I connected with a strong sense of loneliness and isolation, buried very deeply within me since my early childhood, during a recent meditation. I attuned to the four-year-old me, and to a sense of feeling unseen and unheard that I experienced at that age and throughout most of my childhood.
We are very open-hearted and sensitive as children. And as such, we are easily hurt. Not least because due to the fact that we’re utterly dependent on adults for survival, the childhood psyche is naturally self-oriented and self-centred—and sees everything through the prism of “because of me”.
The pain and fear we experience as children often remain locked within us. We carry that pain and fear and the resultant protective mechanisms we develop into our adult lives. We are often oblivious to this dynamic, but what we can observe are its manifestations through our dysfunctional thinking and behavioural patterns. A tendency to doubt our decisions, fear that we’re not good enough, compulsive people-pleasing, an overeating or nervous eating thing we’ve got going on—they all point to the underlying fears and pains.
And it is when we identify and revisit the pain that our younger selves experienced, and when we connect with it as adults in order to see, relate to and experience what this little child experienced, that we begin to release and free ourselves from the pain and fear as adults.
And as I tried to feel into what it must have been like for that little me to feel insignificant and invisible, my protective mechanisms came up, trying to shield me from experiencing all the scary and terrorising feelings that little child must have felt.
My mind tried to block the experience to protect me from the pain. As I assured it that I could be with it, that I just want to see and understand, these deeply-rooted feelings came up gradually. Anguish, turmoil, sadness, broken-heartedness, sense of loss. And tears.
For innocence lost to fear.
For hope lost to terror.
For love lost to pain.
For safety lost to fragmentation.
For peace lost to darkness.
For all the children uprooted from their innocence. Some of them I am. Some of them I’ve met as adults. Some of them I’ve loved.
I cried for the breaking of children’s purity.
For the separation from self.
For the little scared children we’d abandon within.
I was drained for the rest of the day. But in came a sense of deep relief and lightness, too. A sense of joy and playfulness emanating from that four-year old me. Not as a temporary fix, but as a fundamental and permanent shift in the core of my being.