Month: August 2023

I’m going to invite you to have a think with me about a term I hear lots of us use.

Usually about ourselves in relation to a degree of sensitivity we carry. We talk about picking up everyone else’s energy. Of everyone walking right through us. We often say we feel quite helpless in the face of it.

The term we often use to describe ourself is Empath. And the Internet and bookstores are full of advice about how to manage being this sensitive to others’ energy and emotions in a world full of what those same givers of advice tend to call toxic people or even energy vampires.

You’ll notice, by the way, that it’s always the other person’s fault.

It’s incredibly hard work being an empath, isn’t it?
Getting it all, feeling it all, absorbing it all?

Picking up the pain of a stranger so deeply as they walk by that your entire body hurts?

Feeling dizzy and sick in a crowd or café from the energy coming your way?

For several years, one of the most important tasks I had was to help young therapists in training to use their empathic skills differently. To build empathic muscle and emotional resilience. To transform a liability into a strength.

I thought it might be helpful to share some of the key secrets here.

So, first, here is the bad news. It’s where we have to start. It’s going to be a shock to some, but we need to begin at the beginning: empaths are not empathising at all; they are actually identifying.

I repeat, empaths are not empathising, they are identifying.

To explain what I mean, imagine you have someone drowning out in the middle of a lake. If you’re identifying, you’re so overcome by what it would be like if you were the person drowning that before you know it you’ve jumped in too, even though you can’t swim, and now there are two people drowning instead of one.
If you’re a tuned in, canny empath with muscle, you’re observing what’s going on with enormous understanding and compassion, you feel the other’s fear and panic, you hold it inside you long enough to transmute it through the sheer power of loving intention and you breathe out calm and your belief and strength and knowledge that this person can swim.

You don’t jump in; you stay on the shore, talking them through, hearing, noticing, showing you get it, making sure they know they’re not alone. And that these feelings threatening to drown them can be survived.

There’s nothing new or magical about this. It’s what tuned-in mothers and fathers do for their babies all the time. Watch carefully and you’ll see it happening. You’ll see a baby fraught with fear or rage or frustration become miraculously soothed because a parent is showing that these feeling can be survived and managed. The parent takes those feelings into their own body, holds them a while, and then gives them back to the baby in a processed and manageable form.

And this is the crucial bit for us to understand if we’re going to become true empaths rather than identifiers—if we’re going to become empaths with muscle who can make a difference.

See, those of us who grew up learning to be empaths without muscle (identifiers) usually grew up with either an over-anxious parent who couldn’t manage their own feelings very well, or a pretty shut down parent who could give us little or no help in managing our own feelings, because they simply did not do feelings.

In the first case—that of an over-anxious parent—we were required to become what is called, in my theoretical background, a “container” for that parent, because that parent could not act as a container for themselves.
We’re not talking blame here, just cause and effect. If you can’t contain your own feelings, you look for someone else to contain them for you. In this case, your child. You. Me.

Trouble is, a child does not have the resources to be a container for someone else’s feelings, because a child only learns how to contain their own feelings when a parent capable of managing their own feelings shows them how. You see how complicated this is getting?

In the second scenario—a parent who is emotionally shut down—the child has a parent who is also unable to show a child how to contain their feelings. Instead of knowing how to do this themselves, they have discovered what seems like a safe alternative, which is to push them all away out of sight and shut down. This is called splitting. Psychically, we split off our unwanted and unacknowledged feelings unconsciously, and put them into someone else.

Typically, these two parents often show up together, so that we have one parent who is emotionally overflowing and another who is emotionally shut down. Remember, we’re not allocating any blame here—these parents are the way they are because of the parenting they themselves received, which clearly also gave little help with how to manage feelings.

So now, back to the child.

Without help to either contain or process feelings—which are pretty big and frightening things to a child—this child is now exposed to feelings and images in the raw; wild feelings, if you like, with no help to know how to tame them.

As the child develops, feelings remain frightening, a threat rather than a friend, an attacker rather than an ally. Feelings and images continue to hold quite nightmarish proportions, and we have a fearful relationship with them, particularly those we receive from other people.

Instead of welcoming feeling as helpful information, we dread what feelings do to us. We dread the physical sensation of a feeling in our body. We don’t know how to receive and then process what is filling our senses; we are the ones who end up drowning.

So, the biggy: what do we do instead?

Here are my own thoughts on that. They are just my thoughts, and I make no claim that they are anything more than thoughts. Still, I hope they maybe have some use.

Supposing we were to do the following: we begin to process and transmute the energy we receive, rather than merely absorb it.

I would suggest that what the world needs, and I am talking spiritually here now, as well as emotionally and psychically, is not more “empaths,” but more “transmuters.”

I’m talking lightworker talk here.
We know, many of us, that everything is light, and that we are beings of light. We know that the only difference between one expression or manifestation of light and another is the frequency at which it vibrates.

Feelings are light energy vibrating. When we absorb, temporarily hold and process, and then re-release energy which has been soothed by our attention and empathic understanding, we change that energy’s vibration. And once you’ve discovered to bring calm attention to another’s out of control vibration, you can become amazingly effective at transmuting energy in that way.

It’s what tuned-in parents do, and what skillful therapists do.

It’s what empaths with muscle do when they have become lightworkers.

So, suppose we were to become what we were meant to be, what we came here to be: lightworkers who know their purpose. Lightworkers who transmute light vibrationally, who can take light that is vibrating at a low frequency and transmutes it into energy vibrating at the highest frequency possible: that of love. Exactly like the parent I described earlier soothing a distressed baby.

We might not have put it in those terms always, but that is what a lightworker does.

A lightworker is an empath with muscle.

In practice, that means we’d cease going around absorbing everyone’s unwanted emotion, and instead we’d start going round learning to tell what’s ours and what is not, and releasing what isn’t ours, with enormous love and understanding and compassion—with true empathy—to the Universe.

We would get smart, we would get knowing, we would become aware. We’d start noticing that feelings that belong to others have a different quality, bring shock and heat and are sudden. And that we can become practiced at knowing the difference.

We’d stop feeling fearful and start being loving instead. Radiating outward such love and compassion that any low vibrational energy with which we come into contact cannot fail to be transmuted into that same frequency of love.

Can you see what that could do? Can you catch the excitement of that? Can you see it? Can you see how a planet where loving souls were consciously transmuting energy they received, that others couldn’t deal with, but which they did know how to deal with, could become transformed?

We would no longer do it by accident, a bit hit and miss. We would do it consciously, in awareness, with purpose. And through that, we would bring enormous power to this planet, and we would keep the flow going.

This is the true gift of an empath, who has been transformed from an identifier into a lightworker.

We’ve served our apprenticeships. Now let’s show the world what we are made of!

The other day, as I sat in a pub garden one evening enjoying the sunshine, I watched a tiny drama being acted out. You could easily have missed it. It lasted all of thirty seconds. However, in that thirty seconds something huge happened in a little girl’s life.

The little girl in question was playing on a wooden climbing frame, consisting of a castle, turret, and slide. Her daddy was standing at the bottom of the ladder you had to climb up to get onto it, and she was playing a delicious game. She would run up the little runway to the turret at the top, then turn and run joyously back down towards her daddy, laughing openly and freely in the anticipation that when she reached him he would blow her a huge kiss and laugh back.

They were playing a game that told her that, in that moment, she was the centre of his world, and it felt wonderful.

Then the tiny drama occurred.

While she was running up towards the turret, with her back to him, her daddy was called over to sort out something to do with a food order, and another daddy moved into that space and helped his little son up the ladder. The little girl ran down excitedly, squealing with laughter, to the place where she expected her daddy to be, full of anticipation once again of the blown kiss and the intimacy between them.

But instead, she pulled up short as she ran face to face into this other man, a stranger. Her confusion was tangible, and she clearly did not know what to do.

Then she did what she had learned to do with her daddy when he was not really paying her attention. She put her head on one side and smiled widely at the man. But instead of responding with a smile back, like she had expected, this man looked right through her, as if she did not exist, and then shouted at his son who was crawling on his hands and knees up the slope and getting dirty.

In that split second, the drama occurred. You could so easily have missed it. And if you had seen it, you might not have thought that anything of significance had happened.

But I registered the change in this little girl’s face, the lowering of her eyes, the slump of her shoulders, the thumb suddenly going into her mouth for comfort. The shame.

She sidled off, and sat down in a corner of the climbing frame, clearly troubled and confused. Now that was just a tiny, almost imperceptible drama, and her daddy quickly noticed where she was and, although he didn’t know what had caused her change of mood, he responded by sweeping her up in his arms and blowing into her neck, making her giggle and wriggle, and everything was restored.

But here’s the thing. Supposing that this tiny drama were to happen every single day, many times a day. And that the man (or woman) who looked straight through her was not a stranger, but her mummy or daddy.

Then time and again that little girl would experience the shame of openly anticipating and hoping and opening up, only to feel the shame of having got it wrong, of having misjudged it, having expected too much, discovering she was not worthy.

Because this is the root of all shame.

It is the sense that we hoped for something that we clearly didn’t deserve, opened ourselves up and revealed what we hoped for or were anticipating, only to discover it was not reciprocated; dared to think we deserved something only to realize painfully that we were not considered worthy of it.

Shame is always about humiliation resulting from a mismatch of expectations. Those awful comments adults make to children, about being ‘too big for their boots,’ or questions like, ‘What makes you think you’re so special?’ do exactly this to a child. And the damage is seen years later, in grown up children who feel unworthy, unlovable, confused about intimacy, ashamed of being open or showing love. And then the damage goes down through another generation, and another.

A wonderful analyst, writing years ago, a man by the name of Kohut, was one of my absolute heroes when I was training as a therapist. He stated, quite simply, that in order to give a child a sense of worthiness and their place in the world, the child needed to feel and experience that they were ‘the sparkle in their mother’s eye.’ For ‘mother’, you could just as easily substitute ‘father’. Or ‘significant carer.’ And another wonderful theorist, Donald Winnicott, talked about the need a child has to see themselves first in the mirror of their parent’s eyes before they can have a sense of existing fully in their own right.

We learned, as therapists in the making, that the relationship that a client formed with us was a ‘second chance.’ That is, that the therapist could mirror back to the client that they were seen, understood, and known, and that the client could experience being allowed to sparkle, and to be the sparkle in the therapist’s eyes for a while. I have seen the power of relationship, and of being truly seen, heal so much, and I know the power of that mirror that we can hold up for each other.

Let each us be that mirror, each and every one of us, and let us never for a moment underestimate the wonderful gift we bestow on each other in the offering of one of the greatest experiences any of us can ever have: that it is fine, and not shameful to seek and to give love, and that we are more than worthy to do so.

I want to tell you a story. It is a bit of a fairy tale, I suppose.

It is the story of a woman called Molly, but could just as easily be about a woman called Kate, or a man called Sam, or Thomas. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I will begin…

There was once a little girl called Molly. She was a very lucky little girl. She had a very busy and successful daddy, who worked very hard so that her family could have lots of expensive treats and holidays and presents. She also had a very busy mummy, who was always organizing things, helping other people, here, there and everywhere.

Everyone loved her mummy, because she was always so helpful and kind. Molly knew that these were very important things that her mummy and daddy had to do, and so she knew she must not mind. She knew that to mind was being selfish, and made her a bad person.

So Molly grew up learning how to be good. Very good.

When Molly was all grown up, she realized that she knew how to be good, but that she did not know how to be happy. She asked her dad, who told her, ‘Get yourself a good job, earn lots of money, get yourself a big house and fancy car, and you will be happy.’

So Molly tried that. However, although she did everything her dad had suggested, she still did not know how to be happy. In fact, she felt a bit empty and a bit lonely.

So Molly asked her mum, to see if she could tell her. Her mum said, ‘Serve others, always be there whenever anyone needs you. You will be tired, and there will not be time to do things for yourself, but people will love you for it, and so you will be happy.’

So Molly tried this. Still she did not feel happy. In fact, truth be told, she felt a bit cross.

So Molly went to see her doctor, and told him that she wanted to be happy. Her doctor suggested she take a little white tablet once a day for six months. She did as he suggested, and it made her feel a little calmer, maybe, but once she stopped taking them, she felt just as unhappy as before.

A friend suggested to Molly that she read some self-help books, and so she went out and bought some. The books told her to write loving letters to herself, and to look at herself in the mirror and tell herself that she was beautiful.

Molly tried very hard to do this. However, every time she sat down to write herself a loving letter, she could not think what there was to love. And every time she looked into her eyes in the mirror, and tried to say aloud the words the books suggested, the words felt hollow, ridiculous, like they were meant for someone else. Someone more worthy. More loveable.

One day, Molly found herself walking through a forest. It was a path she had never come across before. In fact, she had no idea how she got there. She had just sort of closed her eyes and become very still. She had found herself just listening to herself breathing. And that had brought her here.

As she walked along the mossy path through the trees, she noticed a Wise Woman. Just sitting, looking at her. Almost expectantly.

She decided there was nothing to lose. And so she went towards the Wise Woman. As she came closer, she could feel a strange energy, tingling through her body. In an inexplicable way, she knew it was an energy that she and the Wise Woman shared. She knew that they were meant to meet here.

The Wise Woman looked at her and waited for her to speak. ‘I want to find happiness,’ Molly said. ‘I don’t know what to do to be happy.’

The Wise Woman said a strange thing. She said, ‘My child, what do you need?’

Molly was puzzled, and felt a bit cross. Firstly, the Wise Woman had called her a child. And she was not a child. She was a grown up. Could the Wise Woman not see that? Also, the Wise Woman had asked her what she needed! How useless was that! Did she not realize that she had come here to understand what to do, not to be asked what she needed?

The Wise Woman saw her reaction, and just smiled. And waited.

Molly realized that she was being invited to say something. So she thought hard, and then she said, ‘I need to stop needing so much!’

The Wise Woman considered, head on one side for several moments. Then she asked, ‘What is it you need, my child, that you feel is too much?’

Molly was flabbergasted. She felt like she was being criticized, got at; she felt stupid. Why did the Wise Woman keep asking the same question? She had given her the answer already. Wasn’t she listening!

Then something clicked. She gasped, as if a shock had gone through her. She looked at the Wise Woman, and looked into kindly, knowing eyes. The Wise Woman smiled and nodded. And waited.

Molly looked at her again, then looked away, and then back at her. She saw a depth of knowing in those eyes. Somehow, they gave her courage.

She took a deep breath, and began: ‘I need to be loved.’ She said, almost in a whisper.

She looked at the Wise Woman for approval, but the Wise Woman just smiled, met her gaze, and waited.

‘I need to be listened to…and heard.’ Again, the waiting, and the encouraging smile.

Suddenly, she knew she could say it all. All of it. All the needing and the wanting, the longings she had kept in for so long: ‘I need to say what I’m feeling I need to be allowed to feel what I feel……I need to not feel guilty……or ashamed or bad. I need to know I’m okay. Just as I am. To love me!’

The words were starting to tumble out now.

‘I need to laugh out loud…to be noisy…to enjoy myself to say yes…to say no…To choose ’

The Wise Woman still met her eyes. Molly stopped and felt the connection. It was so profound that it took her breath away.

Then the Wise Woman spoke, very quietly, almost lovingly. The compassion in her voice was so soothing, such a relief, like balm on a sore wound.

‘My child, you have always needed to do those things. They were always yours. To experience them was the reason you came.

But you had forgotten, and now you have remembered.

When we fall into a place of forgetting, we forget our joy, our power, our magnificence, our freedom. And in its place, we learn shame. You have learned to feel ashamed for being you, my child. You must forgive yourself.’

Again, the surprise at what the Wise Woman had said.

Molly thought and thought, but could not understand. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

The Wise Woman nodded. It was clear that she did not need any further explanation. That she knew what Molly meant.

‘When we forget who we are, and why we came here, we start to believe we have got things badly wrong, have done things that make us bad. We feel terrible shame. We stop being able to be ourselves, still less to love ourselves. Instead, there is only shame.’

‘You have to forgive yourself for forgetting, my child. For allowing shame to take over. For hating and despising yourself.’

Molly thought about the Wise Woman’s words. At first, they sounded extreme but, the more she pondered, she noticed a growing feeling inside her that said the words were true.

‘What must I do?’ she asked.

‘What would you like to do?’ the Wise Woman asked her. Softly. Like she, too, was holding her breath.

Slowly, meaningfully, Molly stood up. ‘I would like to laugh…and shout…and dance…and run…and splash in puddles! I want to say it like it is, no more pretending, I want to choose, to change, to be free, to be me!’ Me!’

She was shouting now. And grinning. And laughing. Arms wide, head thrown back.

Suddenly, she became aware that the Wise Woman was no longer there. She felt bereft, as if a part of her was missing.

‘Where are you?’ she cried out. ‘Don’t leave me now. Not now. I’ve only just begun to know you.’

Somewhere, she could not tell whether it came from inside her or outside of her, she felt a voice. As it spoke, it seemed to vibrate all through her. The air around her sparkled and shimmered.

‘You haven’t lost me, my child. You can never lose me, nor I you. We are forever one, always were, always will be. You need only listen, and you will remember.’

Then she heard a peel of laughter, bright, sparkly, effervescent, full and joyous. It was like a thousand bells tinkling.

The air was full. What of, Molly could not tell, but somehow she again felt a remembering stir in her.

‘But for now, beloved child of mine, you need to go and jump in some puddles!’

So she did!

“DEAR HUMAN,

Sometimes we in the animal realms look on and shake our heads at the stark staring obviousness of what you so easily miss. Sometimes we even cover our eyes so we don’t have to watch… 

But I’ve been elected – and I tell you, it was a long and heated discussion, because none of us wanted the job – to try to set you straight on a few things.

So I’m going to give it my best shot. I’m hoping you’ll get what I’m saying, but from your track record so far, I’m not holding my breath.

So anyway, here goes: This striving and competing you keep harping on about, getting to the top, being the best, shining, it really shows just how little you understand of who and what you really are! It’s so simple to us that we don’t get why you find it so hard to grasp. We animals simply accept and allow what is. We live in the moment. We feel the sun and the rain on our backs, we sniff the scents in the air, we sleep when we need to sleep, and play when we want to play. . And we don’t even think about it. We don’t think about it because we know we are part of all that is. We understand the way the Universe works far better than most of you even begin to comprehend.

Okay, okay, see this is what I thought would happen. I told them. I said you’d start shouting me down. I told them. I said, ‘You know how it’ll go, they’ll start quoting at me. They’ll start listening in order to reply rather than really listening.’

And they said, ‘But we have to try, don’t we?’

They said, ‘We know their ego is going to get in the way, and they’re going to be convinced they know better.’

They said, ‘We know their ego is going to make them want to tell you it’s more complicated than that, and we agree that their ego thing is what stresses us animal guides out more than anything else about our humans, but hey, give it a go. Just give it a go,’ they said.

So can you just at least try to listen? Just for five minutes. It won’t take long, I promise, and then you can go back to your intellectual stuff – and believing you’re so much cleverer than everyone else. You really dont know what you dont know, it has to be said! But I’m not supposed to say that because they said it would get your backs up, so I won’t – and then when I’ve said it I can get back to my job of trying to keep you humans from messing up.

Okay? Deal?

So here goes. We animals live in what we call ‘The Flow.’

We live in it. It’s not something outside of us, we don’t make it happen. The Flow simply is. The Flow meets our every need, and we don’t spend any time worrying about tomorrow or beating ourselves up about, or crying over, yesterday.

That truth takes away all stress, all angst, for us. We know The Flow is. We know The Flow is abundant. We know the Flow always takes care. We take what we need and are never greedy for more. We watch the world going by, but always know we are in The Flow and not of this world we OBSERVE… oh, surprised you, that bit, didn’t it? You thought we weren’t that clever, huh? Well, think again!

You humans also live in The Flow. It’s not outside of you. It simply is. But you have forgotten this. You have forgotten the way in which we are all connected. That we are the Flow. That we can never be separate from it, because the Flow is everything. But you seem to think that you’re outside of it. You even have discussions about whether or not the Flow even exists. Can’t tell you much we chuckle amongst ourselves at that one!

And because you think you’re outside of the Flow, you develop this striving thing that we animals just can’t understand. You seem to think that because your brains have grown big you don’t need the Flow any more.

But you really have lost your way. You’ve forgotten that the Flow gives you life. Is life. Is everything. You believe you know more than the Flow. And that’s led you to make so many terrible mistakes! It’s made you dissatisfied, anxious, fearful. It’s made you believe you’re on your own. You’ve stopped noticing how you’re guided, supported, looked after. The way things fall in your path exactly when you need them. That there’s always a way through. That the Flow holds you safe.

And because you’ve forgotten, you’ve started to believe in your own omnipotence, not realising that any power you have, every single discovery you make, every insight or bit of inspiration you ever have, is already there in the Flow, just waiting for the right moment for it to become available to you. You somehow believe you’ve done it all by yourself. You’ve lost the humility to recognise that the Flow is what is evolving, through you. That the Flow holds all wisdom, all knowledge, knows you way better than you know yourself. Because the Flow is you. Just as the Flow is me. And all that is, seen or unseen.

You’re not making new discoveries, you’re being guided to discover those things. You were always going to discover them. The thought was in your head before you even realised you’d thought it. Why? Because you’re not separate. You are such an integral part of the Flow, and nothing exists that is not the Flow.

But because you have decided you’re all individuals, you’ve decided that you need to strive to make things happen. You exhaust yourselves striving. Quite frankly, we get exhausted watching you!

See, you don’t need to strive. You don’t need to try. You don’t need to compete, or be the best, or try to show how special you are, or try to prove you can control the universe with science. It’s led to you spending a lot of time living in your heads. And forgetting that wisdom resides in the body. You even seem to think that what you are is tied to your brain. That if your brain stops working, you will cease to exist! We really can’t get our heads around that one! Don’t you realise that we, you, everything, all exists in the Flow, and that the Flow simply is!

We animals understand it so differently. We know we exist in the Flow. We have a saying. Whenever any of us meet each other, we simply murmur, ‘We are in The Flow.’ Now that’s pretty sacred to us, that saying. It is how we greet each other, and how we take leave of each other. Before we take life, we say to the one who gives their life to us, ‘We are in The Flow.’ We say it with appreciation, with gratitude. And we don’t take that life until the one who is giving their life has replied back, ‘We are in The Flow.’

We know we come from The Flow, that we go back to The Flow. That The Flow is in us and around us and in all things. That we are The Flow, as are all things. And before we choose to incarnate – just as you do – we visualise how our brief time here on this earth plane is going to go. We do it briefly, and quickly, because we know by now how pretty insignificant that all is in the overall scheme of things, in the life of The Flow.

We know that we will live out what we agreed, and that it will always be going the way it needs to be going. And we know we are always being taken care of by The Flow. That everything is always working out.

See, if only you humans could get that. Really get that. But you cut yourselves off from The Flow by choosing to do the striving thing. If you would only use your senses, and trust them as we animals do, it could all be so simple. Because I tell you, when you allow yourself to be in The Flow, life is joyous and peaceful and worry free.

You don’t make things happen, you allow everything to unfold. You’re here for the adventure, exactly as we are. Voluntarily and intentionally. Nothing is random! Life is always working out for you because, just as we animals do, you planned how it would go before you came. So you don’t have to make it happen, because it’s already going to happen. You simply have to allow it and enjoy the ride, this time around.

When you simply allow, you will always find happiness. Always. There. This is how you live joyfully and with ease, moment by moment. It could all be so simple. So much less fearful. You could simply live trusting the Flow.

So that’s it. You just have to let go, allow, appreciate, be joyous and curious, and go with The Flow, in The Flow. When you do that, everything you spend so much time reading and talking about will happen for you. Because you’ll be in the flow.

Okay, so, thanks for listening. I’m going to find me a shady tree now and lay under it for a while. After that, I’ll see what takes my fancy.

Just going with The Flow.

See you around x

Yours ever in the Flow

Your Animal Guide”

The other day, I was sitting in a courtyard outside a tea shop, enjoying the sunshine and the general comings and goings of what is a beautiful place, when my attention was caught by a small family group sitting just back from me and to my left.

It was a man and woman, a young child and a toddler, maybe twenty months old or so. The family were having some cake and drinks, and a collie dog approached and was clearly curious, sniffing the toddler as he sat in his buggy and wagging his tail.

The toddler was transfixed, then excited, and clearly wanted to say hello. He reached out and patted the dog, a bit clumsily, as toddlers do, and the dog responded. He moved closer and gave the toddler’s hand a lick.

The toddler wriggled in delight, and his dad noticed, and encouraged him, saying what a lovely dog it was, and how nice it was to make friends and say hello. The toddler visibly expanded, reveling in this new friendship.

Grinning from ear to ear, he patted and stroked the collie, talking to him animatedly in his way, and receiving happy licks and tail wags back, as these two formed a quite beautiful bond. The world was a friendly, fun place where you reach out to other souls and they reach right back.

Then, this little person suddenly had a new idea. You could see it register. The deliciousness of it. He would share some of his food with his new friend! He broke off a piece of his cake, and held it out to the dog, smiling. With infinite tenderness, the dog very gently came forward to a position where he could take the offered food with his tongue so as not to risk catching the infant’s fingers with his teeth.

The moment was magical. The infant was giving something of his own, that he was able to give, and his friend was accepting it.

And then, the infant’s dad noticed. In the same moment, the infant realized that his dad had seen, and grinned broadly at him, expecting him to share the wonder of what was happening. Just like he had before when the dog had first come over.

However, his dad said, in a voice full of urgency and anxiety, ‘Don’t do that! He might bite you!’

The toddler’s face startled, then crumpled, and then his whole body collapsed, and he let out the biggest howl of a painful sob you have ever heard. And when he had his breath back from that first sob, he just sobbed and sobbed again. He was inconsolable.

The dog slunk away, confused. The little boy cried and cried, and did not know how to stop. His parents tried to distract him, showed him toys, tried to get him to laugh, offered him more of the cake, but all he could do was sob.

In the end, his mother picked him up out of the buggy he was sitting in, cuddled him to her, and walked away from the table and out of the courtyard. You could still hear him crying for a good ten to fifteen minutes.

Years ago, when I was a psychotherapist in training, one of the most emotionally challenging aspects of that training was a two-year child observation. We observed a child, and that child’s interactions with the world, every week for two years. We were trained to look and really see. To see the meaning, to notice what was going on in that child’s internal and external world, and watch how that child’s developing self was affected by those experiences. To respond emotionally to the detail.

For those of us who were parents, it was such a revelation, a privilege like no other opportunity ever, before or since, a chance to really see. And what had just happened reminded me of so many instances observed during that child observation where we, as grown-ups, well intentioned as we most certainly usually are, ride rough shod over a child’s emerging world so thoroughly that we spoil something that cannot easily be retrieved.

Now, some onlookers, watching that scene, would have felt that the father was absolutely right to say what he said. He had not wanted his son to be bitten by the dog.

But of-course, the father was not really looking. The dog’s body language was in no way aggressive, and both child and dog were being careful of each other.

Other onlookers might have decided that the little boy was having a tantrum. That he was objecting to not being allowed to do what he wanted. They would possibly even say that he wanted his own way and was spoiled, needed to be shown he could not have everything he wanted.

Others looking on might decide that the mother was making way too much of it all, taking him away and cuddling him for all that time. That it would teach him to do the same another time, showing him how to get his own way.

All these things you would find people thinking. We are brought up and conditioned to believe that children know no better, that they have no inner wisdom of their own, that the ‘grown up’ view of the world and how it operates is self-evidently the correct one.

However, when we do that, we miss the point. Just as that father missed the point. We miss the glorious truth that our children come into the world to teach us, and not the other way round. However, if you listened, really listened, with empathy, care, and openness, to the quality of the sobs coming from that little body, you would have known that it was not about any of those things that people not really listening might have decided it was.

Because the thing you would have heard, right there in the midst of those heart-rending sobs, would have been grief. And once you had heard the grief, you might find your own feelings stirred. You might find yourself experiencing flickers of long lost memory, of when you too were newly here, of when you still knew you were a spark of Oneness coming on an adventure, of when you still remembered the place where we all shared the same heart and were One, of when you still knew that we were all Love.

A time before the adults around you introduced you to fear.

That is what was in the sobs. That was the overwhelming grief. That was the loss. We do that to each other all the time, do we not? The word of caution, the hesitation in our voice, the warning, the frown, the look of disapproval or anxiety or dismay.

We perpetuate the myth that fear is the correct way, the sensible way, the self-protective way, the way the world is.

But just supposing we gave it a try, this other way. The way that this little boy sitting in his buggy offering some of his food to that dog came to remind us of, to show us all over again.

Just supposing we did that.

Wow, what a world this could be!

I am sitting in a motorway services sipping a coffee, my mind taken up with where I have been and where I am going, when I am suddenly captivated by a family sitting a little way in front of me.

Specifically, by the baby who is bouncing up and down gleefully, laughing and grinning and happy, on his mother’s knee as she holds him upright in a standing position so he can flex his legs and discover what they can do.

In this moment, both for mother and baby, there is nothing else. They are totally absorbed in what is happening between them, and the sheer joy and fun of it. The loving bond is tangible; I can feel it even at a distance. I can also see something else, and it is quite magical.

It is this:

This baby does not yet know that he is separate. For this baby, his mother is a part of him and he is a part of her; they are one and the same being. You can see this by the way he interacts with her. He treats her body as if it is an extension of his, when she laughs he clearly experiences it as if it is him laughing, he knows they are in complete unison. There is as yet no ‘other.

As I watch this baby, I realize that he is barely here yet. He is only very newly arrived in this big earth playground. He is wide eyed and full of the energy from which he has come. In his perception of the world, he is still barely physical. He still knows he is Fundamental Consciousness.

He still remembers. He is pure light energy, still shimmering and settling into his body, still in touch with the heartbeat from which he has come. He is full of the freedom to be. He as yet knows no other way than to be fully and gloriously himself.

He is also a very powerful creator, who manifests exactly what he wants with ease. He wants something to happen, he puts it out there, and he experiences instant manifestation. He never doubts for a moment that what he is wanting, through feeling and imagining, will come to him.

And so it does. He is insistent, confident and clear, and knows that he is worthy.

It is that quality in babies we so enjoy about babies, isn’t it? It is part of what makes them so loveable. This baby is still free to be the unconditional love that he actually is. He has not yet clothed himself in the vast layers of disguise and defense with which we, who have been here so much longer, have learned to clothe ourselves.

He has not yet learned the ways of the world. He is not wearing a mask; he has not yet learned how to pretend. He is not putting a particular face on for the world.

What you see, when you look into his face, and when you watch with delight as he embraces fully the experience he is currently caught up in, is his true nature. He is real in ways that we have ceased to know how to be real. He has not yet learned to be any other way.

It is clear, watching, that this world he has recently jumped into is fascinating and exciting and that he is unashamedly curious and unapologetically open and honest in his experiencing of it. He is still anticipating life as the great adventure that he set out upon when he decided to come. He still perceives abundance surrounding him.

However, it is the recognition that he does not yet know that he is physically separate from everything else around him that catches me. The fact that, as yet, there is no me and not-me. It all just is.

And I feel a sudden pang of deep emotion, which is a mixture of joy for the sense of connection with all that is which he still retains, and a sense of the loss of this he is going to experience as he immerses himself more completely in the life experiences which lay ahead of him.

I know he has chosen this, and I know that he is going to be fine. But just momentarily I grieve for the loss, and almost in the same moment I recognize that it is my own grief at this loss that I am feeling, and my own profound recognition of the oneness that he and I, seemingly total strangers randomly finding ourselves in the same place and at the same time, share.

This so true of babies, isn’t it? The way they can make us catch ourselves and fill up with emotion, bring tears to our eyes and joy to our hearts as nothing else can. It is part of the reason we all love them: they melt our hearts. And those last few words hold the real secret about babies, don’t they? They melt our hearts – a strange expression, makes it sounds like our hearts need to be unfrozen, as if they need to be softened again.

What is that about? What is it that babies do to us? For us?

I reckon that in the eyes of a baby we see a reminder of who we know ourselves to actually be. We see our own eternal beauty and radiance and zest and eagerness and loveliness reflected there. We see our actual face. We see who we were when we first came, just like this baby. We see who we really are, without all the clutter and complication of this strange reality. Without all the effort.

We see beyond, and we remember. Our heart opens wide once more, and we feel the stirring of all we really are but have learned to put away. When we look into the eyes of this newly arrived little being, we see who we really are. We see the beauty of Onenedd in this little newly arrived being, wide open and free, ready to love and eager for adventures, fearless and curious and all joined up, not yet defended or guarded, living from the heart because the head hasn’t got in the way yet.

We realize, in a fluttering, fleeting moment of recognition which we can hardly express, that this little being all of us. It is pure consciousness, pure awareness, pure Love. Pure Fundamental Consciousness already expanding, connecting, and living fully in the moment. Moment by moment. And loving, putting no barriers in the way of love.

Love is our original energy. It is our natural state. It is what connects us, and what we are. When we remember this, just like the baby we once were, we remember that we already are completely loveable and loved, because love can be nothing else, and that we already do know, if only we will allow it, how to unconditionally love. We never really fully forget.

I wish you joyous remembering!

Catherine’s in trouble. It’s 3am and it’s about to happen again.

She can already feel it building and she knows, with a pang of fear and dread that grips her like an iron fist around her heart—merciless and cruel and gloating—that within just a few seconds she will be beyond help.

The heat’s rising, tingling and fizzing through her body, she can hear her blood pounding as she holds her breath in awful anticipation of what’s to come. Every muscle tightens until she’s her body’s prisoner, until this thing that’s now inevitable finally overpowers her.

She’s sweating now, and the constriction’s getting closer. The paralysis is almost absolute: she can’t swallow, she can’t cry out, she can’t move.

And then the wave hits, just as she knew it would.
It is a terrifying and ferocious wave, battering both her body and her mind. As it hits she can no longer get her breath because there is no air in her lungs.

Catherine is once again sure that this time she must surely die.

Catherine’s lived with this terror all her life, but today it’s particularly acute.

She’s in a hotel room in Tokyo, thousands of miles away from home, on a business trip by invitation to deliver a keynote lecture at a prestigious event and in this moment it seems impossible that she will make it through the next moment…let alone the day to come.

She’s being swept straight into the eye of the terrifying tidal wave we call a panic attack.
And then, at the last minute, just as the tide is about to swallow her and carry her away, she remembers.

With seconds to spare, she hears her therapist’s voice, calm and reassuring and certain. She grabs hold of a rock just in time to connect back with safety before being swept out to sea.
The voice becomes her own, and suddenly, she’s hauling herself back onto dry land.
What she heard her therapist’s voice say was:

“This is a memory feeling…only a memory feeling. It feels like it’s happening right now. It feels very real. But it’s memory only. Breathe…Loosen…Soften. You don’t need to fight, you’re safe. It’s in the past, come back to now. Let it go, let it go…just breathe. Breathe out. Out.”

Catherine is calming now. She’s doing what she’s been taught, feeling the carpet beneath her feet, listening to the sounds in the room. The clock, the radiator, her feet moving on the asset. Her own breathing.

Most of all, her own breathing.
Gradually, her chest is feeling less tight and constricted, as she releases the air that had filled her lungs to capacity, making her feel as if she couldn’t get air. She’s remembering that it was because she’d been gasping in small breaths and forgetting to breathe out. She releases the tension, and feels her whole body begin to relax.
At last!

Catherine’s a professional woman, highly thought-of and respected in her field. She travels the world researching, writing, lecturing. And yet, there’s one thing that can lead her to feel terrified to the point of a panic attack: separation from those she loves.

Let me tell you a little more about Catherine and, in the process, a little more about memory feelings and how panic attacks are triggered.
Understanding what’s going on in our memory can really help, as can the discovery that we can control the physiological symptoms that have been triggered once we join everything up.
So here goes:

When Catherine was just two years old, something happened that has stayed in her memory banks unprocessed for nearly fifty years. Everything in her young life changed because her mum became severely ill and had to be taken into hospital. She was in and out of hospital thereafter for two years.
Catherine just came home one day, having been collected from a friend’s house by her grandmother instead of her mother as she’d expected and when she got home, her mum had gone. Her mum was in and out of intensive care and the family decided that visiting would be too frightening for Catherine.

Catherine knew something was seriously wrong.
She picked it up in the lowered voices, worried looks, occasional tears all around her, and in the way the mood in her home had changed. She was filled with childish fears (that no-one knew how to help with) and the pain of missing her mum and believing she was gone forever was something she held in her body and couldn’t begin to know how to share.

Over time, we suppress memories like these.
They don’t have to be as dramatic; nor do they have to even be as significant. Alternatively, they might be more severe.

Any feeling or experience we go through when we’re too young to process it properly is stored in its raw state: a mixture of fear and frightening bodily sensation. It’s the sensations we actually dread.

And so suppressing feelings can become our default coping strategy. And as time goes on, we suppress more and more feelings and experiences until, as adults we continue that same strategy and experience panic.

So let’s pull all this together and tease out the key points:
1. A panic attack is a severe fight or flight response in the body.
2. It’s triggered when something happening now triggers something that happened back then.
3. Physiologically, we bring on a panic attack when we hold our breath, or breathe shallowly and quickly, and tense our muscles tight.
4. We believe we can’t breathe because we’re trying to breathe in when actually we need to breathe out.
5. We believe we can’t move even when we can because we’re holding our muscles rigid.
6. We’re caught in the glare of the headlights of a past event we might not even remember. What it was doesn’t matter. What does matter is knowing it’s memory and reminding ourselves to come back to now.
7. We need to do everything we can to feel safe and grounded in now. Sounds, textures, our breath, our heartbeat, telling ourselves this is memory only, that we are safe, that in this moment nothing bad is happening.
8. Once we start to calm we need to move. Stretch or shake it all out. Anything to prove to ourselves that the paralysis was memory only. And we need to keep breathing out and checking we’re no longer holding our breath or tensing up. To reassure ourselves that we’re free now and safe.
9. Then we need to restore ourselves: a warm drink, something to raise our blood sugar, a hug or a blanket, or fresh air and bare feet on the ground, a walk in nature, music, a nap—whichever works for us.
10. And finally we need to celebrate our true power and what we’ve just managed to do!

It can be summed up like this:
• Breathe — out, again and again.
• Release — move, let go the tension, loosen up.
• Return — come back to now. Do whatever helps to reconnect to where you are now and to reassure yourself that nothing is going wrong here and now. Tell yourself that this is memory only and you are safe.

I wish for you freedom from the past, peace in your now and trust in yourself so that, like Catherine, you can finally taste your true power.

If you’re reading this it’s likely that you (like so many of us) think of yourself as an empath.

And that will likely be because:
1) someone else has told us that this must be why we’re so incredibly sensitive, or

2) we’ve been searching for reasons why we struggle so much in the company of others, or in busy environments, and this is what we’ve come up with.

So I’m here to say to all those who, just like me, have begun to believe the hype: “Not necessarily!”
Or better still, “Wrong!”

I want to share with each one of us who has come to believe it’s us that’s got it wrong a little of the knowledge that, as a psychotherapist and energy worker, I carry around in my pocket. I want to talk about scapegoating and responsibility. I’m not going to pull any punches here.

If by any chance you’re not reading this because you believe you’re an empath, but simply because you’re curious, that’s great! You’re going to look at things through slightly different eyes and this will help you too!

So, let’s start at the beginning and put a so-called empath into a room full of fellow human beings who’ve come along to an ‘Introduction to Mindfulness Day’. Let’s call the empath ‘Steve’.

It’s all going great at the beginning. The guy leading the group through the day comes across as easy, calm and grounded. He talks about mindfulness as a tool, a meditation practice. Something that’s going to help everyone manage their stress or distress better by learning to not engage with their thoughts, but rather by learning to let them just come and go.

So far so good. It all appears to make perfect sense.

However, as Steve sits on the floor, legs tucked beneath him, he begins to detect the ripples going around the room. It’s the old familiar sensations beginning. He can feel tension in his back and his hips, butterflies in his stomach, and he notices that his head becomes dizzy now and then as he tries to listen to the trainer’s words.

He looks around the room. Most people (there are about twenty people seated in a circle) are looking extremely calm and relaxed. One or two are clearly tense or fidgeting but generally, everything on the surface looks fine.

Then Steve catches the eyes of someone sitting over the other side, a young woman who is looking like she’s in pain and on alert, watchful. He recognises her as a fellow empath and smiles. They exchange knowing glances. They’ve both been here before a million times. And, just like every other time, they’d hoped this time might be different. They’d hoped they might have grown thicker skins, firmer boundaries. They’re convinced (because that’s what all the hype about empaths tells them) that it’s completely their fault, that there’s something wrong with them—that they’re just too sensitive.
And the rest of the world is happy for it to stay that way. Scapegoating has always been an extremely effective and convenient way of denying personal responsibility.

However, what’s actually going on is way more complicated than simply Steve being too sensitive. Truth be told, Steve is probably one of the most tuned-in, grounded and aware people in this room.

Why? Because Steve knows what he’s experiencing in his body. Steve is emotionally aware.

And everyone else in that room is busy pushing all their feelings away. It’s everyone else’s split off feelings that Steve—along with the young woman over on the other side of the room—is picking up. That’s the pain in his back and hips, the waves of anxiety that keep crashing through him, the dizziness and fog that keeps assaulting his head and his ability to think.

Before anyone gets a little annoyed by my saying that, or begins to feel a bit offended or defensive about the implications of what I’ve just said, let me say that no-one’s doing this on purpose. No-one’s deciding to do this.

It’s what our psyche does when it’s learned, over time, to detect that there are things we believe are too dangerous to feel. The fear centre in our brain detects their presence way before we even become vaguely aware of them and employs any one of a number of ways of ensuring that we continue to remain unaware.

These are just a few of the more common ones:
1. Denial—these things are not true.
2. Suppression—these things must be locked away in the unconscious.
3. Splitting—things are ‘good or ‘bad.’ Keep the ‘good’ and deny the ‘bad’.
4. Projection—these things don’t belong to me, they’re what the ‘other’ person (or ‘people’) is feeling or thinking, not me.
5. Rationalisation—if I think about these things differently, I can make them feel differently.
6. Intellectualisation—if I distance myself from my feelings by turning them into intellectual concepts, they won’t exist anymore.
7. Displacement—I can’t allow myself to feel this towards you, so I’ll feel it or express it towards someone else instead!
8. Regression—Being a grown-up right now is too hard, so I’m going to revert back to a younger version of me and live there for a while!
9. Sublimation—I’ll channel my feelings into an activity so I don’t feel them.
10. Reaction-Formation—every time I feel this particular feeling, I’ll deny it by making myself feel or behave in the opposite way.

And that’s what everyone in that room is doing. No exceptions! Everyone. These are newbies remember? They haven’t done ‘the work’ of getting to know themselves in order to become aware yet!

And because Steve grew up in a family who didn’t do feelings—his mum was very anxious and couldn’t manage her own feelings let alone Steve’s while his dad was a cold, logical man who didn’t do feelings either—he became ‘the container’ for everyone else’s emotions.

You have no idea how many families, unwittingly and unknowingly, use one of the children in this way. And that child, who’s learned to become the sponge that soaks up what everyone else is feeling, is the adult who becomes what we call an empath.

So, about responsibility…
Well, the empath certainly has to take some responsibility for learning to do things differently. Ideally, Steve will learn to transmute the emotions he’s picking up from everyone around him into something else more manageable. The day will come when Steve will be able to sit in a room like this, breathe in the emotions everyone is busy pushing away, hold them in a sacred space inside him where they’ll no longer cause him physical pain—breathe love and compassion into them—and then breathe that back out into the world transformed. Steve’s a lightworker serving his apprenticeship!

However, there’s another set of responsibilities here too. They, of course, belong to every single person who is busy trying to live in their head instead of in the heart.

When we live in the head, we defend against feeling and we leave it to Steve and others like him to keep cleaning up our emotional debris. When we live in the heart, we live as whole, joined up, emotionally aware and fully-conscious human beings. We allow ourselves to be the perfectly imperfect beings of light and love and power, having the adventure of a complete human experience, that we incarnated here to be!

How about we give it a go!

What if it turned out to be simply amazing?

So how about we clear this up, once and for all?

This, “Thoughts Become Things” thing we have going on.

This, “Be careful what you think” thing. This, “If you knew the power of your thoughts you’d never think another negative thought” thing. How about we look at how the Law of Attraction really works?

One of the greatest spiritual thinkers of our time, Dr. Wayne Dyer, once said, “What I think doesn’t become things; who I am is what becomes things.”

As a psychotherapist steeped in the mind-body-spirit connection and the latest neuroscience research, an energy worker steeped in the latest research into the laws of resonance and entrainment, and a holistic practitioner steeped in a less Westernised understanding of the human biofield and its energy systems, I can tell you that what he said is upheld by everything I know and experience both professionally and in my own life.

See, we have a real problem in the West. We get thoughts and feelings muddled up. And emotions. And beliefs. So let’s get a little clarity.

Let’s start by understanding the difference between a thought, a feeling, an emotion and a belief. Once we’ve done that, we can see way more clearly the part each plays in the vibrational laws of the universe which we call Law of Attraction. And finally, we can then look more accurately at how that information can help us to examine just what we’re putting out there, and how to think about that in a way that helps us.

Let’s over-simplify first and then get complicated afterwards, just because I think that will help us see how everything is inter-connected.

1. Thoughts

A thought is a connecting and sharing of information in the brain. 7×4=28 is a thought. The world is round is a thought. I am 75 years old is a thought.

Thoughts are neutral. They produce a small electrical charge in the brain, but this is of no great significance energetically or vibrationally in itself.

2. Feelings

A feeling is our authentic self speaking our truth to us. A feeling is an inner knowing, and its voice is usually fairly quiet. We discover what we feel in times of quiet reflection or meditation, or in deep conversation with a friend or someone we trust. Sadness is a feeling. Joy is a feeling. Shame is a feeling.

3. Emotions

An emotion is our bodily response to a thought or a perceived situation. Emotions are the big guys, the tangible reactions we feel in our body in response to a thought, a feeling or a belief. Emotions are physical and emotions emit an immense vibrational charge. They are our limbic system letting us know how we’re reacting to our thoughts, feelings or beliefs. These are what we need to become aware of and manage differently in terms of Law of Attraction.

4. Beliefs

A belief is the way we perceive the world, the filter through which we see everything. A belief is based upon everything we’ve known up until this point, and it can be conscious—something of which we’re aware; or it can be unconscious—something which is influencing us to behave and react in certain ways without our knowing it.

So now let’s put some of this together. And let’s talk for a moment about energy and vibration. Specifically, the physical laws of resonance and entrainment. We know that everything is energy. That’s pure quantum physics. As is the fact that everything vibrates and that, via that vibration, everything affects everything else. That’s the Law of Resonance. The Law of Entrainment is the physical law which says that, as energy vibrates, everything eventually resonates in time with the highest vibration present.

Hold that last thought for later. It’s crucial.

So now let’s make this real, instead of just theoretical. Let’s use an example. Let’s talk about “Phil.”

Phil’s family moved house when he was between the ages of two and 18, 10 times as his dad went from promotion to promotion, each involving a relocation. As a consequence of those moves, Phil lost touch with significant close family members and much-loved relatives, struggled with schooling, and finds it difficult to make friends.

Phil holds memories about this, stored in his mind, body and his energy system.

Those in his mind are thoughts, which help him to recall those past events. They are factual: places, people, conversations, events. He also has feelings about those places, people and events—deeply held feelings of sadness, anxiety, confusion and so on. He becomes aware of those feelings when his emotions flare up in response to those memories—those thoughts and feelings—and he feels the physical sensations in his body of those huge emotional reactions.

It’s pretty unpleasant experiencing such reactions, however, they frighten him in their intensity. So his psyche protects him from feeling them by rationalising. These become his conscious beliefs, about how moving that many times was good for him, necessary for his family to become financially secure and successful, that it “hasn’t done him any harm.” By doing this, he’s keeping his emotions at bay, but he’s also denying his true feelings.

Bad news in terms of Law of Attraction!

However, his unconscious beliefs are the ones that are even more problematic. Phil believes that nothing lasts, that anything good will always end, that you shouldn’t get close to people because you risk the pain of losing them when they move on—as he believes they inevitably will. If you searched Phil’s unconscious beliefs even more deeply, you’d also find that he believed that he isn’t worthy of love, isn’t important, that he’s helpless to change situations, a victim in the hands of fate and that the universe was at the very least uncaring and, at worst, downright hostile.

frequency we can emit—goes away, because we’re no longer running scared, believing we can’t. Suddenly, we’re feeling powerful, and believing that we can! And then the law of entrainment—that everything must resonate with the highest frequency present—will deliver!

What we think doesn’t become things; who we are becomes things, because who we are is our beliefs! It’s our beliefs, positive or negative, loving or fearful, helpless or hopeful and resilient, which determine what we attract into our life. And once we really get that, we’re unstoppable!

There’s one subject that therapy clients – and the wider general public – ask me about more than any other. That subject is ‘the inner child’.

What is it? Where is it? Is it a friend or a foe? How do you access it? Can you talk to it? What does it want? Need? Crucially, how do you heal it?

Try a quick internet search for a definition of ‘your inner child’ and you’ll see the confusion. Let’s take the first 5 I come across:

‘your inner child is your shadow self’…
‘your inner child is the part of you that was traumatised’…
‘is your inner child hijacking your adult relationships?’…
‘how to re-parent your inner child’…
‘your inner child is the young you that has never felt seen or heard’…

You get the picture. And the scale of the problem. How can we begin to heal our ‘inner child’ – if, indeed our inner child needs healing at all – if we can’t agree what our inner child even is?

I was recently invited by Welbeck to write a book about how to heal. ‘You Can Remember Who You Were Before Life Made You Forget’ is the result, and has arisen out of wide ranging research into the nature of healing. An understanding of our inner child is crucial to this. Before we think about that further, come with me into my therapy room and meet someone we can call ‘Zoe’.

Zoe is hunched in the chair opposite me. She has kicked off her shoes and drawn her legs up under her, her arms crossed over her chest, holding herself tightly. Her eyes are wild, searching for somewhere to look away from the scene she is witnessing.

I lean towards her, gently repeating her name, reminding her that she’s safe here, that she can tell me. Inviting her to look at me, trust me. And eventually she lets my eyes and voice hold her.

She tells me she’s on top of the wardrobe. Not the one in her bedroom, but the one out on the landing. She’s looking down from there, through the bedroom wall as if it isn’t there, at the little girl’s body she knows is hers, suffering unspeakable pain. It’s her step-father again. It happens most nights. But up here, on the top of the wardrobe, out on the landing, there’s no suffering. She’s intact, whole. Safe. It’s as if she’s watching a movie.

Those of us who work with trauma are familiar with the fragmentation and dissociation which happens as a result. This scene is not unusual. However, we don’t find it easy to explain.

One area that’s helped my own understanding has been the considerable body of University research into the energetic nature of reality and consciousness. In particular, studies involving those who have undergone near death experiences. Typically, following NDEs people report the following:

• Discovering the ability, especially where death is anticipated, and pain involved, of being able to leave the body at will.

• Rising up, floating above the body, and looking down on the body and the accompanying scene below.

• Being able to see and hear activities and conversations going on outside the place where the body is, ranging from outside in a corridor and in other rooms, to places in other parts of the world where their loved ones are (all of which can be corroborated as having been accurate).

• The sense of looking on but being apart, as if watching a movie.

• A pulling sensation, like a strong magnet, tugging the soul away from the body.

• Realizing that they are free, limitless, without restriction, and free of pain or fear, bathed in loving energy.

• An enormous life force surging through them, discovering that they have 360° vision, understand the reason behind everything that has happened in their life, and are surrounded

A fair bit of that sounds similar to Zoe’s experience, doesn’t it?

However, there’s one further piece of startling information that came out repeatedly in one specific area of research: that of trauma work, in which psychiatrists trained in hypnosis were attempting to assist patients to go back and discover the origins of that trauma.

Unexpectedly, patients found themselves remembering not only traumatic events, but also previous lives, and life between lives. Those memories included decisions and choices they had made prior to incarnating.

These included how much of their total energy they would incarnate with. Typically this was somewhere between 25% and 38%.

When I first came across these studies, it was mind-blowing. So what, then, about the remaining energy – the part that didn’t incarnate? And how did this relate to that 25% to 38% that did? What if that smaller percentage was what we called the soul – the part that experiences being human; and what if the remainder was what we often refer to as out higher self? What, then, might we call the sum total? Our pure essence, our full being? The two together? The 100% energy we were? For want of a better name, I called it our Soul Signature.

Let’s go back to Zoe, and what she described to me. Dissociation and fragmentation have so often been viewed as pathological. An adaptive response in which the traumatised mind breaks up thinking, feeling, thinking, sensation and memory in order to protect us from re-experiencing unbearable pain. What if, instead, far from being some kind of illusory or projected experience arising out of dissociation, that aspect of Zoe that found itself on top of the wardrobe was, in fact, an energetic reality? A smaller part of the percentage of her energy that had incarnated. A part that had split itself off from the experiencing remainder, in order to remain intact, undamaged – at all times aligned and connected with her higher self (the 62%-75% that hasn’t incarnated) – until such time as the little girl on the bed is ready to heal from the trauma she has undergone. Might this be the ‘inner child’?

This is not, of-course, unlike the shamanic view of soul loss and soul retrieval. The idea that the vital energy we actually are can be split off, separated, lost and recovered is fundamental to an energetic understanding of the Universe.

However, let me tell you what happened to Zoe in a subsequent healing session. In a guided visualisation, Zoe sets out on search to heal her wounded inner child. For a long while, she has dreaded this. The suffering she knows she is going to witness has felt too overwhelming, too dangerous. Too shaming. Too intimate. Too defining. She has wanted to lock the bedroom door and throw away the key. However, today she is ready. And so we set out together.

Zoe begins her journey in a safe place. A lush forest, full of sights and sounds and smells that calm her. Then she finds herself emerging into rocky terrain, more barren. In the distance is a stone tower. She feels drawn to it, knowing her inner child is in there.

As she enters through the door, creaky and stubborn to open, she’s greeted by a musty smell, as if the tower has been locked and undisturbed for a long time. She sees a stone staircase across the dusty flagstones and knows that’s where she must go. As she climbs higher, Zoe hears muffled noises. There’s banging and clattering. And something that sounds like rhythmic rocking. She dreads what she’s going to see. Part of her wants to run away, but she keeps putting one foot in front of another.

And suddenly, here is the door. Behind it is her inner child. The child she’s come to comfort and soothe. The child waiting to be seen and heard and finally healed. Zoe grasps the handle and turns it. Then lets the door swing open of its own accord, hardly daring to look.

What greets her is so different to what she had imagined it makes her gasp.

In front of her is a little purple dragon. The banging and clattering she had heard is coming from the joyful, excited way this creature is jumping and bounding around the room. And the rocking is not, as she had imagined, a distraught child sitting rocking to and fro for comfort. Rather, it’s the sound of the dragon enjoying riding on a huge wooden rocking horse in the centre of the room.

Before she knows what’s happening, the little dragon has grabbed her hands and is twirling her round and round until she’s laughing out loud. Then, just as suddenly, it swings her up onto its back, and they fly out of the window together, never looking back.

That experience – and so many other similar ones since, invited me to redefine our inner child and the process of healing. I would suggest that:

• There is always a part of us that remembers who we really are – our inner child. Our inner child is at all times in touch with our higher self, our pure essence. It remains the guardian of essential qualities we need to re-integrate when we’re ready. Its nature is like the purple dragon.

• The part that needs healing is the adult who has remained traumatised: the part of the soul that fully experiences our human journey.

• Healing therefore involves the recovery of the vital energy we have lost – our inner child – because without that aspect of ourselves we are incomplete, and lack some of our vital energy.

What can we take from this that’s useful in our own healing? How about these thoughts?

1. Remember that who we feel or believe ourselves to be is far less than we truly are.

2. Remember that our true nature is not traumatised or lacking; part of us is simply waiting to be welcomed back.

3. Our task is to give ourselves every opportunity to get back in touch with our Soul Signature.

4. We can do this most effectively by coming to know – and call upon – our inner child.

Asking ourselves these questions as a starting point can help:

If I was born free and intact, what experiences led me to become separated from my inner child?

How has this depleted me?

What qualities might my inner child have kept safe for me until I’m ready to invite them back?

There will be times when my inner child is calling me – moments of creativity, fun, courage, strength, joy – am I noticing?

How can I use this knowledge and embrace those qualities in my life now?

What image of my inner child will help me do that?

A wise shaman once said to someone seeking to heal, ‘When did you last laugh, or dance, or sing, or tell stories, or walk in nature?’ I would add, ‘When did you last go in search of your inner child in order to discover all that they want to give back to you? Let yourself remember, and heal.’