese Medicine, anxiety gets stored in the spleen/stomach/pancreas network. In this article, I’d like to bring focus to the link between anxiety and stomach issues.
First of all, while I sometimes use the words anxiety and worry interchangeably, let’s also understand that there is a difference according to psychologists.
One way for boosting mental and spiritual health is the Top of the Head or the “Bai-hui” meridian point. The point sits on the crown of our head. The literal Chinese-to-English translation of “Bai-hui” means“the meeting place of the hundreds”.Aptly, it is where all the energies of our body converge and meet.
In TCM, it is often said that “heaven, earth and man are the three powers”. The top of our head is where our human body connects with heaven. It is where the gateway to spirituality resides and and where a lotus flower blossoms in the wake of rising consciousness ((visualise a slow-motion video with the petals unfolding).
The “Bai-hui” meridian point is also the meeting point of all the Yang energy in the body. TCM practitioners use this acupointincases ofneurological and psychological diseases. By activating this point, it promotes relaxation and mental focus.
