How Meditating With My Younger Self Changed Me
On the healing power of visualization
Many years ago when I began to dive head first into meditation, I found myself exploring a whole new world of possibilities inspired by books I was reading on the subject and my own intuitive and creative take while in the experience.
There are many ways to meditate and what works for one person will not work for another. I believe the process of learning how to meditate takes time and that different experiences we are having will call for different techniques. It’s a game of trial and error and we find our way when we are open to what resonates best for our own unique personality and life experience.
The Meditation
That being said, one sunny afternoon while meditating in my room I started to meditate as I normally do. I began to focus on my breath, using it as an anchor to bring me back from the stream of thoughts passing through my mind relentlessly trying to grab my attention. As the seconds turned into minutes and as the minutes passed, I began to feel this desire within me to go back in time, not to revisit the past and obsess about what happened and why but to simply pay a visit to my younger self, that little girl, at a time when I knew she had struggled the most.
I felt there was something there to be experienced although I didn’t have the words for it yet.
So off I went. I found her sitting alone in a dark living room with a few plants being the only sign of another’s presence. I walked over and sat next to her, gave her a hug and began to speak to her. I asked her how she was doing, what was wrong, and if there was anything I could do to help. She spoke to me in the best way she knew how and as she did I began to experience with her the sadness and pain she felt having been left alone for long periods of time; periods too long for a child at that age to bear without turning the experience into one of self-blame, something all children do when they are being hurt by the ones they love and are dependent on.
I comforted her, doing my best to soothe her and told her that I loved her. As is typical of inner child work, I let her know that what was happening in her environment with her parents-their absence in particular-was not about their lack of love for her but about their own emotional limitations and struggles. They were doing the best they could with what they had in that moment.
She told me she felt abandoned so I gave her the attention and protection I felt she could use and sat with her while I observed her take it all in, making her aware I was not going to leave her.
What happened next
Instead of stopping there, a common place to stop with this type of inner child work, I found myself beginning to experiment. It dawned on me that I could show my younger self how to meditate so I began to do just that. I taught her how to work with thoughts that were entering her mind that made her feel unworthy of love. I showed her how to manage the hurtful words of others and feelings that were not hers so that instead of internalizing them she could release them.
If she felt sadness around her, I encouraged her to see the sadness as a fog of energy in the room that she could duck under or walk around so as to not be consumed by it. I gave her a different image to use for when anxiety was the prominent emotion. I showed her how to connect with nature, the trees and the small pond in her backyard, as a way to ground herself.
This meditation had a profound impact on me not only because it connected me with some of my feelings I needed to feel and honor but because I had also experienced timelessness in a deeply profound way.
The only time is now.
The past is occurring in the now, when we allow our unresolved traumas and unconscious beliefs to mold our current views on reality and the future is always being created from the now with our current perspectives being that which informs how we think, act and make sense of the world.
Our future, therefore, can be molded by unconscious beliefs and the ghosts of our traumas that we haven’t resolved or can be created from a self-aware presence.
This is why we have to take special care of the present, to be mindful of who and what is running our life because in every moment we are choosing the course of our path.
We must remember to ask ourselves: Is it our unique voice doing the creating or is it the voice of someone else?
I realized in my meditation I had traveled back in time through the now and gifted my younger self with a new set of tools for her to use instead of her go to: self-blame. With visualization being the vehicle, I opened up a new way for her to respond which consequently caused a shift in the experience of myself as an adult in that same moment. Simultaneously, my future changed for the better, though in ways I am not completely aware of yet.
This is healing.
It is not linear and while we cannot change the actual events that occurred in the past, we can change our perception of them and therefore, how we react to them.
This creates a new reality, one where a past interpretation of ourselves ceases to exist and the events that shaped us become the solar dust in which a new universe can be formed.
When I meditate now, I often invite my younger self in the room to meditate with me regardless if I am doing this type of mediation. I find this extremely helpful especially if I am battling difficult and overwhelming emotions.
I call her in and she sits either beside me or some other place she chooses and she knows that she is being taken care of simply through the invitation.
My younger self and I find peace and presence together.
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Much LOVE,
Danielle 🎈