One thing I am becoming increasingly grateful for lately is that I am growing each day in my capacity to hold my terrified, lonely and hurt inner child.. I was helped this afternoon to be guided to a book I really needed to compliment some of my recent writing when I went out to get some toiletries I needed from the discount pharmacy.. It is a book Buddhist Monk Thich Nhat Hanh wrote in 2012.. It is simply called Fear.
In this book Thich acknowledges not only the pain and vulnerability of childhood he also reminds us that what our ancestors suffered is buried in our very cells. He recommends for our healing we learn how to embrace the emotional reality of this little one and of our ancestores in tenderness, mercy, and compassion..
He also shares at the beginning of the book the healing practice he gave to a young man who came to stay at his retreat in France, Plum Village.. It was the practice of writing a love letter to his father.. The man struggled greatly as he had suffered greatly at the hands of his father as a child, the last thing he wanted to do was to express love, but of course, like many of us who still live in a childish view, he knew nothing of this father’s own suffering..
This the dilemma also portrayed in a movie I watched couple of years ago (and I cannot remember the title but I remember Sam Worthington starred in the lead role) in which another man struggles in a similar way.. In that movie based on a book he meets ‘God’ in the form of a black woman and then he is encouraged to face his wound, in one particularly poignant scene his dead father’s spirit comes to him in the middle of a field saying apologies and asking for forgiveness. The healing for this man only happens as he develops his capacity to embrace that pain.
Thich reminds us in the book that deep inside our cells lives the energy, pain, struggles, talents, and resilience of our forebearers and not only that our cells also connect us to everyone who ever was a part of our life journey and that includes all of the people who hurt us or who we hurt.
Finding that forgiveness for all of it, developing the capacity to hold it all in compassion often involves facing a painful truth, that at one point we were vulnerable child, and were powerless over the nasty or hurtful things done to us.. It may be natural we feel anger or out-rage (which may be better than doing what a lot of us do and turning it in against the self) but it is only when we learn to hold the hand of this little one tenderly as well as connect that hand to the hands of the inner children in our ancestors that suffering that we can reconnect to a chain of evolution and healing.
Breathing in and out we also can acknowledge the seeds of our ancestors that are both positive an negative.. When we use the breath Thich reminds us we create a refuge for ourselves within the self. The healing we seek cannot be found outside of this self but for so many of us we so fear to face what lies buried and hidden there.. But as we develop the ability to be with fear, pain, sorrow, joy, anger and rage then and only then can we transform that in the healing light of our presence.
Emerging From The Dark Night 