The Elder Woman and her Inner Child
Exploring the connection between my inner child and emergence as Crone.
I surprised myself recently when I said to a friend that I was feeling more ‘at peace’ than ..., I couldn’t locate any specific time? I was asking myself what that meant in the same moment that the words slipped from my subconscious?
We all can, and do shift according to our contexts, and what evolves is of course related to our choices. March 8 was International Women’s Day and on a 4 hour return drive to the city, I pondered the sacredness of the Triple Goddess. The day before I was grateful to participate in a zoom ‘circle’ facilitated by Anodea Judith, part of a pre release of her new book Goddess: Blessed Reunions with the Feminine Face of the Divine. I am a contributor to a section of the book dedicated to people’s stories (still gratefully pinching myself that my story was accepted). It is the story of my birthing on Cave Beach as a Crone, or Fairy-Crone as I playfully refer to myself. It is a transition unrelated to a specific age or period of gestation, somewhat a measure of feeling, of being.
The day before the zoom ‘circle’, I had met a friend for our regular surf and brunch. Point RoadKnight is on the magnificent Great Ocean Road. Textured grandstands of sandstone cliffs offer a palette of yellows, oranges and reds. Her curved shoreline and crystalline shallow waters afford her a reputation as one of the more protected and therefore accessible waters on what is known as the Shipwreck Coast of the South West Victoria. As a novice, I hoped for a settling breeze and tiny waves and with said conditions permitting, we bobbed around in our wetsuits after our surf. Floating in the shallows we lay flat as the waves washed and broke over our faces. Through squinting, salty eyes we shared a mutual appreciation for the gift of a summery start to Autumn, “It just feels good”, Di posits. As simple as that statement was, it encompassed the bliss of ‘being’, the stimulation of the physicality of the surf. Those moments of silent contemplation in between waves; the compulsion to laugh; slap waves; throw oneself into the cascading whitewash; all actions steeped in the thrill and joy of childhood trips to the beach. The body remembers and responds to the sensual play of the water; the bite of the salt on the skin and caress of the sun. There is no better place than the beach for me to access my childhood happy place.
The physical experience releases the pumping endorphins and serotonin, the happy chemicals. With the glinting sun reflecting off the gloss of her wet face, Di’s inner child added, “this is just like when we were riding (bicycles) around Uluru.” Our epic drive to central Australia in 2022, had too, ignited the inner child. A shared smile of gratitude broke, for the energetic transfers gifted from those sacred landscapes still resonate. Giving thanks, we dropped our floating feet to settle on the contoured bed of sand. The waves nudged our bodies back into weighted balance and with a quick and appreciative glance back at the horizon, we reluctantly exited her waters.
This is a seemingly long lead up to what I have noticed about embracing my inner child, in my transition to Crone. It is in my reverie of this realisation that I recognise the inner child’s divinity and perfection, the soul’s expression of unconditional love. The divine inner child is the gateway portal to remember who we are, as an aspect of source energy which guides our spiritual evolution. We have not unconditionally accepted the divinity of the inner child while we are harbouring resentments, hatreds, blame, guilt; choose egoic perceptions, judgements - the very reactions that may have wounded our inner child in the first instance. Breaking out-of-alignment energetic patterns is part of embracing the divine inner child - the essence of all of us.
The divine inner child becomes the wounded child when subject to personal experiences related to cultural conditioning and conceptual thinking. When judgements are projected onto us as children; in guises of unmet expectations, the internal feelings of associated unworthiness become portals for those wounds. These can become repetitive themes in the chapters of our ‘narrative’ regardless of the intent of said projections. We all harbour a wounded inner child, as adults, we can choose to parent our inner child with unconditional love.
If we can accept ‘what is’, or ‘what was’, we might afford our divine inner child the unconditional love that is our birth right, and in doing so, surrender concealed thoughts of resentment, guilt, shame and blame? These feelings of unworthiness may have prompted continuing self-sabotage and abandonment of self, in free-will, adult-life choices? Accepting ‘what is’ might also welcome ‘forgiveness’ of the people and circumstances who projected their own unworthiness onto us? It might evolve as an understanding that the person who is perceived to have inflicted harm was also a wounded child? For many of us, this might mean one or both parents, or other close family and/or other adult connections? I am not condoning harmful actions in any way, I am merely reflecting on my own experiential learning. In doing so, I embrace my inner child, with vows of kinship, recognition and acceptance. The realisation that ancestral wounds are patterns we can choose to shift are steeped in the knowledge that our ancestors continue to guide us, from across the veil, in this shared endeavour and investment of universal love.
The Healing Inner Child
Exit, the ego’s shadow of an imagined self.
Unfit to harbour the wounded child
In its exhaustive narrative of shifting identities,
Of blame, shame, guilt and suffering.
Pity; the forgotten, lost child,
Buried in fields of anger, hurt and sorrow,
Attacking, defending and reinforcing the illusion
Of anguish, unworthiness and separation.
Enter the intuitive voice of ‘knowing’,
Calls for ego’s surrender, with forgiveness and gratitude.
Allow the body a still and silent function, a portal beyond.
Intelligence lies in thinking, remembering rests in being.
Seek faith to recognise what was never lost,
Draft courage, trust your innate wisdom,
Lift and evolve with grace, to expand, accept and release
The embodiment of our being, the gift of the divine inner child.