What Self-Mastery Teaches Us About Our Inner Child
The following is adapted from Bright Lights, Big Empty by Ron Baker.
All of us, no matter who we are or what life circumstances we find ourselves in, are on a Soul journey. And one of the primary focuses of those Soul journeys is learning to love and value self, which I refer to as self-mastery.
Despite what many people believe, self-mastery doesn’t have a distinct end result. There is no ideal point to reach. Instead, it is an ongoing process–a journey of becoming more aware of yourself, which includes how you use your energy. Living your life as a continual exploration of which choices set you up well and what vision you are actually moving toward makes it quite meaningful.
As you move along that journey, you inevitably discover challenges, which I was never taught to see as opportunities to claim more capacities of self. However, I have discovered along the way that this is their true function. By learning to face simple challenges early in our lives, such as learning to tie our shoes or to read and write, we claim initial pieces of self. In addition to challenges like these that we all share, I have also learned to recognize that our Souls set up specific challenges for each of us that are intended to guide us into the specific arenas that we most need to develop.
When we finally learn to embrace those challenges, as well as gaining some nurturing tools for navigating them, we can create deep healing. I can assure you that this only became clear after spending decades fighting and avoiding my challenges. However, by learning to shift to the more mature perspective I have just introduced, I was able to discover how that new approach set me up to thrive more fully. And the same will be true for you, just as it has been for the thousands of others I have had the privilege to guide over the last 25 years.
When you discover that you no longer have to wait for someone else to give you permission to transcend your specific limitations or to live your life more fully and authentically, you will most likely find tremendous relief. Another way of saying the same thing is that this involves a shift from approaching life from the original perspectives you developed as a child to a more complete set of adult perspectives.
Taking Control of Your Healing
The vast majority of the people I work with come to me because they want to make distinct improvements in their lives. However, few guess that I could possibly provide an approach that allows their lives to get better and better and better. To do that, what we must all do is learn how to create a solid, reliable connection to the inner Self.
While shifting our focus from trying to control outer circumstances to an inward exploration of self can seem scary at first, it’s incredibly empowering to realize that once you establish a clear access, you no longer have to ask for permission to make empowering shifts. You don’t have to wait for somebody else to change or awaken before addressing your own true needs.
I often tell people that the fear and resistance they feel when they start their inward healing journey is normal. However, I also remind them that the more they learn to connect and value self, the more they will awaken the capacity to create loving connections with others. On top of that, they can even begin to inspire other people to step into more of their power and self-mastery as well.
Of course, most of us don’t grow up knowing how to address our inner wounds and fears. Most of the time, we aren’t even consciously aware that many of our early experiences are creating emotional wounds that we will eventually need to address. However, waking up to discover how to nurture those old places is crucial if we want to transcend the negative patterns that will only keep showing up in our lives otherwise.
Most people have never been taught that each of us holds tremendous power to impact the quality of our own lives. We have typically been so stuck in looking outside ourselves, to mommy and daddy initially and then to mommy daddy replacements, to somehow have the answers or the capacity to make us feel safe, like we matter. However, even if we had had the healthiest caregivers in the world, they would have taught us that it is how we ultimately feel about ourselves that determines whether we trust that we matter and that we hold tremendous value.
The 3 Facets of Self
One of the first steps in developing self-awareness is recognizing that there are three facets of the Whole Self: the child, the adult, and the Soul. However, without having been encouraged to connect and trust our own value when we are little, most of us end up stuck in our initial perceptions of who we are and what we deserve or have permission to choose. When we grow up without that encouragement, we can hardly imagine that we hold all of that potential inside us.
For instance, if you said to a child, “You have an adult held inside you,” you would have no way of understanding what being an adult might be like or what capacities that might suggest. Yet, you are now in an adult version of that same body you had as a child, already experiencing some of the potentials of being an adult.
What if I now suggest to you that you hold a Soul inside you? Do you have any clear ideas about what the potentials and capacities of claiming that level of self might include? It is ultimately no different than being in the dark about adulthood when you were a child.
The Soul Inside Each of Us
What if I suggest that most people go through their lives mostly ruled by the initial experiences and perceptions they developed as a child, even when they have grown into adult bodies? That is certainly where I found myself when I began the journey of claiming my inner self.
And I am thrilled to now understand that there is a Soul inside each of us that has been involved in our lives from the beginning. If you have children, you likely know how necessary it is that those children move through certain lessons and learning curves. And you would likely want to create ways for them to move through their biggest challenges, in order to set them up well as they grow.
Imagine now that the Soul is like the wisest authority who has your best interest in mind. In order to set you up well, the Soul sets up your early life with distinct challenges that will naturally bring your focus to those areas, so that you can use this lifetime to balance and grow as much as possible.
The true opportunity of adulthood includes learning to face the challenges that each of us carries, from the wiser perspectives we are now able to consider and grow into — compared to the limited ways we learned to view ourselves when we were little.
Becoming aware of this potential for expansion into wiser, more nurtured approaches is crucial on our Soul journeys.
The Limited Child-Self
When we don’t have caregivers who understand these things — which has been true for all of the people I have ever taught thus far — we don’t have many healthy tools to face the challenges that the Soul sets up. Therefore, we typically end up defending ourselves, instead of gradually learning to navigate our way through to solutions. I know that I came up with all kinds of ways to compensate for what I perceived to be my particular hardships. And like most others, I created distinct limits to who I thought I was allowed or deserved to be.
Then, when we reach adulthood, we find that we have many more ways to distract from those challenges, often trying to be seen as all together or healed. In reality, though, the experiences of the child are still trapped within us. That energy doesn’t just magically disappear; most often, we bury and store it, magically hoping it will disappear.
What I demonstrate in my new memoir, Bright Lights, Big Empty, is a clear set of tools for going inside to access the wounded child, gradually become the nurturing authority that we wish mommy and daddy had known how to be. Without needing to make our parents wrong and bad for never having been taught how to become nurturers in their own lives, we can simply go directly to our inner child and introduce the specific levels of nurturing that we always needed.
Only once we create a direct experience of nurturing self do we learn to trust that it is indeed possible. You see, it is whatever we actually experience that we learn to trust most fully. Once we experience something, like nurturing, for ourselves, we begin to trust it. Learning to provide nurturing for ourselves, which we would have been taught to do even in the healthiest of childhoods, is what allows us to feel safe being seen and valued. How wonderful to discover that those choices are in our own hands.
The Core Gifts of Self
Learning how to reparent the inner child is a crucial part of self-mastery. It’s also an integral part of living our best, most fulfilling lives. One of the biggest reasons for this is that, by learning how to connect with and heal our child-self, we can tap back into many of the core gifts that would be held dormant otherwise.
Every child has three core gifts: innocence, wonder, and trust. But how many people do you know who came out of childhood celebrating those gifts? I am afraid that I would have to answer, “none.”
When we are not nurtured consistently, as well as taught how to connect to the inner self-growing up, we end up with varying levels of fear, shame and judgment instead. The good news is that, even so, the core gifts of innocence, wonder and trust are still held inside us, waiting to feel safe enough to come out and play in our lives.
Adults are also intended to awaken the core gifts of courage, willingness, and empowerment. What does that mean? It means we feel clear and empowered to make the choices that set us up well. Being true to what is most important to us, as individuals. Waking up each day, making choices that invest in our most authentic self and our most authentic priorities is a formula for more joy and happiness than most have learned to tap.
Empowerment Through Self-Mastery
By beginning the journey of self-mastery, we can learn to reclaim the core gifts of the child and the adult parts of us. The healing we experience through reparenting allows us to encourage and awaken our innate innocence, wonder, and trust. And moving through that nurturing process enables us to build courage, willingness, and empowerment.
What a beautiful thing it has been to watch so many people learning to feel empowered about their most honest visions for their lives, shifting into the choices that set them up to achieve those visions as well. We can all learn to discern, in the moment, whether it’s our adult-self or habitual wounded child-self that is responding to any particular situation.
Developing those capacities is self-mastery. Looking inward and developing more awareness of our most authentic self is what makes it possible.
Just considering that we are all sacred individuals on unique Soul journeys is life-changing. And then, we discover that the Soul is most interested in us learning to love and value all things — starting with self.
This includes allowing the natural process of having wounds, fears, and doubts. It also includes admitting that we each hold elements of true greatness. The sooner we begin to embrace all of it, the sooner we can begin to expand in profound, surprising ways.
For more helpful clues on how you can deepen your own journey of self-mastery, get Bright Lights, Big Empty on Amazon.
After walking away from a career in the performing arts to focus on guiding individuals into a surprising, new approach to personal transformation, Ron Baker has spent twenty-five years as a bioenergetics therapist, healer, speaker, and author. He has nurtured thousands into meaningful empowerment through his School of Self-Mastery and inspired millions to come together for worldwide events that he has led from sacred sites around the globe. Learn more at RonBaker.net.
