There is so much growth to be found in healing our childhood wounds. I recently took a trip to my childhood home, and while I was there, I felt a lot of the trauma experienced during childhood come back to me.
We all feel our childhood wounds in different ways – I am most aware of them when I wake up in the morning, and the sensation feels like a tightness and subtle resistance in my body.
Every single day during that trip I woke up feeling tight,and the headaches I once experienced almost every day, but that I’ve worked hard through physiotherapy to banish to occasional appearances, returned in full force.
Our bodies send us messages like this for a reason – there were wounds to be healed here, and as I’ve committed myself wholeheartedly to the healing journey, I decided to be very intentional about exploring and releasing them.
In exploring these sensations during meditation and walks by the ocean, I felt four words come to me, which I explored on paper and burned in a little ritual so I could release them back into the universe.
The words were: rejection, control, abandonment, and fear.
Why burn and release? Because they don’t resonate with me anymore – they don’t feel true to me in the present day. It is so easy as a child to accept that what we think our experiences are telling us about ourselves is true. Many, many times we were wrong!
Each of the words above contain a vibrational frequency that I was holding in my muscles, in my bones. My body held onto these memories out of habit, even though the experiences that caused me to feel these vibration shad long left my reality.
Our parents show us love in the best way that they know how,and our simplistic child-like interpretation of their actions can cause wounds that keep us locked in old patterns that play out well into adulthood.
Looking back, I now understand that my parents were not rejecting me when they encouraged me to study rather than play – they were preparing me for the world they thought I was growing up into.
My biological father did not abandon me, he made a conscious choice not to parent me because he didn’t feel that he had the tools to do it well.
My adopted father wasn’t exerting control over my life path out of malice or meanness – he was showing me love by guiding me down a different path than I would have chosen for myself, a perfectly valid path that would ensure that – in his words – I would never have to rely on a man for money.
And as for fear – I know now that it’s an illusion.Ninety-nine per cent of our fears turn out to be completely false, leaving us shadow boxing with ourselves rather than living our lives to the fullest.
What words come to mind when you feel into your bodily resistance? When do these sensations come up for you? What comes up for you in meditation when you ask your inner child about them?
We claim so much power when we acknowledge our wounds and work through them. It can be painful at first, but it is absolutely worth it!