Reconciliation: Healing the Inner Child

Every time we need the energy of mindfulness, we just touch that seed with our mindful breathing, mindful walking, smiling, and then we have the energy ready to do the work of recognizing, embracing, and later on looking deeply and transforming.

When we don’t run away from our suffering, but we recognize it, embrace it, and look deeply into it, suffering begins to transform, and liberation and enlightenment manifest.

If we feel safe enough, it’s possible to have no more desire.

When we take a breath, we are light, calm, at ease. We breathe in such a way that all generations of ancestors and descendants are breathing with us.

Washing a dish can be an act of enlightenment. It’s delightful to wash the dishes!

So if you suffer a little bit, or you suffer a lot, or if you don’t suffer anything at all, that depends on you—on whether you have insight, whether you have compassion or not.

Whenever a seed, say the seed of anger, comes up into our living room and manifests as a mental formation, the first thing we can do is to touch the seed of mindfulness and invite it to come up too. Now we have two mental formations in the living room. This is mindfulness of anger.

Go back and take care of yourself. Your body needs you, your feelings need you, your perceptions need you. The wounded child in you needs you. Your suffering needs you to acknowledge it. Go home and be there for all these things. Practice mindful walking and mindful breathing. Do everything in mindfulness so you can really be there, so you can love

What was clear to me was that as long as I was stuck in my own suffering, I couldn’t see anybody else’s.

We call this “inappropriate attention” (ayoniso manaskara) because it takes us away from the present moment and into a place of old suffering. It’s very important that whenever our attention is brought to that place, to that kind of image, we have ways of dealing with the sorrow, fear, and suffering that arise.