We are born as beings of light—wide-eyed and so excited about every little possibility.

As a child, I always wanted to travel and explore the world. So as an adult, I can give myself the gift of traveling anywhere I want—comfort, safety, and other people’s fears be damned!

I was always drawn to Reiki—healing with life force energy, Chi—from a very young age. But while growing up, I became aware that this was a fringe topic, something only “crazy” people believed in. So recently, I decided to stop listening to the criticism that has shackled my inner child and learn Reiki anyway.

The point is that if we felt drawn to it as children, then it must be worth pursuing. As my Reiki teacher recently reminded me, “Children are closer to the light. They haven’t picked up as much damage yet.”

This is the time when the only thing we know how to do is follow our hearts and our bliss. But as we grow up, we start to see the limitations of the outside world.

Our unadulterated light and hope gets buried and marred by the judgments of others telling us that our wildest dreams can’t be true. We see walls and boarded up windows where we only used to see a beautiful world filled with endless possibilities.

Over this past month, I have been diving deep into healing my inner child. I’ve had to face the areas where I stopped feeling worthy of love and beauty. I’ve traveled back to traumas I would rather forget and, instead of turning away, gave love to the parts of myself that felt scared and trapped. And now my inner child is growing up as a child of light once more, which is who I have truly been all along.

The truth is that healing our inner children does not mean dismissing the temper tantrums or the needs we had while growing up. In contrast, it means completely accepting and loving every piece of us that was beaten down and marginalized over the years. It means looking at the parts of our younger selves that we judged as faults and bringing them into the light for a big, embracing hug.

These are the parts of us that never received the love they so desired, and this is why they have screamed and acted out. They are trying to get our attention, they are trying to get our love. And once we can give them this love, their tantrums will suddenly go away. They start acting like mature, light-filled…adults.

And now, we can ask our inner children what we always wanted and needed. What made us look out into the world with starry-eyed wonder? What made us want to write novels, or sail the seven seas? What were the endless possibilities that we saw when we looked up at the clouds?

We must find that wonder, that desire that pulls us into the life of our dreams. We must find the child inside that dreams all day of becoming an astronaut, a princess, a cowboy, or a scientist. And when we find this in our inner children, we must give it to ourselves.

The greatest act of self-love we can give our inner selves is to make our dreams come true. Make the innermost desires that you used to throw tantrums over a reality. Make it happen.

If we can go back in time to when we felt more connected, when we weren’t congested by all the illusions and judgements we picked up along the way, we can learn a lot about our true purpose in this lifetime.

When we get in touch with the purity of our inner children and can discard all the false beliefs around ourselves, the world suddenly opens up to contain our wildest dreams. We become spiritual adults, filled with self-love and self-mastery, while seeing our lives through the playful and creative gaze of a child.

If we listen to the whisperings of our inner children, we find that the key to creating the life of our dreams has really been inside us all along.

The world doesn’t have to be such a scary or limiting place. When we walk with the openness and light of a child as an adult, we open up to the fact that we truly are invincible.

And in this peace, we find our bliss, we find our love and passions, and we find our purpose.

~

Author: Coertunay Krause
Image: Leo Rivas-Micoud/Unsplash
Editor: Leah Sugerman
Copy Editor: Khara-Jade Warren
Social Editor: Catherine Monkman