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July - September, 2009

Healing My Inner Child

by Jack Hartog

“Classes? I don’t need no stinking classes,” I pronounced in my best mock-Mexican bandido accent. My Pathways of Light Reverend wife, Johannys, had just proposed that I participate in Pathways’ “Healing the Inner Child” class that she was about to facilitate in our home. I was only half-joking.

When I graduated law school, many, many years ago, I vowed that the only classes I would take were those that were either required to keep my license to practice law or that everyone had to take because hell had frozen over. I just have never been a “go to class and listen to a lecture” type person. You know my type: I was the kind of grade school student that the teacher made sit in the front of the class to maximize the chances of preventing mischief. While I do gladly sit through church services, I go more for the music and fellowship than for the sermons, being reassured that they usually last only 20 minutes or so, which falls well within my self-declared and admittedly immature threshold for sitting in a chair and pretending to pay attention.

“But you’ll like it,” my wife, the Reverend, implored, “…its participatory, and there’s meditations, and you’ll get a lot out of it – and there are no lectures.” With this clarification, and knowing that trying to get out of this class was as unlikely as getting out of my regular chore of taking out the garbage, I faced my fate and said simply what all happily married men use as a survival skill in moments like this: “Whatever you want, my love.” (She is originally Spanish-speaking, so I said this in Spanish, because it was the first phrase I ever learned in Spanish, taught to me by my best friend when I started to date Latin women, as the only Spanish I really needed to be able to say to women: “Lo que tu quieras, mi amor.” It is a running joke in our relationship. )

In truth, I knew I really wanted to do the class. I had heard so much good testimony about the curriculum, and I was aware that I had some issues that needed attention. And my wife is a spectacular facilitator.

So, a few weeks later, there I was, being a well-behaved student, sitting in a circle, and doing a meditation, trying to get in touch with my “inner child.”

Now, you have to understand, I have tended to be the analytical, left brain over-thinking-everything kind of person. I am intellectually skeptical, naturally contrarian, and innately untrusting — in short, typically male. With years of practice, however, I have learned to put aside certain childish things and have become able to still my rambling and rambunctious mind to get in touch with the Infinite. But I am not the type that can mentally dance through heavenly fields, hear angels sing, taste rainbows or converse with Jesus. I do get inner knowings, but not glorious inner recreations of experiences of the five senses that impart a sense of our ethereal origin. So when I was told during the meditation that I was now walking mentally down a path in a fantasy woods to meet my imaginary inner child in some phantasmagorical surrounding, my inward reaction was a sincere and heart-felt, “Are you kidding?”

I fully believed in the viewpoint of the Healing the Inner Child Course: the present tapes we run in our minds stem from the miscreations of our childhood, and that by learning we have them, witnessing them and releasing them to the nothingness from which they came, we can heal ourselves. Our egos are developed unknowingly and unconsciously when we are young, so any process that brings their origins to our consciousness and facilitates their release is very emotionally, psychologically and, of course, spiritually rewarding.

But I don’t have visions. I don’t follow guided meditations that tell me what to experience. I simply don’t do this kind of thing. Please read the “I” in these two prior sentences as heavily underscored, said with very almost supercilious emphasis and dripping in cynicism. Not me. Oh no. I am the hard-nosed, critical-thinking lawyer. I am not Mr. Granola. I do not do New Age kinds of things.

So you can imagine my surprise when during my meditation, I really did experience meeting my “inner child.” Wow. In addition to seeing him plain as day, the setting was equally unmistakable: it was a 50-50 mix (kind of an overlay) of a Disney Bambi in the woods drawing and a real pine forest from camp where I had chased frogs, gathered firewood for campfires, played mumbletypeg and avoided mosquitoes almost big enough to put advertising on their wings. It was an awesome place.

My inner child, however, was not happy, despite the bucolic setting. The meditation lovingly said that, after we reassured our inner child, we should envision our Higher Self as someone with whom our inner child would be comfortable and then invite our Higher Self to join us. Just as my ego started laughing at the thought of me putting the Divine into physical form… Bang! the thought hit me… When I was young, I used to read, really devour, baseball books. My hero was Babe Ruth — the Babe Ruth in the first Babe Ruth movie: bigger than life, a grown up fun-loving child with such incredible baseball skills that he could down a mountain of hotdogs (with chasers of beers and whiskey, as I learned when I grew older) and within hours go out and break home run records.

So why not bring my inner child to meet the Babe as my Higher Self? To my shock, upon this imagining, I heard, really heard, my inner child exclaim and inquire simultaneously, “Babe Ruth, you are on my team?” He smiled, the big grin I associated with him, all heartfelt and warm. My inner child just lighted up, and all the joy of my youth came flooding back to me. “You are on my team!” My inner child simply melted in the Babe’s warmth and genuine affection.

Meanwhile, a part of me is thinking, “Wow. Am I really having this kind of experience? Wow!”

And then the thought occurred to the adult in me, “I am on Babe Ruth’s team!” I am on the team of greatness and infinite possibilities. I am teamed with joy and fun and big thoughts and big dreams, all the qualities as I child I had placed in all my heroes. I knew, because I had just fully experienced it, that both my inner child and I have all the love we need always accessible in my mind and heart.

Classes? I really did need this class. Thank you Pathways of Light…

© 2009, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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