Our autumn issue is out now. Regular contributor Judith McAdams shares what awareness means to her. Dive on in to find out more…
Stepping Through My Fears In Awareness
ACKNOWLEDGING YOUR INNER CHILD.
by Judith McAdam
I sat regularly in a meditative visualisation with my hand on my heart and I started to connect with and comfort this beautiful, shy, innocent child
A couple of years ago I was asked to work with a large group of executives, who were top professionals in their field. They were also an extremely stressed group of individuals, who were daily faced with many difficult challenges and targets. I was delighted to work with them. However, almost immediately after getting the contract I went into extreme fear. First, in awareness, I acknowledged my inner child – that fearful part of me.
I sat with myself, mindful of my fear, to examine what this had brought up for me. I had worked many times with groups of people without this reaction. I knew I could not fulfil the contract with these people unless I was standing in my full personal power. In order to be effective, I had to be aligned with my powerful self and not with my fear. I knew I would only create momentum based on fear and that the results of this type of creating would be limited.
I wanted this to be a success for myself and for all the people who would be listening to me. So, before developing my content for the seminar, my first point of contact was with my own inner little girl who was throwing a tantrum. I sat in meditation and I asked my little child for clarity on how to release this fear and resistance inside me.
During the days that followed I listened intently to my inner dialogue and noticed that I was repeatedly saying to myself one word – ‘ridicule’. ‘Ridicule, ridicule, ridicule,’ went over and over in my head. So, I asked that reservoir of infinite intelligence inside me why I was afraid of ridicule. The answer came during a meditation. I received a sudden memory of when I was ten years old, in primary school. I was extremely shy.
Each day in school the teacher would make me stand up in front of everyone and ask me questions on what she had taught. For a painfully introverted child, this was worse than pulling out every hair in my head. I remember wanting to disappear into the ground. This went on day after day for two years. As the teacher persisted, I retreated further and further into myself. She was aggressive in her manner and that only compounded the problem.
Looking back on it now, she was probably trying to draw me out. Unfortunately, it had quite the opposite effect. I felt ridiculed in front of all the other children in the class. I had just found the answer to my current conundrum. The explanation for my present fear was deeply lodged in the psyche of my ten-year-old self. My inner child really believed she was stupid and feared being ridiculed. This is the record my subconscious was playing over and over.
So, for over a period of two weeks I sat regularly in a meditative visualisation with my hand on my heart and I started to connect with and comfort this beautiful, shy, innocent child. I gently spoke to her, telling her that she wasn’t stupid at all, but she was traumatised by this experience and wasn’t able to answer the teacher out of deep fear. I fully acknowledged the trauma for the first time in all those years.
Mindfully, using visualisation, I was able to replace profoundly negative feelings stored in my subconscious mind with a sense of security, trust and the feeling that it was safe to express myself without fear of ridicule. I had met and acknowledged my fear and had re-parented myself in awareness. I took responsibility for my fear and decided to free myself from it. I was not a tiny child feeling ridiculed. This was not my sum total.
I had acknowledged, supported and empowered myself. In doing so, I had created something entirely different internally in my life. The work was done and now it just had to ripple out into my external world. I took my ten-year-old child with me the day I did the seminar. She was tucked under my wing. She felt safe and loved. She didn’t feel the need to conduct the seminar through fear – her fear was gone. She was content and calm.
The Inner Child visualisation is freely available on my website if you’d like to step through some of your own fears.
With love, Jx
#healmoveforwardmanifest
Find out more about Judith and her work here: judithmcadam.com
