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Healing the Inner Family Through Play
Have you ever watched the birds fly in the sky or the butterflies dance beautifully through the air, swirling and twirling touching the flowers and the grass with their wings and beauty? Or have you seen the squirrels and chipmunks running after each other and tumbling around in the leaves or the rocks and chasing each other up a tree or into a hole? Nature has remembered the art of having fun in their life expression and in the dance of life. You can look around you on your walks in nature and notice the countless ways Earth provides the backdrop for nature to play upon. There is beauty in the colors, textures and expressions in the clouds, trees, rivers, lakes and mountains; all of this beauty plays and interacts with each other in a delicate movement of joy and gentleness throughout the day and in every moment of one’s life.
Taking the time to stop and see the beauty and interacting with the joy and playfulness that surrounds us and abounds here on beautiful earth mother is a blessing and a gift each can give unto oneself each and every day. In this dance you can release and unravel all that you are carrying around and just be in the moment. Be with the swan, the birds, the little creepy crawlers that cross your path and enjoy their playfulness and the love they offer unto each of you.
Through your walks and times in nature is a wonderful opportunity to allow your inner family to come out and play! Nature has been always a safe place for children and they feel the love, warmth and caress of the kingdoms and the gentle energy that abounds. There are many ways to interact with your inner family and allowing them to come out during your walks can be one of them. You may find yourself skipping through the forest, picking flowers in a meadow, climbing a tree, soaking your toes in a nearby stream, lake, river or ocean or sitting with your back up against a tree soaking up the warmth of the sun’s rays and feeling the gentle magnetic energy movement of the trees with the land. You may be the adventurous type and may want to go on an exploration to a part of the woods you have never gone to before, foraging your way down an unknown path. Or you may find interest in tracking the movement of the little ants to and from their home watching them interact in unity and collaboration with each other.
There are endless possibilities to having fun with your inner family and all it takes it to make the time to do it. We find many reasons not to have fun and the main reason many adults use is that there is not enough time. I need to go grocery shopping, pay the bills, finish up my work, do the laundry, clean the house and so on. This locks one into a mechanical way of living life and does not allow for the nurturing time everyone needs for themselves to be filled up with the love, play and joy.
Those adults whom have children of their own can utilize the time spent with them to allow one’s own inner children to come out and play. Taking them to the forest or to the playground will put one in a joyful dream and setting where one’s own inner family can come out and play. You can create a magical day swinging on the swing, foraging through the woods collecting rocks or leaves, floating leaves down the stream or anyone of the countless dances where joy and play can be incorporated into your life. Often, however you will see the adults sitting on the bench watching their son or daughter or you will see the children out playing while the adult is in the house doing work.
Here is where we have become separated from our own creativeness and self expression in the dance of life. We think it is only the children that can play for there is a belief in society that when one hits a certain age they need to stop acting like a child or a teenager and become an adult. The sigma attached to being an adult is quite steep and the programs laid in can be quite lengthy. For in the identity of being an adult, the playfulness and joy can sometimes be lost and life becomes drudgery for many. They have stunted their creative self expression and now have to tailor it into what one needs in order to get a job and pay the bills which can be very different from that which brings one joy.
Also when one becomes an adult, there is difficulty in interacting with others on a personal level and conversations amongst adults can be quite impersonal and “stale”. This difficulty can also be seen at the teenage years where the open expressive feelings start to get squelched from peer pressure and worrying about what others “think of you” sets in. If you go back far enough in your childhood there are moments where you remember the playfulness and joy and this is where you can return when you need to connect to that part of yourself that can relax, be at peace with oneself in the moment and find the joy in the simplest things around oneself. Healing the wounds that occurred after these moments can be the focus one can address in healing their inner family so a return to the joy one used to experience can be expressed.
Summer 2006 Jasper Conclave Workshop
There are many reasons why one chooses to hold back from expressing themselves and being in the joy and playfulness of ones own creative expression. During the Jasper Conclave this past summer, participants were given the opportunity to attend a workshop held by myself and Paige Wickline called “Healing the Inner Family through Song, Dance and Play”. The participants had a lovely time dancing to beautiful music with Paige and had a chance to let their kids come out and play with one another. There was also a beautiful guided meditation that took participants to a special place they created in nature that was safe so they could address painful experiences that closed down their hearts and disconnected them self from their playfulness and joy.
Inner children of the participants viewed their childhood and remembered those times they were yelled at involving moments when they were playing and in the joy. They were yelled at for being too loud, for playing too rough or playing in a dangerous place where they could get hurt. They were also yelled at for messing things up whether it was when they were digging through the pots and pans in the cupboards, drawing pretty drawings on the bathroom walls or being creative with the scissors on the drapes in the living room. The children felt misunderstood, sad, mad, angry, guilty and unloved for being yelled at when they were just expressing themselves and having fun!
A healing took place between the inner children and their inner and outer parents for the children were able to understand why their parents were yelling at them and in the understanding, their feelings were heard and acknowledged and they were able to forgive and release the traumas. Inner parents also shared their point of view. They may have been tired, angry or upset from something that happened during the day and in the moment they saw the child doing something, they yelled. The parents apologized and expressed how sorry they were for hurting them and asked the children for their forgiveness. The parents also explained to the children that sometimes they yelled at them because they were doing something that they thought was dangerous and could hurt them. In trying to protect them and out of the love they had for them, they may have burst out in the moment not realizing that they were scarring the child and they also asked for their forgiveness. Participants were given the opportunity to go within and heal other scenarios that occurred to them where they lost their joy and playfulness as well as acknowledge that they too have participated on both sides of the dance, forgiving it all in full.
Another area in the inner family life that contributed to shutting down the expression of joy and playfulness was the dance between the siblings, neighborhood playmates and classmates when one got older. In the karmic dance, one child may have may have hurt the other’s feelings by leaving them out of the game, not picking them to be on the team, laughing at them when they tried to express themselves or any other situation where children are playing and their feelings become hurt. Through the traumatic interaction, it closed down the child’s creative expression where they decided not to partake in those similar times of activities later on in life for fear of rejection.
Participants went within, connected to their inner family whom were ready to forgive the traumas and also realized that they too may have hurt someone when playing and did not even realize it. Participants also released their ancestral karma with those individuals that left a scar in this life as well as for their entire ancestry, releasing both sides of the dance through understanding and forgiveness.
After the release work, participants were asked to retrieve all parts of their fractured selves and ancestors as well as all their joy, love, playfulness and magic that had been lost in this life and throughout their ancestor’s lives. With the recasting, participants now had more of them self “back” and there was a possibility now to connect to more parts of self whom hold the remembrance of play and joy again.
“A Living Play with Nature”
The “play” portion of the workshop provided a safe place for participant’s inner family members to come out and interact with others inner family members. This was a lot of fun for everybody! Participants already had a little bit of practice with creating their own skit for we all had experimented with this a little bit as a group during day two of conclave.
All the kids were ready for this part of the workshop for they had worked “really hard” during the guided healing meditation section and now they could have fun and play! The children were very creative and enjoyed deciding what they wanted to be and what scene in nature they wanted to play in. The nature kingdoms came in to anchor and play with the participants as well! The room turned into “nature’s playground” and the children became very animated, acting out many of their animal friends including otter, eagle, fox, whale, dragonfly, bees, fish, starfish, crabs just to name a few! The children also became trees, mountains, rocks, the ocean waves and the sun, creating a living play where some became the backdrop for the nature setting and the others were the animals playing in nature! Some participants also chose to just be kids and played with the animals an in the natural world.
Many nature skits were occurring simultaneously depending on what the children created. The children did not talk about what they were going to do for very long, for they wanted to play! One person said “I want to be an eagle!” Another child said: “I will be a mountain you can fly over”. With that the dance began and the eagle started to soar in the sky above and around the mountain. Then another person said: “I could be a tree on the mountain that you build your nest in and lay your eggs!” And with that, the scene changed and the story’s plot continued where the eagle had a place to go and lay her eggs. Another person added I would like to be a stream coming down the mountain and another added to the story that they wanted to be a fish in the stream and the story and scene changed and grew, many times leading to another story.
There was a fox playing chase with an otter, a piece of driftwood rocking back and forth in the ocean waves with crabs and starfish playing on the shore. There were meadows with bees, butterflies, dragonflies and flowers all playing gently together. Another young boy was swinging from a vine into the cool stream where fish were playing. Another was sitting on a rock (another child) watching the entire scenario. When the story ended they created something else or the scene just led into something else.
Healing also took place for the participant’s inner family members during “playtime”. They were able to observe how their inner children interacted with other children and noticed the emotions that surfaced from this interaction. At the beginning, a few participants’ inner children were shy and chose to create their own private play being a butterfly or a dragonfly in the meadow. However, later on they were found playing with the other children smiling and giggling quietly. Another participant was a “little fish” playing with “bigger fish”. They noticed their inner child was afraid they may get eaten up and questioned when in their childhood their inner girl did get energetically eaten. Another female participant allowed her inner boy to come out and play the role of “bad boy”. She went around tickling the other children, knocking over the sand castles and was seen pushing others into the water. This allowed the other children a chance to react to him and it was very light hearted with a lot of laughter from all.
Laughter and joy are very healing emotions to incorporate into one’s everyday ascension life and allowing one’s inner family to be a part of this dance will assist in creating more joyful and fun-filled experiences for all. Your inner family is an important part of your ascension journey and they have a lot to say and contribute to one’s dance of life. Finding time to talk with them and interact with them through inner or outer play will relay the message that they are loved and are an important part of your ascension life.
If you are needing assistance in working with your inner family or trying to understand emotions or patterns that you are experiencing in life, I offer one-on-one phone consultations and would be happy to assist you with getting in touch with those lost or wounded parts of self that need to be heard, acknowledged and loved for their unique beauty and truth. I can be reached at unity.in.community@lycos.com
Many gentle and joyful blessings for your continued ascension journey!
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Copyright Rhonda Courtemanche 2006 All Rights Reserved
