MyStory - Page Nine - The Child/Maiden

The cry we hear from deep in our hearts comes from the wounded child within. Healing this inner child’s pain will transform negative emotions."  - Thich Nhat Hanh,

Many of us, in our Croneship, have lost the sense of the "innocence within".  But she is there, weeping into the dark night, who needs love and compassion and self-compassion. 

When we are born, we are born with manipulative characteristics that work on the Mother to be fed, changed, and to have survival needs met.  As we age to crawling down from the knee, we learn anger management, we learn there is a world outside of Mother, we learn to seek approval and support of others for survival and to have our needs met.  Our needs change as we mature.  We blossom, and in that blossoming, we are in our wild glory, but we learn, as well, to protect ourselves.  We were testing life with no idea of what we might become.  We are very immediate and our wants and needs lead us to make demands.  We learn to fit in.  We learn to withdraw or to reach into wild abandon of fantasy and fiction and fact of who we are in the world.  As we age to puberty and into our teens and further into womanhood, we may drag some of those wants and needs, met and unmet, positive and negative, through into that next stages of Being Woman.  We move through the times of taming our Beautiful Whole Self.  We can become suppressed and we may repress some of those wants and needs as life cuts us back, pruning away some of that wild beauty within.  Deep inside, we long to express ourselves and that feeling grows as we move into our adolescent years.  Some will drag the Child through into our adolescent years and those years can be fraught with The Disappointed/Angry Child. 

Prior to becoming, woman, The Mother, we begin to think we know who we are to become.  Some of us rush it, and if we do so, we can drag the teenaged self through to our Croneship, as well.  We can learn to suppress or project The Inner Child through many negative ways.  We forget how divine we are meant to be.  We can become worldlier in both positive and negative ways.  Many will glide through those hormone-driven years knowing that the journey is a spiritual one.  Most will not.  We will seek the meeting of the Child's wants and needs and we are more manipulative and/or unhappy because we demand they all be met.  We can remain somewhere between fantasy and fact.  Towards the end of Maidenhood, we can move into a sense of regret.  Or, we can move into being a gift to the world;  that non-self-centered life that remembers we are divine beings here for a spiritual purpose.  To be the gift, we have had need to remember our true wild nature that remembers what a gift we are and why and how and when and where.  We mature into Self recognizing the good for and of all.  It is then that we either heal childhood wounds, or perceived wounds, or we remain stuck in the mire of thinking life is unfair, others are unfair, and others should, always and forever, meet our needs.  Or, we can blossom more fully and realize we are the answer to our own prayers.

In most all of us, there is a wailing inner child and many have experienced, or sense, wounds along the way.  We are good at stuffing everything we choose not to deal with.  We can become defensive and live in flight or fright mode.  Our Inner Child, then, can magnify its childhood demands, its need for attention, its wants, it needs.  Fight only adds more drama we will carry through the stages of being feminine.  Flight only prolongs suffering or negativity. 

Some of us will want love and care and understanding, and, yet, we attract the opposite.  We are blocked by past unmet needs and we forget we have the skills to move past it all.  Some of us go through periods of our childhood trauma, over and over, and tend it like a wounded child...which it is.  We, as mothers, and crones, need to turn back and comfort and guide that child within.  In that is the healing and the letting go of past stuff we are dragging along like a dirty old baby blanket.  To drag that stuff along will mean more suffering. 

To heal the Child is to feel great compassion rather than the great hurt.  We are now the adult that can comfort and nurse the wounded child within.  We need to turn to that child and assure it you will not abandon it again.  As we turn and care for our child-self, we may be healing generations of hurt.  Many of us have adopted our parents and their parents wounded children.  An abuser has been abused.  The hurt hurt.  We can generate so much love for ourselves, that we can become the answer to ancestor's prayers.  When we heal ourselves, we are healing the next seven generations, say the elders. 

I challenge you to love, so love yourself, so that you can be the change;  so that you can be the role model for those along the path of finding our way home.  Nurture that little girl within so that she can truly love and be loved.

For this page of MyStory, I have made sure to leave some blank spaces where I can add more when it comes to me. 

I have used a painting from an earlier journal, cut and paste, with a background, in that painting, that is full of modeling paste stenciling.  I have not done' the Baby' because so much of that section of life has been healed with my finding by birth family.  I have a sense if my wounding, still to be worked on, belongs to preadolescent and adolescence. 

I listed the Goddesses who are relationship with The Child/the Inner Child.  These Goddesses have ways of helping one deal with the Inner Child healing.    The fawn is there because I have a sense that my Inner child is wary, gentle, and carries the gifts and insecurities of a fawn.

Can you do an art journal page that expresses the inner child within? 

©Carol Desjarlais 9.25.17