by Tosha Silver
The kid is usually the one frantically grabbing at the world, yelling, “I want this, I want that, what if I don’t get what I need?” It’s the one whining (often with good reason), “How come I always feel so cheated?” When you finally start to feed it, the world reshapes itself around you.
JUST SELF-LOVE
Now, the connection to the inner child is not just endless self-indulgence. It’s not All right, you’re sad today, so let’s blow through every dollar so you feel better. Instead, you’re making an inner sankalpa—that beautiful Sanskrit word meaning intention or vow—to love, support, and stop persecuting it.
Dana wrote, “I’m hard on myself all the time and have massive expectations.” When she prayed to treat that child with compassion and kindness, her whole world opened up.
The woman who wrote at the beginning of this chapter about endless clothes and accessories wouldn’t need to strip her kid of all shopping privileges. Instead, she might say to her, Yes. Once a week, we’ll buy something. Or she might include it as she cleans out her closets. The kids love to be included, and there are a thousand ways. The more you do, even annoying tasks can become fun.
I have a friend who’d never gotten around to sending thank-you notes a year after her wedding. Every day, she hammered herself for being so irresponsible. Finally, she offered it all to the Divine and saw that her inner child actually was waiting to help.
So she and the kid decided to throw a party. She recruited a couple girlfriends with the promise of nonstop sushi and sake for an evening of “Letters Be Gone.” They ate, drank, blasted music, and made an assembly line with stamps and envelopes. Each time they finished twenty letters, they took a dance break. Her kid had a great time!
This isn’t about new laws for enforcement and punishment. As you build healthy boundaries, the child will start to feel supported. Then you can give to it in ways that fit your finances. When it starts to feel nurtured, it will no longer grab.
Besides, one of the keys to eternal youth is your wild, honest, and loving communion with that child. You never lose your own sense of creativity, play, or abandon, no matter the chronological age your body pretends to be.
And the child will blossom happily in the sunlight of your devoted care and attention.
READING TO THE KID
Perhaps because I’m a writer, I especially love the idea of reading to your inner child.
As my inner kid and I listen to children’s books together, I state her feelings back to her. When I notice emotions churning in my belly, I say to her, You feel furious! or You feel so sad right now. I keep tuning in and stating her feelings as they change, until she relaxes. I release an inner sigh even as I write these sentences. She feels relief that someone has finally seen and heard her; she can relax and let herself be held.
Yes! You can reflect the feelings of your inner kid. Rather than having an argument about why it shouldn’t feel what it already does, you just witness and accept its experience. Once the little one is acknowledged without blame, it reliably calms down.
Simply witness the kid. It only wants to be heard and felt.
Besides, if you want to make it feel truly crazy-frustrated, try convincing it to not have a deep feeling when it does. Boys, especially—but some girls too—are often told to deny having fear or sadness. But how much healthier we are when the emotions can be acknowledged and released.
A TANGLE OF EMOTIONS
The child can make itself known through your own feelings of sorrow, guilt, shame, or resentment. Sometimes you’re deep in a hard emotion and realize, Oh my god. My kid is crying for help! Here are a few examples.
THE SECRET WOUND
A few years ago, I went on a weeklong yoga retreat in Cabo San Lucas. It was my idea of heaven: vigorous vinyasa classes all day, a hot tub under the stars by night. But midway, my little one nabbed the wheel.
One day there was an outing to a nearby town. A group bus would go as well as a couple of cars. I asked someone I knew if I might come along in her car.
Well, the moment I asked, I sensed she wanted privacy, but she got all weird rather than just saying so directly. (You’ve probably had this happen. You’re just standing there getting doused with terrible energy; suddenly you’re six, back on the playground, and no one wants you on their team.)
I quickly backtracked. “No worries, I don’t need to come!”
Now, the wiser part of me knew Love was saying, “Hey, this trip isn’t needed at all. Just stay at the retreat and write. No need to twist someone’s arm.”
However, did that take away the suffering? Oh my god, not at all. You might even say it all happened to evoke the lonely young girl inside who often felt left out.
When everyone left, she cried and cried her little eyes out for hours. It was actually a relief, hitting the mother lode of forgotten pain with total permission to feel. I lay on the bed holding my stomach, sobbing. “It hurts, it hurts . . .” Eventually, the little girl was an exhausted heap on the bed, tired yet happy.
This event may indeed have been Divinely orchestrated to quickly and efficiently cauterize my neglected wound. By dinner, I was even grateful to the curt lady who’d hurt my feelings. If I’d hated her, I would have missed the whole point.
Allow me to give compassion and love to that little one. Let me attend to its deepest needs and feelings.
UNDER THE TABLE
You mentioned how if someone feels they don’t deserve money, they can spend it all compulsively. Could you say more about this? I think there’s some shame there, or unworthiness or guilt, because I’ve sometimes received financial help.
If everything is Divine Source, then up to now, God has sometimes brought you money through the assistance of others. How powerful to be able to say to that ashamed kid, I finally forgive you. It’s okay. This is how you survived. And now God will be showing another way. It’s as if she’s hiding underneath a table with the cloth over her, mortified that she’s needed any help.
You could imagine that you crawl under there to talk with her. You could let her know she’s done the best she could and she’s neither bad nor selfish. You can promise to become a protective, loving parent for her, and that a new financial future will unfold.
Perhaps you can also do the coconut ritual from Week Three where you offer all finances back to God. You might also try a Change Me prayer: “May I know I deserve to have abundance. May I know I deserve to have enough.”
Because you do!
RAKIA’S REBIRTH
Rakia had been a highly valued tech guru who made bags of money in one company after another. Yet even in the best of times, she’d always lived far beyond her means, incessantly craving the best of the best: Gucci, Prada, Cartier—all of it. She never kept any savings.
Then suddenly she went through a stretch where all her jobs vanished while the overhead of her lavish life remained huge. Eventually, she slid from unbridled spending into anxious unemployment. In a few more months, she hit rock bottom when she couldn’t make the payments on her waterfront penthouse. She ended up spending half a year couch surfing with friends.
Rakia had been brought completely to her knees. Until then, she’d always thought she could manifest anything. I mean, she used to believe she had such superpowers she’d attracted not just a regular ole Mercedes, but one with self-heating seats for winter.
But with this intense test, Rakia moved into true, unvarnished surrender. She spent nights pleading, “Dear God, I don’t know why this is happening and I sure never thought it could! So please, please help me embrace the lessons here. Let me trust that You are the Source of all and fix this around as I let go.”
The more she surrendered, the more she realized that she’d clung to all these fancy labels because her mother had never valued her; in fact, she’d barely even looked her way. Rakia saw she needed to cut the virulent cords from her mom. She finally began to care for that dear abandoned girl who’d never felt good enough and always had something to prove. She also
stopped blaming herself for falling into this financial mess in the first place.
During those months of getting by on the mercy of friends, Rakia learned to truly give her finances to God for the first time. She honestly had no other choice. Then one day, suddenly, a former employer stopped by, literally plucked her off the green frayed couch in her friend Dave’s basement, and offered her a job with the same salary she’d made before. Soon enough, she owned a home again—though a far more modest one so she could build savings. Most important, she had a brand-new relationship to money.
She now knows to her core that the money is God’s. She knows what it means to lose it all, and regain it, seemingly from nowhere. She finally respects and honors money as largesse from the Divine.
LET IT RIP!
One of the biggest myths is that spiritual people should never have “bad” emotions. When anger, sadness, jealousy, pain—all of it—are repressed, they often unconsciously spray all over the place instead. The road of this inner communion allows for all feelings to be welcomed. There are simple ways to release them without inflicting them on others.
Once they’re given permission, emotions are like a thunderstorm or any other force in nature. No reason to think it always has to be tranquil. In fact, the more feelings are allowed, the more they can just pass through like the weather. Yet certain ones—anger, especially—can take special care.
If you have a fiery nature, getting anger out physically may make all the difference. Exertion can go right to the problem in a way that just talking won’t. For some people, a vigorous sport like hiking, swimming, or biking is helpful.
But if the anger is huge, some people really need to “destroy” something. My theory is that if you’re absolutely furious, it’s so much better to break or implode something harmless than send all that firepower against yourself.
Personally, I’m a big fan of breaking dishes, the cheapest therapy on the planet. If you’re ever wildly mad, go to Goodwill and get a stack of old, cracked plates or cups. Then find a private place and smash the heck out of them. Scream if you need to. (Some people even like to scrawl names on what they’re breaking.) Better the dishes than your own tender psyche. The anger wants and deserves to come out.
Elsa felt unbearable rage after her divorce. She took it out on herself by eating barrels of popcorn, though it made her so sick she could hardly walk. When I suggested she try this dish therapy, she said, “Oh I need way, way more than that!” I suggested she pray for her own route.
She called me the next day, giddy with joy. Her inner kid was so palpable, even on the phone. Elsa had bought about 20 stuffed animals at a thrift store. Then she’d hidden in her garage (so the neighbors wouldn’t think she was totally stark raving bonkers) and ripped them to shreds with scissors and knives. Stuffing flew everywhere like a blizzard.
Eventually, she collapsed on the floor, helplessly laughing and surrounded by decapitated teddy bears. She said she’d never had such fun in her life; she’d grown up in a proper British home where she’d never, ever been allowed to get mad.
If you’re reading this with horror, I would just ask, Where do you think all that violent energy went before Elsa did this? Straight into her own poor body and psyche. (And if tearing apart stuffed animals doesn’t work for you, you might try beating the crap out of a tightly rolled mattress pad with a baseball bat, another inspired route.)
Everyone’s different. For some, anger is easy, and sadness is the stopper in the bottle. Some even use anger to not feel the sorrow underneath.
When my mom died, I couldn’t cry for months, though every unshed tear felt like a geyser inside me, ready to blow. Finally, I realized I could turn to sad movies for help, especially animated ones. Mulan, Up, and Ratatouille all sent me on crying sprees, though I could probably list 20 others as well. Tears are what happen when the ice in the heart melts.
The writer and movie critic Kevin Lincoln wrote a story in The New York Times about regaining his ability to cry by going to movies. As a “typical American male,” he’d had the ability forced out of him (though I’ve met people of all genders who have had this happen too).
He wrote how he learned to stop crying, the way so many boys do, as a rite of passage to becoming a man. Eventually in the safe dark zone of movies, he learned “to sit with a moment and be empathetic and vulnerable, to react without an agenda,” and to get comfortable with his own tears. It brought back his ability to access and understand his own feelings for the first time since he was a kid.
While some people gain this access through therapy, I love how Kevin turned something as simple as moviegoing into a spiritual communion with that once-neglected child.
For the remaining weeks, get to know your inner kid. Bring it out of hiding, listen to it, include it. Be patient, take it slow, be consistent. Notice what age the kid is. For some people, it will be very young; for others, a teen. (It may also change ages on different days or morph in the course of a single meditation.) And if your own kid is filled with rage, prepare for age-appropriate behavior—tantrums, snubs, hurtful remarks, manipulation. It’s all okay. Let it get those feelings out.
If you’re not sure how to handle the behavior, aren’t seeing results, or are frustrated because a strategy works one day and not the next, don’t despair. Just as a parent who’s having trouble speed-dials friends for advice, you offer it to Love. If you persevere, you will be rewarded. Through the process of reconnection, a deeper creativity,
joy, and contentment will come. In loving that kid, you recover your own sense of wonder.
I offer this to you, oh Beloved. Allow the wall to fall that separates me from my own vulnerable child. Show the route that reunites us with patience and faith. I long to take care of myself like never before!
During my twenties, I used to go to Michael, a terrific intuitive in Berkeley who said one thing like a broken record: “Honey, there’s always gonna be somethin’.” The idea that one day you’ll land in a secret spot where no problem ever comes (if you could just keep your mind fanatically clean enough) was complete lunacy. “This too shall pass,” he’d say, “but don’t forget, it shall pass and bring the same damn thing a second time—or a close proxy—if you don’t embrace it the first.”
That’s why in Week Six, we’re going to go deeper into the nature of offering. It’s based in radical acceptance, saying yes to Reality in any given moment, so that what’s needed can come next. It blasts open the door to being abundance.
This week, I’ll take you through the key stages of offering I’ve often witnessed so you can watch them in your own process. But first, we’ll need to dive into three concepts.
THREE LITTLE JEWELS
For a while, a meme was going around the Internet that said, “Relax, everything really is out of control!” And yes, from the level of ego, this is entirely true. We all know change is a reliable constant. So if the ego leads, every time something shifts, especially if it seems “negative,” it may well throw a hissy fit: No, I won’t let go. I refuse! Or it will spiral into hopelessness or despair. (Yes, the kid is usually the one having these reactions.)
So how do you get past that? Besides comforting and soothing the little one, the answer lies within three beautiful terms: aparigraha, vairagya, and ishvara pranidhana. In the ancient Indian texts the Bhagavad Gita and Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, these are the crown jewels of Existence. Gaining them is a prize far beyond winning an Olympic gold medal, nabbing an Oscar, or being knighted by the queen. When these jewels begin to grace your soul, your feet are firmly on the road to freedom.
Sometimes people say, “Oh, I’m working sooo damn hard to surrender. All I do is beat myself up about not being able to let go.” The ego will want to make this all an arduous job, but that’s just more doership and distraction. As you offer your burdens to Love, you invite in these Divine qualities. Eventually, they will come.
They’re actually available to anyone, with practice. You can say, “I can’t do it, God. I can’
t! Take over and help me let go.” But self-acceptance (and even a rollicking sense of humor) is critical along the way. Your humanity is learning to align with the Flow. You keep offering kindness to the kid, saying, It’s okay. Don’t worry. All will unfold.
You might wonder at this point, What is that humanity? Well, it’s your unique individuality, the small self, the personal expression of you as you. The trick of this work is to allow the authentic humanity to remain in all its vibrant glory while at the same time bowing to that inner Divine. In the toggle shift between the Great Self and the small, as time goes on, with prayers and offering, you become fluent at moving between the two.
Once you’re on Earth for enough lifetimes, as an old soul you begin to long ever more deeply for these gemstones. They are the peace of God. And then, that longing itself actually brings the chance to acquire them. You get custom-made, just-for-you opportunities to develop nongrasping, detachment, and surrender.
Remember Prarabdha Karma? Every person has their own personalized study plan in this Earth school. For many old souls, gaining these jewels is the core curriculum. If you were learning a foreign language, progressively harder lessons would come as you advanced in skill until you could say anything you needed. Similarly, the Divine has a lesson plan for you to learn to hold these spiritual qualities with ever-increasing fluency.
A simple example: Freya collects antique glassware. One day at a garage sale, she found a highly valuable vase for just 99 cents. Excited beyond measure, she bought it . . . then accidentally dropped it on the way back to her car. If her ego were in the lead, she might have said, What a klutz! I’m completely destroyed and devastated. Let me blame myself for hours. But seen through a spiritual lens, she actually got the perfect chance to invite in those jewels, far more valuable than even the shattered antique.
Authors Stephen and Ondrea Levine tell a story about this in Who Dies?