Walter's Inner Child Coaching: A Guide for Your Inner Journey

WALTER’S INNER CHILD COACHING

SERIES TRAINING AND CONSULTING BY PETER FRITZ WALTER WALTER’S CAREER GUIDE WALTER’S LEADERSHIP GUIDE WALTER’S INNER CHILD COACHING

WALTER’S INNER CHILD COACHING A GUIDE FOR YOUR INNER JOURNEY by Peter Fritz Walter

Published by Sirius-C Media Galaxy LLC 113 Barksdale Professional Center, Newark, Delaware, USA ©2015 Peter Fritz Walter. Some rights reserved. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License This publication may be distributed, used for an adaptation or for derivative works, also for commercial purposes, as long as the rights of the author are attributed. The attribution must be given to the best of the user’s ability with the information available. Third party licenses or copyright of quoted resources are untouched by this license and remain under their own license. The moral right of the author has been asserted Set in Avenir Light and Trajan Pro Designed by Peter Fritz Walter ISBN 978-1-517119-47-8 Publishing Categories Self-Help / Personal Growth / Success Publisher Contact Information [email protected] http://sirius-c-publishing.com Author Contact Information [email protected] About Dr. Peter Fritz Walter http://peterfritzwalter.com Pierre’s Blog https://medium.com/@pierrefwalter/publications/

About the Author

Parallel to an international law career in Germany, Switzerland and the United States, Dr. Peter Fritz Walter (Pierre) focused upon fine art, cookery, astrology, musical performance, social sciences and humanities. He started writing essays as an adolescent and received a high school award for creative writing and editorial work for the school magazine. After finalizing his law diplomas, he graduated with an LL.M. in European Integration at Saarland University, Germany, and with a Doctor of Law title from University of Geneva, Switzerland, in 1987. He then took courses in psychology at the University of Geneva and interviewed a number of psychotherapists in Lausanne and Geneva, Switzerland. His interest was intensified through a hypnotherapy with an Ericksonian American hypnotherapist in Lausanne. This led him to the recovery and healing of his inner child. In 1986, he met the late French psychotherapist and child psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto (1908-1988) in Paris and inter-

viewed her. A long correspondence followed up to their encounter which was considered by the curators of the Dolto Trust interesting enough to be published in a book alongside all of Dolto’s other letter exchanges by Gallimard Publishers in Paris, in 2005. After a second career as a corporate trainer and personal coach, Pierre retired as a full-time writer, philosopher and consultant. His nonfiction books emphasize a systemic, holistic, crosscultural and interdisciplinary perspective, while his fiction works and short stories focus upon education, philosophy, perennial wisdom, and the poetic formulation of an integrative worldview. Pierre is a German-French bilingual native speaker and writes English as his 4th language after German, Latin and French. He also reads source literature for his research works in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Dutch. In addition, Pierre has notions of Thai, Khmer, Chinese and Japanese. All of Pierre’s books are hand-crafted and self-published, designed by the author. Pierre publishes via his Delaware company, Sirius-C Media Galaxy LLC, and under the imprints of IPUBLICA and SCM (Sirius-C Media). Pierre’s Amazon Author Page http://www.amazon.com/Peter-Fritz-Walter/e/B00M2QN4SU

Pierre’s Blog https://medium.com/@pierrefwalter/publications/

Contents

❊

Prelude-Maternity

11

Becoming An Individual

23

Who is Who Guide

35

Chapter Two

55

Chapter Three

71

The Starting Point

71

Write About What You Like

74

Express Your Feelings

75

Jot Down Creative Ideas

76

Chapter Four

79

Introduction

79

Inner Child Recovery

83

Inner Child Types

83

The Bereaved Inner Child The Betrayed Inner Child The Cataleptic Inner Child The Wounded Inner Child The Magical Inner Child The Playful Inner Child

Mastering Your Resistance Get in Touch

94 104

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Peter and Paul Inner Child Healing

Act One Act Two Act Three

117 120

125 134 145

Scene One Evaluation Scene Two Evaluation Scene Three Evaluation Scene Four Evaluation

Chapter Five

181

Introduction

181

Main Theme

187

Preparation Inner Artist, Get Ready! Just Do It!

188 191 205

Spontaneous Composing

211

Inner Child Essays

223

Contents Feel Good for No Reason Inner Child Recovered Inner and Outer Child Child Play The Invisible Artist Violence Begins Inside

Feel Good For No Reason

224

Inner Child Recovered

226

Inner and Outer Child

230

Child Play

234

CONTENTS

The Invisible Artist

247

Violence Begins Inside

264

Inner Child FAQ

269

Postface

289

Two Specialized Books

295

Jeremiah Abrams

295

Reclaiming the Inner Child Hal and Sidra Stone

306

Embracing Our Selves

Inner Child Glossary

315

BIBLIOGRAPHY

319

Personal Notes

339

Our inner world is reality, reality even more real than the apparent world; to call fantasy or fairy tale what merely seems illogical means that one does not understand nature. —MARC CHAGALL

The author’s profits from this book are being donated to charity.

Prelude-Maternity

The Way to Your Inner Child

❊

This guide is the fruit of twenty-four years of work on inner child recovery and healing, creativity boosting and counseling. It was a long journey, and it taught me that one quality the inner child asks for is patience! But the journey was a rewarding one ultimately, both on the personal and the professional level. And yet it started innocently, so to speak, as a way of solving personal problems! Accomplished work looks always neat but not many of us would ever engage in anything worthwhile if destiny did not kick us a bit along the way. Most of our greatest accomplishments are not voluntary choices but the result of inner and outer tensions that led to friction and strife. The biographies of creators, artists, healers and business people all show this pattern. From the problem, the friction, heat is gener-

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ated, hot creative or yang energy that frees its way through all the obstacles faced, through all the darkness, into the light, and new harmonious solutions. The quest for recovering and healing our inner child is identical with our quest for more aliveness, more joy of life and more creativity. This quest is a vital issue and one of the foremost topics in modern therapy, and yet it is a foolish thing to strive for elucidating what most people consider their childish and immature side. Behold, the highest treasures in life are often hidden at places where we least expect them to be! Unfortunately it is also true that the inner child is the inner energy we are inclined to disregard most; it is the inner voice that is most easily made down or put to silence in our culture. Yet the denial of our inner voices, and especially the voice of our dear inner child has many undesired consequences. Be it a dull, monotonous life with mediocre achievements, shallow relationships and a lack of depth in our insights about life, be it extreme alienation from self, schizophrenia, robotism or alcoholism, where it all begins is where

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our creative inner guide is put to silence, sentenced to shut up, deprived of input on our daily decisions. The quest for the inner child is the quest for soul, and for that matter not something actively supported by our cultural values. It is a personal religious quest of the purest vintage! In the East, meditation serves the need for reconnecting with our source, and in the West we rely on similar techniques that are only different by their names but that lead to the same goal: true religio. As Jeremiah Abrams, one of the finest editors and authors on the subject of inner child healing and voice dialogue points it out, inner child recovery and working on our inner shadow are the essentials of true religion. —See Jeremiah Abrams (Ed.), Reclaiming the Inner Child (1990).

Our modern media culture rarely ever informs about the healthy growth of our inner landscape. It does not officially recognize the fact that creators are multi-dimensional personalities, beholders of heaven and hell, angels and devils, to express it metaphori-

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cally. Worse, moralistic education and puritanical conditioning attempt to define the human being in a reductionist manner that labels negatively certain emotions, fantasies, inner processes, desires or obsessions, thus telling people to repress the most precious portion of their energy resources. This careless attitude regarding our inner world is perhaps a relict of our past, the rigid conditioning of our previous generations toward religious dogmatism and the cultural blinding out of inner truth. Real morality is not a cultural achievement but innate in humans when we are connected to our inner wisdom; while it can never be brought about by coercion, religious indoctrination and intolerance because of the simple fact that we are the beholders of our inner life! The result of this denial is human potential wasted in the millions, virtually every day, and this in the name of culture, while, truly, this process is closer to the dissolution of culture than to its progress! Culture is language and language begins where inner and outer processes are acknowledged and verbalized.

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If you want to be yourself, you have to face yourself, all of you, all the time. You have to be nonjudgmental for this purpose, immoral in the right sense, and gentle, rather than persecutory and moralistic as mainstream culture tries to dictate for smashing the individual and promoting the false hero as the incarnation of structural violence and thus of resistance to life. The authentic individual is critical, yet flexible, focused on self-actualization yet compassionate. The true individual is the result of inner alchemy; the rebirth of the individual requires the death of the social mask and the integration of the shadow. The true individual follows innate wisdom rather than authorities. The true individual does not build growth upon knowledge, but upon self-knowledge. Voice dialogue and especially the involvement of the inner child in our daily rational and emotional decisions wards off dissolution of our soul in the meltpot of postmodern consumerism. The awareness that results from it helps you to act appropriately, not by reject and elitist evasion, but by making the right choices and staying attuned to true and constructive relationships.

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Truth is the key word to inner child recovery and healing, and it’s truth that the inner child is asking for. To be truthful establishes the bond with our inner source; to be aligned with our inner energies, we have to put aside self-condemnation, moralism, judgmentalism, and overadaptation. Most people are unaware of their inner trials, blindly surfing on the hot waves of mass hysteria, the past and the present ones, imitating the general schizoid theme of splitting the world into black and white, good and bad, heroes and offenders, thus preparing the world for war and themselves for a schizoid crack-up! Inner child recovery and healing cannot be done halfway through, or it will never be done; we cannot fool the inner child for it is bright, smart, and superior an entity or energy, full of wisdom and generosity. What we dissect from its life, we feed on our inner critic. The world is a sad place because of all those blown-up righteous fighters of eternal justice and socalled ‘good causes’ of all sorts that destroy true innocence, the innocence that is innate in life, in love, and in pleasure.

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Let me accompany you on a part of your way to innocence! Let me be of help in opening the channel that leads to freeing your inner child from the vicious attacks of your inner critic or a hyper-rational inner adult that tries to argue away all that is outside a mechanistic universe that comes with the presumptuous label of a ‘scientific society.’ And let me help your inner child get out of the hands of a hypocrite and hyper-tyrannical inner parent who yells that it acts always for the child’s best through all the inner and outer media of this world while subduing the vital energies of children from birth and manipulating them emotionally in a holy war for the golden calf of consumerism and for upholding the age-old myth of children’s purity. The inner child is powerful but its power is not of this world. If you do not open your awareness to a nonjudgmental worldview, you can hardly come to grips with it and your quest will remain superficial. Do not fool your inner child with sentimentality, with all that lukewarm soup that you absorb every day in the mass media! It is immune to this kind of care. It is beyond the pettiness of those life haters who rec-

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ognize as children only obedient little toddlers, but consider criminal or delinquent those truly critical, disturbing, obnoxious and intelligent adolescents who often are big souls and great persons. Our best children, inner and outer, are perhaps our most unwelcome ones?! Surely, you and me will end up with different patterns and definitions of this truth, and do not have to share a ready-for-all solution. I do not believe in quick fixes, and I do not offer you one in this guide. What I offer you is a part of my truth. I will show you some of my way, to help you finding yours. Whatever may stand in the way of you and me understanding each other is the difference of human character; however, the true key to yourself is your inner child!  There is extensive literature on inner child healing and art work. There are excellent nonfiction books, there is fiction, there is poetry, there are films. A recent Google search under the key word ‘inner child’ threw me out 34,000,000 results! Yet, I dare to say that on our daily life agenda, the topic of the inner child is still a marginal item. It is not a subject cherished by the mass media. It does not really fit in their black18

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and-white design of a world split in angels and beasts. It is a subject that leads to meditating about the unity of all life, about our humble connectedness with nature rather than our arrogant fight with it. It is true when you say that you already practice inner connectedness through caring for your pets, through watering your flowers every day, through the role you play in uplifting others around you, if you do that not as a dry obligation but with the enthusiasm of innocence. It is true when you argue that, after all, you practice involving your inner child in the world! What I can give you is not much more, if you have this attitude, this talent to be natural and connected. What I can give you is perhaps some kind of check list to help you uncover the hidden parts of your inner child, to help you detect where and when you act for others not from a point of genuine care, but from a guilt pattern or a nasty obsession of being good at all times. We are not supermen and superwomen and selfdevelopment should never pretend to render us super-human. Unfortunately, a large part of the modern selfhelp literature has a strong imprint of that 19

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kind. In my view, it has misled people more than it helped them, for it has enlarged the split that divides people in light and shadow, angel and devil, beauty and beast, instead of contributing to close this split and thus establish natural harmony that is based on accepting life as it is: an unending play of shades of gray. This guide is based upon acceptance as the superior principle of wisdom, in accordance with one of the oldest sages, Lao-tzu who writes in the Tao Te Ching: EMBRACING THE WAY,

You become embraced; Breathing gently, you become newborn; Clearing your mind, you become clear; Nurturing your children, you become impartial; Opening your heart, you become accepted; Accepting the world, you embrace the Way. Bearing and nurturing, Creating but not owning, Giving without demanding, This is harmony.

What about being truly human? Is there not beauty in that, is there not immense joy coming from that, the joy namely to be free of any concept, of any obligation to represent this-or-that in the eyes of an-

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other. What about representing yourself in the eyes of yourself?

21

Becoming An Individual

The Journey to Self

❊

The Tree of Life is different from the Pedigree or Genealogical Tree. To walk into your own life basically implies to leave home, and to make the psychological cut with the matrix. For this to happen, we have to go through a process of identity building that commences as early as in babyhood. Building identity is coupled with building autonomy. Liz Greene & Juliet Sharman-Burke write in their enlightening study The Mythic Journey (2000): There is a mysterious impulse in all of us to become ourselves—unique and defined individuals apart from the family bonds, partnerships and community life which give us a feeling of identity. But, as myth tells us, the process of becoming an individual is a hard and sometimes painful one. It involves not only a willingness to meet the inner and outer challenges that test

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our strength, but also a capacity to stand alone and endure the envy or hostility of those who have not yet begun this journey towards selfhood. Myth presents us with stories about how hard it is to leave home and what kind of dragons we must encounter and fight in our struggle towards autonomy. Not least, mythic tales also reveal the profound importance of a sense of personal purpose and meaning—perhaps the deepest mystery imbedded in our efforts to become what we truly are. We may not always recognize the degree to which we have avoided the challenge of individuality and the everyday ways in which we betray our most heartfelt values in order to feel we belong. In these spheres, myths can offer not only insight, but also the reassurance that self-development is not necessarily the same thing as selfishness. We cannot really offer to others what we have not yet developed within ourselves. (Id., 73)

Our present social and educational system makes us believe that there are standard truths for all of us, standard values, standard forms of behavior and a standardized morality framework for all of us. A natural science that was deeply alienated from spiritual truth and whose main advocate was Charles Darwin has led many to simply compare humans to the animal race and to deduct social, political and psychological conclusions from such a haphazard premise.

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The fact that we all got two arms and two legs does not mean that we can compare human beings with each other on a soul level. If we could, it would be easy and practical to work out standards for selfimprovement and promote them worldwide in schools, universities and the media. The only wisdom you can learn is the one you have got already, that is contained in your continuum, your own inner space, your timeless soul, your potential. All wisdom, all knowledge that we can find, we knew it already before, and if we wish, we can find it again. I think we all have gone, as humans, through the loss of connectedness with our true source. From this experience of loss we keep a deep-down memory, somewhere in our collective unconscious. From this memory and the depression and loneliness that followed, we have developed a feeling of anticipation, a deep anxiety regarding the lost knowledge. This is why many of us today still reject what they call ‘esoteric knowledge’ or make it down as superstition or imagination.

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Life is our creation at every infinitesimal point of the lifeline. The lifeline itself has no beginning and no end and therefore is more appropriately described as the circle-of-life, or the spiral-of-life. There is no doubt about our impact upon the invisible threads out of which the web of life is woven. However, the depressed and alienated masses tend to believe that there is, if ever, hardly any individual control over life and that life is per se destined to be this or that way, according to some mysterious heavenly plan. In reality, there simply is no such plan. It is interesting to see to what extent this wrong presumption contributes to the dullness of the ignorant masses. Contemplating the power of nature, of creation, how can one associate anything but freedom with the fundamental force from which sprang all the thousand things? This force has created unlimited freedom and power. However, humans have limited it to the tiny stupid thing that they have made out of life and that they use to call their life. They talk of my life and your life, as if we individually owned life, as if life could be owned at all. Only things can be owned but life is not 26

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a thing, but a dynamic, energetic process—a cosmic dance. Only utter ignorance about the very roots of life could bring about the present state of affairs among us humans, this desperate dependency and passivity of humans worldwide. Of course, we are very busy imitating others and in that many people find their shallow satisfaction. It is a lack of energy, of commitment to ourselves and our individual, very specific mission that makes us comply with the baseline of living and transforms us into bad copies of ourselves. Few people live original lives, first-hand lives. Compared with the masses of imitators and robots that run around on this globe, these people represent a tiny minority. And if you look closely at them you find out quickly that they are always the contradictors, the ones who try to do things differently, the ones who are not easily satisfied, not easily duped into some petty mediocre thing, be it a job or a partner or a million in the lottery. Their value system is strangely different from the one most people have blindly

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adopted. When they were children, they were keen, curious, sometimes excessively inquisitive, yet not out of low intention but from a deep thirst for human experience and interest in the human soul. In school, or more generally, in systems, educational, military or otherwise, they are the big or small disturbers, the ones who never fit in, the ones who won’t comply with most of the rules, the ones also who spontaneously create different rules that, typically, function better than the rules they broke. I do not say that you have to become a rulebreaker in order to get to know your original self, while rule-breaking at times does trigger a personal path of self-perfection. I do say, however, that in order to get in touch with your own originality, you have to become acutely aware of all the influences you are exposed to at any moment of your life. Why? Because there are influences that are beneficial for your growth and there are others that are harmful for it or that for the least are going to retard it. The art of life is all about being able to distinguish the latter influences from the former. Some authors and gurus require an inner purification before they admit that our soul can grow and develop. However, this means to put a time 28

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element in something that is beyond or outside of time. Matters concerning the soul or our higher self are outside the space-time continuum. If we assume that growth processes on this level can only take place after going through a sort of soul graduation, we assemble events on a timeline that have no place there. It seems smarter to admit that the very process of growing implies in itself a purification of old soul content. There is probably, without our knowing of it, a continuous process of renewal going on in the soul. In addition, it seems more effective to think in terms of evolution than in terms of purification. Purification focuses on the past, evolution on the future. If I want to ride a bicycle or a car and watch the road too closely, I am accident-prone. I ride safely if I gaze within a farther distance. The same is true for personal evolution. Directed, voluntary progress is possible only if there is vision, and a vision that heads farther into the future than just tomorrow or next week. True vision is created by your higher self, after deep relaxation, by centering within and focusing upon your uniqueness.

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Many people, especially from the older generation, find it against the rules of good taste to focus upon themselves, to do self-improvement or generally to bestow attention on themselves. Many of them carry along deep guilt feelings from childhood, often having suffered mistreatment and neglect in their early years. As a result, they tend to block off when they are asked to take care of themselves. They may indulge in a good deal of social help for others, assist in welfare projects, or be otherwise useful to the community. More often than not, their self-neglect ends with a cancer or some other violent disease that crowns the big sacrifice they wanted to offer with their life! We cannot be ultimately useful if we regard ourselves as useless. We cannot bestow loving attention upon others if we do not give it to us first. True religion, in the sense of the word, begins with taking care of self. This is not a religion of egotism as you may haphazardly consider it, but the only true religion. We do never know others good enough to judge their spiritual views, needs and belongings. We are all on different levels of evolution and different spheres of existence and belong to different soul groups and 30

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energy fields; and we all have had different former lives, incarnations and challenges, and we all carry different visions about our individual evolution and the evolution of our clan or race. It is this difference about our soul origins that makes us so helpless when we talk about what we call spiritual matters. Have you ever observed that people talk on different levels of consciousness when they discuss about what is called spirituality? The true lover of truth does not make a distinction between spiritual and nonspiritual matters since this distinction is artificial and without value. For the spiritually minded being, everything is spiritual. For the materialistically minded individual, everything is material. Life is a whole process and every attempt to divide it up, to section it, to dissect it into various parts is detrimental to grasping its perfume. Metaphorically, we can compare symbiosis and codependence with paradise. Adam and Eve had to leave paradise—why? They had to leave paradise for developing their autonomy, as a matter of achieving their individuation. Paradises are not different from other things in that they, too, have a shadow: posi-

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tively, they give us the almost complete illusion of security and satisfy all possible desires. But negatively, they are true prisons.  The tree of knowledge was forbidden in paradise to Adam and Eve—and we must add, even in paradise! Or, more clearly put, it was forbidden to them because they lived in paradise. To live with their full potential, Adam and Eve had to follow the wisdom of the serpent. Eating the apple, they knew each other as man and woman: they got to know about their sexual identity. It was also their discovery of sexuality since the Bible uses the old expression to ‘know another’ for sexual intercourse. Through the fact of knowing the other, recognizing the sexual identity of the partner, we get information about our own sexual identity. This is an important truth: love leads to increased self-knowledge and is a part of our growth process. Without loving others, and I dare to specify, making love with others, we will hardly get to know ourselves. Through love we grow, we mature.  Leaving paradise is exactly this, leaving the childhood of dependency implying a self-sufficient, narcis32

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sistic way of being, and opening up to true relationship where every partner is a whole autonomous being. Hence, love means relating and taking responsibility for one’s love choices. All sentient beings have to leave the nest of paradise. The fetus, decided he to stay in the womb to avoid the trauma of birth, would die right there! Adam and Eve, leaving paradise, survived! Their leaving paradise was a birth, a birth to life on earth, life in a body of flesh, created by desire, an incarnated life. The family tree and the phylogenetic tree both symbolize the nest, the matrix. They are the symbols for the hereditary roots of the person. But they are also prisons and graves for the individual.  This truth is pointed out in many religious scriptures and Ramana Maharshi expresses it in the formula that we have to go beyond the confusion that we are the body, that we should set aside our unconscious or conscious identification with the body. Once we have found that we are spiritual beings, sparkles of light in a universe of light or planets or stars, as the

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natives say, we understand that the family is only the nest and as such a kind of springboard which should catapult us into life, into our own life.

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Who is Who Guide

The Who is Who of Your Inner Child

❊

This is a guide into the Who is Who of your inner child. Who is this child? When you see the abundance of literature on the subject and consider that it’s already so many years that inner child healing is known, well, you think everybody should know about it. But reality is far from this; truly, it is still an esoteric subject, even for physicians and, you may not believe it, for many psychiatrists. In my experience, there is a deep gap between therapists who work on the gestalt, the emotions, the imaginal realm, and the sub-language level such as hypnotherapists, and those who work with psychoanalysis, let alone behavioral psychologists or most personnel psychologists who are really on a different track. The difference consists in the fact that the first group tries to do away with conditioning while the lat-

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ter make their living with helping maintain and reinforce social conditioning. Inner child healing or, generally, voice dialogue is a technique pertaining to the first paradigm; it has nothing to do with social conditioning, and even acts pretty much counter to it. Inner child healing therefore truly is a step into personal freedom! It is important to note that this energy is present even in cases where the inner child is cataleptic and not responding in any way. A mute inner child is not a child that has the tongue cut out. A mute inner child can be gradually led to communicate using language as a means of communication, once the fear blockage is removed, and sufficient trust was built for the inner child to get out of the protective shell. The next question that most people ask silently or openly is to know if this inner child is the same in all of us or if we have all got a different inner child? The answer is that we all have got our unique and individual inner child and that your inner child carries by no means the same energy pattern as my inner child.

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That is one of the reasons for the fact that inner child recovery is such a unique and important event in the life of a person. The inner child is different in all of us and makes the process a different one. There are persons whose inner child would stay a considerable time in the wounded phase without wanting to move on to complete healing. With others, the inner child, once communication is desired from the inner adult and the inner parent, quickly takes its natural power, is healed, and becomes the Little Professor in the sense Eric Berne used this expression. This is actually not something surprising. We have all got different characters and a quite unique mental and emotional setup. Why then should the inner child be the same in all of us? This idea does not make sense to me. One of the greatest pleasures in life comes from recognizing and enjoying life’s incredible variety. As there are no two roses that are exactly the same, there are no two inner children who have the same character and the same kind of reaction. Your inner child will face life differently than mine. This is even so if both your and my inner child have been re37

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covered with exactly the same method, using the same therapy approach, the same kind of voice dialogue, the same facilitator, and so on. This insight should warn us to standardize the work on our inner child and expect automatic and uniform results. Such an attitude will not only render the work ineffective: it can impede the recovered inner child from expressing itself fully and joyously. Besides that, great care and sensitivity is needed to cope with the first responses of a formerly mute inner child. A wrong answer, a slight lack of empathy, a spur of arrogance can hurt and damage much, especially when the inner child was wounded and betrayed. But after all, drawbacks have to be accepted as a normal and unavoidable fact of life. Inner child recovery is no easy task; but that should not shy us away from doing it. The energy invested in it is never wasted. It will pay back tenfold! It would be very unrealistic to say that because of the mistakes one may commit when doing the recovery work alone, people should imperatively be accompanied by a professional. Of course, such advise

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is no bad advise, but it is impractical advice because of the simple disproportion of masses of people with unrecovered inner children and a tiny percentage of mental health professionals who are specialized in inner child recovery and healing, on the other. And there is an emotional factor as well. The inner child may indeed defy any sophisticated technique highly trained professional and remain totally closed up —just for showing that it can’t and won’t be impressed by any worldly knowledge or power. This is exactly what I mean when I am talking about the power of the child. The inner child is often moved by true empathy, by true commitment, by soft and repeated demands, or a repeated and sincere quest to get in touch. Such a quest typically comes from the heart, and it is motivated by love; not the kind of love most of us engage in every day, not passion or desire, but genuine care and a certain prudence, a certain caution not to hurt another who may be fragile in some way. Yet not pitiful love either. The inner child tends to ward off against saviors and apostles with their usually false way of dialoging with a child. It generally is not 39

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responsive to ‘baby talk’ since it is watching out for manipulation. A betrayed inner child who is faced with a manipulative attitude during the recovery process will never develop enough trust to open up to real dialogue. Genuineness primes. For those of you who write poetry or are otherwise well connected to the non-rational side of life, also for those of you who have defied social adaptation, the inner child will probably play a considerable role in your lives, and you may have more ease than others to recover and heal it. An important point in this guide is to understand that your inner child is not asking you for— ‣

adapting well to your environment;

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listening to what your neighbors or friends say;

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doing things the way others do them or as ‘one should’ do them;

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being persistent and patient, well-mannered and nice;

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obeying to a strict system of values and principles; 40

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‣

having a high standard of moral or ethical values.

If you want to sell any of these virtues to your inner child you will get one of the following: ‣

A long silence followed by a funny remark;

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A chuckle and warning that you’re going to be a robot soon;

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A serious remark that you’re not connected to your creative potential;

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A hint that you’re a boring, annoying nerd;

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No answer at all.

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A cynical hint that you should read pornography or Shakespeare, or both, so that you get a last chance to wake up from your millennium sleep.

The inner child is not the instance in you that wants to avoid all, be at peace all the time, satisfy everybody, or play the savior or a role model. In the contrary, your inner child asks you to be daring and bold!

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Your inner child seeks adventure and pushes you to do unusual and often funny things; is not always rational, but that does not mean that it is per se foolish. Your inner child is your voice of wisdom once it is recovered and healed. Your inner child asks you to be passionate and to live your life to its fullest. It belittles you if you want to hold back yourself from adventure. Your inner child wants you to be open-minded and frank; it abhors dishonesty and hypocrisy. Your inner child is hurt by nothing more than your indifference. It can take the worst of critique, the worst of admonishments, the worst of blame. It may cry, but it will not turn away. It will turn away only if you are indifferent to its needs over an extended period of time. Then it might become cataleptic. Your inner child is proud of you when you are brilliant and bold with others; it respects you less if you hide behind a social mask or run with the majority. It is a minority lover and prefers intelligent marginality over stupid conformity. Your inner child is strong and powerful through the fact that it appears to be a nonsense to most people. 42

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You can win many people playing out your inner child in the social game, and this, if you do it the right way, can give you many advantages in your interactions with others, professional or private. Let me focus for a moment on the last point, the question of social power. I think it is a very important point and one that is generally largely misunderstood. Social power has a lot to do with the tactics of communication, the silent dialogue that we lead when we interact with others. To be more precise, there are basically two levels of communication, an obvious, and a hidden level. When we communicate we are constantly interacting on two levels. The obvious level represents the matter we are actually talking about, while at the hidden level, we have an exchange of coded messages regarding things like: ‣

‘Who are you?’

‣

‘Are you nice and friendly, or ugly and criminal?’

‣

‘What is your motivation for this exchange?’

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‘What is your general attitude?’

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‣

‘Are you interested to build a close relationship with me?’

Let me point this out more in detail, using an example. When you present yourself to an employer for a job interview, during that interview a lot of interesting things are going to happen. Of course, on an obvious level we are talking about such common things as the number of work hours, salary, vacation, your qualification for the work. your references, your expertise, your work experience, etc. That is rather boring compared to what happens on the hidden level, for on the hidden level, the things are exchanged that later really count for your employer to hire you, or not. Here the elements come in that are used to either build trust, or to not building trust. Your employer wants to see if you would be a trustworthy person as an employee of his company, and you want to know if this employer is somebody you can trust and who will not cheat you on your health insurance or vacation amounts. There are typically many imponderables that make this silent dialogue a very interesting thing to observe. For example, the way you sit in the chair, the way your eyeballs move, the way you talk about

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others, the way you talk about yourself; how what you say relates to what is written in your CV. There are many other points. Let me exemplify those five points more in detail so that you can see the complex kind of hidden dialogue that is going on in every verbal exchange with somebody, provided there is at least some form of visual contact, typically physical presence of the two persons in one and the same room. I will now list a small number of questions that your employer or the person that interviews you for the job asks and answers for themselves. Please note that the emphasis is on answers; truly, if you want it or not, the person will give those answers on the mere assumptions taken from your presence, if though those answers might be totally wrong, for the conclusions the person draws from your appearances might be completely off-track. But that is precisely the tricky thing about it. THE WAY YOU SIT IN THE CHAIR

‘This person seems very carefree or irresponsible.’ (You sit too relaxed, your spine is too much curbed).

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‘This person seems to be obsessed or neurotic.’ (You move too much on your chair because you are afraid). ‘This person is not flexible enough to adapt to changes.’ (You sit too straight, too upright, too stiff). THE MOVEMENT OF YOUR EYEBALLS WHILST YOU ARE TALKING

‘This person is too idealistic, her goals are too high.’ (Eyeballs are rolling up). ‘This person is depressive or dishonest.’ (Eyeballs are rolling down). ‘This person is afraid of others, constantly in fear of mistakes.’ (Eyeballs are rolling sideward). THE WAY YOU TALK ABOUT OTHERS

‘This person slanders everybody.’ (You talk negatively about previous employers or colleagues). ‘This person sullies her family, her nest.’ (You talk negatively about your past, your childhood, etc.). ‘This person is too indulgent.’ (You talk about how people you know enjoy themselves). ‘This person is too critical about others.’ (You talk about others’ mistakes).

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THE WAY YOU TALK ABOUT YOURSELF

‘This person is megalomaniac.’ (You talk about your self-vision, your plans for the future). ‘This person betrays others.’ (You talk about your hidden motives in relationships with others). ‘This person is morally weak.’ (You talk about your pleasures in life, what you really like). ‘This person has no sense for the group.’ (You are proud about things that you have accomplished alone). HOW WHAT YOU SAY IS WRITTEN IN YOUR CV

‘This person lies to us.’ (You say that you want a stable job, while you changed employers 25 times in the last 22 years). ‘This person is not trustworthy.’ (You tell them professional secrets from former employers). ‘This person has a weak social sense.’ (You mention interests that do not involve others, such as reading, playing with your pets, cooking nice meals for yourself, being around your favorite plants, etc.).

Surprised? Well, observe yourself, then you will see that employers or job interviewers are not especially mean people. We all do this constantly! It’s what Krishnamurti called ‘putting up mental images about

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others.’ The mind, the brain does that almost automatically, and only a very few highly conscious individuals control this when it occurs. Most of us just let it happen and later are not even aware where we base our conclusions and decisions upon. We might say ‘Oh yes, this person lacked one year of the required work experience,’ while truly, we don’t care about this experience, if only we liked the person on the spot. However the person appeared to be obnoxious, riding on a high horse, too proud, too much of a single fighter, ego-centered or too indulgent … where did we take all those conclusions from? In the rarest cases from what was really exchanged in the obvious part of the conversation. We take our conclusions from those vague assumptions we make up as reactions of how the other person appears to us on a level of subconscious dialogue. When you read through this example, you may find some of the conclusions exaggerated or off-track, but that is how it occurs in real life. If you like it or not, it is not at all exaggerated. And I know part of it from a psychologist who is a professional job interviewer and who told me some of his ‘secrets’ during a per-

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sonal growth seminar I gave and where he participated. Sorry to appear so hard on relationships—that’s the way we are towards each other, and there is no basic trust. This first kind of hidden exchange namely drives us to deepen a relationship or abandon it. This is—as I have explained in RICCA® and HIT®— a question of five subsequent steps, to be precise, from Relation to Association. We all want to move on in relationships, we all want to have deep and meaningful relations with others, but we are generally rather careful to build trust, while going from step to step and getting closer to one another; and if there is anything that puts us off on the way, the relationship is going to be put on ice, or in the garbage bin. Now, what has all that to do with our inner child? An interesting thing is that the more you are conscious of your inner entities such as your inner child, your inner adult, and your inner parent, and the more you experience having dialogue with them, the more you control this hidden subconscious dialogue with others. I even go as far as saying that the only way we master dialogue with others is to train our inner dia49

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logue, or that our outer dialogue with others actively mirrors the quality of our inner dialogue with ourselves. This is some stuff from my communication training, but it’s not just an idea or an opinion; it’s a fact of life that I have myself found through trial and error. When you read through the above example, you may find some of the points not at all applying to you. This is natural since we are all different. Of course, this example is tinted by my own unique experience of life and my way of being. I am perhaps that kind of unsocial, high-strung, megalomaniac, overly individual, pathologically ambitious and obnoxious person … That’s how mainstream people tend to see me. I have never been employed for any job; I simply see no value in that, and in most group interactions neither. I enjoy my solitary life very much, and I do not feel lonely at all. I love the company of myself, and else of my cats, and my plants, and when I go out into the street, I feel connected to all. But sometimes I can find people truly annoying, and I feel I am wasting my time with them. And then I prefer working and doing something more worth50

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while, more productive, such as playing piano. The problem was that I did not figure why I was constantly rejected, why I had so many problems with others? It was only through my therapy and my work with voice dialogue that I became gradually aware of all of this. It has taken many years and was a beautiful thing to happen. I am very happy and love my work. That’s my bliss. You may not be as extreme as I am and perhaps much more accommodating with others, with groups, with social life. Your problems may be others; the principle, however, is the same for all of us: the principle of the hidden dialogue, the language that is not verbal and that we constantly use to evaluate another on a trust-building scale, while on a basic level, when trust is not yet built, we consider each other as rats! Why do I mention all of this? Because all of this was totally hidden to me and is hidden to most of us. I did not know why I was constantly rejected, why I felt so terribly lonely all through my school and university years. I did not understand it, so much the more as I appear to be a rather gentle person in social exchange, that I try very hard to respect others and I 51

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hide my true identity in order not to dominate the dialogue with others. But I could not control that pattern until I had found voice dialogue as a means of knowing myself; and doing that, I found that it was my inner child that was that obnoxious part in me. I then became aware that this inner child had indeed all reason to be obnoxious; it was obnoxious because it was very angry with me, very depressed and very upset because I had neglected it for about two decades of my life. After I was getting to know my inner child, suddenly all became clear like a mountain river, and the fog lifted around all those mysterious events in my life, all those missed opportunities that in hindsight had been no opportunities at all, simply because my way was not to be a conformist. And I would not now be able to contribute in the way I contribute to society with my productions, had I obeyed to social standards rather than my inner voice. There is always a sense in all that happens; the problem is that we often do not understand the signs,

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the ominous events that happen, because we do not understand ourselves and the guidance we always receive. This is simply the problem of connectedness with all-that-is.

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Chapter Two

Personal Diary

❊

This is a personal diary. It is an intermezzo and you should read it in a relaxed, detached mood. This dialogue, while it was personal between myself and my inner child, should some hints and throw some light on the point I want to make. The point is the relationship of your inner child to our inner adult and our inner parent. Our inner adult represents the logical part in us, the part that is the grown-up, that sees things on a maturity-scale. The inner parent is the entity that tries to guide others, that judges, that evaluates, and sees things on a morality-scale. The inner child, by contrast, is the entity that creates, invents and that changes things, and evaluates life on a creativity-scale.

WALTER’S INNER CHILD COACHING

How do these entities relate to each other on a daily basis? Well, this can be shown in many different ways. I choose the work model called voice dialogue. I named the voices: —Inner Child: Peter —Inner Adult: Pierre —Inner Parent: Walter Let me add here for the anecdote, and with a smile, that my inner child was right at the end with his argument in this following dialogue, not the inner adult in me. I have in the meantime given up all those promotional activities that in the end did not bring in anything but annoyance. I once again focus on publishing books. Online presence might be of some importance, but for me personally it has never contributed to make any sales of my books, nor was there any feedback to my spontaneous musical inspirations, and my visual inner child art. This is an insight that came from experience, but my inner child had anticipated it—and that’s quite an

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uncanny result when you think about it … because had I listened to my inner voice, I would not have wasted so much time! Peter

You are again caught in those routines. It’s awful how many hours you spend on the computer every day. And what are you doing? Fixing bugs. You are a bug-fixer, not a writer. Pierre

But I have to get that straight. Otherwise the whole software won’t work. And people cannot use it. So all my work will be for nothing, and your work, too. For we may be as creative as Picasso and as smart as Einstein, but all would be garbage if one single bug makes that the media package is not going to work. Peter

Strange how much you focus on the negative side of life. Imagine if Picasso had thought every day about the quality of the oil color he was painting with! Could he ever have done something of value if his thought had been obsessed with such stupid little details?

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Pierre

Those stupid little details make out ninety percent of life, unfortunately, and this is the same for Picasso’s and for normal people. Walter

Let’s say that life bears different depth levels. Peter

No, no, and no. I’m not talking about aspects or depth of life. I am talking about creativity, and nothing less. Pierre is caught in routines, for sure. Yesterday he spent two hours with changing all those meta tags in all his web pages. Stupid, he’s not looking for somebody to help him with that or a machine or robot that can do it. Pierre

My web editor does not allow to automate this process. I wish it could. I do not know about any program that can batch-process meta tags. Walter

Perhaps, if you searched on the Internet you’d find one?

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Pierre

Perhaps. Peter

Well, this is what is commonly called a pretext. Pierre knows very well that he can look for it on the Web and that he might find something. But he does not do it. Why? Because he kinda enjoys routines. They comfort him and keep him from feeling the challenge to be unique and productive. This challenge, he has never faced. He’s never done the step into total acceptance of himself. Pierre

Are you talking about me or with me? You are going to be annoying again! Peter

Why the hell do you find me annoying if only I open your eyes to the reality of life? Pierre

But I am myself very much aware of that reality. That reality namely consists of routines also. I am my own publisher and also your publisher. I publish your ideas since they are so daring most of the time that nobody until now wanted to publish them. So I am working for

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both of us when I self-publish our stuff. And that involves routines, I can’t help. That’s life! Peter

Okay, but you could reduce those routines to a strict minimum. Instead you indulge in all-and-nothing. Web design, hosting, publishing, promotion, free mail and free home pages, there is almost nothing you are not doing. And for what? Pierre

There is a strategy behind all that. Perhaps you don’t get it, but it’s there. I have to build a whole universe where your unique thoughts and opinions can fit in. Because they do not fit in the existing one, as you know very well yourself. Walter

I think, Pierre, you want to prepare the ground for later prosperity. Is that right? Pierre

You can indeed put it that way. You see, if you try to see things in a kind of rational way, it’s clear that to be successful one day with publishing, we need to build our own publishing empire. I am not a big boy on the Net but I must become one in order to reach out to people.

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And I am sure about one thing: there are people out there who are searching for exactly what Peter has to say and what he produces. Walter

It seems that mainstream culture does not want our productions. I mean, we have abundant proof for that. How many rejects did we get from publishers, for our writings and our music? And this since twenty years and with publishers from different countries and cultures. Pierre

Oh yes! True. And it’s truly Peter’s music. It’s absolutely not my music. I am unable to produce that. I am completely out of the game when he engages in that. That’s why we can’t remember anything after he’s played something. It’s truly inspirational. Peter

Well, you see, there’s something unique about it. The secret is to not control it, to not interfere with the natural flow. It’s to give it over to a direction that is of a higher origin. I believe I receive the music from a secret galaxy …

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Pierre

Well, you may believe that or whatever. It does not raise sales. Nobody ever sent an email or showed any reaction to all this music published on the Web. It’s so sad. And that after all the rejects from music publishers in Germany, Holland and England. It’s so sad because our great hope was the Web after all. Peter

Stop it, or I am going to cry! Stop it, damned! Do you think I understand why people are so ignorant, so insensitive? I can’t figure why they don’t like it. I think they’re just stupid and primitive. How can they like all this shit on TV every day? How can they want to pay for this stuff, for those mediocre, utterly stupid productions? Walter

Peter, you are getting overly obnoxious again, overly critical. You don’t leave a door open to them. You make them lose face. That’s not good taste, and not wise. Peter

The hell with your wisdom! Are they going to reply to your wistful articles about Feng Shui? Do you remember that bitch from Canada who said that your writings were parental lectures for her and that she felt as if

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there was a wagging finger in her face when she was reading your stuff? Walter

Yes. I am very touched by this and try to see the truth in it. What’s wrong with us? What is it that makes people reject us constantly? I am really concerned about how we come over to others. Pierre

That’s again where routines come in. You see, people are naturally attracted to what is shared by a majority. Once something is going to be in, once there is a group however small who are excited about it, then more and more people will accept it. To get there, hard work is needed, promotion, fixing all the bugs and so on. This is not achieved with childish hit-your-headagainst-the-wall nor with parental care-about-all. Here we are talking about getting through. We are talking about hard work, about toughness, about persistence. Peter

Exactly. For one time you’re right. And I even tend to agree with you regarding fixing the bugs. I see it now more clearly. But you should not overdo it. That’s what I want to say. You are sometimes too tough and you suppress me, you just make me down, you push me in a corner!

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Pierre

When, for example? Peter

Now, tell me what happened to the piano recently. Pierre

You make me ashamed talking about it. I’m so sorry I sold it. Walter

And for so cheap—too cheap! Pierre

Yes, I have to admit it. It was a mistake. I thought we needed money. Walter

But Peter has no more way to produce music. That’s very hard for him to bear with, very hard. Are you aware of that? Pierre

I was a bit aware of all that, but perhaps not enough. It’s true. I feel bad about it. But on the other hand, I

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sold it with the afterthought to buy another one. I think Peter has grown so much in his talent that he just needs a better instrument. We’re going to buy an 88key one, a wonderful thing. Because you can even play piano concertos on it. Peter

Who the hell is playing those piano concertos? You know very well that we don’t have the technique to play this difficult stuff and I have no sense to practice twenty more years in order to play one Rachmaninov concerto or only the Grieg concerto which is perhaps the easiest one of all. Walter

I love this concerto! Peter

But how much have we exercised that already! And then listening to Richter’s recording again …; it’s deafening. We can never keep up with that. Walter

True.

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Pierre

Yes, I would like so much to play this concerto, note by note. It’s wonderful. But I’m afraid you’re right, Peter, that we would simply waste our time with that. Your productions are just as original! Walter

Some of Peter’s pieces have moved me in exactly the same way as the greatest music. I was in tears and thought I could see the angels singing. There is something so unique in this music, something beyond-earth, something truly innocent. It’s absolutely mysterious. Peter

I have no merit in this. It all comes to me. It goes through me. I just receive it. Pierre

Yes, but nobody appreciates that so far. No response, just silence. That’s what we get. And this already for almost ten years now. That’s why I insist so much that we must make a kind of promotion, a kind of marketing, advertising. I am going to use the Internet for that. I build the platform for it to happen. I build the ground for it.

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Peter

Thanks, Pierre. I understand you now much better, and kind of see the necessity of your work. It couldn’t do it alone. It’s true. Walter

Yes, it seems Pierre is doing a good job. And we should trust him more. He’s our public relations manager, isn’t he? Pierre

Well, if you don’t mind my many hours on the computer… Sometimes I really think I’m getting mad about the horrid amount of work. But Peter pushes me; he drives me into a frenzy at times. He’s just so productive, new ideas every day. I don’t know how to catch up with all those exciting ideas? It seems there is only one way: forward. Walter

He passes a lot of ideas to me, too. I have many new projects for the science sites, for the spiritual sites and for my new writings. Peter

Don’t give up. Try to be more creative on a day-to-day basis.

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If we are talking about creativity, we are talking about the primary domain of the inner child. Some of us, because of early conditioning, tend to ignore this fact. What we do, then, is to imply the inner parent or the inner adult when we are challenged to be creative. The results are poor and dissatisfying. Most of the time we do not figure why this is so, and is necessarily so. This is because it’s not very common in our culture to talk about inner energies and the subtle process that is involved in being tuned in to our inner selves. This is truly a lack of culture, a lack of significance in our social interaction. It has its roots in an education that is primarily manipulative and compulsive instead of informational and supportive. Of course, those who are driven to be creative, our true artists, do it instinctively. But what about those who are not primarily artists, can they learn being more creative? My view is that they certainly can learn it. But what is needed for this to happen is not just the will to learn or the capacity to store and digest information. We are talking here about emotional self-awareness. This awareness has to be created first, and this is a

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subtle process that involves time and constant finetuning. Our culture is absolutely hostile to this kind of learning. It is far off the way we are trained to behave and to function. I even go as far as saying that learning about our inner child means to turn the back to this society with its ignorance and its brutality. It means to open the door to a new world of sensitivity, a poetic world that is unknown to most of our contemporaries. It’s to open the way to innocence.

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Chapter Three

Creativity Central

❊

The Starting Point To start with, you have to open a door to your understanding of life. It’s not enough, to repeat it, that you read this book. It is not enough that you know exactly what has been written. What is important is what is going to happen on your feeling level, and regarding your set opinions. As long as those set opinions are alien to the idea that there are multiple universes and layers of consciousness, you’ll have a hard time to get to grips with the idea of the subtle realm of energy I am talking about here. In other words, sitting in a coffee shop and listening to rock music, you may get to understand even a complex programming language or master your latest

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computer application, but you won’t connect to your inner child. For this to happen, you have to move onto another plane. Yes, it’s as esoteric as it sounds and I do not make a fuss about it. If you believe you can do this in a linear way, the way you learn math or job knowledge, you are off-track and I cannot help you. Life is not linear and dealing with your inner child is dealing directly with life. Dealing with your inner child, you have to prepare for the unknown to occur, and you should rather implement the following: —Accept the irrational in you and others; —Accept the idea that culture should foster neither rational thinking, nor irrational thinking—but both; —Accept the fact that male and female are relative expressions pointing to an energetic interplay of yin and yang; —Forget all what you learnt in school and unlearn it as fast as possible so as to again become truly natural and integral; —Forget all moralistic concepts and black-andwhite theories.

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If you agree to approach these ideas and to integrate them in your existing worldview you have a good chance to succeed with enhancing your creativity level. But an action must follow, too. It’s not enough to do this in theory but to remain passive in practice. A fine practice that could accompany those mental or emotional processes is the following: —Prepare some paper and color crayons. Take one crayon or several at a time and, after breathing deeply three times, just express the first emotion that moves through your heart. Try to jot down this energy, as you feel it, onto that paper. You can accomplish this through the strength and spontaneity of the movement or through the colors or through both. —Do more and more spontaneous activities every day. —Make a little list where you drop ideas what in your life could be done in a more spontaneous, intuitive, more joyful and less brain-draining way. This will activate your inner child and invite this energy to participate in your daily activities.

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Write About What You Like Write about what you like, not what you dislike. Once in a while, when you have a minute, sit down, take your laptop or a notepad and write a few sentences like: —Since I was a child I liked to be around paintings. And there was aunty Ida who had these wonderful flower paintings in her house, and every time I was there, I loved to be around her cats and the oil color when she was painting. I liked that smell of the paint. It was like the anticipation of something joyful to happen. Since then I love paintings. So often I had that idea to open a café-gallery, a place where people enjoy art while they sip a cup of coffee or a glass of wine ... —I once had the opportunity to drive a Rolls Royce. It was a unique experience. I felt like the world had changed, like I was seeing things from another perspective that day. All was magic, not real, not down-to-earth, but somehow transformed. I thought there are things in life that are not commonplace, but result from a challenge, the challenge to be daring and bold. This car was that, I thought— daring and

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bold. And beautiful. And in that moment I saw why I always wanted to have that car and yet condemned the very wish a moment later! I just gave you two little ideas from my own life, but you will of course jot down your own! Doing this once in a while, without a feeling of obligation, helps to give your inner child a signal to be loved and accepted, and that shall be an uplifting experience for you. You can’t recover an inner child that is not collaborating, that prefers to remain the rebel because that child was always betrayed, hurt and neglected, because it lost trust in adults. Don’t misunderstand me. It’s not that you have to do this or that. No. Just when you feel like, when you anyway daydream and indulge in those wonderful thoughts, take a further step and write those thoughts down. That little step makes a huge difference! You will see for yourself.

Express Your Feelings Once in a while, follow your intuition to express your feelings toward another person in a way that is 75

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not calculated, but spontaneous and with the impending risk that you may be rejected or regarded as being off-track, such as— —telling a woman or a man in the bus or train that she or he has a nice haircut or a pretty face or very beautiful hands; and see what happens; —telling your employer or your employee that you really like him or her as a person, not just as a superior; —telling your child that she or he is a unique person and that you had never thought you’d get such a gift from heaven when you once wished to have that child; —telling your parent that despite of all the problems you had with her or him, you value the exceptional bond between the two of you and the significance that this relationship has for all of you in the family.

Jot Down Creative Ideas Jot down your little creative thoughts, those that come to you in moments you are not prepared to re-

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ceive them. It is often while you are in the restroom, under the shower, or doing household tasks. These ideas are often as smart as they are soft-voiced; they do not come up boldly, being more like inner whispers. And they are easily forgotten if you are not attentive enough, and this so much the more as they appear in moments when you are not prepared to receive them. Often you don’t even have stationary with you and thus must become creative in marking your thoughts for later recovery. The best technique for this is to summarize a thought or idea with a keyword or a symbol. For example if you get a new idea about how to market the soap you are selling and it has to do with the Internet, key it something like ‘soap online’ or ‘soap opera online.’ It should be catchy or funny. Your inner child likes a funny and unusual markup of things and ideas, and will help you developing your creative intuition further. Just rely on the wisdom that inspired you in the first place! Rely on this superior intelligence, that subtle guidance. This force is connected with all of our inner entities, but primarily with your inner child, be-

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cause it’s primarily innocence that creates the openness needed to receive: a beginner’s mind, as it is called in Zen. By contrast, what most effectively blocks off this superior guidance is pride, arrogance and the feeling that one possesses special professional knowledge that one regards as the ultimate truth.

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Chapter Four

Healing Workbook

❊

Introduction This workbook consists of—1) Inner Child Recovery—and 2) Inner Child Healing. I have put these two main chapters into one part as they belong tightly together. I think one should not be done without the other; it is stopping the work halfway if you recover your inner child, and you do not heal it. You would do yourself a disservice. Better you don’t touch the whole thing from the start. It’s a bit like building a house and finishing it before the roof is installed. What is going to happen when it rains? Would it not have been better to avoid building that house in the first place? You would have saved yourself from getting a cold. I do not know of any systematic therapeutic approach that leads thoroughly through all the phases

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of inner child recovery and healing. This sounds astonishing, but after all, within our cultural paradigm, this is not surprising. Working on our inner child still is a quite esoteric matter, although on a superficial level, our society fakes to embrace all and every mindopening and consciousness-broadening technique. When I was searching for a therapy some ten years ago, there were only transactional therapy and gestalt therapy that came in a certain way close to working with the inner child. Now, the situation seems to be the exact contrary; virtually hundreds or even thousands of healing methods abound in a grey area between official medical care and blunt charlatanism. Within around ten minutes searching the Web, you can easily find twenty or thirty sites, and some of them focus on recovering and healing the inner child. So, is there more help now? I dare to guess that despite this outward image of abundance in healthcare, we are not much farther than ten years ago. The mere presence of know-how or human capital in society does not mean that this know-how is used by a significant number of people. The healthcare statistics in the United States show an alarming increase in

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mental illness over the last twenty years. Epilepsy, to give only one example, a mental or emotional disturbance, that has been thought to be eradicated from Western culture since about the Russian Revolution in the 1920s, is again firmly established in American mainstream culture. The fact that many traditional methods have proven ineffective against diseases resulting from the repression of our natural emotions is an indication that it’s not with medical care or healthcare that we can do away with this kind of social illness, but only through a change in our fundamental sociocultural mindset. The next step, then, would be changes in education, and the way adults relate to children. From this perspective, it is certainly important to broaden the care for the inner child as a matter of general public health. The results would be very positive, not only seen under a health or public health perspective, but with the broader view in mind that we relate to outer children in exactly the same way we relate to our inner child. If we manage to recover and heal that inner child, chances are that we improve our relating to children also on the outward level.

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With these few thoughts as an introduction, I would now like to focus on elaborating a comprehensive method for inner child recovery and healing. The material offered on the website has hopefully prepared you outlining the fundamental principles of working with inner child recovery. Principles are important in that they have an impact on our persistence when dealing with any matter in life. However, I consider even more important the attitude that motivates our actions. When reading the literature of the sages, there is Lao-tsu’s ‘Tao Te Ching,’ Tchang-tsu’s ‘Essays’ or Krishnamurti’s ‘Commentaries on Living,’ the Gospel or the I Ching, we can make out an amazing similarity with regard to what would possibly be the best conduct or attitude toward others, and life in general. It is overwhelmingly shared by those sages and even our modern science sages like Einstein, Capra, Bohm, or Grof that it is a natural, innocent, creative, and flexible attitude that is the most likely to produce success in all our dealings with others; to bring harmony to our family, friends, and business relations, to engender prosperity through win-win, and giving suc82

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cess to others; to bring health and stability through inner peace and harmony. Tis attitude is the typical behavior of a recovered and healthy inner child. It is therefore not far-fetched to see an immediate positive result flowing from the work that I propose here, a result that irradiates into the social environment and that brings multiple benefits for self and others. It might then astonish us why working on the inner child has not gained more popularity in the meantime? I think the reason simply is that wisdom never was popular and that the voices that propagate the exact contrary are overwhelming in the ears of the masses.

Inner Child Recovery Inner Child Types The first task in the recovery process is to find out what type you inner child is. This assessment serves as a kind of diagnosis. Ask to yourself the question ‘what is the condition of my inner child?’ Then listen inside for a subtle reply. Before doing that first activity, simply read through the various inner child types. There

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are four pathological, dysfunctional types, and two healthy types. You need this information even though you are later going to use your intuition to find out what type your own inner child is. Once you know what type of an inner child it is, you can more appropriately find the right measures for inner child recovery and healing. Suffices you quietly peruse the following classification, you will know at once, through intuition, which condition their inner child is suffering from. ‣

The Bereaved Inner Child (pathological)

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The Betrayed Inner Child (pathological)

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The Cataleptic Inner Child (pathological)

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The Wounded Inner Child (pathological)

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The Magical Inner Child (healthy)

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The Playful Inner Child (healthy) The Bereaved Inner Child

The bereaved inner child is a subjective impression rather than a fact; it is the idea that your inner

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child got lost. The inner child cannot get lost. Having lost contact with your inner child, you haven’t lost it. I mention this here only because in some of the literature on inner child recovery the expression is used. The inner child may have been declared lost by psychiatrists who diagnosed the cataleptic inner child. In fact, the cataleptic inner child is lost for the eye of the beholder since it appears to be dead—but isn’t. In fact, there is a difference between somebody who is in a state of muteness, of catalepsy, and somebody whose inner spirit has left forever. Considering research on out-of-body experiences, we know that in states of catalepsy and coma, the life spirit is still attached to the physical body and only in death it is cut off and departs. I believe however that the substance contained in the inner child energy is part of the spirit or soul and therefore transported to the after life. This assumption is of course a hypothesis, although it bears some convincing logic, for otherwise it would be unexplainable how the inner child can suffer from former life hangups; and that the inner child does bear karmic traces, wounds and remembrances which is an infor-

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mation provided by the work of many regression therapists. If you positively affirm the inner child lost, you may have difficulty to go through the process of inner child recovery successfully. And if your inner child does not collaborate and remains passive, there is as good as no chance for healing. It therefore appears wiser, whatever one tends to believe, to at least assume the presence of the inner child. This opens a door for the subtle changes of the inner child energy to manifest once the process of recovery has been set in motion. Little Briar Rose from the famous Grimm tale was not dead but in a bewitched condition after having being enchanted by the witch-mother. Otherwise the kiss of the prince could not have brought her back to life. From cases of black magic and shamanic experience we equally know that the organism can appear dead for days without actually being dead. Furthermore, even if you do inner child healing with a psychiatrist, you as the patient have to do the essential work in the process of recovery—not the psychiatrist who can only be a catalyzer. That is why you as the pa86

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tient must become actively involved in the recovery procedure and focused on a positive outcome. However, this is difficult to achieve if you believe from the start that your inner child has been bereaved. Thus if you see any logic in what I am saying here, never consider your inner child as lost. This is in my experience the best condition for successful inner child recovery and healing. The Betrayed Inner Child

The betrayed inner child is the inner child that has completely lost trust in adults because that child was repeatedly betrayed. Do I need to emphasize that it’s not theory what I am talking about here? The inner child is the actual child in you of the past, the actual child you have been. It is not lost but preserved in you as an invisible energy, but it’s real. So whatever that actual child has suffered, you are dealing with in your recovery process, and that may not always be a pleasant experience! In most cases, it’s actually not an agreeable experience; you may actually go through quite a bit of mourning, crying and a sort of life review, but that will ultimately be to your benefit.

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This being said, among the various categories of inner children that I present here, the betrayed inner child is still the best off. This remark may sound cynical, but compared to the damage that the cataleptic inner child and the wounded inner child have suffered, the betrayed inner child is somewhat better off. This, however, does not mean that the betrayed inner child is easy to heal. Rather the contrary is true. Betrayal leads to a complex system of self-defenses that make treatment rather difficult. The betrayed inner child is not accessible in the first place and may constantly fight back and hardly accept anything beneficial. The wounded inner child has much in common with the betrayed inner child which is why it is so defensive. Street children and particularly those who are labeled in their society as delinquent youth, once they have grown up, are carrying in their heart a betrayed inner child.  To cure the betrayed inner child, there is only one way. Building trust. The Cataleptic Inner Child

The cataleptic inner child is the inner child who is mute and paralyzed, and the worst off among their 88

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peers. This inner child has never been given a voice, was never listened to. Once this child was living and moving he or she has been entranced by what fairy tales call a witch and what in real life is a narcissistic mother. Such a mother is one with a broken self-image who feeds her lacking self-esteem with a dream image that is mirrored to her by a false environment. Instead of being a mirror for her child, she is a mirror to nobody since her mirror glass is blind and her senses are numb. In many cases, the narcissistic mother was not ready to conceive or did not really want the child, or even secretly wished the fetus to be born dead, else she attempted abortion that failed. Yet those mothers use to override their guilt feelings toward their child with jovial speeches and balsamic talk featuring themselves as the child’s generous companion. Thus, the witch-mother tends to put herself in the role of a benefactor to the child while in truth she considers herself unlucky to be a mother in the first place. She may rationalize down her relationship with the child as some form of duty, an obligation, a crux to bear, a sacrifice. 89

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The witch-mother will only be generous and kind if the child complies with her emotional needs without moving and contradicting, and thus by outright self-denial. If the child refuses to comply, the witchmother will threaten and terrify the child by sometimes unbounded hatred, fury, and violence. For her love is conditioned, not genuine. In order to punish the child for moving and enjoying life, she entrances and hypnotizes the child with deafening and deadening suggestions that therapists call ‘magic spells.’ Thus, narcissistic mothers raise children who will, once an adolescent, bear in their heart a cataleptic inner child. The Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller has perhaps best written about this ‘drama of the gifted child,’ title of one of her most well-known books. She herself was suffering as a child from a narcissistic mother but she was strong enough to let her artistic creativity and critical sense survive the ordeal. Her beautiful aquarelles express the pain she has suffered under the rule of her cruel mother.

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The Wounded Inner Child

The wounded inner child is the inner child that is hurt and that, if given speech, longs to complain, weep and cry. The wounded inner child is better off than the cataleptic child, and this for an important reason: this inner child can express feelings. The wounded inner child may complain or even run amok, but is not paralyzed in its expression. The wounded inner child is the entity in us that easily cries. Tears are this child’s most natural way of exteriorizing the hurt once suffered in childhood. Healing the wounded inner child is easier than healing the cataleptic inner child. The wounded inner child is open for consolation, for reassurance, for emotional care. Before, however, the wounded inner child may react defensively and refuse help or support, and resist your attempts of inner parenting. In the actual voice dialogues, this inner child may tell you that you could not be trusted because you were an adult or because you most probably had bad or hidden intentions. Your caring behavior might be misinterpreted as a one-

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sided bargain just in the same way as it happens when you try to take care of street kids. The wounded inner child has in most cases been exploited, hurt or abused. In many cases it was not a single event that produced the wound, but repeated hurts that have accumulated to one constantly hurting wound. However, the very fact that the wounded inner child is able to perceive and feel the hurt and can cry about it, makes it easy to trigger a process of healing and inner parenting once the child has overcome the initial resistance. The Magical Inner Child

The magical inner child is a recovered inner child who is highly poetic and sees reality in interesting ways, different from our rational, linear mindset. This healthy inner child creator likes to make up stories and do things that don’t make sense. When we read Alice in Wonderland, we face a prototypical magical inner child as the main author of this book. The magical inner child’s reality is a world of dreams and fairies, unlike our daily life. It is more like our dream world. It is a world of potentiality rather than a reality of set values and parameters. In this re92

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ality, everything can happen and miracles are nothing special, but rather the order of the day. In poets, painters, filmmakers and musicians the magical inner child is usually strong, if not dominating the inner scene. The same may be true for great scientists and philosophers who question the existing reality and help building a daring new reality. Their magical inner child is often well developed and may even have traits of the eternal archetype of the divine child, as it was uniquely described by Carl Jung. The Playful Inner Child

The playful inner child is perhaps the most natural manifestation of our inner child. Often the playful inner child is the driving force for creative expression. As such it is very strong in artists and, generally, in creative people, but also in science, business or entertainment, and even politics. It is reported about Alexander the Great that he used to play horse riding with his children even in the presence of foreign ambassadors visiting his court. Picasso’s playful inner child was notoriously very strong and he could relate to his children from this energy and then got on their level,

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playing with them in a manner of child-like innocence and grace. Last not least we know from great and famous businessmen such as Bill Gates that they like to play with investments in a way that is not totally rational or that they even apply chaos principles to some extent in the search of new and profitable investment opportunities. One of the reasons why personal computers gained such widespread recognition as useful and creative tools is their intuitive interface that permits us to use the energy of our playful inner child for learning and working with the computer.

Mastering Your Resistance The fact that you found your way to this guide shows that you are willing to go beyond that first gate of initiation, and that I can assume your enthusiasm and anticipation being stronger than your resistance! Nonetheless, do not underestimate this resistance. Resistance is a phenomenon we encounter in every therapy and even, beyond that, as a general feature of human behavior. There are multiple reasons for resistance, here are some of them— 94

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—Our natural desire to keep going and do business as usual and thus without change and without having to modify our inner software; —Our emotional attachment to the past or past experiences; —Our tendency to value peace and tranquility higher than exciting roller coaster journeys and upsand-downs, adventure and sudden changes; —The psychological fact that rigid psychosomatic structures tend to intensify and solidify in time rather than dissolute by themselves. Your resistance should not bother you, should not make you afraid, but on the other hand, you should not belittle it! When, after a few days doing the work proposed here, you suddenly think that all this is fake and will never lead anywhere, this is probably a first mutter of your voice of resistance. The best in this situation is to listen to that voice but not accommodate what it requests. What it requests is obviously to drop the new and mind-opening activity as soon as possible.

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This retroactive or retrograde energy is actually a negative turn or expression of your bioenergy, or the release of bioenergy that formerly was blocked in hate and revenge and that now got unblocked through your inner child work. If you surrender to that burst of negativism, you will become trapped by it and it may later be difficult to catch up with the work again. You will have less enthusiasm, because you will be less innocent. This is an important point. You may know means and methods to overcome your fatigue in the morning when you have to get up, and you may know how to resist eating another plate at midnight whilst you are already overweight. You may know how to handle those situations. Here, we will deal with how to handle our resistance to recovering and healing our inner child, and I can tell you that this resistance is more difficult to master than the others, for it is more subtle. The remedy is to work out a strategy that helps you to cope with this particular voice of resistance, once it comes up. An enemy that is known is much

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easier to combat than an enemy that we are unaware of! Resistance is one of the reasons why working with the energy of the inner child is still a rather esoteric matter in mental health care, for besides individual resistance, there are forms of collective resistance. Collective resistance is much stronger and much harder to dissolve than individual resistance. Sometimes it takes decades or even centuries to dissolve collective resistance that tries to block the evolution of consciousness. We know this from the history of science and from the biographies of scientists who have come up with revolutionary changes in the collective mindset or paradigm. The voice of resistance has no power, unless we give it power. We give it power in letting it control us, in having us drop caring for our inner child. There are three major ways or strategies of coping with resistance: —Do not resist or fight it; —Do not belittle it; —Do not forget about it.

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The resistance may manifest in the disguise of well-meaning friends who say something like: ‘We always thought that you are slightly off-track, but now we know for sure that you lost yourself in a jungle of meaningless yet fashionable expressions.’ ‘Do you believe all this stuff? I tell you, get back to normal again and you will see that you were just a bit over-excited.’ ‘Come down from your cloud and see that we, the majority, live good and healthy lives without listening to all those voices!’ ‘Only people with weak willpower will listen to such nonsense. You control what’s going on in you. Don’t believe those guys, psychiatrists or whatever they are called. Go normal, go average, and go to the movies!’

Do you listen to those well-dressed voices? Most of these people’s lives are shallow, meaningless and dull. I saw over decades that this bunch of people live without harmony, without beauty, without innocence, without taste, and often their lives are full of hate, misery and war. You may then see that these people are attached to what they call social life, parties, clubs

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and gatherings, or the latest fashion or boom. You should take a leave from them and you will never regret it. Your solitude is bliss compared to their sullied company! Do not contradict them. Remain silent when they bully you. And understand in that very moment that you never had true friends. And accept that fact, perhaps not happily so, but nonetheless. Then you are ready for the friendship with your true friend and companion, your inner child. The secret to effectively cope with resistance is accepting it and acknowledging its right of existence. You may give it a voice and personify it. Call it ‘Mister Handicap’ or ‘Dr. Bold Mess’ or whatever, but do not belittle it. Do not think that you are by definition the highest boss in your inner team and that there are no other gods beside you. Acknowledge your weakness but do not surrender to it. Now, let’s make up an inner dialogue or inner selftalk between your inner adult (you), your inner child (little you) and the voice of resistance that we will call Dr. No. Please be aware that this usually happens in your thought; it is not a real or spoken dialogue but part of your inner self-talk.

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You

I have scheduled a work session with my inner child for today. I must not forget about it. Dr. No

I know that you’re not particularly excited to go for this trip. I wouldn’t be either, in your place, honestly. After all, it’s fake. I tell you, that’s something for weaklings, not for strong men or women. Little You

Don’t listen to this one. He’s a nasty guy. And not smart. He does not know about the subtle world. You

Probably because he does not want to know about it. Little You

It’s like with most people. They believe what they see. And their eyes are all they’ve got. Do they know that they’ve got ears, too? You

But, can I really hear you?

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Little You

Never mind if you can sense me, hear me, feel me, intuit me, guess me or get my thoughts telepathically. That’s individually quite different but the most important is that you are willing and open to receive my message, in whatever form it comes. You

Yes, I feel that what you say is true. Dr. No [laughing, acid]

That’s all fake. There’s no inner child. Where the hell should it be? In your chest? How big is it, one foot or two? What’s the color of its skin, and how old is that child? Little You

Idiot! You

That’s probably the way most people reason. Perhaps it’s only for being polite that they don’t voice it?

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Little You

Follow the Beauty or the Beast. I don’t care. But if you follow the fools, you’re not smart. I don’t like when you’re not smart. You waste your brain. Dr. No

You think that you’ve got all the smart of the world, don’t you? If you ask me, what you’ve got is just a quick tongue. When I was brought up, they would have put a child like you for two days in a dark room without food. Little You

That’s what you look like, exactly, a child abuser. That’s what you are, a sadist. You

Boy, I think this discussion is getting out of hand . . .

Writing a funny dialogue like the present one is not just an amusement. If it’s amusing, so much the better. Its main purpose however is not to produce amusement. It’s actually quite serious business. Getting those voices to express themselves openly and fixing the dialogue on paper is a good way to cope with resistance and get conflicting energies in you into a state of mutual acceptance and, ideally, coop-

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eration. They might not want to cooperate at first, but it is certainly already a success if they stop throwing each other stones. They might collaborate later on. What counts is that you meet that resistance, that you do something about it—anything. The worst is procrastination. Sun Tzu, citing the great general Pan Lo, said in The Art of War: —If you want to maintain peace, get prepared for war!  That means to build an inner attitude that I use to call the attitude of the Warrior of Peace. A warrior attitude is a state of preparedness. There is no sluggishness in it. It’s a state of readiness to act. But it’s not aggressive. It defends only. When the voice of resistance manifests, let it speak up. Let it question the existence of the inner child. Let it get sour or acid. Accord to this negative voice its right of existence and it will bother you less in the future. The secret to cope with negative influences is to respect them. Fighting evil with evil will only lead to more evil. Recognize evil as a necessary part of life and you will be in peace! And, believe me, there will be less evil.

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Get in Touch The third step on your way to recover your inner child is to get in touch with that child, to open yourself to this energy. That sounds easy to one and difficult to another. And in fact it is easy for some and difficult for others. It depends on how you previously have dealt with your inner landscape. Was it an unknown land for you? Or were you already familiar with those various voices or energies of your inner mind? Whatever your previous attitude was, you will manage to get in touch now! I’ll show you how. The most important is that you have done your home work. Remember? You must have done at least one major effort in mastering your resistance. If you have done that, your feeling about proceeding is now something like that— —You feel excited about what’s going to happen next; —You feel that there is more chance to grow than to shrink; —You think that anyway you at least give it a try;

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—You believe that this was a turn of destiny to follow.  A welcoming attitude helps to get our work starting in a positive and constructive way. On the other hand, a negative, defensive attitude can block it quickly. I once had the proof for this truth when giving a presentation on inner child recovery for the department heads of a resort hotel. The audience was from the start bathed in icy silence and nobody ever took notes. Later they made a number of negative, abrasive remarks that showed their utter misunderstanding of what was supposed to happen. I knew that for them to get in touch with their inner child individually really depended on their level of receptiveness. Our inner child abhors to be pushed or dragged into something not familiar. And so, perhaps in that seminar, I had been too pushy, too quick or distracted. The experience taught me the importance of preparation which is the reason why I am rather lengthy at introducing the matter, and why we advance carefully and step-by-step in this guide. The inner child is situated on an emotional level, a level that can only be reached through associative 105

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and holistic thinking, not through logic and reasoning. Try to be more centered, more relaxed, more quiet inside and more receptive than usual. It is intuition, not thought that communicates you the messages of your inner child. It’s through sudden flashes of insight that you get this information, not through thinking and reasoning. The inner child responds in the intervals in between your thoughts … At the start, to be frank, I was rather anxious. Contrary to most people, I did not doubt the effectiveness of the work nor the possibility to get in touch with my inner child. My problem was that the perspective really scared me! However, in hindsight, I felt that this fear was rather conducive to getting closer to my inner child since my inner child was but a bundle of shivering fear! The voice of the inner child, when you get in touch with it for the first time, is very weak, almost imperceptible. In my experience, what most people do is to talk to their inner child and never wait for an answer. Such an attitude can do much damage. Be careful that you do not treat your inner child in the same way

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as those who brought you up and who were responsible in the first place for your loss of creative power! Never treat your inner child as a poison container for your misery! Do not use that inner child as a commodity or a tape recorder. A dialogue that is initiated as a monologue is misguided from the start. And yet, really, most people begin like that. Let me give you two examples, first a bad one and then a good one, so that you may see for yourself what I am talking about. And then you may hopefully be strong enough to avoid one of the major mistakes that newcomers do when using voice dialogue. Bad Example

Are you there, inner child? I want to talk with you. I want to tell you a lot. Yes, I have neglected you and perhaps you are dead. I don’t know. I hope that this will bring us some relief. I must tell you that this life really was a misery from the start. I could not care for you since I was really too busy with just surviving. I could not think of anything else than work, going home, cook my food, sleep, wake up and going to work again. I was a robot. I have not been creative since so many years. And all my

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friends are like that. They look for money, status and security, just like me. And I do not even tell them that I have started this work for I am afraid they laugh at me. I never cared for you since I probably never cared for myself. I was told since I was small that it was bad to care for oneself, that it was a selfish, egotistic attitude that one had to avoid by all means.

And now I get to hear the exact contrary. What am I going to think of all that, after all? Good Example

—Are you there? I would like to get in touch with you . . . —... —I, … well, I would like so much to receive a sign of life from you … —… —It should be possible that I can perceive your voice, but perhaps you do not want to talk … , right? —Yes, I want to talk. But I know you won’t listen.

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—What … ? Well, I’m glad you responded. But what you say surprises me. You say I won’t listen. Are you mad with me? —Mad? You are joking, hey? Mad is a flat expression of my feelings. You have not deserved even my madness. You have not merited that I’m still alive. You have not merited it since you never cared for me. —Oh, yes, I think it’s true. So, this is your feeling…? —Not only madness. I feel you are a very stupid person. —Thanks for the compliment. What else? —You are stupid because you only listen to others, but never to yourself. Who the hell tells you that others possess more wisdom than yourself? Who the hell makes you believe that you are just too stupid to find your own way? —Do you think I’m apathetic? —You are not by your own nature. You have become apathetic because of frustration, of disappointment. —Yes, you’re right. —You have stopped thinking by yourself, moving by yourself and taking independent decisions.

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—Yes, but it’s so difficult. You know, on my workplace, they just ask me to follow their stupid policies, their work orders, and yet I know it’s not effective. —You know better. But you do not act on your intuition, do you? —You are right again. I do not dare to. I am afraid they’ll fire me. —And if, really? Is that the end of the world? —Actually, no. But why should I risk my work? —To value yourself for what you are, to emphasize your dignity. You know better. That means you have deserved the place of your boss and not the place you actually take. —Oh …, that sounds awfully true. It hurts. —Never mind. Take a first step …

That’s quite lively isn’t it? Now, read again the first dialogue. How does it feel like? The second dialogue shows the progress you can make at the very onset of your work. That’s the exciting thing about inner child recovery. It can shoot up like fire but it can also hang in there for months. You never know in advance. Your inner child is unpredictable by definition.

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What is important is that you avoid long speeches for they are leading nowhere, as they represent movement of thought. And they are low-energy. They are not likely to touch your inner child’s subtle energy and can even block this energy to manifest. Long speeches most often sound like gossip when you read them once again. That’s actually how you can identify them. Perhaps, already at this stage of your inner child recovery work, you may wonder about how you relate to children or how you now evaluate others who preach to their children? Take a moment and evaluate this and really try to see the destructiveness of such kind of behavior in adult-child interaction. Try to put yourself inside the skin of your inner child and imagine yourself listening to an adult who treats you like a tape recorder or a night pillow. How does it feel like? How did it feel like when it happened to you? What is it that makes us afraid to get in touch with our inner energies? Why is it a bit scary, after all?

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I think whatever you feel about it is okay. There is no right or wrong about it. It may be the most normal thing for you in the world or it may scare you to death. For every of these alternatives there are reasons. It’s not just by chance that you feel this way or that way. After I had done the work I saw the logic of my fear. My fear was what my inner child’s foremost emotion had been. My fear thus gave me a very important hint from the start regarding my inner child. It showed me the way to meet my inner child on that same level. Had I avoided the fear, had I run away from it, it could not have led me to where I wanted to get. That’s a good example to see how logical emotions are, contrary to what most people believe who hold that emotions were irrational. If you are scared, consider your fear as a natural part of the game and accept it as such! Do not defend it, do not try to get away from it. Be a passive observer who notices what is going on. Now you sit in your chosen position that is comfortable and that feels good and warm. You are ready to write what comes to mind. Put a starting phrase. Any kind of opening. If you are short of ideas, just write the following little sentence: 112

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—Inner child, are you here? I’d like to get in touch with you … Then listen. Of course, it may seem ridiculous to say it but I say it nonetheless: the voice you are going to hear is not a human voice, not a voice coming from outside. It’s an inner voice that you perceive like a thought or an intuition, or like a flash of insight that you try to put into words. That’s rather complex, isn’t it. Nonetheless the thing is commonly called voice dialogue, despite the fact that it really has little to do with voices. So be attentive if you can intuit anything after having asked that question! You may perceive an itching somewhere. You may suddenly want to go to the restroom. Accept it with a smile. It could be a resistance. But you never know. It could be your inner child playing hide-and-seek with you. It could also be a hidden answer. The secret is to not reject anything that is going to happen and not even to seek keen explanations for it. It’s a rather silent process in which you try to get closer, to understand things that till now you never understood.

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Believe me, not many people really understand what’s going on in them. Not many people have a lively inner child, because if they did, the world would look very different from what it looks like right now. There would not be masses, millions of consumers around the globe eating what others think they should eat, both regarding physical food and mind food, in matters of spirit and intellect, and we would probably design and paint our clothes by hand instead of buying industrial wear. Now, your first dialogue may end right there, with that question that you asked. But that is by no means a defeat! It could as well end in the way of the abovementioned second dialogue. Do not condemn the first and do not react overly enthusiastic when the second happens. You are not going to conquer your inner child with a Trojan horse, like a new sex partner, trying to pull it into some kind of ‘magic love’! The story of your love is going to be much more subtle, much more refined than our usual passions are. The best results are achieved when your attitude toward your inner child is—

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—empathetic and welcoming; —patient and peaceful; —humble and innocent; —curious and joyful. The inner child tends to respond to these attitudes and it tends to defy all others. This is really something I did not know when I started and that I only found through experience. It can well be that if you are getting attuned to one of those pairs of characteristics, your inner child may respond spontaneously and almost without cynicism. In fact, the ironical tone that may manifest is often meant as a provocation rather than criticism. The inner child is really not an instance that likes to criticize you. That role is typical for your inner parent or your inner controller. When the inner child appears criticizing you, it has well-founded reasons to do so and it does it because it is deeply hurt yet does not want to admit that it is hurt. The ritual or method for the second dialogue with your inner child is not essentially different. You may have a better feeling about it, especially if the first experience had been a bit scary. You are getting used

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to it. You are perhaps more sensitive to perceive the subtle voice of your inner child. You may also begin to understand that your inner child does not like to be pushed and that, if you do push ahead, you’re going to be blocked in your endeavors. You will get a feeling of how powerful that inner child is—contrary to what most people believe. Some people may learn it the hard way in being overly arrogant or pushy. They’ll learn their lesson from an inner child that will play the capricious nerd for months without end. It is quite important what your attitude is right from the start since it determines in some way how your inner child is going to respond to you for the next six months or so. This is a factor of effectiveness. I have seen that people who are very slow in getting on with the work have generally begun with a wrong attitude, an attitude that is not characterized by a proactive attitude, or that they have preached their inner child to death. Try to do it the wrong way, just to test out what I am saying. You are going to see how hard your inner child can become on you. 116

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Peter and Paul Peter and Paul are the names I gave to my positive and my negative inner child. First, I had no idea about this, and it was not written in any guide or manual at the time I started my work. It happened after a while of doing the work that I strongly felt that there were two inner children in me, or rather that my inner child, like a coin, had two sides, a positive, bright one, and a negative, dark one. When I began to dialogue with my inner child, I could not know in advance which side was going to respond, Peter —the positive, strong, wistful voice, or Paul—the negative, weak and complaining one. But after the first words uttered by my inner child, I knew which one was going to reply. Let me give two examples. I let you guess who is who … Pierre

Today I want to discuss a rather important issue with you. When father left, you were just one year old. However, mother said you had been so conscious about their divorce that you went into the bedroom, struck with the fist on the bed and said ‘Daddy, why have you left us?’

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P…

Because I thought it was my mistake that he left. I thought I had not been good enough for him. Perhaps he had expected to get another boy, a stronger one, a better one. I don’t know. [I feel that was Paul talking …] Pierre

But it cannot be your fault if a man and a woman are going to dislike each other, I mean … P…

You think I was too small to know that? No. But you never know what people’s real motives are. I just felt guilty. That’s it. [I feel that was Peter talking …] Pierre

Okay, I accept it that you felt that way. I was never aware of that. It really strikes me that you say that. P

See, you have to understand that children tend to feel involved when something goes wrong between their parents. They tend to take a part of the blame. I knew

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that father was going for other women but that alone did not explain the true motivation of his behavior. After all, behind his dissatisfaction with mother, there could have been another motive, for example, a lack of self-worth. Or, really, that he had expected another kind of child. Can we ever know? Talking with him, what you got were excuses. And he was always like that, even many years later … [I feel that was Peter talking …]

If you observe the subtle change in this dialogue from the start to the end, you will see that at first Paul was responding and in the last two answers it was Peter. Paul is the incarnation of guilt, shame and fear while Peter is the guy that is uplifting and comes up with solutions and original ideas. Peter is sometimes funny and sometimes rather dry. I like him more than Paul with his complaints and his weak attitude. But I am glad that I can meet Paul, too, for if not, I would be out of touch with that weakness, that guilt and that shame that is, if I like that or not, part of myself.

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Inner Child Healing Some people regard inner child recovery and inner child healing as one and the same process or even use the expressions as synonyms. While it is true that the two parts are logically the first and second act of one drama, I would not say that they are synonymous, simply because you cannot heal an inner child that you have not previously recovered. How can you heal an entity or energy that you have not so far detected? On the other hand, it is of course true that inner child recovery without inner child healing does not make sense. But let me be more precise and ask: ‘What, then, is needed in addition to inner child recovery that we can bring about inner child healing?’ To be honest, I never asked that question when I did the work. I completely ignored that. I learned the theory after I had done the practice. That may appear kind of upside-down to you, but to evaluate it in hindsight I must admit that it was rather favorable; for I had not been blocked by those intellectual categories and this theoretical knowledge. I was really innocent when I engaged in that work, really deprived of a scheme, a map for the landscape I was going to ex-

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plore. I just went into it with a childish sense of adventure and wonder. Perhaps that starting point was not bad. You may have another perspective, a more informed one, after having read this guide. This being said, I would like to focus on healing the inner child. For healing to take place, we must first make a diagnosis. Who is going to make the diagnosis? Your psychiatrist? Could be, but I start from the point that you, like me at the time, are going to do the work by yourself, and not accompanied by a psychiatrist, and not in the group. Now, your inner child is going to make this diagnosis! You find that funny? Well, it’s quite unusual but it’s like that. Your inner child, in the recovery process, will gradually become conscious of its particular affliction. It will find out in which of those five pathological categories it fits or fitted. From that moment, the dialogues are going to change fundamentally. There is a shift in the way the inner child responds. And even more so, there is a shift in the way you, or your inner controller, ego or observer, is going to respond to the inner child.

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Generally speaking, the healed inner child’s attitude is much more flexible, playful and humorous than the afflicted inner child’s behavior. Furthermore, it is typical that you consider the opinions of your inner child on a daily basis and for daily problems. It is then a matter of habit for you to consult your inner child for important decisions that concern matters involving creativity, major changes in life, emotional affairs and even business affairs. If your Little Professor is well developed, it can become a wonderful business venture guide, for example for investment. While flexibility and harmony are typical once the inner child is healed, the situation until that moment may be one of— •

inner tension and strife;

•

sudden and often unexplainable changes of temper;

•

obsessions of various kinds, or neurotic habits;

•

a sometimes obnoxious or obtrusive attitude;

•

a rebellious or revolted attitude;

•

a depressive and defeating attitude;

•

a non-cooperative and haughty attitude;

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•

sometimes, in extreme cases, a schizophrenic split;

•

paranoid fears or persistent anxiety;

•

over-excitation, sexual dissatisfaction;

•

persistent conflicts in relationships or drop-outs;

•

being dominated by others or desiring to dominate;

•

general dullness and lack of creativity;

•

a fear-ridden or principle-ridden attitude toward life;

•

a dominance of any of the inner entities or energies;

•

a compulsive attitude of the inner controller;

•

controller constantly silences the inner child.

This list could go on and on since the ramifications of pathological misbalance in our energetic setup are countless. To understand the healing process, I must refer back to the beginning, when I was talking about the fundamental energetic life principles that explain the functioning of our psyche. There is general agreement among health professionals that mental health is primarily a state of flexible harmony in the setup of our psychic energies. It is namely not a static or rigid condition.

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Our organism can cope with energetic misbalance, but only up to a certain level and for a certain time. If the misbalance is too strong or lasts too long, or both, the disturbance manifests first in the psyche and later, if no action is taken to remedy the condition, in the soma. In this sense, every illness is psychosomatic. The body, since it is never disconnected from the mind, cannot produce an illness by itself. This is pretty much contrary to mechanistic medicine but it is nonetheless true. Starting from this paradigm, it becomes clear that it is not enough to recover the inner child and heal it. The art is to place the inner child in its role as an inner energy in a harmonious relationship with the other inner energies, such as inner parent and inner adult. Even a healed inner child, as long as it is a nerd or a tyrant, is of no help. Therefore, inner child recovery really is something very delicate. However, do not be scared, there is in our psyche a force that tends to establish this balance I am talking about. Thus, nature helps to get it all done once we seriously engage in recovering and healing our inner child. Let me now outline further in detail the

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healing process. I’ll compose that as three acts of a drama: – Act One : The Inner Child Enters the Scene – Act Two : The Inner Child Interacts – Act Three : The Inner Child Builds Trust

Act One The Inner Child Enters the Scene

The healing process, in my approach, is focused upon interaction. For the recovery process, I prefer to work with dialogues between inner controller and inner child. This results in one-to-one dialogues. The healing process adds an additional element. The inner child is going to interact with those inner entities that before the work were either too dominant or too weak. Regularly, before the work, the inner entities lead some kind of messed-up existence. It is therefore very important to get them into a balanced, harmonious relationship if healing is to take place.

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Please note that healing cannot take place if we focus only on the inner child. We must be careful not to over-stimulate one inner entity to the detriment of the others. For example, an inner child that has become an obtrusive nerd cannot be said to act its role in a healthy psychic environment. There must be something wrong with the ensemble, the group interaction inside the psyche, our inner team, if the inner child behaves that way. Therefore, in our healing work, we must try to see the whole, the totality of our inner landscape, and not only take a single shot on our inner child. Sometimes, when reading inner child healing guides from other authors, I get the impression that the world is turning around the inner child. Careful. Do not replace one pathology by another! To have a blown-up inner child with disabled or handicapped inner adult and inner parent is not a healthy condition. You may end up as an eternal student, a clochard, a gambler or a terrorist … This is the part of the work that is the most difficult, for it takes a subtle understanding of group interaction.

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We have an inner team in our psyche once these entities work proactively with each other, achieving synergistic solutions. I believe that highly effective people, especially if their success is based on their talent to be brilliant communicators, have worked this out in one or the other way on their psychic level. This is not as surprising as it may seem. Many of us actually engage in some form of inner dialogue without however naming it that way, without giving it importance. We do it naturally if we have that talent to be in touch with inside. I entitled Act One with ‘The Inner Child Enters the Scene.’ That may sound a bit commonplace but it is really an event to happen! The inner child that is still unrecovered will never enter any scene, private or public. It will hide or cry in silence. Or escape. It takes lots of courage to enter a scene. If you have ever acted on a stage you know what I am talking about. The good actor is not the one who has absolutely no fear but the one who masters his fear. When you interview actors about stage fright they all reply that the fear is actually something productive

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and that they have their best performances when they experience the greatest stage fright. Fear that is mastered transforms into courage. By the same token it is true that depression that is mastered transforms into self-confidence. Now, how will you prepare the inner child for entering the interactive level? You do this by gradually involving your inner parent and your inner adult in your dialogues. You can and should wait with this until you feel safe working with the inner child on the oneto-one level. When you feel the moment has come to enter the healing phase, you do at least two sessions in which you ask the inner parent and the inner adult to show up and to present themselves. Then, sense the inner child’s reaction and take this reaction as a diagnostic tool for the assessment of the readiness of your inner child for the next level. Only when you feel the inner child is ready and will not have a major drawback when entering the stage for full interaction with inner parent, inner adult, and all other entities that may come up, you can begin with inner child healing.

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How, in practice, is this going to happen? I often received questions that focus on very down-to-earth problems. How is this going to happen in my dialogue? What must I do now? And I reply, simply and humbly ‘Sorry, I don’t know.’ It is of paramount importance that you develop autonomy in the work. This is so because we are very different. Everybody has a different psychic pattern and reacts differently in identical situations. When you have a sound feeling of autonomy, you do automatically what is right and what is best for you, for your inner child and the rest of your inner landscape. What I can lay out here are only the general principles. How they are applied in practice depends on so many factors that it would be awkward to fill pages and pages with examples that, after all, do not apply to you—since for you all may work differently. I do not know how it is going to happen, but I know that it is going to happen. There will be a moment during your work when you know that it is going to happen, when you feel that your inner child has built the consistency, the smart, to get into a wider field of interaction, and to enjoy that interaction.

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Here is a little sample dialogue that indicates that the inner child is mature enough to enter the stage. Walter

Peter, it’s now quite some time that we are talking, and I have learned a lot from you. When I think back at the time before we started our work, I can’t believe it because it feels so unreal. I am so happy to be in touch. Peter

You have never been out of touch, but you were so busy with other things. And, if you ask me, those things were not the things you should care about. It’s things for others, but not for you. Walter

What are the things for me? Peter

I’ll tell you. Walter

For example, piano playing, is that for me?

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Peter

Are you kidding? You know it very well. That’s the prototypical activity for you – yet you rarely engage in it. You have sold your piano. Walter

Yes, but that was only temporary. I am going to get a new and much better piano very soon! Peter

Eventually, you make good decisions. Walter

Yes, but let me take the occasion to get you acquainted with some other voices in me that sometimes want to contradict me or you since they have a somewhat different way to see the world … Peter

I am scared to meet them. They are perhaps not very understanding. Walter

They are perhaps not very understanding, true. But perhaps we both can learn from them. I mean in a way that is two-sided. You see, my vision is that they have

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also their right of existence, but of course, they will not be allowed to abuse of their influence. On the other hand, it would not be okay either if you had total control over me – what do you think? Peter

Well, sometimes I have a bit foolish ideas, I know. I do not want to dominate you; that’s not what I want. I may become a bit pushy at times, but that’s because you don’t listen to my request to get in touch. Then I try to get your attention by getting hold of you. Walter

I guess, the other two do the same if I’m not watchful. So that’s where the mess is coming from. I see it now. Peter

Okay then, let’s meet them … Walter

Are you ready? Peter

As for me, I am ready, provided they respect me. If not, I’ll escape or don’t say a word. Okay?

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Walter

Okay.

Some people, and among them even therapists, think that the inner child needed a lot of pet care. I do not subscribe to their worldview that is based upon sentimentality and not upon love, upon hypocrisy and not upon truth. In my experience, the inner child needs truth in the first place, and it reacts very positively to frankness and straightforwardness. It does not need a lot of crying. That will make it only more depressive. The hurt inner child tends to weep, of course, but that is only at the beginning. And then, if it happens, truly it should not be blocked off. Through empathy and the amount of attention that is needed, the wounded inner child will rather quickly stop crying and look for more constructive opportunities to express itself. Crying is a way to communicate, but not a very effective way. Crying says only one thing, ‘I feel hurt and want you to take care of me … !’ While in verbal

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communication many more and much more subtle messages can be communicated. Thus, I think it is mistaken to pity the wounded inner child. The right method is based upon an optimistic approach that tries to move onto healing as soon as possible.

Act Two The Inner Child Interacts

Let me open this second stage of inner child healing with a sample dialogue. I call my inner critic Acid in this dialogue. As in former dialogue,s my last name Walter equals my inner parent and my French first name Pierre my inner adult, while Peter, my German first name, stands for my inner child. Walter

Peter, let’s continue with our previous session in which you told me you are ready to meet the other actors of my inner stage. I would like to open this dialogue now and present you to each other.

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Acid

You do not need to present us to each other. I do care and never forgot about Peter. However, he was always hiding, because he was so scared. I don’t know why. Pierre

It’s not very smart to be scared, indeed. Walter

Your comments are very valuable, but I can’t see how Peter could respond to you other than being scared again. Your attitude does not show much empathy. Acid

I said I do care. Peter

Yes, you said it but perhaps you don’t mean it. Acid

I always mean what I say. Peter

I know, you are always right. So we can just stop here and say Bless You!

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Walter

I think we are not on a very constructive track… Pierre

Never mind. I find we have to respect rational behavior first of all. Walter

I think we have to respect each other, and not some kind of behavior that we individually subscribe to, be it rational or irrational or whatever. Everybody reacts differently and has a different mental and emotional setup. You try to put yours on top and implicitly tell Peter that he is off-track. Peter

Yes, there it’s where it’s not constructive. Because they both have no respect for me. They are icy and haughty. As for me, I am constructive! Walter

You say it. Implicitly, in this stage of our work, I also focus on giving Pierre and Acid a voice to utter, and I have to. I cannot just focus only on you, Peter.

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Peter

But then, please, do your job well. Otherwise, I’m not going to meet those icy idiots again. I just won’t reply anymore if they are going to continue that way. Do you understand me? Walter

Yes, you are clear enough, indeed. Acid

I said that I do care, and I mean it. Pierre

It’s necessary that we remain rational in our overall behavior. Walter

It sounds as if you were tapes, repeating a recorded message over and over. That does not come over as very lively, to be frank! And it upsets Peter. Acid

Well, as long as it does not upset you, Walter, I don’t care.

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Walter

I don’t care if you care or not. I think for you caring is some kind of dogma, but not a felt sense, not a way to empathetically relate to others. Pierre

May I add something to this discussion? Walter

If it’s not again the same tape, yes. Pierre

I would like to be more explicit here. From a rational point of view, the discussion is not non-constructive. It is rather mind-opening. There is also some reason in Peter’s arguments. I can’t deny that. There is logic in it when I see it along his lines. So, as for me, I don’t want to appear too far off. I can see some basis for cooperation. Peter

Hey, great! That’s a great statement! I appreciate it. I feel valued for the first time. Oh, that feels good!

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Walter

I am very glad we have got to this point. That’s indeed a progress. Let us see what our friend Acid has to say about it … Acid

Well, I do honor Pierre’s intervention. It does not very well match my own way of seeing things, but it has merit. I would like to make sure to not being misunderstood myself. It’s not that I tend to disregard Peter’s way of being, I only want to make sure that he does not become over-indulgent. Walter

There we have a point to talk about. Peter

Please tell me what you mean by over-indulgent … Acid

I mean your enthusiasm sometimes blows off all limits and drives us to act in a rather unrealistic way, or even a bluntly foolish manner.

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Pierre

I think it’s because of lack of information that this happens. Walter lacks necessary information and at times just follows blindly Peter’s suggestions. Walter

I am glad you added that it’s only ‘at times’. I feel there is some truth in this, and that’s actually one of the reasons I felt that this work is necessary. I was rather oscillating in my relationship to Peter. One time I listened to his voice, another time I blocked it off entirely. I was totally inconsistent and that was certainly not very constructive for my overall attitude, my way to appear to others.

At first, when doing inner child recovery, it often appears nonsensical to continue once the inner child responds and things develop well. Why should there be a larger range of inner dialogue than just between the inner parent and the inner child? As I already mentioned, if you want your work with the inner child to impact upon your outward relationships, you cannot remain, and limit yourself to a harmonious one-toone with your inner child. For the way you are going to interact with your outward audience is not deter-

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mined by your one-to-one with the inner child, but by your inner child’s interacting with the other inner entities. While interacting with others, we unconsciously project our inner landscape into the outside world. What then happens, is the following: Inner Child—Inner Adult inside of you develops into: 1.

Inner Child in you relates to Inner Adult in the other person;

2.

Inner Child in you relates to Inner Child in the other person;

3.

Inner Child in you relates to Inner Parent in the other person;

4.

Inner Parent in you relates to Inner Child in the other person;

5.

Inner Parent in you relates to Inner Parent in the other person;

6.

Inner Parent in you relates to Inner Adult in the other person;

7.

Inner Adult in you relates to Inner Adult in the other person;

8.

Inner Adult in you relates to Inner Parent in the other person;

9.

Inner Adult in you relates to Inner Child in the other person.

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 Thus we’ve got nine possible constellations when we communicate with others. And this is only a reductionist kind of picture, for I don’t consider psychic entities other than the traditional set of three already acknowledged by the founder of Transactional Analysis (TA), Eric Berne, in the 1950s. In fact, there are many others. In my own work with voice dialogue, there were as many as five. There was an entity that incarnated my inner shadow and that I named Sad King and there was an entity named Lux that was representing my higher self or supreme wisdom. Those entities were less apparent at first and they actually interacted much less compared to the others but when they acted and said something, it was always something important. Many people think that it was enough to just focus on the inner child energy, by recovering and healing the inner child, be it for enhancing their creativity or being liberated from inner tension or the pathological results of trauma. But that would be a very restrictive view. There are many more benefits, primarily through giving another dimension to your communication

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skills. Interestingly, this is achieved without you ever joining a class about communication, without you ever knowing about it. It is in most cases others who will tell you, mirroring your inner changes, your inner growth process and your enhanced maturity. It is your soul that draws the main benefit of this work. It is your entire being that is enriched on the way. It is that you are deeper than before, that you have gained selfknowledge. The important step you take in Act Two is to confront your inner child with the other inner actors, and to lead this dialogue in a way that all benefit from it. The task is not an easy one. Your role as an intermediate is particularly required in this part of the game. When I say you I mean your conscious ego, the one that sets up and leads the dialogue, and that you could compare with the stage director of a film or theater play. You have much responsibility in this role as a stage director. If you commit major mistakes, for example by arrogantly silencing one of the inner voices, you could create an inner misbalance that only after much time could be remedied again. The smart way is to listen

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attentively to all the input that comes up, to all what is said, and to respond in a manner that is not judgmental or moralistic. The best way to direct the inner theater is to be humble and to value, in one or the other, all the inner actors, whatever they say, however bullish, blunt, stupid, pushy or aloof they may seem. Behind an aloof voice, lots of wisdom can be covered that only will appear if enough trust is built in the interaction. And there you see the parallel to your communication with others. The principles of inner and outer dialogue are exactly the same. All is based upon trust and trustworthiness, and all interaction serves but one goal: to build more and more trust so as to achieve some kind of synergistic interaction and cooperation, or even association. Those of you who consider it enough to recover their inner child are too bottomline in their work. They do not see the dimension that voice dialogue, when led consciously, is going to be the starting log for your entire success as a human being.

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Act Two is so important in that if you fail at this stage, Act Three is never going to happen. For Act Three is the logical and consequent continuation of Act Two—on a higher trust level. So lets assume that you made it through to Act Two and see what happens next.

Act Three The Inner Child Builds Trust

Synergistic interaction requires communication plus a level of trust that makes people not only talk but act. Now, in your inner theater you may not quite see how to apply this principle. For it seems quite a fantasy thing to ask your inner actors to collaborate on acting out for a project. True? Yes and no. No, as far as the inner communication process is concerned. How are they going to act inside of you? That’s a bit far-fetched, isn’t it? Yes, if we talk about a project in real life that is wholly carried out by your inner actors. Let me give an example.

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As a trial project for Act Three, you set up the following task: You are going to live three whole days during which you use every possible occasion to let your inner actors collaborate on every single thing you are going to do. Sounds funny? Let me be more precise and first put up a sample agenda: 1.

Scheduled meeting with your boss about setting up a program in your company that is focused upon enhancing the employees’ creativity level;

2.

Taking your husband/wife out for dinner in a nice restaurant for the purpose to tell him/her that you know s/he is cheating you with another and that you want to talk things over, while s/he thinks that you totally ignore the whole matter;

3.

Writing a letter to a friend who broke off relations with you in order to seek a renewal of your relationship;

4.

A single parent, preparing for joining a birthday party with costumes, you are talking with your little daughter who insists that you have to buy her a costume and take her with you to that party while you want to go alone in order to use this opportunity for finding a suitable new partner.

Let us take these examples as moot court events to see what possible kind of interactions your inner

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team is going to develop. In practice, you are dealing of course with your own daily events, but demonstrating the principle, I will use these situations to exemplify the general principle. I will proceed in the following way. I first give you a sample dialogue that you may consider only as one possible way of dealing with the problem, knowing that there are millions of others. I will then evaluate what happened during that dialogue or interaction and hereby give you some guideline how you later should evaluate your own results in matters of synergistic interaction of your inner team when carrying out specific tasks in daily life. Scene One

Scheduled meeting with your boss about setting up a program in your company that is focused upon enhancing the employees’ creativity level. Let me give the actors the following names: B: Your Boss Y: You (your conscious ego) C: Your Inner Parent

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R: Your Inner Adult LY: Your Inner Child (Little You) B

Have you prepared our meeting … ? By the way, I totally forgot about it. I find all of this silly and nonsensical. We’ve always achieved our goals in this company without this modern stuff. Creativity … big words …, and at the end the employees think they are the boss and end up to become totally off-track. But okay, maybe I’m too old-fashioned …, what do you think? Y

Perhaps we should consider it as what it is: a mere proposal from our consultants. It’s up to us, after all, to implement it, or not. And we can do it in our way, no? B

Sounds smart. Have you got more ideas about it? Or, to ask more precisely: how do you think our staff will react to such a program? Will they welcome it, and will it not be just another gimmick ending up in distracting them from their work?

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R

I think creativity is not just something that distracts people, or only in the case they have not got any chance to become creative in what they are doing. B

You mean in the case the work is something like repetitive or boring or does not give the employee any empowerment, the person will escape into something else? LY

Yes, I think playing is a very natural and important part of human behavior. Creativity manifests by playing, by a consciously non-focused activity that is based on mere trial and error and that has no specific purpose—other than playing. B

But, you won’t seriously consider our staff playing games here while they work, do you? That would really be kind of crazy, wouldn’t it? R

I was talking metaphorically, of course. Playing, in a larger sense, is a space for impacting on the work with one’s own being, and not just as a piece of staff, as a

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robot. It’s to be empowered to change something in the setup or come up with something new. B

But … R (hurriedly)

I am not talking about total freedom. I was thinking of rewarding those who do more than just the usual routines … B

Yes, definitely, that’s a good idea. I find that idea has merit. What else? C

Those who care about the company are generally those who think about improving what they do. The only viable strategy to have their input validated and turned into the profit of the company is to give them the necessary space for doing so. (Switching to R) What we are currently doing is pretty much the contrary, to say the least … B

Really? Are we that tough? Is it such a bore to work here? I mean, yes, this has always been a bit of a stiff

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company. I don’t know, I think you’re right in a way, but I haven’t got any idea how we can possibly get out of our old habits without losing control. You see my point? LY

It’s by changing the work processes in a way to give that space for personal impact, for creative impact. At the present moment, we are rather punishing people once they get clues to changing the established standards. It’s just not democratic! B

Okay, then, let’s consider that more in detail. What can we possibly change, or, how can we change work processes so that personal impact is validated and not punished? And how can we punish those who abuse the system, for there is a danger here that you cannot deny …? C

There are always those who try to abuse the system. But can we rely on that if we want to modernize things? Parasitic people in every democratic society heavily abuse democracy and the social insurance system. And yet, neither democracy nor social insurance have been abandoned for that reason until now.

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B

You’re right. That’s a good point. I’m getting into it now. So, let’s see that point later and what security features we are going to build into our new system so that we can prevent it from being abused—at least cum grano salis. Right? LY

Yes. I think we should focus on how we can validate personal impact and remunerate that part of giftedness that smart people bring into their work. (Switching to R) Let me give an example. The Note-It, these little yellow sticking papers, was invented, some decades ago, by a simple employee of 3M’s packaging department. But 3M, already at that time (!) had a policy for rewarding creative input of their employees. Every Friday, they got one hour, before they went off for the weekend, to discuss their creative ideas over a cup of coffee and, if they liked to do so, could submit them to the company direction. They were promised not only serious consideration of their ideas but also, if 3M decided to realize their inventions, a percentage of the profit share. B

Yes. But we are not 3M. They could afford that, we can’t.

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R

At that time, they were not yet a multinational corporation. But it’s through empowering their employees to that point that they got fantastic ideas that made them much stronger than their competition. I think part of their tremendous success is due to this attitude, an attitude that, if I dare to use that word, calls on the inner child in every person. B

Are you talking psychology now? I don’t quite run on that spur. It’s a bit far off, isn’t it? LY

Not at all. Everybody has got that inner child, that part that wants to play. You too … B (laughing, playing with the pen, then drawing absentmindedly some circles in his agenda)

Hm … LY

It’s first of all not a factor of investment, but a way to validate the person in her integrity to give more creative freedom. That it also pays shows the 3M example. (Switching to R). And if you calculate it, it seems they’ve drawn a much greater profit out of it in terms of inno-

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vation capacity than this one hour per week free time granted to their employees has cost them. B

Well … after all, that’s not a bad idea. Not bad, really. I’m getting into it, I’m getting into it now … You know what, I’m getting hot for it. Let’s schedule a meeting with our financial controller and the guys from the concept department. Let them come up with detailed suggestions. And please write a report about our meeting, very short, and forward it to them. Y

Okay. I’ll do that. Thanks. B

No, I’m the one who has to say thank you. You have given me very valuable input. In a way, all that responds to something I felt in myself but never dared to express … LY (smiling)

Yes, it corresponds to the voice of your inner child … Evaluation

This dialogue shows how in real life things are acted out on the stage of interpersonal communica-

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tion. You have no more those clear-cut role plays as in Act One or Act Two and things get much more messed up in a way. But that’s real life! I have tried to show it when I pointed you to the role changes. This is the usual way we interact, at least when we have our inner entities fully developed and functional. This example was such a successful meeting because you, in this example, were playing out your inner team with great strategy and tact. The inner child was namely played out very carefully in the beginning because the boss reacted only with his inner parent and later his inner adult. His inner child was totally silent until the moment he began to draw the circles in his agenda. That was the turning point of the whole conversation and that led to the final victory of convincing the boss to act on the proposal. The boss was convinced at the end not because he had been told this and that, not because he had rationally understood and seen the necessity to implement a policy change for creative input. No, it was because you were smart enough to have his inner child getting involved in the 155

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game. That way the boss was driven from his own inner energy to take action for that necessary change, and not because he had been told so or was advised to do so. And you can count on his steady collaboration on this project because you have not only informed him, but you have done to him exactly what he is supposed to do with his employees: you have validated in him his inner child, by activating it in a very careful yet conscious way.  You see the power? Scene Two

[The roles in this scenario can of course be reversed as in real life it’s not always the female that ‘cheats’ her partner once in a while but perhaps even more so, the male, taking a mistress]  Taking your wife out for dinner in a nice restaurant for the purpose to tell her that you know she is cheating you with another and that you want to talk things over, while she thinks that you totally ignore the whole matter. Your intention is to win her back. These are the actors: P: Your Partner

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Y: You (your conscious ego) C: Your Inner Parent R: Your Inner Adult LY: Your Inner Child (Little You) P

It’s really a nice restaurant, such a warm and welcoming place. You made a good choice! Y

Yes, I thought you’d like it. I know you like tasteful settings, and that’s one of the things that we share, no? P

Yes, I guess so. I’ll never forget the day after we met; you sent me such a wonderful bunch of roses. Others would find that old-fashioned, sure. But I found it wonderful. These roses were so fresh, so lively, really apart … LY

And now, they’ve perished. They grew stuffy, like paper roses. With lots of dust on top …

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P

What are you telling me, darling? They’re as fresh as they were the first day I got them … R

Are you kidding? We’re no more in our twenties. And there is a difference between real roses and paper roses … P

Oh yes, a large difference! I am so glad you see that. I would have been deadly disappointed if you had sent me paper roses … C

Yes, I do care about such little details in life. After all, what we do to others, we do to ourselves; that’s the saying. Isn’t that so? P (nervous)

Yeah… I’m getting a bit tired. Perhaps you could ask for the bill … R

But we’ve barely finished our meal! Don’t you like a dessert? You’ve been more requiring in younger years.

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[Switching to LY] But maybe … , your tiredness is more general than that? Maybe it’s kind of metaphorical? P

You’re talking in riddles. Can you not be more open with me? What do you mean? C

I care about discretion. And you seem to care about it, too. P (very nervous)

… R

Do you really want me to be more open? P (pale)

… LY

I can say that everybody likes to play around once in a while. The world is shades of gray, so as to say. There are no angels and no devils. Everybody’s got a little sin. Right?

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P

Hm … LY

However, sometimes our little sins hurt others, because after all, we’ve got that part in us that is fragile, like a … child … you know …? [Suddenly in tears]. P (concerned, pale)

Would you mind ordering me a glass of cognac? I need something strong. I think I have to tell you something … R

Waiter, please one cognac! [Switching to LY, changing the voice to very soft] You don’t need to if you don’t like to. I know anyway. I don’t want you to lose face. But it would be nice to know that you see what you are doing to me … P

Okay. You know it. Well, I’m afraid I can’t figure how you could find out about it …

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R

That’s not important. Let me assure you that I never spied you out. That’s not my style. It was a chance event that revealed it to me. I’ll tell you later. First, let me know what moved you to find me boring, or let’s say to seek some kind of adventure … P

You know, I was really not seeking it. C

So much the worse! You have been drawn into it? P

No!! That’s not what I wanted to say. I mean I was and am in control. But I have not thought something like ‘Let’s go out and seek some other friend or playmate.’ It just happened. R

As it happened to us some twenty years ago … P

Yes. I think, and please don’t mind me to say that, I think it’s human …

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LY

I agree. But I feel so bad, so betrayed …, you know? It’s really on that inner level, that feeling level, that it kind of knocks me out of the game. It’s really painful. That’s what it is. And I wanted to tell you that only. What can I possibly do more? Love cannot be forced, after all. P (relieved)

I am very thankful that you react that way. I did not think you would take it so …, so humbly. Your reaction is kind of surprising me. Seems that I did not see that part of you before. I really appreciate your openness. It kind of re-bonds me with you. Y

Really? I can’t believe that—after all. P

You seem so aloof, sometimes. It made me think or feel that you don’t care, you know. I thought it did not really matter if I had another lover or not. I thought you care more for your work, your computer, your piano … LY

That’s my way to seek adventure, to play, to grow. [Switching to R] That does not mean that I do not relate to you on an adult level as well. It does not mean that I

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am so immersed in my inner world that there is no space for you in it. It does not mean that I want to let you go off with somebody else! P

Really not? C

I care for you. And I care for you to stay with me and to let go the other. But, of course, that’s only my part of the game, my view of the story or how I would like to see it ending. P

So you really care that much about me? R

I care for you and for both of us. After all, we had a beautiful relationship during all those years, no? P

Yes, I have to admit it. LY

You may act as you wish, since we are free and look for the exciting things in life. It’s after all what makes us

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grow. But for the sake of my heart, please be open to me and tell me what’s going on. To feel betrayed means to feel unworthy. Do you see that? P

Yes …, please, I see it. I am truly sorry. I should have been open with you. But I was afraid … R

Of what? Should I play the tyrant or knock the other out? We are not living in the Middle-Ages and I do not own you. But please play open cards with me. That’s only fairness. Just that. P

Okay then. I find your attitude very good and you do not make me feel bad about myself. That’s really very different of how I saw you before. It kind of enamors me again for you. R

Let’s see that again tomorrow morning. Just to make sure it’s not the effect of the cognac … P (laughing)

No, it’s real, it’s real …

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Evaluation

This dialogue is kind of revealing. It says more than all I can possibly say in this book. He who has won the game here is without doubt LY, the inner child. It’s the child that met the adult in your wife who reconnected with her own inner child and then connected on a child-child level with your inner child. Once the two had met, the rational and caring parts of both partners, their inner adult and inner parent had no more problems to meet and to re-bond. It was through getting the two inner children in touch that this was possible. Or, to put it this way: it was because the inner children of these two partners had become out of touch that it was possible in the first place that P sought out another partner. Strategically speaking, it was through your playing out your inner child that you could touch the vulnerable point in your partner and thus re-bond with her on an emotional level. That’s perhaps an uncanny way of diagnosing and healing an extra-marital affair, but it’s a very effective one.

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Scene Three

Writing a letter to a friend who broke off relations with you. You seek a renewal of your relationship. These are the actors: Y: You (your conscious ego) C: Your Inner Parent R: Your Inner Adult LY: Your Inner Child (Little You) ‘Dear X, (R) You may wonder why I write to you—after all. You may not expect it. (LY) Yes, it would be better to talk, but I do not dare to phone. I’m afraid. You might just hang up and I’d feel hurt and rejected. (C) But I care about our relationship. It has been a time and it went up and down as, perhaps, in every friendship. It’s not that I need you for feeling good about myself, or that I am so much attached to you that I couldn’t make up my mind by myself. It’s just that we have shared so much, and that was, I suppose, an enrichment for both of us. I can’t know for you, though, and you must decide for yourself how much you value our

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relationship. (LY) When you turned me the back recently during the meeting, that hurt me. You were kind of icy and I couldn’t figure why. (R) True, we don’t have all our interests in common and there are worlds, if I may say so, that you inhabit and that are alien to me and equally I inhabit worlds that are alien to you, perhaps. You have said you cannot bridge over the gap in our different worldviews. But I guess that’s what friendship is about, to be able to build those bridges that link us to worlds alien to us so as to enlarge our lives and our experiences. (C) I care too much about our relationship to just let it go for this difference in opinions. It could also be that you acted from a sudden emotion that you may presently no more foster. (LY) Before, if you may want to remember, our discussions or debates always ended in a feeling that we had learned something—both of us. There was a sense of innocence, of wonder, in all we did together. And that for itself was more than a bridge. What do you think? (R) Anyway, I would like to close now and leave it up to you to respond or not. (C) As for me, I have no reason to carry spite or similar emotions in my heart, and I beware of them since they undermine our positive power and self-esteem. (LY) I

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prefer looking back with that sense of wonder and say ‘However it was, it was good!’ Your friend, Y. Evaluation

This sample letter shows how a smart change of the inner entities operating, even in a one-way exchange, can vivify a message and add a note of empathy to it. What will the reaction of the other person be, do you think? Is there a chance the addressee will be positively touched? I think there is a greater chance that the addressee will be positively touched than that he or she will be negatively touched or not touched at all. The dimension that the inner child (LY) added to this letter is one of honesty, truthfulness, innocence and outspokenness. If the other person has a minimum left of his or her previous interest in the relationship with the writer of the letter, they will respond and at least give it a try to renew the relation. A central point of the letter is where the writer reminds the addressee of their previous debates and 168

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says that they had learnt from those exchanges. LY was saying that and added that there had been a sense of innocence and wonder in their relationship. What happened, I guess, was that previously LY could bond with the addressee’s inner child so that despite their intellectual differences, they could feel attached to each other on an emotional level. We do not now why presently the addressee kind of deactivated his or her inner child so that this bonding was no more possible. In fact, the voice of the inner child can easily be silenced by rationalizations, by a hypertrophied inner adult who wants to control all by reason, or a hypertrophied inner parent who wants to control all by care, or, worse, a hypertrophied inner controller that smashes down all intuitive wisdom and wants to control all by willpower. We can only guess what the outcome will be, but one thing is sure. If the addressee responds favorably to that one line in the letter, if they let their inner child respond to that call of the writer’s inner child, the result will be positive without doubt and the relationship will be healed. 169

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That sentence was the key in the letter and the key giver was of course nobody else than, again, the inner child. Scene Four

A single parent preparing for a birthday costume party, you are talking with your little daughter who insists that you have to buy her a costume and take her with you to that party, while you want to go alone in order to use this opportunity for possibly finding a new partner. These are the actors: Y: You (your conscious ego) D: Your daughter C: Your Inner Parent R: Your Inner Adult LY: Your Inner Child (Little You) D

Right, you take me to that party and buy me a costume …?

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Y

I said I want to think about it. D

You have already thought about it for three days. LY

But you have reminded me one thousand times in these three days and I’m getting kind of fed up, you know… D

So, what do you want? C

It’s good that you ask so straightforward, after all. I should perhaps be more open with you. I don’t know. D

What do you not know? C

I do not know you enough to know all about you… something like that.

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D

You know me already for seven years. C

Yes, but a situation like this one is new for both of us. D

What situation? R

So, let me be cool and say it the cool way … D

Yes, that’s great, to be cool! R

Well, you see me alone, already for two years. And you know that before I was not alone … D

Yes, before there was Daddy. But then he went away. So what? Do you want to have another Daddy?

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LY

I do not want to have a Daddy, I mean … for me. [Switching to R] I mean I want a new man, or just a friend. You never know … D

Again, you don’t know. What do you know …? C

I know that you need another Daddy. And I need something else, too. D

You want to sleep with somebody again? R

How … do you … know? D

You seem to know a little only. But I know much. You always say that you don’t know. But I know that I know. C

You know that you know … Very smart, indeed.

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D

I cannot buy another friend for you, but perhaps you can meet one at aunty Ida’s birthday party? R

Why the hell at aunty Ida’s birthday party? There is nothing more boring than aunty Ida’s birthday parties … D

Not for me. Last time, there was a nice little chap. And we had a good time together. C

Did you? But I don’t like little chaps, I want a big chap, you know? D

Yes, I know. LY

What about the idea that you go to aunty Ida’s birthday party to find another little chap and I go on another birthday party to find a big chap?

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D

You mean, you don’t want to take me with you? Oh, that’s not fair … [crying] C (angry)

I knew that this would happen, I knew it. D (sniffing)

Suddenly you know all. Before you didn’t know anything. LY

Let me tell you something. I want you to have fun. But at the same time I ask you to give me a little freedom to have fun, okay? D

You don’t have fun when I’m around? C

Look, yes, but only once the guy accepts that … I have a child from a former relationship ... D

Oh, first you don’t want to tell him?

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R

No. Sometimes, that puts them off. D

Do you want to hide me in the cellar? C (laughing)

No! I just want to sense what the guy is up to before I bring him here and present you to each other. D (capricious)

You think, he’ll like me …? LY

I don’t know. He is not supposed to like you in the first place. He’s supposed to like me—get it? [Switching to C] But of course, he should like you later on so that you and him can become friends. That’s important. D (suddenly apathetic)

Well, I don’t care. If you ask me, I don’t care. Go out and get your chap but I do not guarantee you that later I’ll be friends with him. After all, he’s not going to be Daddy, because there is no second Daddy…

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C

I did not say that he’s going to be Daddy, but perhaps, you never know, he’s going to be Daddy Second Vintage … D

Again, you don’t know or you never know. When do you know? I guess you should go to this party and get this chap first and later you’ll know. And I’ll know. But I don’t care—anyway … Evaluation

This kind of fun dialogue between mother and daughter reveals how tricky it can be to talk with children when it’s about emotional matters. Children tend to react in often surprising ways, and so much the more as we try to hide things from them. Without ever criticizing us for our hypocrisy, they have their own weapons to win their battles. In this case, D did not win hers. That’s probably why at the end she insisted that she ‘doesn’t care.’ She tried to hide her disappointment that her mother wouldn’t take her to the party and, more generally put, that her mother would not initiate her in the intimacy with her chap. This is a recurring theme in parent-child interac-

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tions and, as we see it here, the mother used her inner child to ask for her daughter’s understanding and collaboration in this somewhat delicate situation. It was by letting her inner child say that first she approves of her child to have fun, but that second she asks her daughter also to respect her mother’s desire to have fun and to seek intimacy outside the motherchild relationship. This was a smart move because, if she had said this from the point of her inner parent, as many parents use to do in similar situations, she would have made her daughter feel inadequate and immature. For example, she would have possibly said ‘Daughter, you are still too small for those matters and you should better keep silent’ or she would have betrayed her child by telling a lie—as so many lesser honest parents do. It was by acknowledging innocently her need and desire for love and sex that she could win her daughter’s collaboration. Her daughter’s ‘don’t care attitude’ at the end of the dialogue shows a whole bunch of things: a silent will to collaborate; a silent will to not wanting to interfere in a potential relationship of her 178

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mother with the chap; a silent will to be less demanding in matters of closeness, at least not when her mother’s intimate relationship is in the way; a clear voice that says— —I’m frustrated about the fact that I have to grow up, get less exclusive attention and have a less symbiotic relation with my mother from now on. And another voice that says— —Okay, right, it’s hard to choke, but that’s life. And after all, I can also have my little chap … With these four examples, I would like to close the Healing Workbook and hope it has given you enough model stuff for your own practice. Please keep in mind that it’s by far not enough to just read this book, but that the most important is your own practice. Theory can never replace practice, and this is especially valid for relationships, inner or outer.

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Chapter Five

Art Guide

❊

Introduction This is a guide to the inner child art work. In the previous two chapters we have seen how to recover and heal the inner child. This present guide is a little work manual about how to activate the healed inner child for creative work. You should begin working with the present art guide only after having completed the recovery and healing of your inner child. The reason for this precaution is simple. You cannot work with a cataleptic or wounded inner child that is not yet recovered or not yet healed. If you attempt to do so, what happens is that you will try to force creativity and end up saying ‘I always knew that I have no talent for art’ or ‘I always knew that I am too rational a person to do something

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like that.’ Your efforts would be wasted and on top of it, you would block yourself against any further attempts. That would be a real damage! So, please take my advice serious and do the recovery and healing work first! There is another reason for that; it’s because of the general introduction to voice dialogue contained in it. The same applies for inner child art work. Without knowing how to get in touch, you cannot possibly do any work with your inner child. Here, too, you have to get in touch first with your inner child energy, so as to run on that spur—and not on another. The inner child’s creative energy can carry you really far. In all other matters of life, when you carry out your daily routines, for example, your inner child is of little help. Then your inner adult and your inner parent may be very good in the ring. So, please do not expect to get really far in art or any artistic, creative endeavor, private or professional, if you only rely on your inner parent or your inner adult. If you do that, nobody will deny it to you, but frankly, you would be foolish!

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And in fact, many people do it, all those namely who have unlearned to play with concepts, rules, ideas, things and even people. To stop playing is to kill your inner child. To relearn playing is therefore a natural part of inner child recovery. Now, in this part of this guide, I will not repeat all that stuff again. It would give the book a wrong turn because here, we have to focus on the art activities right away. We won’t do any kind of formal dialogue work. Of course, when you work with your inner child doing spontaneous art, you always silently communicate with inside, but you won’t do it consciously or verbally. It’s a subtle, intuitive kind of dialogue, something really special. Once you have learned that, you won’t want to miss that in your life because it is one of the most beautiful experiences you can make here on earth. It is something truly religious. The work we are going to do together in this guide is both visual and audio. Our inner child is going to draw or paint, and to compose music. If you

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like your spontaneous creations, you may keep them. If you don’t like them, you may destroy them. But please, before you do the latter, answer for yourself the following questions: ‣

Who is the liker?

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Who is the authority in me that likes or dislikes?

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Who says this has value or that has no value?

 This instance is your inner controller or inner critic. Before you tear your inner child productions to pieces, you are well advised to check who asks you to do that. Just to make sure you are not acting under a dominant influence of a mean or hypertrophied inner energy that is the manifestation of your self-hate. Also see that even in case you have worked through the healing guide, you have not done much work yet on your inner parent or inner adult. In most cases, but not in all, the healed inner child will take its natural place and counterbalance a pre-dominant influence of the other inner entities. I guess that in about eighty percent of all cases this is going to take place. 184

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What about the rest? The remaining twenty percent of people who have healed their inner child have to do some additional work with the inner parent, inner adult or inner critic. Thus, in the present guide I suppose you are among the majority who is working with a healed inner child that is respected and valued by all the other inner entities. In this case, your feeling which productions of your inner child really have value and which not, is based on a sound intuition, not a malevolent inner tyrant. In cases of doubt, I recommend you the following: ‣

Keep all your inner child productions in a safe place;

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If auto-destructivity occurs, keep them in a friend’s house;

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Do not look at your productions for some days;

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Do not show them to anybody during the first month;

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Do not destroy your productions just for feeling uneasy;

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Do not challenge your inner child for producing;

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Be yielding to anything that comes spontaneously;

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Do not push your inner child in any way;

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Do not punish your inner child in any way;

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Do not ask anybody to evaluate what you are doing.

Some of these points need to be discussed more in detail. I have not known all that when starting my own work with my inner child and I’ve done terrible destruction. I’ve actually done all wrong and it’s from my mistakes that I learned all that. I can tell you how dangerous all that is. It is nothing less but explosive! And—you are going to be on an island to do this work, to walk this path, and to walk your talk. You are going to be in a desert. But I can promise you one thing: this is going to be your island and your desert. And you are going to love it to such a point that you never anymore want to miss it in your life—even though you may be utterly alone there and without one single friend, except your inner child.

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Main Theme The essential in inner child art is that it is not predictable and that there is no technique—at least not for the production. Later, there can be—if you wish—a post-production that works out the inner child’s productions in order to professionalize their appearance or refine the essence that has been created spontaneously. This post-production is not a process where the inner child is involved; or at least it is less involved. Typically, this process is guided by the inner adult and evaluated by the inner adult. In this guide, I concentrate on the creation in the strict sense. While in the post-production stage we apply intellectual and systematic techniques, in the creation phase we apply strictly no technique, and we certainly have to get rid of any intellectual involvement. Inner child creation is spontaneous, intuitive and not intellectual. You can also say that the creation process is right-brain and the production process leftbrain, but that would be an undue simplification. It’s not that clear-cut.

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As there is always a small portion of yin in a big accumulation of yang, there is a small portion of intuition in every intellectual process. And as there is a small portion of yang in all accumulation of yin, there is always an element of reason in every nonintellectual and spontaneous creation. The reasonelement may be hidden or we may not be aware of it. But it’s nonetheless there. I think if it was not there, there would be misbalance and we would simply be mad. Salvador Dali said that the only difference between him and a madman was that he was not a madman. That’s the point.

Preparation What is to be done to get ready? You may think that with your inner child right in place, you can just start and do not need a preparation. You are almost right. Yet there is a little thing to do. You may want to skip it and just go ahead. You may do so but if you don’t get a result, do not blame me.

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If you ask me, I find it necessary to begin with relaxing and focusing before we begin with the art work. You may argue that a painter will usually not pray before he sets out to paint. I answer that you will not have to pray, but to get in touch with inside, you should perhaps focus inside for ten minutes. For, please don’t forget that the painter paints with a painting technique that he may have had to learn for a decade while you are going to paint with no technique, purely relying on your inspiration. Impossible? If you expect to paint the Mona Lisa a second time, perhaps. But you are not supposed to imitate Leonardo while doing inner child art work. If you feel restricted in any way, please get to the source of those restrictions. You will then find that there are mental restrictions, and emotional restrictions. Both have to be dealt with if you are out to produce results. These restrictions are not lack of talent or lack of technique. They are exclusively resulting from a lack of faith! It is for this reason, and only for this reason, that the preparation is necessary. For in our culture virtually everybody lacks faith in miracles—and inner child

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art work truly is miraculous. If you come along with a proud, skeptical and willful attitude, I would first put you in the corner for two hours, as it is done in oldfashioned kindergarten with ‘naughty’ children. I would let you there, and let you roast on your rage until you are red and boiling. Then I would simply ask you who in the world had told you that you are still alive tomorrow? You’d answer: Nobody. Because you just believe it. And I’d reply to you that this, too, is a miracle, which we call the miracle of life. Just to let you feel that we can’t live without miracles, that they are part of our lives. Thus, you have faith that tomorrow you are still making plans, getting a budget together to work them out and collecting helpers and collaborators to delegate some of your work, right? You naturally think that you’re going to wake up tomorrow morning. But who has told you that? Nobody. Of course. You have faith in it. So please don’t tell me that you live totally without faith, based only upon your pretendedly rational and logical premises. I laugh at you if you say it again, and throw you out of the class. And you won’t enter it again!

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Inner Artist, Get Ready! We have two main elements for preparation, namely a positive expectation and relaxation. The technique that we are going to try out for relaxing is very simple. You listen to four tracks of a special braincoordinating music that I composed for this purpose, preferably by using high-quality headphones: —https://soundcloud.com/peterfritzwalter/ complete-combirel-relaxation-session

While you hear the music, you focus inside a moment and then quite spontaneously throw yourself in the work. You sit relaxed in an armchair and begin to breathe into your abdominal diaphragm a few times, not too often in order to avoid hyperventilation and dizziness. Just about three to five times. Then you close your eyes and focus inside, directing your inner attention to your navel region and you breathe consciously into that region of your body. You imagine to charge your belly with vital energy.

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Breathing should not be too strong, but as regular as possible and it should be diaphragmatic breathing, not chest breathing. After about five to ten minutes, you feel warmth in your lower belly, a sensation that is very agreeable. At the same time, it could well be that you feel suddenly either sleepy or sexually aroused, or both. Let it go naturally and do not do anything about it. Only make sure you don’t fall asleep. These sensations only show you that your body has been charged with a surplus of vital energy. How does that feel like? That’s not something nebulous or imaginary. It’s very real and it can be described accurately—as follows: ‣

Your eye pupils are enlarged;

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Your skin tonus is reduced;

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Your muscle tonus is greatly reduced;

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You hardly keep sitting on the chair so sleepy you get;

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You feel a warm stream from your head to your feet;

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You feel you are fully conscious yet rather apathetic.

This is how it should. Naturally, if you are afflicted with an anxiety neurosis or a compulsion neurosis, the outcome will be quite to the contrary. The boost in vital energy will in such a case inflate your defenses so that your anxiety will increase instead of diminish, which will in turn make you feel rather uncomfortable. I know this from experience since I practiced this technique before I went into therapy, and later was diagnosed with an anxiety neurosis that still later expanded into a compulsion neurosis. Only years after that, once both neuroses were healed could I experience these wonderful sensations in my then healthy mindbody. You may wonder who this inner artist is? If I tell you that it’s your inner child, you may believe that or not. You may take it as a statement and say ‘Well, he must know it. He has done it, so he knows.’ Or you may say ‘He can tell me nuts. Is it important for me

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what this author says? I want to see for myself. Who knows, perhaps this inner artist is an entity different from my inner child?’ All this is valid. There is no absolute truth when we talk about the subtle realm. There is truth, yes, but we all perceive that truth differently and then hold what we see for ‘different kinds of truth.’ We may rightly do that, and there’s nobody to contradict us. So feel free to think whatever you please about who this inner artist is. Find out for yourself. You may evaluate this experience differently, according to your different mindset. But that experience there will be, that’s a fact. When you consider this truth, you see that the question is of little importance who this inner artist really is. The question is kind of a luxury I may say. Your investigation into that has no meaning for the work itself—please keep this in mind. This investigation is a purely intellectual exercise that you may indulge in if you like. But for doing the work it is strictly unnecessary. Some of you may end up saying that, after all, this inner artist is no lesser than the higher self. Others will say that it’s the inner child and others will name it in194

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ner artist and suggest it’s another of our inner entities and has to be validated as such. I do not speculate. Speculation leads nowhere. However, the work leads to a well defined goal. Therefore I stick to the work, and I frankly do not like speculation. I leave that to philosophers. The danger is namely that if you indulge too much in such intellectual luxury, you’ll end up doing no inner child work at all! You’ll end up being dominated by your inner controller, the eternal skeptic, your repetitive thought patterns and your past. And as a result the door of creation will be closed for you. For it’s not your intellect that opens that door; it’s your intuition and your faith. It’s your innocence, not your knowledge or pseudo-knowledge. I know that some of you, and often the ones who are not the great brilliant successes, have that innocence. I have seen it. It’s those of you who, without talking much, without giving me much feedback, just sit down and do it—a smile on their face. Most of you have to do more than that, especially those of you with a hypertrophied inner parent. They dance like monkeys around the banana. They 195

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dance. They don’t eat. They talk about the banana, they discuss it, they dissect it in their mind without ever touching and trying it. For those of you who have lost their spontaneous innocence I have inserted a special note in this guide. It’s only for you, not for the first group, the innocent ones. They may safely skip this section. So what we are going to do is to insert a section that deals with a kind of S.O.S. dialogue with our inner critic. The situation is that this inner critic may hold you back from addressing vital issues in your life. If this is so, you really have to enter into a constructive dialogue with this inner entity. The sample dialogue that follows is only one of many ways to tackle this important problem. You may do it differently, but you must do it if you want to open the doorway to real creation and genuine creativity. The actors: Y: You (your conscious ego) IC: Inner Critic (IC sounds like icy …)

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Y

Inner critic, I would like to talk with you … are you there? IC

Yes, I’m always there, always watchful. That’s part of my care for you. Y

I want to tell you that I am furious about you. You have messed up my life by interfering in all my endeavors, with your horrible cynicism, your negativity, your utter lack of humor, of creativity, of youth. That’s why people now find me stiff and boring and tell me I was giving parental lectures to others. That hurt me so much! You are responsible that I had repeatedly no success, for years and years, that I am caught in a net of guilt, of anxiety, of self-reject that makes me feel inadequate most of the time. You are the one responsible for my illness and lack of energy. I feel very clearly that my energy went down considerably over the last years and I had many bad dreams about sickness. You took over my whole personality when I abandoned that exciting project some time ago and now I feel that I missed a great opportunity. Where is my spontaneity,

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my enthusiasm? It all dried out, like dried pepper, and became too strong in taste. And you have always been like that, since I was a child. You have been blown up in me and I will now take every step to knock you down, to annihilate you, and get you out of the game—believe me! I will take care that you lose your arrogant superiority and instead, in my social interactions, will play out my inner child. I value that child and I do not value you with your silly infantile attempts to play the big boss in my life. I am fed up with you and that’s what I want to tell you. IC

I want you to understand that you have to learn proper conduct. If you want to be successful in a hypocrite world, you must become a hypocrite. Don’t show who you are! You want others respect you? If you want that, you have to lead your life in a way that is aligned with what is considered proper conduct. If you let your inner child dominate your life, you will lead the life of an eternal adolescent; you will be jumpy, light and irresponsible. I try to influence you to learn about the values commonly shared in this society. Y

But what about my individuality, then? What about my original and sometimes daring ideas? Forget about all that?

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IC

You have to evaluate it on the scale of proper conduct or the principles this culture is based upon. Y

What the hell are those principles good for? IC

When there are no principles, there is confusion, and chaos. How do you want to find a red line in your life if you do not have principles? Y

What is such a red line good for? IC

It serves the purpose of trustworthiness. You are much more trusted if there is a red line in your life. But okay, if you want to jump amok, here and there, like a mad monkey, because you like that, that’s not my business, then. You may follow every fancy, if you want, but not under my influence. You may override my voice, that’s up to you. I only give you recommendations.

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Y

But what can I do about the way I am? This society is utterly false, hypocrite and violent. It disregards soul values and tries to streamline all and everybody. It pretends to give freedom but it conditions the promise of freedom in such a sordid way that at the end of the day there is no freedom at all. IC

Society is as it is. There are times when it’s more liberal and times when it’s more repressive. Now it’s getting more repressive again. But there is more freedom, too, in other respects. The art of living is to see where the break is coming from and to follow that spur. But you are often detached from this reality and live in your own one, disregarding the rules and perhaps breaking them. And then you wonder why people don’t like you. Y

I am a nonconformist. IC

Yes, and you mean it. You almost hit it on everybody’s head.

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Y

I thought that this attitude comes from you, inner critic? IC

Not at all! I always want us to be respectable. It’s coming from your inner child, of course. Y

Really, I want to be very honest with you and very clear. This striving for respectability is utterly ridiculous. It undermines our true intentions and it pushes away those who sympathize with us on a deeper level, on a soul level, so to say. So there really is conflict between our true being and this false being created by the quest for being respectable. It’s the eternal fight of the true and the false. IC

It needs much more courage to be true to yourself. That’s for sure. Y

But why do you not give me support on that way? The inner child gives me support but often it is not strong enough either. You could help me much more by not sabotaging my natural outgoing attitude, but to help

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foster the development of a red line—as you call it—in this very endeavor. One can be reliable and trusted as an alternative element of the culture, as a critic, as a respected contradictor. What about that? IC

Yes. That’s true. I have not yet thought about that. It’s really a new idea for me and I’ll ponder it. Y

Thanks for your collaboration. I feel we have made a big step forward today.

You guessed it—yes, I had that problem; that’s why I wrote the above dialogue. After having done that, there was a tremendous change in my life, and my awareness about the subtle messages I was sending out was much higher. I had that problem despite the fact that I had worked for many years on my inner child. This tremendous change distilled in me the insight that it is simply not enough to recover and heal our inner child. What we have to do is actually recover all our inner entities and lead them in a way to build a harmonious inner team. We have to orchestrate this inner land-

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scape and conduct it so that it produces the music we would like to play in the world. You do not need to be as aggressive and angry as I was in the above dialogue when you approach your inner critic! Naturally, if you do the work timely, you won’t be fed up to that point. In my case, I had committed the mistake to wait too long which makes that things pent up inside. Much depends also on your general attitude, your work and your environment. If, for example, you have a creative and rather independent job, it’s much easier for you to cope with a pushy inner critic than if you work as a clerk or administrative jerk. But please believe me that it all depends only on your intensity, your desire to really get in touch with that creative potential in you, that originality, that wonderful uniqueness, that carefreeness, too. Some of you need to do a hard step in that direction before they can enjoy the fruits of that work. It is a matter of commitment! The S.O.S. dialogue should have adjusted your inner critic’s attitude toward your daring new endeavor. Please do not belittle the sometimes nagging conservatism of that inner entity. In some cases it bor-

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ders fascism, in some others it just runs on pure arrogance. In many people it runs on fear and wants to hold you back from virtually every new, daring and unconventional plan or enterprise. If you do not get this energy under control, you are never going to make it in the arts or in any endeavor that requires your wit, your uniqueness and your original ideas. When I talk about art, I mean that not in the restricted sense like an interest for going to a museum. I mean that in the sense that art is the art of freedom, the art of being truly humane, the art of living, the art of mastering yourself. This is the reason this inner child art guide is written for, not just for having you sit down and do a drawing once in a while. I have trodden this path because of an inner conviction that most of us are robots—as I myself was one twenty years ago—and that I feel I have a mission to support others to develop their original true self. Thus, when I talk about art I actually talk about all—about living in general. It’s that vast, and it’s that important!

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Just Do It! Once you are ready, it’s easy. You just do it. You sit there, in a relaxed position, perhaps on your bed, perhaps on the floor, and there are several sheets of drawing paper. There is in front of you a box with pastel crayons or wax crayons, preferably a large one that contains at least twelve different colors. Your mind is relaxed and there is no thought. You are a bit apathetic, very relaxed. You take one or several of the crayons and just dance with them over the sheet. And you see what happens … I know that this is extremely difficult for most of you. It’s difficult because you never do and have never done anything like that before. Why? Because you are very reluctant doing things for no purpose, and that is your greatest problem! Doing things always with a purpose in mind destroys every spark of creativity in you in the long run. It has been told to you again and again, when you were a child, that you have to have purpose in life, that life is not worth living if you have ‘no purpose.’ You have

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been fed with these hypnotic spells, you have repeatedly ingested these dried formulas that may be good for dead people, but that are disastrous for those who are alive. Therefore, now you are at a point to experience an atrocious fear doing something without a purpose. You may reply that, of course, you have a purpose behind your doing. It’s that you want to be or become creative, that you want to have your inner child do some art work. But that’s not the purpose I am talking about. I am talking of the act of drawing itself which is done for no purpose since you are not going to draw anything that— ‣

has a value;

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is going to be seen by others;

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is supposed to be artistic;

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can be recognized as something real.

What you are going to do with this paper and those crayons is what it is: play! It is the very characteristic of play that it bears its purpose in itself and

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has no other or ‘higher’ purpose. What you learn by doing this is to play. Most of you have unlearnt that in school. You sit there and do it for no purpose, okay? That’s what healing is about. Healing comes about through re-aligning the mindbody with its own purpose—which is pure living. Once you have no other purposes than this single purpose, this main purpose of living, you are aligned with the primordial life purpose. Many spiritual practices go for the same. Zen and Yoga are no different from spontaneous art in that they re-align you with your true life’s purpose, pure living, purposeless living. This very special state of mind is comfortable. You will hardly be satisfied after having done one drawing. If you are relaxed, you will enjoy this dance and the vivacity of those colors, and you will begin to meditate about certain forms, without however attaching yourself too much to them. You just flip over the page when it gets too intense. Do a next one, and a next one.

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Usually, in my experience, a kind of satiation comes up after around five, sometimes ten drawings. It will be different each time. But definitely there will be a point where you know for sure you want to stop. It’s not that you want to do something else. Imagine, only ten to fifteen minutes have passed because typically, you spend no more than a few minutes on every drawing. It’s not that you are bored. It has another, more mysterious, reason. This satiation is real! It is like having eaten food and become satiated with it to a point to stop eating. It’s really like that. Some of you will inquire what all this is good for, or when and how the benefits will show up? Let me answer this question in detail, but before doing that, I’ll give you some more instructions for the next sessions. There is work that needs to be done regularly, such as most body-mind exercises. And there is work that does not need a fixed schedule. Inner child art is of the latter sort. It is rather allergic to scheduled or planned ruling. You should trust your intuition and do it only when you feel like. What happens if you do it when you’re not in the mood is that it feels boring or off-track, and 208

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if that special excitement which is triggered by your inner child is lacking, you will quickly lose any interest to continue. It would be foolish to endanger your excitement through putting an obligation or restriction that could be taken as a boring duty by your inner child. You do not need to worry since there is nothing you could lose if you don’t do the work for a certain while. It will be so much the more exciting to take it up when you are in the right mood again! The other thing to take care of is your privacy! I remember how shocked I was when I was disturbed in those precious moments. Better to skip a work session when you’re not sure you will be alone and undisturbed than to go on and be surprised, or even questioned by some of those well-meaning friends who care so much about you that they try to interfere in all and everything you do. Keep away from those while you do inner child art and never let them know about it! To inform them could result in a sudden end of your new endeavor, because those people have this astonishing ability to make down everything they don’t get in their narrow

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mindset of predefined values. Keeping aloof is the best defense in these cases! The next step in your practice of spontaneous art is to use freedom creatively. You may never have enjoyed real freedom and an activity in which you are not restricted in any way in your expression may at first be strange for you. You may for example stand on your head or shout while you draw, or you may finish sessions once in a while with a spontaneous dance, as it was my practice. You will see that once you are used to it, your consciousness will be more subtle and you will begin to perceive certain patterns, motives, original ways of expression that come from deep inside of you and that you are going to identify in your repeated productions. These patterns can serve two functions. They can serve to develop a certain artistic style which you may develop further, if you like. And they may give you psychological hints that may come with word or thought associations for revealing you the inner truth of certain fixations of yours, certain obsessions, traumata or fears. However, be careful with those conclu210

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sions. They can be misleading if derived from superficial evidence and insufficient observation. It needs long practice for developing an intuitive psychological sense that serves you to know yourself. It really needs a deep commitment. Jumping directly to conclusions by interpreting your productions could be not only counterproductive, it could be the end of your creative flow. Your inner child will harshly contradict those rationalizations since they come from the inner adult and are not produced by the inner child itself. Unfortunately, in our culture we find we have to interpret all and everything so that we don’t have to deal with the fog that is and will remain there. To wipe out the gray areas in life means to wipe out life itself! Self-knowledge is, as life itself, not black-and-white, but millions of shades of gray!

Spontaneous Composing We are a visual culture. Research has shown that visual stimulation and visual pleasures in our culture by far outweigh the joys derived from sound. You’ll find that almost everybody likes photos, enjoys colors 211

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or likes sightseeing. While there are not many people who really enjoy and appreciate music. They may like sound, or certain noises that they use to call music. But people who really like music to the point to have an interest to read musical scores or to compose music, or to play a musical instrument are a minority. Why? It seems that this is merely a cultural phenomenon. Sociologists say we are a visual society, a visually obsessed one. What is it that we are so much focused upon the visual, to a point to neglect the conscious perception of sound, of music? How many of you are aware of the music that plays in the mall while you go there for shopping, and that penetrates you unheard—in the truest sense of this word. Now, if you, like me, belong to the minority of people who appreciate both visual and auditive stimuli, you may want to try spontaneous composing as your next step in inner child art work. You may never have touched an instrument. Never mind. That is better than to have touched it wrongly! The worst antipathies against playing musical instruments are created by forced musical lessons. It can have devastating psychological consequences.

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Spontaneous composing or instrument play is the only form of instrument handling that has truly deserved the term play. Everyone who has ever tried to really learn to master a musical instrument knows that serious study of an instrument has nothing, but nothing to do with playing. It is hard work, and often not even gratifying. But it does not have to be like that. Spontaneous playing is the key. It was the key for my own musical production. Without that fundamental insight, I would still sit there in my sweat and hack my fingers wound on some exercises in order to produce some ‘decent classical.’ And, besides, this guide would never have seen the day. After stopping all decent lessons, I preferred to engage in indecent improvisations. And that was far more rewarding in every, respect. Every jazz musician will confirm this to you. Every stiff classical player will contradict it. I’m on the side of the jazz and against the musical catalepsy that today is called ‘classical music.’ Life is soft and flexible, and not hard and stiff. I am pro-jazz, because I am pro-life. What most people forget is that so-called classical music, at the time it was composed, was not classical at all, but dar-

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ing, modern and, for the most part, rejected as ‘too extravagant.’ All those distinctions and categories are truly debilitating exercises of a confused mind. The truth is that inspired music is inspirational music, spontaneously composed or improvised music. If you can’t follow me until here, you better give up right away and remain with drawing. If you can get this in your mental drawers and do not feel bashed, then by all means continue! And you may have a listen to some of my music. You can find it here: ‣

http://ipublica.wordpress.com/music/

The digital culture has done lots of benefits for musical inspirational art! When I started out as a boy to spontaneously improvise on the piano in the boarding, I risked to be beaten either by the cook, a fat angry lady, or other boys. It is unavoidable to play an acoustic instrument without being heard, except you exercise in a bunker. What can you do if people are so insensitive that they perceive music as mere noise?

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Now, by using a digital piano and connecting a pair of headphones, I can improvise undisturbed and without filling the ears of others with unwanted sounds. You may still object that there is a greater obstacle for getting people involved in spontaneous composing than it is for having them do spontaneous art since generally musical instruments, and especially pianos, are expensive. That is true in general, but that argument is not really relevant since anyway only people who have already a natural affinity to music will be attracted to this idea. The others will just skip that part of the guide! And if you have a soul connection with something, you will attract it into your life, do what you will. The universe will do miracles that you can get what you need in terms of hardware. It did for me, and it has done for people more needy than I was at the time. Many of you who possess this affinity have already thought many times of buying a piano or a keyboard, but you did not dare to do so because you thought you will have to take ‘expensive lessons’ in order to 215

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learn the basics. You will also have imagined of how awkward it would feel when others, friends, would ask you to play something for them while you think that you can’t play anything, and if so, you would not play it right. Please be aware that as long as you feed on the approval of others, you are never fed well; worse, in decisive moments of your life, you will suffer from malnutrition or even starve of hunger! You have all the seeds inside of you that you can use for growing the virtual plants you need for healthy nutrition of your soul. That’s the safe way—relying only on your own inner self, and not on others. When you now sit down, for the first time, in front of your instrument, try to empty yourself of all this accumulated sense of failure, of all this friendly or unfriendly gossip that blocks your creative expression. As long as you value others more than yourself in a particular field you cannot develop a sense of high self-worth in that field. If you think you have never been an artist and will never be one, you are kicking yourself instead of treating your other me with gentleness, patience and understanding.

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Inner child art has nothing to do with playing right or wrong. It has solely to do with playing. As soon as you learn to forget what the difference is between playing right and playing wrong, you begin to play. And only then. Playing does not know right or wrong. Only a mind conditioned by mechanistic education can come up with the idea that there is right or wrong in playing, in any kind of playing. The truth is that real playing is carefree and non-judgmental and that an attitude that puts up two battlefields, one for the right warriors and one for the wrong ones is alienated. And yes, the player is a warrior, in the old meaning of this term. Playing means doing one’s best— which is exactly the definition of the warrior. The problem is namely one of misjudging the human potential. When you do your best and you fail, you are a hero in as much as you do your best and win! But of course when you listen to all this false heroism that is marketing propaganda of a deeply alienating manipulative consumer system, you are dead before you are born! 217

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For most of you, the difficulty to open up your creative potential is exactly this judgmental, critical, skeptical and deeply ignorant attitude that you developed under a life-denying and debilitating education. To do away with this cannot be done by insight or intellectual maturity alone. It needs to grow in the body, in the veins, and this requires you to play, to play, and to play again. When you see children, you wonder why they like to play the same game over and over again. Well, this is exactly what I am talking about. Children do not have that problem, generally, because their original, natural sense for the carefreeness of play is still intact. Their inner observer or judge is not yet overbearing and hypertrophied as it is in most adults in our culture. The moment you decide to rent or buy a musical instrument, you have done the first decisive step toward a new form of spontaneous creation. Let me add a note why I prefer a piano. It’s not only because I myself use the piano. It is because of the unique features only the piano offers. The piano is unique in that it incorporates a whole orchestra. It is 218

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not a solo instrument such as a flute or a trumpet but has many registers, sonorities and it is truly polyphonic. The organ is polyphonic and the keyboard, too, and yet there are huge differences. The piano is a percussion instrument and can be used to imitate percussions. The organ is a pipe instrument and not able to render a percussion-like kind of music accurately. Moreover, the organ keyboard is much smaller. It encompasses only sixty-six keys while the piano contains eighty-eight, thus providing deeper bass and higher treble levels. Those of you who have heard great pianists playing know that the piano really is an orchestra in itself. Now, after you made the choice, took the decision and got your instrument—what comes next? What comes then is the beginning. Let’s do away with the preliminaries, and start! Here again, as in all inner child work, you need a preparation. This is so important because once a drawback occurs because of your resistance, it is essential that you are prepared to deal

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with it. If not, chances are that you give up prematurely. The preparation that I suggest here is similar to the one used for inner child work in general. It is tuning in and turning inside, so that you connect to the inner child energy before you sit down to play. Later, when you have done the work many times, you will no more need this preparation, but in the beginning it is important to do it. It will help you focus and do away with disturbing daily thought patterns that distract you from getting in touch with inside. Let me quote here what Laurence G. Boldt, one of America’s most successful career trainers writes in his book Zen and the Art of Making a Living (1999), p. 87: LAURENCE G. BOLDT

Society’s propaganda will tell you that you are inadequate, that it’s your fate to live in fear and beg for the approval of others, that things are just the way they are, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You must resign yourself to a gray existence; you must go along to get along.

Creativity really begins with a No, a decisive No to listening to what the group says or those called the achieved ones, those who have made it. Working with

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your inner child, you get rid of that point of selfdelusion to consider, or not, yourself being ‘achieved.’ Then you may well find that there is a truthdistance between your truth and others’ half-truth. If you want to listen to others, listen to those who are self-thinkers. They will let you go on your own without making you down for being original, daring, bold, curious or adventurous. If you do not know any of those and are surrounded by the road-runners, then it’s definitely better to shut off all contacts for a while, at least for the period of your inner child art work. That was how I did it. I am a rather soft and gentle person, and I tend to get along with everybody; and it was therefore very hard for me to develop a sense of identity, just because I wanted to keep up with everybody—something that is impossible actually. By the way, I never had that sense of identity earlier in life and could develop it only under the condition of cutting off all bonds with others for a certain time, and do a hypnotherapy. This retreat yielded

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enormous benefits that only later I was able to reap and to fully appreciate. When you sit at your instrument, try to get in love with it. Touch it, feel it, listen to its voice. Fall in love with it! That is the surest way to get into that special state and that is the beginning of all, of your letting go, your creativity, your happiness. It’s a state of awareness where there is no ordinary thought, but a feeling of general wellness, a heightened receptivity and sensitivity. I guess it’s the state a child is in when they are at play. This is our single most valuable treasure, a treasure however that most of us have lost.

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Inner Child Essays

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Contents Feel Good for No Reason Inner Child Recovered Inner and Outer Child Child Play The Invisible Artist Violence Begins Inside

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Feel Good For No Reason Essay

Do we need a reason for feeling happy, for feeling good about ourselves? Many people do because they have lost the perfume of innocence, so essential for a life of joy and beauty. The good news is that we can relearn to feel good for no reason. It is more of a process of unlearning, to be true. What to unlearn? We must unlearn to expect something. We expect good or bad events, success or failure, depending on our inner program. We can change this program, yet there is one step further which is truly revolutionary. That's to get at the point where the inner program has no more importance at all, because we quit expecting and are centered in what is. This is not an idealistic quest or obligation. It is what Zen is all about. Living without expectation but with high input, high energy, high commitment.

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If you are really and completely centered, completely attentive, there is no more space in you for expectation.

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Inner Child Recovered Essay

All our child dreams have to be taken up again so that they will take on their full poetic flight. —GASTON BACHELARD, GASTON BACHELARD, REVERIES TOWARD CHILDHOOD, IN: RECLAIMING THE INNER CHILD, ED. BY JEREMIAH ABRAMS, NYC: TARCHER & PUTNAM, 1990, 40 FF., 48.

There is a way from the outer adult to the inner child. For some, this way is longer than the universe. They have closed the well that is the joyful source of creativity; they try and try harder, they achieve results, but nothing outstanding, nothing worthwhile, and nothing really satisfying. They are bored, tired of life, weary. They have abandoned their inner child, and with it, they have abandoned themselves. I was one of them. I was lonely depressed, and sad. There was no joy in my life, nothing exciting. I could see no reason why I was living that life that was like an empty shell. Instead I graded and upgraded myself, I scored and improved constantly. I exercised, I imitated, I felt it was worth the effort for a

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moment, it seemed to give me value and I could feel good, until the next depression. Because it did not last, I fell back in my fragmentation after a short while. Where was the poetic side of life, where was this magic the poets were talking about? It was in the books, well, yes, it was there in the stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann, or of Gogol, in the novels of Dostojevski or the poems of William Blake—and I loved it. But in my life it was absent, there was no poetry and no love, there were only obligations, things one had to do. If it had only been for the money I could have understood: at least for that! But despite all my efforts, money did not flow in either. So for what? For what, after all this whole process of living? The change came with a hypnotherapy and the discovery of my inner child. Suddenly I thought that I was right in what I essentially was standing for, that I had been right all through those years, while feeling miserable, small, and powerless. So I setup regular dialogue sessions with my inner child, and later on also with the other entities or energies. But the inner child opened the door, and without

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having embraced and recovered my inner child energy, I am sure the other entities would not have shown up. Recovering my inner child gave me what I have never felt before: a sense of completeness. Suddenly I discovered that I could pass again an afternoon without really doing something in a compulsive manner, without spending my time with ‘worthwhile’ occupation which had been a must-do for me, and that I could just be—be with myself. That was a wonderful new state of existence, just being with myself and my inner child. And then I discovered with surprise that the symptoms had disappeared along the way; I did not feel nervous anymore. I did not feel I had to defend myself. My body felt warm and whole, whereas before it seemed to consist of ten different parts that did not belong together, cold and stiff as it was from my childhood days. It was as if with recovering my inner child I had recovered by body. Then, an explosion of creativity occurred; it just happened. I wrote extensively, books, poems, novels, stories, essays, films, a play, an auto228

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biography, travel reports. I kept a diary and began working with my dreams that I noted every night. Sometimes I had up to seven dreams in one night. The dreams were like films, full of color, and I met many new people. I gave conferences, talked about psychology, conducted seminars; my dream life was much more vivid than my real life at that time. And many times, my inner child would meet me in my dreams and say words of wisdom. I made spontaneous drawings, hundreds, and later began with oil painting. Today I am not perfect, not more and not less than anybody else; but perhaps I am a little more myself, a little more integrated, a little more content with what I have and what I do than the masses who seem to have borrowed their lives in a second-hand store. I am not more and not less successful than others either; others are richer, others are more at ease in playing the big bosses; others are more surrounded by great society.

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Inner and Outer Child Essay

Grown-ups write children’s stories too easily. Thus they make childish fables. To enter into the fabulous times, it is necessary to be serious like a dreaming child. —GASTON BACHELARD, REVERIES TOWARD CHILDHOOD, IN: RECLAIMING THE INNER CHILD, ED. BY JEREMIAH ABRAMS, NYC: TARCHER & PUTNAM, 1990, 40 FF., 47.

The way we relate to children depends on our relationship to our inner child of the past. Many people’s inner child is in a cataleptic state, wounded, autistic, mute. If this is so, how can people then healthily relate to children? Before I give an answer, let me ask a second question: who in school was not under the pressure to draw something recognizable, something the educator could fit in his or her barely imaginative mind? And how imaginative we surely have been as children! However, we were blocked in our artistic expression, not to say that we were denied to be artistic at all.

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It was child play, they said, and with their typical ignorant assuredness they added that child play is not art! Not art? Art, that was for the grown-ups, for the artists, some very special people, situated far remote from the normal human being! Or did you have a teacher who considered the production of the children in the art classes as art ? If yes, you belong to the few who are lucky. In my school, for example, not only the art and music classes, but also the art and music teachers were despised, ridiculed and belittled by the respectable science teachers, the mathematicians, the philologists and, of course, the sports teacher who was the most important in school because he had the strongest legs for kicking all the others. The school director had always been either a mathematician or a philologist. Never an art teacher. And later, grown-up myself, and working as a teacher, I was considered a heretic since I said that children who express themselves with art are artists. They laughed at me, at first, and then they grew jeal-

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ous since they saw the successes that I had with what they called my method. Then they aggressed me, and at the end they pushed me out. That was my history of teacherhood. It was hardly different from my history of childhood since the same reductionist—not to say fascist—spirit reigned there, and as you were different, child or adult did not make much of a difference: you had to suffer and eventually to leave. Open your own school!, the more sympathetic ones said, then you can implement your own method. They did not understand that I had no method and that it was just the fact that I had no method that I was successful. This insight could not fit their worldview of child dressage. When we recover our inner child from the past, we are facing again all those vicissitudes, but not in order to get mad eternally with people or circumstances of the past—while this might last a short time, and might also be healthy in the process of inner child recovery process.

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What happens is that we are beginning to parent our neglected inner child, that we are taking over a role our former educators could not assume, because their own inner child was blocked. Maturity begins with the care of what is most vulnerable, a new life or a life within us that had been denied living. When we do this, we are beginning to see children in a different way. We will be much less influenced by societal standard opinions regarding education and we will be less affected by factors that condition our relationships along the lines of a majoritarian worldview or cultural mainstream paradigm. We will be more open to display our full range of natural feelings about togetherness; we then will rather spontaneously share warmth and affection with children we are relating to and who relate to us. Art is a wonderful means of sharing wonder; and it is an experience that is healing at the same time. Doing art work with children helps us to recover and heal our own inner child. I have rarely had this affectionate exchange within school or day care settings where I have worked with children for years. Most educators I was working with 233

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have disturbed the innocent togetherness I had carefully built with the children and that is so essential for sharing and expressing emotions. These educators, women without exception, were regulating, commanding, supervising, inspecting, demanding, criticizing or vomiting pathetical praise that was as false and as artificial as their whole being was. Sharing with children on a heart level is an experience that nurtures the soul and contributes to the growth not only of the children - but also of the educators.

Child Play Essay

Opinions about inspirational art vary greatly. After eight years of exposing this concept on the Internet, I can say that the overwhelming part of humans totally ignore it. The low interest that the common web user has for intellectual and artistic concepts and productions is a sad fact in the virtual world.

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And when things become even more esoteric and a concept is presented that even in the non-virtual world is known only to a tiny range of people, there is but dead silence on your server. That is my web publishing reality, despite my efforts and the setup of my inspirational art sites; thus this article is written for the few interested in one of the most important topics of creation. There are two main definitions of inspirational art: one is called spontaneous art, the other is what nowadays is called ‘channeled art’ and what in former times was called inspired art or spirited art. I believe that as in some many cases where our intellectual mind splits life off in different parts that are only apparently distinct, we are actually dealing with one and the same thing. It is a mere fight about words to define inspirational art as either the product of a selfhypnotic trance, or the infusion of a spirit’s wisdom, or both. Whatever theory we subscribe to for explaining the fact, the way we have to bring about this connectedness is clear: it is through a special state of consciousness that allows us to tap into our subconscious

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potential or to open the door to another dimension of existence. And in both cases, there is something we receive, something that was not there in our conscious mind before we induced the trance—wherever this something comes from. It is merely a matter of dialectic to argue that either this something comes from our own subconscious mind or that we tap into the collective subconscious while being in trance, or else if another consciousness, for example that of a spirit or ghost reaches us. Therefore I will not open this futile kind of discussion here, but focus upon the matter in an empirical way. The question thus is how to induce the trance that enables us to open our consciousness to deeper levels. There are indeed people who pretend spontaneous art was a mere form of child play or childish behavior for adults. These ignorant people should be advised with the old saying of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that there are more things between heaven and earth than school wisdom admits.

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Inspirational art, then, is not for therapy purposes only. Actually, all art inspired by genius is inspirational, but on the other hand, there is inspirational art that serves therapy purposes only and that does not need to be of genius or even important. Under therapy purposes I understand every purpose that uses art with a specific practical purpose in mind. Besides trauma treatment, liberation from addiction or dependencies, sexual problems, perversions, or depression, where spontaneous art successfully contributes to healing, spontaneous art is also a great and powerful tool to enhance creativity. It therefore has got a strong position within personal growth workshops all over the world. In this essay I would like to deepen the other aspect of inspirational art, the side that is not concerned about healing but that cares about art as such. Inspirational art is art, there is no doubt about that. What most people find disturbing in this form of art is that it does not require any particular technique. Let me give a personal example. I have seriously studied piano playing at several conservatories in Germany and the United States and with renowned 237

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pianists and professors. However, all these studies led only to very mediocre results. As long as I was practicing piano, as long as I was putting effort in achieving a brilliant technique, as long as I was playing etudes and breaking my fingers off, I was not creative, not productive, not original. It all changed from the moment I left all that, after some kind of heroic decision I had taken, a decision that was extremely difficult to take since it sounded utterly crazy, utterly childish, utterly unrealistic. Already before that moment I had improvised, and to my continuous surprise, people listened to my innocent little productions wherever I was. Even when I played in supermarkets, restaurants, hotel lobbies or public places, I always got an applauding audience, and I did not understand why? When I then played some or the other classical piece I had studied for years, I felt how quickly the attention of my audience dropped, and I became nervous, which of course in turn negatively affected my play. So this decision had been prepared in a way, in a subtle way, and by little steps, steps that a small child would take for learning to walk. 238

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I had been careful indeed and therefore it has taken me not only years but decades to realize my own productions. I have learnt in the meantime that this world, this mankind, in its current state of ignorance and brutality is not suggestible to this kind of voices, and this is truly logical since more than 90% of all people are not suggestible to their own inner voices, their own inner intelligence and original potential; since this mankind is fixated on imitation, blindly following heroes and authorities instead of everyone tapping into their own individual uniqueness and fertility. I have got over all the hurt and the frustration to be utterly alone and to have no audience at all. I know I have an audience among beings that are living in other, more subtle dimensions and who have the sensitivity and the taste to appreciate the highly expressive music that I have created. It is possible that these beings have worked with me when I created, it is even highly probable. There are pieces that strongly remind Tchaikovsky, others that remind Chopin, others again that remind Rachmaninov. And yet, the whole is not at all an imita239

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tion of existing music, but something entirely and daringly new and original. Although as I have stated above, it was not child play to create this spontaneous music nor the visual art I have created. But it would not have been born if I had not adopted, at that time, a childlike attitude, a playful attitude toward the whole of my art production. What I want to convey is that at that moment in my life, I simply let go all I knew about technique in both musical composing and drawing, and just created, almost furiously and with a ferocious energy that was partly fed by the pent-up frustration, anger and hate that was the result of being rejected and ridiculed for years by a highly stupid and insensitive environment. Yes, I have suffered for my art, and it is perhaps for this reason that I so strongly identify with it and so dearly love it. For the few of you who find an interest to read this and who want to give it a try, I shall provide some basic guidelines how to setup an inspirational art session, be it for the creation of visual art or spontaneous composing.

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First, please bear in mind that you need a preparation. You cannot just jump from a worldview that prescribes watching the news every day, go to a physician when you are sick, and otherwise absorb what others think and say, to a mindset that recognizes that you yourself and nobody else is the creator of the universe you are living in. As long as you stay with the mass mind, you remain a member of the mass, and you will not be able to tap into more subtle forms of existence; for the treasure is not outside of you, but within yourself. This source is hidden to you and remains firmly locked as long as you do not change your mindset and become more flexible. Inducing self-hypnosis is now very commonplace and there are lots of resources on the Internet that prove its popularity. But self-hypnosis alone cannot help you to become an inspirational artist, namely as long as you stick to the wrong opinions and limitations of the mass spirit. Therefore, and for this reason only you need to take an Ultimate Decision before you even think of learning auto-hypnosis.

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This decision cannot be a light-hearted one and it needs to be a truly informed decision. That means you have to get information about other resources of knowledge first, about other forms of existence, about more subtle energies than the one that has created the physical world. Without this knowledge indeed your endeavor will be and remain child play; the lack of this basic information which is only to get through the study and practice of holistic truth, all your playing around with hypnosis, self-suggestion, trance, or dream walking will remain a mere distraction, another element in your useless life, your senseless search for pleasure and entertainment. This being said and assuming that you belong to an even smaller minority, here are the basic steps to take after you have got this information and have taken your Ultimate Decision: 1) Prepare for change in all matters of your life and do understand that attachment to past forms of existence hinders your progress;

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2) Setup in your mind a dream world of your liking, or at least a favorite place you like to come home to in secret moments; 3) Induce self-hypnosis using a technique that I have developed and that combines creative writing with music; 4) Take a seat at a desk that you like, put either paper or your computer, choose a silent moment, plug out the phone, light some incense and a candle; listen to classical or chamber music, preferably Baroque or early Classics like Bach, Telemann, Mozart or Vivaldi, or else, if you prefer, Debussy, Franck, or Rachmaninov, piano trios, string quartets or quintets. Listen to this music using high-quality headphones or speakers. If you are nervous, prepare a glass of wine that you put next to your paper, typewriter or computer, but only one glass, and no strong alcohol. Sit down and take three deep breaths, then taste your wine or else let the music fill your entire being with enchantment, close your eyes and get to your favorite please and then, when you are ready and not before, write as quickly as you can and without ever correcting anything: one page. Write a story, either 243

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invented or something that has happened to you or that you lived through, or else a story featuring somebody else but that has once greatly moved you. Only one page, but in a style you may have never practiced before, fast, fast, so that one thought directly links to another, associates to another while your inner observer has no time, not even a fraction of a second, to interrupt this daring flow of thought. Do not fight the upcoming emotions, even though they maybe disturbing you, maybe violent, negative or of an obscene kind. Do not fight the rage or depression, the feelings of humiliation or hurt that you may invoke in your story. Fight nothing and accept all! Usually, when your page is full and your glass empty, you will sit there in your sweat, feeling hot and heavy: that is the moment you are in trance. Now you may stop the experience, or move to a piano or a set of drawing equipment you have prepared, depending on which kind of inspirational art you would like to engage in, or else you may continue writing if before all, you have an interest in writing. Please do not be confused that negative feelings, that rage, anger or hate are the emotions that have come up or now come up after your writing. You may not have expected this to happen, but please let

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me assure you that a high percentage of my musical and visual art creations were born out of feelings of extreme anger and rage, when my head was glowing and I was sweating out of all my pores. This tempestuous rage is the expression of our inner revolt against humiliation that we have suffered, and surely this rage is among the greatest and most powerful energies for our inspirational creations. Therefore it takes some courage to engage in this experience, and it will certainly be the first step in a tremendous inner growth process. Our pent-up negative emotions are mountains of unused energy; to mobilize them for creative and constructive purposes is among the best we can do during our lifetime. I even believe that this is a way to resolve past-life karma. What keeps us attached to past lives is unresolved anger and hate and feelings of revenge for the humiliations we have suffered that we cannot forget or pardon. To prepare the process of forgiveness, we had to reactivate the emotion that is blocked within our subconscious mind. That is the only way to solve past conflicts once for all. Without combining a process of inner healing with art creation, art will always remain cold and artificial, something I call MuseFun or Museum Fun, but not

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the cathartic experience that has given birth to all our great art creations that incarnate human genius. You too are a genius since you share the immense potential that we are all part of. This potential is at your disposition once you dare to reject the manipulative and palliative spell that mass culture throws upon all of us and that hinders our way to truly be and become ourselves. Without crawling through your deepest trauma, you will not be able to levitate into your highest heaven. That is what we were: frogs; that is what we are going to be: princes, as in the fairy tale, because all fairy tales express truth, inner truth, and it’s up to us to incarnate that inner truth in the living flesh of our life so that it becomes tangible reality.

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The Invisible Artist Essay

This essay introduces into a higher form of creativity in order to gain access to a world of expression that is outside of the personal ego and all conscious memory. For those who wish to enhance their inspirational powers, I will give some guidelines. The first step in this process is to be able to receive inspired messages from the quantum field or invisible realm. The second step, then, is to learn to incarnate those messages through the means of art and literary expression into the time-bound dimension. Artists are mediums. Yet most of us do not consider them as such. We have split off from our daily reality most of the once united realms of existence. We imprison them into tiny categories, and thus castrate their power, belittling their existence and reducing them to what we call ‘para-sciences.’ We talk of parapsychology, paranormal or supernatural powers,

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on one hand, and of art, of science, of knowledge, on the other; while truly all these powers are simply natural powers. This was very different in Antiquity where the sages and hierophants knew and practiced science and art as a whole that encompassed what dualistic thought concepts have later split off from it. The whole, unified, body of knowledge was called ‘philosophy.’ Life was considered a mystery, composed, like a secret mosaic, of a multitude of elements, all interwoven on a macrocosmic as well as a microcosmic level. The sage could read the signs of the body, of nature; he was in subtle and synchronistic communication with all surrounding forces, nature, animals, the four elements: water, fire, wind and earth, as well as the ether. He was scientist, astrologer, artist, poet, healer, and clown, but first of all medium, channel for the messages coming from the invisible world. Ratio and emotions were not separate experiences for him, but different expressions of one and the same human nature. 248

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I am deeply convinced that human beings are genius without difference, that we all have the potential of sages, and that we can develop our innate genius, our completeness, by opening our mind, enriching it and training it. What is essential at the outset is that we have the will and integrity to burst our nutshell of mediocrity and grow out of the herd, the securing groups that are the graves of the complete human. We are living in times of turmoil and fundamental change in all areas of life. And there is more interest than ever before to rediscover the true wisdom of the mystery school as they existed in the Antique world — wisdom that brings happiness! Nietzsche said that mankind lost its happiness when the moralistic era of human history began. (Nietzsche meant platonic idealism and the trend since early Christianity to restrict or even deny the pleasures of the body). This tendency went together with a striving for perfection, first of all technological perfection. Technical skills became highly valued and appreciated whereas spontaneous forms of expression and

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creation were more and more belittled. The truth is however that what is genius never is merely technical! When we admire today the highly complex music of Johann Sebastian Bach, we often forget that most of this music has been created when Bach was improvising on the organ. Bach’s mastership is first of all a mastership of spontaneous improvisation. The same we know about Mozart and Beethoven. Spontaneous art has no pretension to be compared to classical artworks. It is devoid of pretension at all since it does not indulge in comparisons and does not intend to be honored or awarded. Its primary root, its motor is not a longing for recognition or applause but deriving pleasure from the simplicity of living expression. Spontaneous art is a manifestation of the joy of life! The interesting fact is that once freed from the prison of planned activity, and indulging in spontaneous art, we can attain mastership in it! This sounds paradoxical! Yet it is the truth. The spontaneous creator within, our inner child, is unlimited in its potential.

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During spontaneous creating our brain is not switched off. In the contrary, it works at a higher and more integrated level as usually (when we use it for mere thinking). Therefore it is possible and even the rule that after a while of truly ‘thoughtless’ and enjoyable artistic activity, certain repetitive patterns establish in our way of doing. These patterns can have two different origins. They can represent fixed behavior patterns or obsessions that we express in a symbolic metaphorical way. They can also be the manifestation of the continuous tendency of our brain to establish behavior patterns that lead to perfection. Routines are such patterns. While they often impede us from finding new creative solutions, they enhance our perfection in the accomplishment of certain tasks. We need them in order to work out our initial (spontaneous) creations or ideas. Basically we have the choice of two alternatives when we practice spontaneous art: —Leave our artworks as they are, sketch-like, in raw form and often unfinished, or

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—Work them out until perfection. When I do spontaneous art, I generally leave my drawings as they are after the few minutes of spontaneous creation. Yet with music this is sometimes different. In some cases, after having spontaneously played and computer-recorded new music, I postproduced it, arrange it, joined effects, and finally produced it in the form of an audio CD. The post-production of my initial musical ideas takes an incomparably longer time than the time of their invention, and there is effort linked to this postproduction while the spontaneous creation is without any effort. This is an interesting fact since it reflects typically the relationship between creation and perfection, between idea and realization or, as Bach put it, between composition and transcription. ‘Every composition is a transcription,’ said Bach. He meant that the composition never is completely identical with the original idea because ideas or inspirations are holistic and by far surpass our human understanding.

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Our ideas belong to a realm different than this earth plane and its limitations, and to melt them into the time-bound form of this dimension lets them loose a greater or lesser amount of their original grandeur and originality. Therefore it can be said that every artist is a medium, a transformer of ideas and concepts into the material visible world. Art is not defined by a particular technique and its value is certainly not dependent on the mastership of a technique. Many people, however, confuse art and technique. They think art was only something which is produced by a master, a master of a technique, a painting technique, the mastership of some musical instrument, the mastership in photography, and so on. Yet this is definitely not so. Otherwise children could never be artists. And there would certainly not be any naive art, and probably a great part of the abstract painting neither. In general, in the international art world, art is defined as any human expression that was done with an artistic intention. One of the more recent art forms, the happening, is undoubtedly recognized as serious art, if one personally appreciates it or not. Enveloping

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the Reichstag in Berlin with aluminum paper and subsequently taking the envelope off so that people may see that building with new eyes, is art. What is more specific for the spontaneous artist is his conscious choice not to be bound by a technique in order to enjoy the utmost freedom of expression. This rule or premise may sound strange for those who adhere to the concept of mastership. Yet art is not per se related to mastership. Some people find it very unusual to conceive the idea of producing art in a rather spontaneous way, without a kind of planned long-term work on a particular art project, and without applying complex skills or a specific technique, which has to be learned over many years. Yet spontaneous art is since about the 1960s recognized as a serious form of art. It has mainly been developed by the so-called DADAmovement, a group of avant-garde artists who experimented with new forms of art. The outcome of those experiments was sometimes a bit extreme. However, this does not mean that we are extremists if we enjoy spontaneous creation!

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Many of us today want to discover our original creativity and break out, for moments at least, of our daily routines and stresses. We wish to rediscover the lost innocence of childhood and play. Playing is very important for everyone, not only for children. In the United States and in Japan the method of learning by playing is now well established and taught in private schools and institutes. Some years ago, if you had talked about it to business people, they would have taken it for a joke! And now seminars for managers in ‘Learning by playing’ are maintained in many private institutions. Spontaneous painting and composing is a form of playing. It is not learning by playing in the strict sense, since we do not indulge in it for learning purposes (except learning about ourselves). If you want to know yourself better, you are very well advised to practice spontaneous art. You do not need to share it with others, if you think you expressed, in your spontaneous creations, something too private, it is completely up to you if you consider this activity as an intimate dialog with your inner self, or if you like to make a little game out of it, or an amusement party. Some of us really need to learn playing again. Simply because 255

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they are out of touch with their inner child; however, the inner child is not dead, while it may be mute or cataleptic. It may sleep only, like the princess of the German fairy tale Sleeping Beauty (Dornröschen) who slept some years until the kiss of a young prince woke her up to life. After her long sleep, she got a better life, not a lonely one that she had lived before when she was enchanted by the witch, but a happy life, a life that she shared with her prince and probably with children. No method or technique is necessary to learn playing, except relaxing and letting go! Simply give it a try and relax, and let everything happen. And this is what we now want to do together: Please get a quite spacious block with white drawing paper and a set of color pencils. I invite you to play with these colors and this paper, to forget all what you might have learned in school about drawing and all this questioning ‘What is that, what does it represent...?’ No painting or drawing has per se to represent something. There is no obligation, no rule and no law that drawing means drawing the visible reality. We can draw invisible things, dreams, or just impressions of

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our inner life, feelings, emotions … We can use colors to symbolize these emotions. And we do not need to think about this process at all. We can just do it intuitively, spontaneously, with a peaceful and joyful mind, and not for any goal or achievement, but for the sake of pure joy! Another exciting application of spontaneous art is spontaneous composing. I invite all of you to compose spontaneously a little piece of music, for example on your sound card synthesizer or your keyboard or any other acoustic or electronic instrument you have at your disposition. Just enjoy yourself doing this and recording, or not, your music. If you are familiar with MIDI, do not try to compose difficult pieces with many tracks at once. Multi-track work is quite a technical thing and needs lots of practice and experience. You do not need to work out your initial ideas, but if you wish to, you can learn doing this and acquire the necessary skills. Then you can work out your spontaneous inspirations to various musical pieces. This is called post-production work or arrangement. Many musicians proceed nowadays in this two-

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step process in creative musical production. I have composed all my music in this way. The invisible artist is in all of us. Every single human being has creative impulses. Yet often these impulses, these creative intuitions remain unperceived, and therefore undeveloped. Our subconscious mind has a unique faculty of adaptation. If it knows that we do not want those intuitions, those creative impulses, that we are bothered with them (because we are too lazy or to busy with our daily routines and obligations), it will stop sending them. On the other hand, if we listen to our inner voice and follow once up to such intuitive insight or impulse, once or twice, then our subconscious mind will send us many more of those impulses. Let us reflect a moment about the question why we humans produce art. This has many reasons. One main reason why we produce art certainly is the natural feeling of happiness that goes along with the realization of our creative impulses and desires. Please try it out for yourself and do not spoil this natural happiness (which is similar to the spontaneous

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happiness of children). The best way to destroy this innocence is to worry about how others would appreciate your creations or if your work will have an artistic future or not. All this kind of worries and doubts suffocates our artistic flame. This flame is in most of us very small and almost put down with smoke. It lacks oxygen in order to really burn highly and brightly. This oxygen is our natural happiness and freedom of worries, freedom of intellectual skepticism, freedom also of inferiority feelings and self-criticism. We never, and I repeat it, never have any reason to belittle ourselves or put our Inner Artist in a secret corner. The fact that this Inner Artist is invisible does not mean that this creative force should be hidden or disguised. Art can only make us happy if we accept it to be a natural enrichment of our lives, without pretension, but also without inferiority complexes. Art is a mirror for us, since it shows us many facets of our personalities, many hidden corners of our mind. It shows us truth about ourselves, a truth which is steadily moving and changing, since we are changing, ever-changing beings. There are not two days in our lives where we are the same persons!

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This mirror function of art can raise our creativity potential in an unforeseen way. If we are engaged in business, in a university career, in a technical profession, if we are doctors or dentists, or artists, we need to know ourselves in order to know others. And this knowledge is an often-underestimated part of our professional and social success! It is not so much our particular professional knowledge, which makes us winners, superior in relation to our competitors. It is this particular knowledge about life, which is selfknowledge. Our creativity is induced by art, but it is not forcibly artistic creativity. To give an example: If you are a sales manager, let’s say for cars, you will probably not be interested to follow a workshop on spontaneous art in order to indulge the next six weeks in spontaneous painting and composing, putting aside all your professional activity in selling cars. You will want to get new inspirations through art activity, through the workshop, not for art itself, but for car selling. Or you may be a bank director and yet engage once in a while in painting. Why? Because you may feel comfortable in this leisure time activity, and you do not bother if your paintings are not put in museums or renowned art exhibitions. 260

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You may just feel good and relaxed composing lines and colors on a canvas. Of course, in your daily life as a bank director, in your work, you will most probably not have to deal with painting but rather with the movements of financial markets and credit rates, but the creative impulses you get during painting will continue coming while he is doing banking! Why is that so? Because once we are united with our creative source, our true potential, this source, this potential is available in whatever we undertake, and at any time. This is very important to know: the door we once open will remain open. Once we are connected to our creative potential, we will remain connected to it in all fields of our life, in all what we do and what we want to achieve. This means that if you engage in spontaneous art, your higher creativity potential will sooner or later positively affect all your professional or private activities. You will observe that in your business, your research, your daily work, you are more inventive, more original, more daring and more productive than your competitors or your colleagues. And this even though you may not have the professional perfection than

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one or the other of your competitors has got; because you will compensate for this lack of perfection by being more creative, more original, more productive, more effective and, last not least, more happy! True happiness is the strongest force that exists. For truly happy people there are no obstacles to achievement, for the happy person receives help and support from everybody. Simply because we all like to have happy people around us! That is why people who irradiate happiness and positive energy find many friends and have much support in life. They do not have many a problem that negative people are struggling with simply because their path of life is so totally different, so much smoother and focused than that of ordinary people! Spontaneous art has made me happy, also because it was for me the mirror of my true self. Before, I tried, just like so many other, to imitate great musicians, to achieve high perfection levels by exercising, with all the inherent frustrations. These frustrations are obstacles to happiness. Some of us become very proud that they master this or that technique, be it in art, in sport or in busi262

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ness. They are proud as a compensation for all the frustrations they went through until being a master. Their pride is a defense and keeps them still more away from true happiness, which is pure joy and innocence. Spontaneous art has the precious effect to develop our innocence, so that we can let go and accept life and ourselves as what we are when we put all our titles, our status and our achievements away for a moment. Giving up voluntarily our defenses and becoming like the children for some moments of spontaneous creation makes us very strong and very healthy. Because these defenses are detrimental to our wellbeing and our development into wholeness.

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Violence Begins Inside Essay

All violence we see in the world is but our inner violence projected outside. Violence begins inside. It is a way to escape from facing life, from facing conflicts, contradictions, oppositions and all we do not really understand. It is the result of a denial, the denial to look inside and explore who we really are and what our inner landscape looks like. Religions and ideologies of whatever kind have gradually but decidedly got us on the wrong path. They have alienated us from our own inner wisdom which is understanding life in its complexity. Understanding life and ourselves is based upon holistic perception, a form of knowledge gathering that is characterized by our two brain hemispheres working in sync. Instead, mankind has hypertrophied the left brain hemisphere, yang qualities, logical thought, reasoning and deductive processes, to the detriment of the qualities of the right brain, or yin qualities, associative thought, fantasy and inductive processes. 264

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More and more alienated from his inner self, man has searched for outside sense-givers in the form of organized religion and ideologies. These organizations have in common that they have erected authority to judge what is right and wrong. They have replaced natural self-regulation by moralistic behavior norms. They feared and oppressed the individual and minorities, divided true collectiveness into the ingroup and the out-group, and empowered the ingroup by systematically breeding dominator group pressure. Individual wisdom became marginalized and even persecuted. They established schools, engaged in mass alphabetization and missionarism, gradually undermined parental authority and came to more and more disregard the individual creative continuum of each and every child. They slaughtered those who knew better, the native populations and ethnic minorities who, through their historic struggle have gained more wisdom than most majorities. They created the hero cult, a single male god they called Yahweh, patriarchy, male dominance and all the rest of it. This happened long before the division of

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the three religions Judaism, Islam and Christianity. It is part of our cultural heritage. This culture cannot help us to find peace because it has never practiced peace. In the contrary, it has systematically bred violence through an obsession for control that is the result of its disregard for pleasure and permissiveness and its insane rejection of the female principle. Peace comes along with dialogue and understanding, not with practicing persecution and control, with respecting nature and not through violating nature, through accepting differences and not through holy wars that are out to bring more standards, more uniformity and more stupidity for all. What we really need cannot be brought about through any outside action or revolution, but only, as Krishnamurti has so clearly shown us, through a ‘psychological revolution’ from inside. All violence begins inside and is first of all a lack of inner communication, of inner dialogue. Selfknowledge comes with seeing the truth that all outside sense-givers, authorities and powers cannot re-

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veal us our inner nature and cannot change our inner landscape. It comes through abandoning all attachment to those outside authorities, through establishing trust in the self-regulating wisdom of nature, the wisdom in all-that-is. As all violence is first of all inner violence, all peace is created by inner peace that is gradually projected outward, in the form of wistful action, fruitful cooperation, healing and respectful dialogue. This, in turn, brings about solutions, true solutions, not the fake solutions that are brought about through so-called political action that is cunning and deceitful. Once we see that evolution comes from inside, we might open up to relearning the vocabulary of love instead of engaging in the next holy state war against drugs, pedophiles, terrorists or other poison containers. It is through seeing and acknowledging our own self-delusions, our own antisocial desires and hangups and our own inner violence that we gradually begin to clean up the mess inside and begin to understand life through understanding our own opposites. This understanding might be painful once we abandon our inner drug addictions which are our 267

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thousand beliefs in technological progress, machismo, physical prowess, racial superiority and all the other forms of I-am-better-than-you. This painful awakening is the beginning of wisdom, and the journey into a new and peaceful lifestyle. It is what brings about humility. This attitude listens to our opponents instead of shooting or shouting them down, knowing that we have got a part of their worldview in us and that, thus, we can empathetically bond with their inner and outer tragedies. And then, change can come about, also outside, peacefully and totally uncontrolled.

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Inner Child Recovery and Healing FAQ

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Q. What is the inner child? I have to bring up six children and never heard of such a thing. A. The inner child is a psychic entity, not something you can see or hear. It is a part of your mind or your emotions, your inner self. You can access it through a specific kind of dialogue with your inner voices called voice dialogue or inner dialogue. ____________ Q. Why should I engage in this kind of work? I do not see the use of it. I find it could rather disturb me or even drive me crazy. I heard about people who hear voices and I think they’re off-track. A. There is not much information let alone education in our society about accessing and using our in-

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ner potential. The general setup of mainstream culture is obsessed with what is at the periphery of our being, i.e. distraction, pleasure, routines, securing habits, consumption, striving for outward recognition, status or material wealth. Therefore, it is after all not astonishing that all this sounds rather strange to you. The only information most of you got about mental health is information about mental sickness. From the pathological you attempt to derive conclusions for the healthy. That this can never lead to true understanding is kind of logical, no? You can’t find the pearls if you look for them in pig stalls because usually in pig stalls there are no pearls. If you are enough motivated to look for pearls you will find the places where to get them or the people who want to share them with you. ____________ Q. What advantage does it bring to recover my inner child? A. It brings you the only unique true advantage you can have in your life: to become yourself. It brings you an explosion of creativeness, an ongoing creative

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drive and a passion for living that you have never known before. ____________ Q. If it is something so extraordinary, why is there nothing about it on TV or in the common news? A. About all true and valuable things there is almost nothing in the mass media or the news. Have you never observed that? If you’d live up to yourself, you’d live a life totally different from the kind of life you are living now. And you would surely not need so much of the stuff you are now addicted to. For the least, you would be much more discriminative in your consumption. For most of you, the limits are set by your budget only. If you were not so poor and so shallow for the most part, you’d live very destructive lives, full of danger, and you would not live long. It’s your lacking budget that keeps you from living the life you wish to and to engage in all the sins you are dreaming of. Surely, if you’d do it you’d be better off because from the indulgence you would develop more wisdom to turn back to what is true, than from your present restrictions. So, instead of going this long way for learning (as many rich people have to go in fact), you 271

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can take a shortcut and acquire wisdom through connecting with your inner child. You will then see how much of all what you think you need you don’t need at all. And how much from what you think you don’t need you truly need. And from this insight a kind of freedom and joy will arise that you never thought were possible in this life! ____________ Q. This sounds like some kind of religious quest, and not just something related to psychology! A. Religion—the word comes from the Latin ‘religio’ which means something like ‘back-link.’ Yes, in this true and original sense of the word, the quest to recover and heal your inner child is a truly religious quest. ____________ Q. What do I have to do to heal my inner child? Does it mean I have to listen to my inner voices? I have intuitions every day but mostly disregard them. How does the inner child manifest?

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A. This is an intriguing question, and a very important one. Most of us, perhaps all of us, have creative intuitions every day. In fact, what we get are glimpses from our Higher Self that always tries to help us and to lead us to higher achievements and a more complete life. However, most of us, under the spell of a life-denying and totally ignorant education, disregard those godly voices and therefore lead dull and uncreative lives. The inner child manifests through those voices, at least in some of them. However, to accept this input in your life, you must free yourself from all prejudice, from all this idiotic toughness that this hero culture blows you up with every day. This very toughness, this stupid aggressiveness, this lack of gentleness and sensitivity makes you judge your inner child as an intruder, when it tries to manifest. The work, then, is first one of emptying you of all the garbage that this no-culture has filled you up with. This is part of my work, of our work if you commit to it. ____________ Q. What kind of garbage are you talking about? A. The thoughts that are not yours; the sullied opinions about life, about sex, about love that haunt 273

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your mind; the reject of those whom you call ‘offenders’ but who are humans like you and me; the stupidity that consists in splitting the world off in good and bad ones, virtuous and unvirtuous ones, lovers and rapists, citizens and terrorists, good ones and bad ones, while in reality we are always both good and bad, virtuous and not virtuous. You are garbage as long as you think garbage thoughts. You are insensitive as long as you don’t ward off against the subtle messages you are absorbing all day long while watching TV, shopping in your malls, talking to your physician and accepting his advice without the slightest hint of an idea that you yourself could possibly be your best doctor! This garbage is real and it’s in you. Your inner child is suffocated with it and as long as you don’t do something about that, you will never succeed in recovering it and being united with its subtle truth. ____________ Q. It seems that your work asks your clients to be critical with regard to our culture. Is that right? A. I only give examples. I do not blame anything or anybody. Critical is not the right word. I would say 274

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‘alert, watchful.’ And the garbage is not just in our culture. It’s everywhere. It’s what results when we lie to each other, when truth is some kind of luxurious taboo, when honesty becomes a sin because it damages ‘business.’ But can you imagine the business you can do if you are bold and truthful with your customers...? Perhaps you would like to, but if you are not bold and truthful with yourself, you can’t be with others. That’s so simple yet who lives up to it? This culture asks you to first think of others before you think of yourself. This is the first and most destructive of all lies about life. You can’t do that because it’s not human, because it’s simply fake. As long as you do not recognize fake as fake, pseudo-religion as pseudoreligion and make-belief as make-belief, you cannot realize true life, true religion, and true belief in your life. That’s what I mean when I say that you have to empty your inner garbage first. ____________ Q. What is the best approach when engaging in voice dialogue? Is it to do some kind of creative writing or spontaneous drawing, or perhaps improvising

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on the piano first? Is it to do some kind of relaxation or meditation? A. We are very different in our ways to connect to our source. Some of us only need to focus a moment and they’re connected (geniuses do it that way), others need a kind of ritual or even some kind of relaxation technique in order to open up to our subtle voices. I try to keep a distance to my own method— which I will nonetheless present here as one possible way—and do my best to offer you alternative choices so that you can see for yourself what works best for you. I think it is of paramount importance that you see your options before you begin because much damage can be done and is actually done when people use consciousness-enhancing techniques that are contrary to their inner setup. Again, we are all very different and you should use your discretion and your smart to take what you feel is good for you, and to reject what you feel is strange to you. Whatever gets you to connect, use it! But to repeat: you can only feel what’s right for you if you’re free of the garbage. Otherwise you feel nothing because you’re numb. ____________

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Q. Do I have to do this work on my inner child for a long time, or can a short therapy or auto-therapy do? A. I have done the work during around two years, but very thoroughly. After that, I did not do it again. I mean I did not do the recovery or healing work or the dialogues again. It’s as if from that time—that was fifteen years ago—I was connected. I just create, create, create. I can’t catch up with my inner drive, my creative ideas. It’s too much and I just can’t follow. My lists of things to do grows longer and longer and I’m excited every morning about the new day and new inspirations I get. I can only realize a tiny part of it. That’s a creative life, I guess. I have not one minute free. I have never expected that when I first engaged in that work. Never. And until now there is nobody, no friend, no parent, no reader of any of my writings who has ever grasped the greatness of that revolution in my life. It is pure beauty, pure joy and pure excitement every day. What I want to say is that I have no reward for this work, no recognition socially, financially or as an author. But I do not need this reward to see the gigantic fruit of this work. I can offer only support for those who can help themselves, not those who 277

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want to continue leading fake lives and buying into ideas instead of realizing their own truth. I cannot and will not give you truth. I tell you a story. That’s all. It depends on you what you make out of it—call it therapy, inner awakening, truth, or whatever. ____________ Q. Do you think that children have already an inner child? A. Psychologists say that the inner child is created between our 7th and 14th year of life. I guess a small child is all-around one and not divided yet in inner entities. It lives in the bliss of unity which, later on, becomes a quest because, strangely, it gets lost. Only true geniuses never lose it. I see no break in the lives of, for example, Leonardo, Picasso, or Einstein. There was this continuity from the start. For most of us, and perhaps because we have been abused, there is a split occurring somewhere around the years of our puberty or adolescence. This split causes a wound that needs healing. Some never survive it. When I left high school, three of my school friends committed suicide when they just had entered university. For exactly that reason. They could not bear the hurt any 278

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longer and they did not want to wait until they were ripe to begin the self-healing. I lived through that misery, and it was the worst I have experienced in my life. ____________ Q. You are using the expression ‘bliss’ which reminds me of what Joseph Campbell wrote about it. Are you familiar with his writings or did they have an impact on your work? A. Yes, definitely. I feel very close to Joseph Campbell and find him one of the most extraordinary and outstanding scholars of our time. I have learned so much from him! And his writings have fully confirmed my own work with inner child recovery and the conclusions I derived from it. Sometimes I found my view too daring, too aggressive, but after reading Campbell I found I was much too conservative still. For what I say, Campbell said fifty years ago—and in public. ____________ Q. Do you think it’s a matter of IQ to do inner child recovery or voice dialogue? I remember that Freud

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wrote about his work that he could not engage in psychoanalytic treatment with patients of very low IQ. A. That’s a good question. It’s funny enough, but this attitude of psychoanalytic doctors is exactly what has driven so many people away from this technique. Many say it’s a mental exercise or some kind of intellectual checkers with the soul. You see, typically, the therapists who engage in inner child recovery are hypnotherapists, transactional therapists or gestalt therapists, and they stress the importance of a nonintellectual, emotional approach. They also say it’s not a matter of IQ, but of commitment. That is exactly my view. I usually found that therapists who take this approach are not very much fond of classical psychoanalysis. That is all I can say about this subject. But that does not mean that I am against psychoanalysis. I think a smart therapist is flexible as to the approaches he uses and primarily orients the therapy according to the individual setup of the patient. Not everything fits for everyone. But, of course, this needs very high qualification. I stress to inform my readers in all my publications that I am not a mental health professional and not going to be one. To repeat it, I tell you a story, that’s all. 280

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____________ Q. Are there professional publications you specially recommend? A. Yes, of course there are. Brilliant works have been published that I can highly recommend, and that you find in the Bibliography. But please behold: it’s two pairs of shoes to intellectually grasp and enjoy the knowledge or to really do the work. The knowledge may prepare the work, it may do away with wrong opinions and even help to empty you of some of the garbage. But it can never replace the gettingin-touch and the actual dialogue with your inner child. ____________ Q. Do you have a kind of program or, let’s say, a method that works for most people and that helps to get them connected in a most effective way? A. I am sorry I do not have that kind of trick and I am not going to develop it. I already said above that I do not offer quick fixes. There are certainly gurus who are going to sell you that, for a few thousand bucks, and they have big names and beautiful name cards. I know that many of you will run after them.

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____________ Q. Is it so tricky, then, to get this work done? A. It’s not tricky. It’s genuine. Your inner child is not a fool although you, in your capacity as a consumer, may be one. Your inner child will see the trick and hide even more, or you can really get it to remain mute. To come with a quick fix means you will lose your inner child’s potential trust right from the start. But please, you run your life, and I do not hold you back running after those gurus who promise you everything provided you have enough cash. ____________ Q. What is the best approach, then? A. It’s to be receptive and innocent. It’s to forget what you have done in your life before and to come with what in Zen is called ‘a beginner’s mind.’ That’s promising for the work and it leads to results. The inner child is responsive to this attitude. It is deeply moved by humility. ____________ Q. Are you humble?

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A. I don’t know. I observed that people who did not understand me called me arrogant. But through connecting to my inner child and through the experience to see it so responsive when I was honest and down-to-earth, I learnt that humility is not just a word, but actually a way of facing the world. I am still quite ambitious but I guess I am more humble than before the work. And I feel a lot better. I can say that humility is something that really feels good. It makes you so much more receptive for yourself and others. It’s not very exciting to be in war all the time, you know! It’s not fun to always strive to be superior. It consumes a lot of energy, too. I found that humility and simplicity are true secrets. I learned them from my inner child— after I had read the Dao De Ching. I could understand Lao-tzu only after I had done the work. He cannot be understood intellectually. ____________ Q. Do you think that people that appear as truly happy, creative and successful and a bit carefree are well connected to their inner child? A. Yes. I think all truly creative people act first of all with their inner child energy. They give priority to this 283

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voice before they listen to the other voices such as the inner parent or the inner adult. That does not mean that they do not listen to the other voices at all. That would be foolish! But they would not just reject an idea from their inner child because their inner parent is against it. They would ponder the idea further and, to be sure, fix it on paper so that it does not get lost. It’s not always appropriate to act out the ideas of the inner child; the wisdom is to take this voice serious enough as to consider the ideas and creative intuitions that it provides. Later, it is a good thing to double-check those ideas with the inner parent and the inner adult. That’s the best way of doing it, and those creative and successful people, be they filmmakers, actors, singers or famous business people do all of that intuitively. They do it naturally. Genius begins there, and nowhere else. On the dollar note is written ‘In God we Trust.’ In reality it says ‘In the Inner Child We Trust.’ It’s synonymous. And it’s the key for success. The dollar note says the truth. That’s perhaps why it’s such a successful currency...? ____________

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Q. Can there be negative reactions to inner child recovery? I think of depressions or a shock-like situation when trauma is remembered that was formerly repressed? A. This is a major issue that must be addressed. Yes, to be true, this danger is real. All can happen, in fact. Depressions are frequent and there can be shock. But I would not call these reactions ‘negative.’ In the contrary, they are genuinely positive. They are necessary in most cases. As long as a wound is infected, it won’t heal. What happens? The wound breaks off again and blood comes out and with the blood the infectious sperms leave the body and true healing can take place. Some people have broken members in their psyche that have assembled wrongly. In order to heal, the broken arm must be broken again so that the limbs can be made fit to each other as they should. You get what I mean? ____________ Q. If this is so, is it not a good thing to ensure that one is not alone when doing this kind of work, or major parts of it?

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A. Yes and no. Inner child work is most intimate and most people really want to be alone when doing it. But I agree that a person who knows that she is prone to depressions should take some securing measures before she takes important steps in the work. In some cases, the person should even be accompanied by a hypnotherapist or gestalt therapist. It is in the discretion of every person to know where her limits are and when things are getting out of hands. That’s a general rule for all what we do in life, not only for voice dialogue. I have repeatedly said that I address my work to mentally healthy individuals. I am not a mental health professional so if you have a problem of this order, please consult your mental health practitioner before you begin any work of this kind or any other work on your self. ____________ Q. Have you yourself experienced similar trouble when doing voice dialogue? A. Yes. Actually I have not listened to the advice of my psychiatrist and other people. At that time, I went through a hypnotherapy and voice dialogue was an add-on to the therapy that I myself engaged in— 286

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without any professional support. I had been suicidal some years before that time and still went through strong and paralyzing depressions and autodestructive trips. To make it worse, I also engaged in spontaneous drawing which deepened the selfhypnosis. I often combined the two techniques and found that they enhance each other very profitably. But sometimes I could not handle the emotions that were freed, that came up spontaneously. The rage, well, I could face it, the depression was more difficult to handle, but the paranoid fears were the worst of all. They drove me to the border of madness. I think I was very lucky that I escaped a major breakdown. I do not recommend this combination to anyone unprepared for this to go through. On the other hand, I think this combination is ideal, but the person should by no means be alone. Therefore, what I propose when I deal with individuals, and not groups, is just the voice dialogue itself, and not any combination of it with other powerful methods of self-liberation. ____________

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Q. Can you summarize the benefits of working with voice dialogue in general, and dialogues with our inner child, in particular? A. Yes. Let me summarize it in six major points: —Establishing connection with all our energies; —Finding our identity as a multi-dimensional being; —Aligning with our inner guide to achieve inner harmony; —True compassion with suffering and ignorance; —Becoming able to see the truth of self and other; —Accepting life as unending change and growth.

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The True Religio

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In this book, I have given a roadmap for what I call the inner journey. This inner journey is one that links you back with your true self, and thus it’s the true religio. This was affirmed also by Jeremiah Abrams, an American psychologist and specialist on inner child recovery and healing, who has published one of the best readers on the subject, a book I highly recommend and which I have reviewed. (You find it in the Bibliography). I know that the inner journey is not a very popular way to link back to our true self; many prefer some or the other esoteric way to enlightenment, and seek out a guru. I say, there is no enlightenment and there is no guru. Humans are perfect as they are, but they are

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sidetracked since generations, if not millennia. So what we need is not enlightenment, but simply a way back to the light. The light was always there. And don’t need a guru for we have the guru in our bosom. The guru is our inner child. Of course, it’s much easier und requires less commitment to comfort oneself with visiting gurus and saints, and feel good about oneself. I have tried that, too, for a while, and I clearly saw that it doesn’t work. I saw that it brings about confusion and guilt, and even disgust in some cases. It’s about the same as it is with marriage. Many marry because they think they cannot live alone, cannot prepare their food, and cannot bear the tension without a partner with whom they can have sex every day. Then, they procreate some children, which is often just some more household items to possess. ‘I am married with a wife and three children.’ No Sir, you are not married with your children, are you? But in the sense you are saying it, I guess you are married also with your house, your car, your computer and your new luxury fridge. In that sense, you are married with 290

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your job, your employer, your football club and even your whole nation. In that sense, you are married with your beer and all the prostitutes you need to embrace and frequent just to feel that you are a man, right? I know that all of this is an illusion, are illusions. I went through all of it and while I don’t say I have wasted many years of my life, I say, well, it was a learning experience. And it was my inner child that triggered the change, two decades ago. And I still needed those twenty more years to get to understand that not only was it true what my inner child said, but also that I can do it, really do it, and live a life of contemplation, without a partner, without what is called a ‘social life’, without rewards and medals, honors and special powers—and still feel good about life and myself. I know that one can live alone, that one can care for oneself, and that one doesn’t need a dummy for sex. I also know that one doesn’t need children, dogs and cats, and other yes-sayers in the home, to feel that one has something to say in the world.

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The inner child has a streak of truth to it that lets it come over as a freak, at times, not the tender obedient little toddler that everybody loves. If the world consisted only of tender obedient toddlers, we would still live in the stone age, for nothing would have happened of all those great revolutions that brought us forward. For these revolutions, inventions, discoveries and advancement in consciousness were all brought about by individuals, who, including my own little self, were not tender little toddlers as children, and had never any even slight tenderness with their parents—and they did neither need it nor ask for it. They were fully conscious of themselves, as I was, at age two, and even earlier, they were fully aware of what was going on, and why their parents did things the way they did, and why they did a whole lot of things that were absolutely not ‘nice things’ to do. The inner child is a queer creature somehow, not a nice little fellow with whom you can chat for hours and feel good about yourself. It’s a creature that questions you, to a point you may get angry and defensive, to a point you want to cut off the dialogue, to a point you want to close your ears. But it’s also a creature that can express the most daring spontaneous love for 292

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you, in a way you may tremble in awe about such intense feelings! But the most important is this, the inner child is the creative motor in you, it’s the energy that affirms life and love, and that drives you to enter new ways of living, new ways of doing things—or doing things differently. The inner child is the energy that is fully pro-life, that has no scruples, actually no morality. In our inner world, things are not quite as in real life. Characteristics are not equally distributed, so to speak. Morality is not one of the character traits of the inner child, but the main character trait of the inner parent. This is one of the reasons why I am saying in this book and other publications that inner child work is not enough and just a starting point of the inner journey. If you want to do it right, you need to deal with the other inner energies as well, the inner parent and the inner adult, for the least. What happens if you focus only on your inner child, and neglect the other two entities? You become a Peter Pan, you are developing what psychologists call the ‘puer personality,’ which may help you to get a job in the arts, but may at the same time drive you

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out of all your relationships with adults. Perhaps you may seek out the company of youngsters. Some men find that nice and good and that’s their choice, but there is a reason for it that they may ignore. The reason is that they feed only their child self and disregard the other inner selves to a point to become misbalanced. This, when you drive it to the extreme, will end you up as a marginal freak, and you may be put aside by the ‘good citizens’ as a Charlie, a tramp, or a clown. When you are an artist, you may accept that, but not many people can live in such a state of isolation for long without becoming depressive. I wasn’t really able to show you what inner child art work is all about and how it works. It’s difficult to describe that in verbal language, it needs to be shown and shared, in a workshop setting, for example. But so far I think there is is stuff enough in this book that can keep you busy for quite a long time, if only you take serious the inner journey as a way to building a high awareness level, and for integrating your inner energies so as to become whole again—holy!

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Books Reviewed

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Jeremiah Abrams

Reclaiming the Inner Child New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1990 No Cover Scan Available

Steeped in the mythopoetic tradition of Jungian psychology, Jeremiah Abrams, psychotherapist and author, has worked for almost 30 years in the helping professions. His books include the best-selling Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature; The Shadow in America: Reclaiming the Soul of a Nation, Reclaiming the Inner Child, and Living from the Inside Out. He is director of Mt. Vision Institute, in Marin County, California.

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I found Reclaiming the Inner Child when I was myself working with Inner Child Recovery and Healing. Next to Stone & Stone’s Embracing Our Selves, the present book was an important inspiration for drafting my own approach on healing the inner child. This reader is well edited and presented; each contribution is essential and brings a new insight and perspective for awakening the inner child. Jeremiah Abrams wrote once in a presentation of the book that inner child recovery is a religious quest. I can fully subscribe to this statement, as it’s in accordance with the oldest of traditions. In fact, the Hermetic Tradition was teaching the dialogue with our inner selves as a path to self-knowledge, and unfortunately this is today forgotten in our rushy and outwardly prosperous culture. Inwardly, most of us are impoverished on the level of soul which is why we have such a high level of depression and resulting emotional disorders in our modern international culture. Let me tell you upfront that this book is not about psychiatry. You do not need any psychological knowledge for reading it, and applying its wisdom in your 296

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own life. Most contributions, and to mention here especially those of Jeremiah Abrams, Gaston Bachelard, Joseph Campbell and John Loudon expand on the poetic and mythological dimension of a healed and functional inner child. But even those other contributions, written from the pulpit of psychiatric professionals, to mention only John Bradshaw, Nathaniel Branden, James Hillman, Robert M. Stein or Hal and Sidra Stone, do not present inner child healing as a discipline that is strictly speaking to be placed within the closed space of psychiatric hospitals or the coach of the psychoanalyst. Also these contributions are very well readable for the novice and non-professional reader, and they emphasize the poetic, creative and artistic role of the inner child, while they also show what good a functional inner child can do within a healthy and well-composed psyche. To make this book review not too extensive, I have chosen to publish a few quotes from the contribution of each author to the reader. JEREMIAH ABRAMS

If we are to stop abusive family patterns and not transmit them to the next generation, then the internalized parental image also must be recognized as wounded. Such compassionate 297

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awareness is a developing phenomenon in the lives of those courageous adults who are overcoming their shame and pain in order to acknowledge and heal the wounded child within. /168 GASTON BACHELARD

He is stuffed with sociability. He is prepared for his life as a man along the lines of the ideal of stabilized men. He is also instructed in the history of his family. He is taught most of the memories of early childhood, a whole history which the child will always be able to recount. Childhood—that dough!—is pushed into the die so that the child will follow closely in the path of the lives of others. /45 The child dreamer is alone, very much alone. He lives in the world of his reverie. His solitude is less social, less pitted against society, than the solitude of men. The child knows a natural reverie of solitude, a reverie which must not be confused with that of the sulking child. In his happy solitudes, the dreaming child knows the cosmic reverie which unites us to the world. /45 JOHN BRADSHAW

Our source relationships were bathed in poor modeling and abandonment. This created our shame-based identity. Because we had no authentic self, we clung to our caregivers in a fantasy bond or built walls around us where no

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one could hurt us. These earliest imprints colored all our subsequent relationships. /225 The emotionally shut-down person literally is filled with will, i.e., becomes will-full. Willfulness is characterized by grandiosity and unbridled attempts to control, and is the ultimate disaster caused by toxic shame. /227 NATHANIEL BRANDEN

In effect, the child we once were can be experienced as a source of pain, rage, fear, embarrassment, or humiliation, to be repressed, disowned, repudiated, forgotten. We reject that child just as, perhaps, others once did—and our cruelty to that child can continue daily and indefinitely through our lifetime, in the theater of our own psyche where the child continues to exist as a subpersonality, a child-self. /243 When related to unconsciously and/or negatively, a child-self is left in a kind of alienated oblivion. In the latter case, when the child-self is left unconscious, or is disowned and repudiated, we are fragmented; we do not feel whole; in some measure we feel self-alienated; and self-esteem is wounded. /244 Left unrecognized, not understood, or rejected and abandoned, a child-self can turn into a ‘troublemaker’ that obstructs our evolution as well as our enjoyment of existence. The external expression of this phenomenon is that we will at times exhibit harmfully childish behavior,

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or fall into patterns of inappropriate dependency, or become narcissistic, or experience the world as belonging to ‘the grown-ups.’ /244 On the other hand, recognized, accepted, embraced, and thereby integrated, a child-self can be a magnificent resource that enriches our lives, with its potential for spontaneity, playfulness, and imaginativeness. /244 JOSEPH CAMPBELL

How might we as individuals get in touch with the child that lives within us? By killing the dragon ‘Thou shalt’. By choosing not to live by other people’s rules? Right. Respecting them, but not living by them./260 JAMES HILLMAN

Jungian therapy, at least how I practice it, brings about an awareness that fantasy is a creative activity which is continually telling a person into now this story, now that one. … Soulmaking goes hand in hand with deliteralizing consciousness and restoring its connection to mythic and metaphorical thought patterns. Rather than interpret the stories into concepts and rational explanations, we prefer to see conceptual explanations as secondary elaborations upon basic stories which are containers and givers of vitality./278 Whenever we are caught in a literal view, a literal belief, a literal statement, we have lost the

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imaginative metaphorical perspective to ourselves and our world. /278 The main body of biblical and classical tales directs fantasy into organized, deeply life-giving psychological patterns; these stories present the archetypal modes of experiencing. /279 JOHN LOUDON

There is a sense then in which the self is a lifelong project, as long as we remember that it is a project that requires as much passivity as activity (to use Teilhard’s terms)—both receptivity and taking hold, yin and yang. /237 The child has the glory of simply being, like a flower or an animal, without the necessity of doing anything, becoming anything in order to be fully what it is. /238 In later childhood, one is socialized into conventional values and meanings. While this is necessary for an adequate sense of self-worth and basic orientation and for social order, all too many of us can become arrested at this stage of development and lead what Paul Tillich calls ‘heteronymous’ lives, in which something external sets our priorities, establishes what is meaningful and worthwhile. /239 But if we give ourselves to the process of growth, if we take up the search for wholeness, the quest for understanding (rather than the vain longing for certainty), we are set on a path

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that leads not back to the childhood we may nostalgically idealize but forward toward an authentic fullness and integration. /239 Maturity, then, is an achievement of synthesis. It is not simply a chronological stage of life. /240 ALICE MILLER

The true self has been in ‘a state of noncommunication’ as Winnicott said, because it had to be protected. The patient never needs to hide anything else so thoroughly, so deeply, and for so long a time as he has hidden this true self. /136 Where there had only been fearful emptiness or equally frightening grandiose fantasies, there now is unfolding an unexpected wealth of vitality. /137 JEFFREY SATINOVER

I would say that the puer may result from a parental milieu which, in a roughly eighteenmonth to a two-year-old child, habitually disrupts any sign of assertiveness, of action or fantasies that carry not the hallmark of masculinity, but of specialness and grandeur. /146 Thus, an internal vicious circle is established; each constellation of the Self, bringing with it a tide of grandiose fantasies, is followed by a tide of self-criticism and re-fragmentation. /147

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By reflecting back to the child his specialness and grandeur, the parent helps to sustain a kind of necessary inflation. This inflation will motivate the child to move into an ever-expanding world where, by suffering tolerable defeats, the inflation will be modified and personal identity sustained more and more by the capacities of the ego. /153 ROBERT M. STEIN

Creative psychological development, individuation, is dependent on spiritual freedom. When we say, for example, a man has a free spirit, do we mean that he freely or necessarily transgresses the imposed manners, mores and taboos of his culture? I think not. But it does mean the freedom to do anything or go any place he desires in the imaginal realm. He is a man who has clearly distinguished the sacral, timeless world from the secular, historical world. He knows he can move with unashamed dignity among the gods and demons which belong to the mundane world. Such freedom cannot occur with a primitive form of consciousness in which inner and outer reality are governed by the same laws and values. In this sense, our Judeo-Christian tradition is primitive in that our thoughts and desires are subject to the same dogma, the same regulation, as our deeds. Spiritual freedom requires a break with biblical tradition and the development of a new form of consciousness—a consciousness which promotes the cultivation of imaginal freedom. /265

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If one has experienced an authentic rebirth, one is ready to enter into a new life where kinship of spirit becomes a stronger bond than kinship of blood. /269 The lack of firmly rooted kinship connections is perhaps more responsible for our sense of isolation and alienation today than any other single factor. Frequent renewal through kinship connection is basic nourishment for our spiritual and physical well-being. /270 There is a great need nowadays for new forms in marriage, friendship and community which will promote the development of erós and feelings of kinship connection. /270 The exchange of soul-substance which occurs when two souls meet and touch is essential for the life and health of the body and spirit. Inner wholeness soon becomes cold, rigid and lifekilling if the soul is not continually re-humanized and renewed through the human connection. Still, it is just because soul-connections are so rare and difficult to have in our culture that the internal healing of the mind/body split and internal wholeness is so essential. This is another paradox which we cannot avoid. /270 The need to keep one’s soul carefully hidden and protected disappears when one is no longer dependent on the connection to another for completion. There is no longer the fear of experiencing and expressing one’s feel-

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ings, one’s reactions to another, simply because the integrity and wholeness of one’s being are not dependent on a particular relationship. This increases the possibility of having close human connections, and it decreases the demands and expectations which we are all prone to make upon those we care for. In addition, the revealed soul generally evokes the emotion of love, especially when it demands nothing from the other. Thus, inner wholeness opens the door to many more possibilities for soulconnection, in spite of the lack of erós promoting vessels in our culture. /271 HAL AND SIDRA STONE

What is this child like? The most striking quality is its ability to be deeply intimate with another person. The facilitator can feel a physical warmth and a fullness radiating from this child. It is as though the space between the two people is alive and vibrating. /177 The vulnerable child is tuned in energetically—it is aware of everything that is happening. Words will not fool it for a moment. As you speak, the child will know if there is any change whatsoever in your energetic connection to it. /177 Caring for this inner child through an aware ego gives a feeling of real strength. It represents real empowerment. /184

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Hal and Sidra Stone

Embracing Our Selves The Voice Dialogue Manual Novato, CA: New World Library, 1989

The Voice Dialogue Manual was my companion in the two years I practiced dialoguing with my inner selves. Let us first clarify what voice dialogue actually is all about? It’s a synonym for the inner dialogue with all our inner selves.

The Voice Dialogue Manual accompanied me with valuable advice over these years; I highly appreciated its clarity and depth that gives immediate credit to the authors’ immense expertise with facilitating personal change and transformation. This is not just a boring technical manual that teaches a method. It’s that also, but much more. Here is how the authors introduce the book:

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Voice Dialogue is not a school of psychotherapy, it is not a substitute for psychotherapy, and it is not a profession in and of itself. It is a technique for psychological exploration and for the expansion of awareness. Although it can be a highly effective tool for any psychotherapist it should be clearly understood that it is not a complete and autonomous therapeutic system. /78

The authors appear to be way beyond the mechanistic paradigm, radiating a true and living spirituality. One of the objectives of their unique and empathic approach to personal development and transformational change is to help people develop their unique vulnerability, their openness to the whole of life. In my own inner child work, I have indeed become aware that vulnerability is a sort of key word, and can be set as a destination in therapy. Vulnerability is our highest virtue, it’s the daringness, the courage, the boldness to really embrace our destiny, to live fully and without anxiety or fear of life. Coping with this fear is a process, it cannot be brought about through an instant, sudden insight but is the result of dissolving, one by one, our shields, defenses, and projections.

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Now, there is one pattern that is stronger than the others and which builds most of our character armor: it’s our inner controller. The authors write: The protector/controller is the primary energy pattern behind many other selves. For example, it will utilize the energies of the rational self and the responsible parent as a way of maintaining control over our environment. When most people use the word I, they are in fact referring to their protector/controller. For the vast majority of us, protector/controller energy is the directing agent of personality. It is what many people think of as an ego./15

The authors express some things better than any of the famed psychologists I have been reading, Freud and Jung. They speak of our psychic fingerprint, which is an expression that beautifully wraps around our inner clarity, and cosmic identity, when we are in the state of total awareness, when there are no defenses, when there is peace, when our inner lake is reflecting life without ripples. And beyond the scope of this book, I believe that this cosmic identity is related not to our mind, but to our emotional identity. It’s coded as a vibrational

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code, and it’s related to the flow nature of our emotional body, the human aura. The authors write: The problem is, of course, that we gradually begin to lose track of our psychic fingerprint. This is a sad state of affairs, for our whole system of relationships is affected by this loss. If we are no longer in touch with those qualities that make up our unique psychic fingerprint, then it is not our deepest and most vulnerable self that is involved in relationships. Instead, it is a group if subpersonalities, watched over by the protector/controller, that determines our feelings and behavior./15

Another expression I find helpful for understanding our inner life is the notion of disowned selves. The authors write: We can be helpless victims to the multitude of relationships in our lives that reflect our disowned selves, or we can accept the challenge of these relationships and ask: How is this person, or this situation, my teacher? Asking this question in itself represents a major shift in consciousness. A great deal of the stress in our lives results from our tendency to attract reflections of our disowned selves in our relationships, and we continue to suffer as the same patterns are repeated in our lives. Unfortunately, for most of us there is no support to learn this lesson inherent in this process. Without this support the en-

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ergy of our disowned selves grows stronger and more twisted./32

Sigmund Freud was among the first psychologists who found that the etiology of neurosis is primarily sexual, or with other words, that when we repress sexual desire, we risk to become seriously ill. Later, Wilhelm Reich found that not only neurosis, but also psychosis, and especially schizophrenia are disturbances of the vital energy flow that are the result of a distortion of body perception. The same is true for the repression of ‘negative’ emotions such as anger, hate or revengeful desires. What happens when we are conditioned to repress our hot emotions is that they will be replaced by depression. Thus, every time you would be angry at somebody, you will ‘make’ a depression. The depression will lead you back, through dreams and intuition, to the original wound, which was inflicted upon you when you were punished, as a child, for being angry. When you go deep enough down the rabbit hole into your depression, you can trigger the therapeutic effect of remembrance! But what most of us do most of the time when we are depressed is to seek distraction, else we take anti-depressants, thus avoiding the 310

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catharsis that the depression would naturally trigger. And on it goes. Every time you get angry because somebody interferes with your boundaries or lacks respect toward you, instead of using your anger positively as it should to put that person ‘straight,’ you escape into your next depression. Hal and Sidra Stone speak in such a case about disowning the anger energy, which is a good terminology that vividly describes the effect of the unhealthy repression of desire, which is unfortunately an integral part of our patriarchal tradition. When natural instinctual energies such as the need for survival, sexuality, and aggression are disowned over time, they cycle back into the unconscious and go through a significant change. Energy cannot be destroyed; thus, these disowned energies begin to operate unconsciously and attract additional energy to themselves. They soon lose their natural qualities and become malevolent./32

Emotional flow is the natural positive flow of the bioenergy. Demonic and destructive energies are the result of a negative polarization, which in turn is the

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consequence of the repression of the original desire and its biogenic expression as ‘emotion:’ The disowning of the seven deadly sins results in a particular blend-up of instinctual energies in the unconscious that we call demonic energies. They are among the major disowned energy patterns, and as a society we pay a particularly heavy price for their negation./33 The subpersonalities also protect themselves by revealing themselves only to a facilitator who has access to a similar energy. Thus, the facilitator must be aware of and able to locate the energy pattern within himself or herself that resonates with the subject’s energy pattern./76

As an evaluation, this book clearly has merited the attribute excellent, both in its addressing the intelligent lay reader and the psychic health care professional. For both audiences, there is ample information, which is not just theory, but practical and directly applicable when actually doing the work of voice dialogue, with oneself or in a team, or else with a group, as a voice dialogue facilitator. I may point you here to a more specific book by these authors which is more specifically about han-

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dling the inner controller—which they call the ‘Inner Critic.’ You can find the book on Amazon. —Hal & Sidra Stone, Embracing Your Inner Critic: Turning Self-Criticism into a Creative Asset, New York: HarperOne, 1993

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Inner Child Glossary

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INNER CHILD

Inner child is an inside entity, part-personality, or psychic energy, created between our 7th and 14th year of life, and that is part of our »inner triangle. Positively, the inner child energy is primarily emotional and wistful, predominantly creative. It is the motor of every human being’s creativity. Negatively, the inner child can be either mute or cataleptic so that its energy cannot manifest, or else its energy is turned upsidedown which makes an inner child that is rebellious, capricious, willful or overbearing. POSITIVE INNER CHILD

Positive inner child is the inner child energy that is directed forward and well used, positively charged and healthy. It is the typical energy of the recovered and healed inner child. It is sometimes called Little Professor since its voice is wistful and witty. NEGATIVE INNER CHILD

Negative inner child is the inner child energy that is retrograde, blocked or negatively charged. It is typically the energy of the patho-

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logical inner child, but it also occurs as the shadow side of a healthy inner child. Its voice typically is complaining and sometimes rebellious. NECESSARY INFLATION

Necessary inflation means the process of inflation of the child’s self-awareness. The inflation itself is not equal to true self-esteem but it prepares healthy self-esteem in that it inflates temporarily the ego—such as a balloon inflates—and leads to a kind of childish selfishness that is often misunderstood by moralistic education. What actually happens is that the child’s psyche kind of beta-tests its future robustness and survival-ability in a competitive or even hostile environment. It therefore temporarily blows up the ego and makes the child feel like a hero or a winner or else a conqueror or a smart nerd. Only adults who have achieved true maturity in their own psychic growth can deal with this very important phase in every child’s psychic development. Traditional education, with its sadistic, authoritarian and moralistic setup is unable to tolerate inflation and reacts with a great deal of open or hidden hostility or even retaliation against the inflated child—a fact that leads to millions of depressive and crushed adults who are blocked in their healthy expansion and their growth into true individuality, as well as blocked on the creativity level.

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INNER PARENT

Inner parent is an inside entity, part-personality or psychic energy that represents our inner value standards, our moral attitudes, our caring for self and others, but negatively also our judging others, our I-know-better attitude or blunt interference into the lives of others without regard for their privacy. The hypertrophied inner parent energy plays a dominant role in tyrannical and persecutory societal, religious and political systems. INNER ADULT

Inner adult is an inside entity, part-personality or psychic energy that represents our logical thinking, our reason, our maturity. Positively, it makes for our balanced decisions, our down-toearth attitude and sense for responsibilities. Negatively, the inner adult manifests as the intellectual nerd or through emotional frigidity, cynicism, skepticism or an obsession to measure human relations purely on a scale of reasonableness or straightness without considering the emotional dimension and without sensitivity. The hypertrophied inner adult energy plays a major role in modern education where it results in devastating damage on the next generations’ emotional integrity. INNER TRIANGLE

The term inner triangle has a double significance. It signifies either the oedipal triangle that impacts on the formation of the inner child

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or the constellation of inner child, inner parent and inner adult within the psyche. VOICE DIALOGUE

Voice dialogue is a technique for getting in touch with inside not only on a feeling level but, beyond that, on a verbal level that condenses inner expression into outer expression and thus renders a communication with inside possible. Voice dialogue is applied in many different forms of therapy and self-therapy. It is also called inner dialogue or intuitive dialogue. PART-PERSONALITY OR SPLIT-PERSONALITY

Part-personality or split-personality is not to confuse with the phenomenon that the psyche is naturally composed of various energies that represent different parts of the person. Contrary to folk wisdom and popular psychology, this is not per se a pathological phenomenon, but exists also in the healthy psyche. The difference between a healthy multi-dimensional psyche and a pathological split psyche is to be seen at the flexibility with which the various voices or part-selves are interacting under an integrating ego and to which extent they collaborate with each other for the best of the whole of the psyche.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Abrams, Jeremiah (Ed.) Reclaiming the Inner Child NEW YORK: TARCHER/PUTNAM, 1990

Allen, Abel Leighton The Message of New Thought 1914

Allen, James As a Man Thinketh, 1902 Arntz, William & Chasse, Betsy What the Bleep Do We Know 20TH CENTURY FOX, 2005 (DVD)

Down The Rabbit Hole Quantum Edition 20TH CENTURY FOX, 2006 (3 DVD SET)

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Bachelard, Gaston The Poetics of Reverie TRANSLATED BY DANIEL RUSSELL BOSTON: BEACON PRESS, 1971

Bandler, Richard Get the Life You Want THE SECRETS TO QUICK AND LASTING LIFE CHANGE WITH NEURO-LINGUISTIC PROGRAMMING DEERFIELD BEACH, FL: HCI, 2008

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Boldt, Laurence G. Zen and the Art of Making a Living NEW YORK: PENGUIN ARKANA, 1993

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Personal Notes

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