Communicating with the inner child

In hawai'ian ho'oponopono practice, it is said that a human being has three parts:

the higher mind, called 'the father' - this mind communicates directly with God;

conscious mind, called "the mother" - this mind balances the checkbook, etc. AND it also has to initiate communication with the subconscious mind;

subconscious mind, called "the child" - this is the only one who can go to the higher mind and communicate back to the conscious mind.... The subconscious mind listens to EVERYTHING we say, do, feel, etc and takes notes... To it, it is all true...

So, conscious mind, the mother, has to WILLINGLY INITIATE communication with the higher mind, the father, by ASKING the subconscious mind, the child, to go to the father and talk with him and bring the answers back.

Wow - what a concept.... The conscious mind is not a monster, and it has to start the contact. This is the first step in ho'oponopono, or the mediation/forgiveness/cut the ties/move on practice. There is really no precise translation in English.

So, anyways, here I am, stuck in rush hour traffic by the surf beaches, and thinking about the massage I just had, which went very well, the person felt better. I remembered what my family ALWAYS REPEATED TO ME: that I don't have a clue about anything, that I am nobody, will never amount to anything, will fail in life miserably... And I contrasted that to the reality of me being good at what I do.

So, I said to my inner child: "See, they lied to you!" I had a feeling that something inside me was listening carefully. WEll, it always does, but this time I was aware of it :) So I continued: "your father lied to you." The kid actually could agree with my point, probably because it was obvious. I kept on going: "and your mother, and your aunty, uncle, grandma..." And the kid looked very HURT and snapped back at me: "Stop it!!! You are trashing my whole family and you cannot do that!!! They are my family and they are right!!!" The kid was defending them, in spite of what bad stuff they did, because the kid loved them and needed them and WAS WILLING TO DO ANYTHING TO FIT IN. So, if the adults said that she was incapable and will fail, she was ready to be that. She WAS that. She forced herself to be that.

I was astounded. I had to work more gently with that... I had to kinda adopt the kid all over. That helped. I felt much more peace. Somehow, all my need to prove myself, all the worries about being inadequate, all that - just disappeared...

A few days later, I was ranting and raving about something I didn't like, my conscious mind was raving madly, cursing at this or that. Suddenly, I had a definite feeling that my inner child was witnessing all that and was TOTALLY petrified. To it, I was mad, out of control, definitely not paying attention to it, and even capable of doing damage to it. I was stopped frozen in my tracks. My kid was basically witnessing a rampage into extreme negativity and violence and NEGLECT. To explain it some more, maybe it is energetically equivalent to rampages alcoholics or drug addicts can go on (although I have no clue about what that is like, I have never even seen it, I suspect that energetically it has the same "signature" of extreme negativity and self destruction).

In any case, I had a clear notion that my inner child thought I was insane and dangerous. I understood ... to the child, it was obvious that I wasn't following the rules of survival, and that my conscious mind will actually lead to disaster, and naturally, the child was scared. I dropped that attitude as a hot potato. I stopped it immediatelly and appologized. That helped... and there is more, I didn't really fix it yet.

Looking back, I was torturing myself the same way my family tortured me, and there is a long list of abuses to my inner child that I need to forgive myself for.