INNER CHILD
Many healers and therapists talk about healing the inner child. And they point to an important and powerful truth. Because so many people have talked about this issue, and I don't think that it is generally well defined, or even well understood, I will present the point of view of the Avicenna Therapy.
Before delving into the inner child, I need to remind that we have, appart from our body of flesh and bones, five different invisible bodies. Made from earth, fire, water, blood and air. They are inexact copies of our body of flesh, and are located inside us, except for the body of air which is slightly outside. One of these bodies, the body of water, is very important for understanding the inner child and its problems.
In a normal person, all these bodies, except for the body of earth, are undeveloped. Ideally, they should be "solid" and able to work, but they are almost always insubstantial, vaporous, like gas, and unable to work. At least unable to work in normal circumstances. The undeveloped bodies can work in cases of danger or other extraordinary circumstances.
The first undeveloped body to be finished is usually the body of fire, then comes the body of water, and then the body of blood. I will talk mostly about the body of water because it is related with the inner child, but there are many things in common in how the different bodies are formed.
Some of the psychological problems that we adults have, come from unfortunate experiences that we have suffered as children. In many cases from false beliefs that our father and mother have inculcated us. The impact of a wounded inner child can be strongly felt in adult attitudes, nutrition, religiosity and self-esteem.
Inner child problems are locked in a very deep part of our unconscious and it is very difficult to access them. More difficult than most people assume.
Until we are maybe six years old, we use our body of water to interact with the world. This means that our body of water receives the inputs from the outside world, processes them, and adjusts its beliefs accordingly. We can say that it develops and evolves with the person.
The body of water grows and evolves with us until we are more or less six years of age. Then, suddenly, it stops growing, and evolving, and we start interacting with the outside world from our body of earth. The body of water retires to a special place. Its main functions cease to work, but it continues to influence our life in very important ways.
The rest of the person continues to grow. He interacts now with the world from his body of earth. The body of earth grows with the person during the rest of his life. And the body of water stays almost always the way it was when the person was six years old. This six year old boy, or girl, that we have somewhere inside us is what the Avicenna Therapy calls "the inner child". It is our undeveloped body of water, that still has a childish mind, and is not able to heal its own issues.
"A small child has no personality as yet. He is what he really is. He is essence. His desires, tastes, likes, dislikes, express his being such as it is. But as soon as so-called 'education' begins, personality begins to grow...
It very often happens that essence stops in its growth at a very early age and grows no further. It happens very often that the essence of a grown-up man, even that of a very intellectual and, in the accepted meaning of the word, highly 'educated' man, stops on the level of a child of five or six." (Gurdjieff. In Search of the Miraculous)
Some adult people are able to finish their bodies of water, or at least to solidify them enough to make them work again, but they are so few that they don't represent the typical client.
For the majority of people, the body of water has been pushed to a deep place in their unconscious. It cannot be reached easily, it doesn't evolve, and it stays forever like it was the last time it was able to communicate directly with the external world, that is, like a very small child. The implication is that many problems and hopes of a six year old are still active in a very deep part of our being.
This is a very important concept. We might have had a lot of experiences since our childhood, both positive and negative. But they have not reached our unfinished body of water. In order for our body of water to process them we should have in the first place a developed body of fire, that we don't have, either. The body of fire also stops growing at the same early age, and also disconnects. In conclusion, the body of water of most people remains always a child.
Because it disconnects, the body of water cannot use its special abilities, directly communicate with the world, or learn from our experiences. But it sends us its "thoughts", and in this way influences our lives. In some cases these "thoughts" are received by our conscious mind (navel chakra), and in some cases they reach only our unconscious mind. Of course, these "thoughts" are the thoughts of a six year old, and we can easily understand that some of them can create difficulties for us.
The most important problem is that many of the thoughts of our inner child are not even his own thoughts, but implanted ideas transmitted by our parents. They can be wrong or destructive, and can harm us in very different ways. They also subtract from our freedom.
The ideal thing to do would be to let our body of water grow, solidify, evolve, "crystallize", learn from our experience and of course clean the alien influences that it has received during its childhood. But to finish a body of water is very difficult, and usually requires the help of a true spiritual master. Or, in the words of Gurdjieff, "the development of essence depends on work on oneself".
"Sometimes, though very seldom, and sometimes when it is least expected, essence proves fully grown and fully developed in a man, even in cases of undeveloped personality, and in this case essence unites together everything that is serious and real in a man.
But this happens very seldom. As a rule a man's essence is childish. The development of essence depends on work on oneself." (Gurdjieff. In Search of the Miraculous.)
From the healing point of view, we can clean our body of water from alien external influences, received during childhood. The main technical difficulty is that the body of water is reachable only though the body of fire, and very few people have a finished, or "crystallized", body of fire. Some special techniques have to be used in order to temporarily "crystallize" the body of fire and be granted access to the undeveloped body of water.
A REAL CASE OF SOMEONE WITH INNER CHILD PROBLEMS
I believe that the best way to understand something is using real examples. I once treated a man with four important problems coming from a wounded inner child. He was a very generous businessman, who gave money to charity. The main problems were:
1.- Unability to believe that he could have good luck
2.- Unability to believe that he could obtain a normal health
3.- Unability to believe that he could be loved by women
4.- Unability to believe that having more money would give him more chances to help people.
Do you believe that these issues are important? I do. It is difficult to have a happy life with these kind of beliefs.
Do you believe that this man had huge problems? I can tell you that most people I meet have worse problems, also coming from their inner child. The man in my example was comparatively healthy. Some people are not able to believe in God because their parents, consciously or unconsciously, transmitted them the false idea that God doesn't exist. Now, this is a huge problem! These poor victims can consciously believe in God, go to the church, meditate or do any kind of spiritual exercises. They can maybe become priests or spiritual masters themselves. But the deep belief is not there, and consequences are terrible. Because they can consciously believe in God, but unconsciously be atheists, they are powerless against their true problem.
In my client's case, false beliefs one, two and four came from his mother, and number three from his father. These kind of false beliefs don't disappear with contrary experience. My client had been loved by several women, for example. But, because his body of water had been unable to learn from adult experience, he still believed the stupid things that his father and mother had transmitted him when he was a very small boy.
This is, in my opinion, one of the causes for real suffering in life. There is a part inside us that is still an ignorant child, that believes in lies told by our parents, that is not able to learn from our experience, and that continues to influence our lives with thoughts and attitudes that should have disappeared a long time ago. I would say that this fact is ultra unfortunate, and guarantees frustation, misunderstandings, self hate and lost chances.
The man in question was very well connected, and because of that, many excellent healers had treated him. Nevertheless, as far as I can tell, none of them healed his inner child. I can imagine that some of them tried but, as I told before, true inner child healing is very, very difficult.
Because the body of water corresponds with the deep unconscious, any kind of talk with my client would have been useless. In most cases, words reach the conscious mind and sometimes the superficial unconscious, too (solar plexus chakra).
Even trying to show my client that he had been lucky several times, or that several girlfriends had loved him would have been to no avail. Because he was a very generous businessman who gave money to charity, I could have told him that earning more money would allow him to give more money to charity. But this kind of talk would have been totally useless, and wouldn't have changed anything at a deep level.
When I asked him if he believed that more money would increase his posibilities of helping other people, his answer was: "My mind says yes but my heart says no". Because his mind was already saying "yes", the attempt to convince him would have been useless. He was already convinced. No need to convince him again. It is only that this conviction came from his mind and didn't help him.
No amount of him "talking to his unconscious" would have helped, either. Usually, when people talk to their unconscious they talk to their (undeveloped) body of fire. And we need to go a layer deeper.
Even hypnosis would have been useless, from my point of view. The body of water is not susceptible to hypnosis. It is an interesting fact that, once the body of water of somebody starts to work, this person cannot be hypnotized anymore.
The intelligent thing to do was to reach his body of water and deactivate the false beliefs that his father and mother had transmitted him over thirty years ago. In other words, to do an inner child healing.
Before healing his inner child, I explained him his issues and asked him how he felt about them. After the healing, I asked him again the same questions. I am going to write, as exactly as possible, the questions and answers both before and after the inner child healing.
Concerning luck:
Question: "Do you believe that you can be lucky?"
Answer before the healing: "Like I am now, I know that I cannot be lucky"
Answer after the healing: "Yes, why not?"
Concerning health:
Question: "Do you believe that you can reach a normal health?"
Answer before the healing: "No"
Answer after the healing: "Yes"
Concerning women:
Question: "Do you believe that women can love you?"
Answer before the healing: "No."
Answer after the healing: "Yes, why not? It is within my reach."
Concerning money:
Question: "Do you believe that a person who has more money is, potentially, more able to help people?"
Answer before the healing: "My mind says yes but my heart says no."
Answer after the healing: "Yes."
As you can see, the results obtained are what I like to call "life changing". The whole future of this client will be changed as a result of believing that he can have good luck, that he can have a normal health and that women can really love him. His decisions in life will be totally different after this inner child healing. As a businessman, he won't limit himself. He knows that having more money will mean helping more people, giving more money to charity, funding more worthwhile projects, etc.
No talk was involved in this healing. I didn't convince him of anything. Everything happened in silence, and was done in five minutes.
For those people who are interested, the frequency that my client received to clean his inner child's problems was derived from the atom of gold.
From the Imaginal World point of view, what I did was to dig an elongated hole in the ground, not too deep, and bury my client in it. He laid horizontally. The body was covered with sand. Only his head remained outside the hole. Then, the light of the moon bathed his head, and I used a golden crystal to filter the moonlight. There was a river nearby, and I took some water from the river to clean the crystal after the healing.
If this looks like it took more than five minutes, you are right. In the Imaginal World the healing needed a full month. The Imaginal World and this world have totally different scales of time.
The four inner child problems could be perceived as parasites that were digging a hole in his eyes and nose. The filtered golden moonlight was enough to stop them.
The shape of the crystal was a symmetrical hexagon, with sides of unequal length. Its size was maybe ten meters. The crystal was made from the atom of gold. It was not gold itself, but some kind of element derived from gold.