Archive for the ‘Inner Child Work’ Category
Dis-Creation
Posted by learning | Filed under Emotional Healing, Forgiveness, Inner Child Work
Greetings from Learning To Flow!
Do you ever feel like you’re at the mercy of life? Does it ever seem like you continue to encounter the same types of unpleasant situations in your life?
Perhaps you find yourself in the same kinds of unfulfilling relationships or that no matter how many times you change jobs, you wind up working with difficult managers or co-workers.
Quite often we feel like if we could just find the right person or the right job, we would feel happy or at peace.
When we are ready to take responsibility for our lives though, we remember that we are creating ALL of it. While we may not be consciously seeking out these kinds of situations, we are certainly unconsciously attracting it. The “why” of that is another discussion entirely and we will get to that in a few weeks.
But it is a huge step forward in the growth of a soul when we are finally ready to take responsibility for our creation and seek to understand how to change it. We covered one part of this last week when I explained how to create what you want.
This week, I will explain how to stop creating what you don’t want. This is called, “Dis-creation.”
You will find that only focusing on creation will only take you so far. You will arrive at a point that if you do not understand how to dis-create…you will just keep running into the same walls.
To master creation and dis-creation requires significant practice. But if you do not master it, then you will remain at the mercy of what seems like “the winds of fate” and in case you haven’t noticed, those winds are starting to pick up considerably.
If this is your first introduction to dis-creation, then get ready for your spiritual growth to start moving forward in leaps and bounds!
Namaste
Jeff Scholl
Quote of the Week:
“If you bring forth what is within you, it will heal you. And if you do not bring forth what is within you, it will destroy you.” – St. Thomas
Peeling Away our Emotional Layers
As children, we reacted to our environments with intense feelings. If we were not taught otherwise, we creating stories around what we were seeing reflected back to us. And the more we replayed those stories in our minds, the more we were unknowingly programming our own minds.
If we had abusive parents, we quite naturally developed beliefs like, “I’m not safe” or “I don’t deserve love” or “I can’t have what I want.”
If we had an older sibling, we may have developed beliefs such as “no one listens to me” or “I’m not important.”
If we were the oldest sibling, we may have developed beliefs such as “I’m responsible for everyone else” or “What I want doesn’t matter” or “I have to be the responsible one” or a myriad of other beliefs.
One way I started detaching myself from these beliefs was to stop identifying myself with them. I started identifying myself as who am what I truly am…a spiritual being…a being of energy. I started looking at my body as not who I was…but as my vehicle for what I am creating in this lifetime.
Once I could create that distinction clearly enough, then I came across information that reminded me that I came into this body…into my family…into the lives of the people who have touched me throughout my life..to become the conscious creator of my life.
But if I had come in as a clean slate, then I could not become that conscious creator because I would never have known anything different. So as I learned in “Conversations with God” if I had never learned “hot,” how could I know “cold?”
Similarly, if I had never been sick, how could I appreciate being well? How could I create healing in myself and others if I knew only vital health?
So into this life, I brought an agenda…a very full agenda…meaning I brought a lot of negative energies in with me. When I started understanding my life from that perspective, I realized that all of those people who I thought had been mean, hateful, rude and abusive to me…were also simply playing out their roles. They were perfectly responding to the set of energies I brought in…and I was responding to their as well.
And since I now knew that I could feel those energies through my feelings, then I could choose to LET THEM GO. Now this wasn’t always easy and when I first started out, I needed a coach to help me learn how to face those energies. I needed someone else to create a safe space for me to do it and to guide me through how to delve down into that energy and let it go. I had to learn to feel that energy and how to maturely express it to others.
Denying it was there only resulted in situations being attracted to me getting more and more intense…until I finally surrendered to just facing them and letting them go.
Dis-creation is the act of facing the feelings you have carried with you all of your lives and letting them go.
Anyone can learn how to do this but I will warn you that it takes practice to be able to face fear and pain. And it will also take the guidance of someone who has been through this to face your deepest fears.
Also realize that these are the fears and pain you don’t even realize are there until you start digging down into them. My coach proved to me in an hour how much pain I carried. He didn’t tell me I was carrying it. He just led me through some questions and through the questions he asked…I could feel it.
After going through this myself and coaching others for the past five years, I can safely say that everyone I know has these energies buried within them. Facing them is one of the most difficult phases on the spiritual journey towards mastery.
But once you experience the value of letting this energy go and choosing to practice a new, more loving energy in its place, your perceptions of what is possible for you in this life will shaft dramatically.
Namaste
Jeff
© Jeffrey L. Scholl 2009. All rights reserved.
www.learningtoflow.com
Spiritual Exercise of the Week
Think of an area that was painful to you when it happened. It could be something like divorce or a friendship ending. It can be the loss of a job or encountering a bully when you were in school.
Take a few moments and replay that experience in your mind. Do you still feel the feelings you experienced when it happened? If so, that energy is still within you and it is still attracting experiences that match it into your life so that you can heal it.
This is the purpose of attracting these situations in your life…to allow you to have an opportunity to heal and let go of the energy within you.
So many times, people tell me, “Oh I already worked through that. I’m done with it.” But when I ask them how it feels, they still feel it intensely. This is the difference between healing something and just denying that it’s there.
So close your eyes and replay the scene. Notice what you are feeling. Give yourself permission to feel angry, sad, worried, fearful, embarrassed, hurt, etc.
Notice where you feel this energy within you.
Now envision this energy as a small child and ask her/him why she is feeling what she is feeling. Allow him/her to vent their feelings to you and validate whatever they are telling you.
Explain to them that what they are feeling is normal….that anyone would feel that way. Explain to them that it’s natural that they feel pain or tightness in their chest…and explain that it’s necessary to feel it so they can let it go.
Then breathe into that area…allow yourself to feel it as intensely as you can while forcefully blowing that energy out.
Take at least 7 breaths in and blow it out, then blow out the next three breaths using the sound of relief…sighing out those breaths with “Ahhhhhh.”
Most people feel significantly better after this exercise. Some people only feel a little better, but again this comes with practice.
Realize that your ego will only allow you to go as deep as it feels safe and if you truly want to dive down deep, you’re going to need a “diving instructor.”
Once you learn how to go deep with guidance, you’ll feel safe enough to get into some of those feelings when they happen. When you get to that point, you are no longer at the mercy of the world. You realize at this point, as I did, that the FEAR isn’t “out there.” It’s “in here” and since it is, I can face it and let it go.
And the more I let it go, the less I am attracting similarly charged experiences into my life.
© Jeffrey L. Scholl 2009. All rights reserved.
www.learningtoflow.com
Dialoguing with Your Inner Child
Posted by learning | Filed under Emotional Healing, Inner Child Work, Spiritual Evolution, Spiritual Growth
Greetings from Learning To Flow!
This week, we are taking the next step forward in creating our sustainable spiritual practice by learning about the inner child. I will explain what the term “Inner child” means and why it is so important.
Each of the steps in our spiritual practice tie together so we will continue to build on the fundamental practices of feeling our feelings and being in the now. We have to be in the now to face our feelings and we have to be practicing feeling them in order to be willing to face our inner child’s deepest fears and pain.
It is so important to understand that the pain we carry within us is manifesting what we experience as our “problems” in life and until we release these energies from our being and replace them with a reflection of who and what we really are, our world will not change.
Being a man, I know how resistant the ego is to taking this kind of step. My ego told me that doing something like this was silly and wouldn’t have any impact. But phase I of the shift from an ego-based consciousness to a heart-based consciousness is the realization that ego methods are not working sufficiently and we long for more.
I encourage you to take this important step on your journey, to surrender to the necessity of it and allow your inner child’s messages to flow.
Namaste
Jeff Scholl
Quote of the Week:
“We originally established our protections as children in an attempt to protect ourselves from pain that was too overwhelming for our little beings…As adults, that pain is still within the Inner Child and we may still be protecting against it. As long as we choose to protect against it, the work we must do to avoid that pain controls our lives.” Margaret Paul, PH.D. in “Inner Bonding”
Dialoguing with the Inner Child
This week, we’re going to talk about working with the inner child. In the Self-Mastery process, I learned a method called Self-Parenting. In “Inner Bonding,” Margaret Paul teaches her own form of this method and establishes a two-way dialogue with our inner child. I am going to explain how I have learned to dialogue with my own inner child, how this has helped me to grow and evolve as a soul and what benefits I’ve experienced as a result.
Before we get too far into this subject, let’s clear up what this term “inner child” means since many people feel uncomfortable at first with this term. The inner child is essentially our emotional body. It is the part of us in which our emotions are felt and stored or actually repressed. When we have an experience that triggers our repressed emotional energy it is our “inner child” that cries foul. The emotional energy is triggered and starts coming to the surface. If we are identified with that pain AS us or we are primarily identified with our minds, then we do not understand that it is not only normal and natural for those feelings to come to the surface, it is necessary that they do so.
When we are triggered, all that is happening is that this repressed emotional energy has attracted a situation for the purpose of evolving our soul. When we learn to recognize that this is what is happening and open a dialogue with this energy through the symbolic visualization of communicating with our inner child, then we can let go of those feelings more easily and replace them with feelings of love, acceptance and security. When our inner child feels safe and secure, our vibration is raised and we experience the reflection of that higher vibration in our life experiences. In effect, we are clearing out the blockages in our emotional body which is imprinted upon our soul in this lifetime.
So again, it is important to note that what has happened in this lifetime did not “cause” these energies to be there. What happened to us with our parents, teachers, siblings, etc was a reflection of the energies…or the agenda we brought in with us. When we can detach ourselves enough from the perspective that we are this person who all of these bad things have happened to in our lives and start identifying ourselves primarily as a soul who is simply continuing our evolution in this lifetime, then we are able to move forward in that growth more easily.
Visualizing the inner child as being the one who has all of these upset emotions allows us to detach ourselves from identifying with the emotions and/or the thoughts that spring from these emotions. We are then able to be who we really are…a soul who is expressing our unique energy in a human form.
When I learned how to create this conversation with my “inner child,” pretty quickly I didn’t feel so attached to these emotions. I didn’t feel like they were mine. I just felt like they were being expressed through me. This is an important distinction as being able to see myself as the “observer” of the triggers and the resulting emotions has helped me to understand “why” my inner child is upset. It has helped me to validate that he has a right to feel angry, sad, frustrated, etc and to give him permission to feel it. This distinction between me and my inner child also allows me to create a safe space which allows him to let go of his repressed emotions. I can then see myself as his parent and giving him what he needs to feel which is loved, accepted and safe. And when he feels that…I feel it in my heart. As a result, I am feeling safer and more loved in my life…not because the outside world is giving it to me…but because I have the power to give myself this feeling.
But in doing so, it has changed my vibration significantly. I do feel safer and more confident in my life and I am seeing more people reflect acceptance and appreciation for who I am back to me. Another side effect is that I am experiencing an explosion of creativity for what I want to create in my life and what I want to write about. Right now I have more topics to write about than I have time, so my next project is to create more time to write.
For more on how to dialogue with your inner child, go to the “Spiritual Exercise of the Week.”
© Jeffrey L. Scholl 2009. All rights reserved.
www.learningtoflow.com
Spiritual Exercise of the Week
When you become aware that you are upset or fearful about something, find a place where you can get quiet and explore these feelings.
Close your eyes and take a few deep breaths…slowly inhaling and exhaling.
Scan your body with your awareness and feel for where you feel this energy in your body. Notice what it feels like and put all of your focus on just feeling it there.
Then see a younger version of yourself there. Notice what age your inner child is and ask him/her what she is feeling…and wait for an answer.
Then when you have that answer, ask them why they are feeling that. Let this energy tell you why this is coming up right now.
Validate your inner child by telling them that it is normal to feel that way.
So for example if your boundaries have been violated in some way, you need to validate your inner child that it is normal to feel angry when this happens. By doing so you are giving them permission to feel what they feel.
Most of us were never validated so this may take practice or you may need to have a coach help you with this prior to being able to get really good at this.
Once your inner child feels safe to feel what she/he is feeling, you may feel a strong rush of emotion. Whatever pain you have been experiencing may get significantly more intense. This is normal.
Just recognize what is happening and instead of running from it…breathe directly into the center of that pain. Inhale deeply and forcefully exhale. You may have to do this several times, but you will start to feel this energy coming up and out of you.
Some people say it helps to see the pain as a dark area and see themselves breathing light directly into that area. They then see the light breaking up the dark area and turning into a dark mist that they are exhaling…kind of like what happens in “The Green Mile.”
There is no right or wrong thing to see or experience. Allow yourself to create something that works for you.
After you release your pain, tell your inner child how courageous he/she is and tell them how much you love them. Give them a big hug and help them to feel safe.
Take a few moments and just practice feeling that love in your heart…and then open your eyes!
This may seem like a very simple exercise, but you will be surprised
Physical Exercise for Your Inner Child
Once you’ve established a dialogue with your inner child, maintain that dialogue and ask her/him what she wants to do to have fun.
Be willing to accept any answer that comes…whether it’s to go play on a playground, go to an amusement park or go dancing.
Be willing to go with whatever answer comes and allow yourself to have fun!
LTF Weekly Newsletter – August 1st, 2009
Posted by learning | Filed under Emotional Healing, Inner Child Work, Spiritual Growth
Greetings from Learning To Flow!
We are continuing our view into our emotional consciousness this week and how those blockages can manifest in our lives.
I want to point out something that was not apparent to me for much of my spiritual path and that is the application of the knowledge being provided in these newsletters.
Whether you’ve been on your journey for a matter of months or for many years, all of this information is virtually use it unless you practice it.
How you practice the application to this information does not have to match what I am providing in these exercises. These much like the exercises in many other books by well known spiritual teachers are just suggestions. They are ideas for you to play with.
If you have created something that works well for you and you would like to share it, send it to me and I will publish it here so others may benefit.
All of us on a path of spiritual development are teachers. Some of us are doing it through overt methods as I am with my writing, teaching and coaching. But even that is designed to plant a seed within each individual I touch. The intent is to help you all implement a spiritual practice in your lives that helps you learn to identify with the spiritual beings you truly are…so you may explore how to express that in every aspect of your lives thereby modeling it for others.
As many have said, if we are going to change our world, we must BE the change.
I encourage each of you to practice being the change and sharing with us all how you are doing that, what you are learning and how it has benefited your life. I can assure you, that your story will inspire and benefit others.
Quote of the Week:
“It is easy to be angry with someone, but to be angry with the right person, at the right time, for the right reason and to the correct degree…that is difficult.” Aristotle – paraphrased
This week’s article:
Your Emotional Consciousness
Another way to consider who and what your inner child is…is your emotional consciousness. There is a consciousness within everything…within plants, animals, crystals, even every cell of your body has a consciousness. When anything within us is out of balance, we feel it and our inner child is our connection to that. Using the image of our inner child is simply a way for us to communicate with this consciousness in a paradigm that our minds can understand.
We know when we have angry or sad feelings within us. And at some point we learn to master how to release these feelings without having this inner dialogue. But that takes practice and in the interim, having this dialogue with your inner child can be a very valuable step.
I used to think that once I got to a certain point in my spiritual journey that I would just be in this place of peace, love and joy that no “bad” feeling could touch. But I have learned that my judgment about whether these feelings were good or bad was most of my problem. Emotions are simply part of the human experience. As long as I am here, I will have situations that will take me out of my place of peace. So for me, mastery is not about being in a place of perfect peace and joy. Mastery is about my conscious choice to return to that place of happiness in the face of a situation that provides an upset. It does not mean that I won’t ever get angry or sad or embarrassed or be ashamed. It means that I have learned how to use these experiences to grow.
So what does that mean?
As I have noted before in these posts, many of us were taught that it wasn’t acceptable for us to get angry. We were taught that by our parents and teachers as a child. As we grew, we may have always had an authority figure in our life with whom we didn’t feel we could express our anger. Many of us learn to just bottle that up inside of us. Make no mistake though…that energy is going to be expressed somewhere. Remember what emotions are…”energy in motion.”
We must be aware that we cannot stop the motion. We will either learn to holistically express our anger or we will learn the hard way that the emotional energy of that anger will “stay in motion” until it is released.
Read the quote by Aristotle over to the right. The goal is to be angry with the right person at the right time for the right reason. When we do this, we express the appropriate amount of anger. We are allowed to defend our boundaries and we MUST give ourselves permission to do that.
As a child, I learned that I was not allowed to do that. My mother called it “talking back” and I was punished for it, sometimes severely.
So how that has manifested in my adult life is that I have been afraid to say what I felt or thought when I was in stressful situations with someone. While my wife for example may feel completely comfortable expressing her anger in a disagreement, my mind shuts down and I have to walk away because I have yet to completely let go of the fear of speaking up for myself.
The difference between me and many of the people I come across in my life is that I know it and I consciously accept that I am in a process to let it go. I realize that my life is about seeing my reflection in others. It is not what they are consciously intending to show me or have me feel. It is my perception of life…my unconscious perception of life bouncing off of them.
Before I learned to really feel my feelings, I would just blame others and walk away. I walked away from many, many people…friends, lovers, business associates, family. I didn’t understand what those experiences were teaching me. I didn’t understand that some of what was happening was caused by my inability to express my feelings…to feel safe to express my anger, my disappointments, my frustrations, fears, worries and my embarrassment at not being able to understand what was happening.
I also in some cases stayed in situations long past the point where they were serving me because I didn’t understand how to translate the messages my feelings were giving me.
The only way I can ever find out whether to stay and work it out or to go though is to feel safe enough to express my feelings. And to be able to express them, I had to just stop and feel them instead of just thinking about them. I had to stop thinking about what the other person did or said…or what they didn’t do or say. I had to learn that if I was ever going to create the situation I DID want to experience, I had to let go of the energy that was reflecting what I didn’t want to experience. Because as I have learned both through my studies and my own life, that as long as I hold onto old hurts, angers and pains, I will unconsciously manifest the same experiences again and again.
My teacher taught me that this process is about “making the unconscious – conscious and making the conscious – unconscious.” What that means is that as long as our foundational beliefs, our foundational perceptions of fear are unconscious to us, we cannot heal it. We must make it conscious so we can feel it and release it.
We can then choose what we do want to feel in life and practice that feeling until it is unconscious to us…until we just accept that we are loved, that we are safe and that we are joyful expressions of the Divine.
Namaste
Jeff
Exercise of the Week:
Write down an experience that seems to continue to happen to you over and over again in different ways. Perhaps you seem to be dating the same type of person or having the same types of experiences with them. Perhaps you get jobs that have difficult managers or co-workers who betray you. Perhaps you have a body issue, weight you cannot lose or a health problem that crops up again and again.
Realize that if you have emotional energy blocked, it colors your perceptions and prevents you from realizing a path towards your solution.
So now that you have your experience written down, how do you feel about this?
Now think of the earliest time in your life when you felt this experience.
Journal about what was happening.
Allow those old emotions to flow to the surface. Breathe into them and release them.
These old emotions may remind you of something very painful someone did or said in your childhood. While it is common for the mind to want to hold onto this energy, it is necessary to let it go in order to heal.
Where do you feel this energy in your body?
What does it feel like?
Allow it to just BE there. Feel the tightness of this area and then start taking deep breaths. Use your conscious awareness to direct your breath to this place. Inhale through your nose and exhale forcefully. Do this several times and on your last few exhales, use the sound of “Ahhh” like a sigh of relief to let the last of it go.
Take a few more deep breaths imagining that you are breathing in light and love into this area.
Think about what you desire to experience. What would that look like? What would it sound like? Most importantly, what would it feel like?
Journal about what you intend to create. Let the Universe take care of how and when. Just focus on what it is that you want and practice that visualization and feeling as often as you can.
The more you practice that feeling, that vibration and that is the primary way you view this issue…from this new perspective and feeling, the faster it will manifest into your life perhaps in a way you never expected!
LTF Weekly Newsletter – July 25th, 2009
Posted by learning | Filed under Emotional Healing, Inner Child Work
Greetings from Learning To Flow!
This week, we are going to explore how to create a dialogue with our emotions, why many of our emotions have been repressed and how releasing them can be highly beneficial for us.
We must learn to communicate with our emotional body since it is the connection between our physical body in this world and our non-physical self. It is through the nurturing of this connection that we are able to learn to allow our power to flow into this world.
We can learn to feel how open or closed this connection is and how to consciously choose to allow more of the peace, love, happiness and joy to flow freely through us.
Quote of the Week:
“Think of your subconscious as a small child…Every time you give thanks to yourself for something you have created, that little child within you lights up, sparkles and wants to do even more for you.” Sanalya Roman and Duane Packer “Creating Money”
Dialogue with Your Inner Child
Think back to when you were growing up. Did the adults around you listen to you or were you expected to listen to them? Did you have permission to have what you wanted, to play when YOU wanted, to laugh, cry, get angry and express your emotions freely? Did you feel safe, happy, loved and nurtured in your world?
If the answers to any of these questions is either “No” or “My parents did the best they could” or “I don’t remember,” then you may find it highly beneficial to establish an ongoing dialogue with your inner child.
You may have heard that term a lot and not really understood what it means. So when I use the term ”inner child” I am referring to your emotions…how you feel about things. So for example, how do you feel when you look at your body in the mirror? When you look at your body, do you feel happy, peaceful and excited about all of the activities you use your body to enjoy?
If not, the shortest way to changing either the health or fitness of your body may not be to just go hire a personal trainer or to get a doctor or nutritionist’s opinion on what you should be eating or drugs to take. It may be much more effective to ask your inner child what is going on.
If you as a child were not listened to by the people around you, it is quite common to have learned to repress what you wanted and for your subconscious to develop a belief of “no one listens to me.”
Now your subconscious and your emotions are closely tied together. So for example, your subconscious beliefs about your body and how you feel about your body are connected. If you have a belief that “no one listens to me” in your subconscious, it’s common that you are not listening to your inner child either. This is one way you are passing down the behavior that was modeled for you by your caretakers. It’s not their fault. It’s just what they knew.
If you want to change that and perhaps treat your children differently, you can develop that behavior by first learning how to listen to your own inner child first. When you learn to listen, to validate how your inner child feels and why, you may find for example that you eat foods out of habit but that your body isn’t all that happy about. You may have overlooked the signals that your body was sending you.
With the plethora of over the counter medications for lactose intolerance or antacids, we learn we can override our body’s signals. Sometimes our body may create illness or dis-ease to get our attention and then we go looking in other areas. We may have developed habits of eating certain foods to avoid facing how we felt about something.
And yet a step in that direction is to just look inward, create a dialogue and be willing to listen…to feel what is happening and to take responsibility for what we have been unconsciously creating.
How safe or happy our inner child feels about something determines how open our heart feels to it. Our heart is the connection between our physical reality and our non-physical self. Our Non-physical self is our soul, our Higher Self…our connection to Source energy. And so if we want to create peaceful, loving outcomes in our world, we cannot create those situatons if we feel fearful or angry most of the time. We cannot create that if our heart is closed.
We must learn to keep our hearts open, to keep that energy from our Higher Selves flowing through us. And our inner child is the gatekeeper to our heart. If our inner child feels safe, loved and nurtured, our heart is open. If our inner child feels angry, frustrated or hurt, our heart is closed.
Most of us go through our lives looking outwards to others, to external situations to be able to feel safe. But what is outside of us is a reflection to how safe our inner child feels. So if we want to see something different indicated to us in our physical reality, we must learn to nurture our inner child.
Use the exercise this week as an example of how to do this and let us know if you need any help determining what areas would be most beneficial to work on or to have someone guide you on how to do this effectively.
Namaste
Jeff
Exercise
Think of an area of your life that you want to change. Perhaps it is your fitness level (that’s mine!), your health, a relationship, your career, your romantic life, etc.
Close your eyes and imagine your inner child. Ask your inner child how old she’he is. Ask her how she/he feels about this situation. Notice that you can physically feel this somewhere in your body and allow it to be there.
Tell your inner child that you want to develop a relationship with her/him and that you want to start listening to what she’he has to say. Tell your inner child that you want her/him to share her/his feelings with you and ask her/him to give them to you.
Listen to what they have to say and then validate their feelings by telling them that it’s normal for them to feel that way. Anyone would feel that, but now it’s time to give those feelings to you. Breathe into those feelings and release them.
Then ask your inner child what they DO want to feel about this. Tell them to imagine their desired situation and envision this with them. Feel that feeling and breathe into it. If it is a positive emotion, allow it to flow freely throughout your body.
Praise your inner child for having the courage to give up their old feelings and for embracing change!
Journal about what you experience and make this a daily practice. If you do this for just a couple of weeks, you will be amazed at the changes you experience.
All of this may feel like you’re just making it up. Be willing to do that. All of us are either making up our lives as we go…or we’re reacting to what someone else made up for us.
Be willing to take hold of the reins of your life and create it the way YOU want it to be!