Healing the Inner Child with Ayahuasca

Who is the Inner Child?

Those of you who are on a healing journey are probably familiar with the term inner child work.

But let’s clarify what is the inner child and why that work is needed for us to be free.

Let’s start with the fact that in childhood, we have less or no resources (strength, awareness, skills) to deal with constant stress and trauma. When something overwhelming happens that threatens our safety and survival, we often shut down and dissociate from the experience. At the moment of this separation/dissociation, the mind fragments as a coping mechanism in order to survive and the unprocessed experience is held in that fragment.

Often the most significant damage happens when we are children, so these fragmented parts stay at the level of the child, and we refer them as inner child.

So, the inner child is that lost part of us where we carry most of our pain, things that we don’t want to see, feel, and remember because it feels too much to bear.

Another reason why we are so impressionable during childhood is the fact that the first 7 years of our lives, our brainwaves are in a half hypnotic (theta) state. We are in a mode of absorption.  But there is no discerning awareness yet, so we download everything from our immediate environment (belief system, behaviour, coping skills etc.) without thinking about if it will serve us or not.

Most of our behavioural pattern gets wired in the first 7 years.

Most people come from a family with dysfunction. Therefore, we often learn dysfunctional behaviour without recognizing the dysfunction, usually much later in life.

Therefore, when we are on a healing journey, we tend to return to this starting place, the childhood, which is necessary if we want to really change and uproot things. It is my experience after many years on this healing journey, that childhood is always a place we come back and keep integrating back into our whole self.

Why is Inner Child Work Vital?

Some people think they can just draw a line and disconnect from the past to start a new and different future. But that is not my experience. I believe that those things that are not dealt with will keep showing up in different (mostly dysfunctional) ways in our lives until we are willing to see and embrace them.

Some major ways that childhood traumas can show up in adult life are the inability to create loving and nurturing relationships, sexual dysfunction, anxiety, depression, insomnia, oversensitivity, amnesia, dissociation from the body, addictions, denial, auto-immune disease, inability to commit to things/people just to mention a few. So, when we look at our lives and our behaviour, we can notice the effects of these past issues in our present life, even if we were not aware before.

Often, we are not aware that we were traumatized. The suppression and dissociation can be so much that we literally don’t have those memories accessible. That’s one of the defense mechanisms of the psyche. Therefore, often people do not connect past trauma to their present-day challenges. However, I believe that it is always connected.

To go back to the origins, we need to visit those tender years of beginning where our system was formed, and our personality shaped. I believe that until we make peace with our past (and process our experience in a healthy way) we keep dragging it into our present and re-create it in our future.

How to Heal the Wounded Child?

The first step is to acknowledge this aspect. The next step is your willingness and desire to integrate this part of you and bring healing to the whole self. You are the healer.

The main reason people give up upon themselves and their healing journey is because, at certain points they feel too confused, too afraid, too overwhelmed to touch their pain and process it.

An experienced therapist can create a safe container where deep healing can happen and will assist you to surrender rather than resist in the difficult moments.

The purpose of any tool, guide, medicine, therapist, healer is to help you to access and integrate your fragmented self, including the inner child aspect. This can happen in various ways depending on what serves best.

 

 

Healing the Inner Child with Ayahuasca

Healing and integrating your inner child can be done in many ways, and I certainly tried countless tools and methodologies.

Accessing Hidden Parts of Ourselves

For me, healing the inner child with Ayahuasca helped me to reach aspects of myself that were suppressed beyond recollection. You can’t heal what you are not aware of, and often, childhood trauma gets so deeply hidden away that it becomes a blind spot for us. However, we can feel that aspect in our present-day life creating pain and suffering.

For me to access these deeply hidden parts was very intense and revealing but also a liberating and empowering process. Beyond my experience, I witnessed many times the same thing happen to others.  I sometimes think about Ayahuasca as a powerful surgical tool that can help us to access the hidden wounds that we may carry.

Expanding Awareness & Healing the Inner Child with Ayahuasca

In addition to this, Ayahuasca helps us to expand our awareness and see things from a different perspective, bringing healing, compassion, forgiveness and understanding to painful past experiences.

Letting go of blame, anger, and resentment and bringing understanding, acceptance, compassion, and love to old wounds is certainly a common theme in healing the inner child with Ayahuasca. Making peace with our past, with ourselves and others is vital for us to move forward in a healthy way and become free.

Seeing the bigger picture is a great gift of this medicine as I feel that often we are stuck in pain because we only see a fragment of the whole story that keeps us in suffering. And while these moments of realizations can be very emotionally intense, they are also very empowering and liberating. I always felt, even in the deepest darkest moments of my journey, that I am being held by a loving Mother, being loved and supported always.

Reconnection & Healing the Inner Child with Ayahuasca

This sense of connectedness is another aspect of working with the Ayahuasca, the feeling that we are not alone, or abandoned in our quest, in our life, or in our healing journey. A sense of guidance and comfort even in the most difficult moments is always there, always present with Mother Ayahuasca.

Trauma and suffering often leads to loneliness, isolation, and disconnection. Ayahuasca helped me to start reconnecting and integrating all my ‘parts’ and feeling connected again as part of a bigger intelligent design.

You are the Healer

I believe that the Ayahuasca can be a powerful ally in our healing journey. As mentioned earlier, this powerful plant medicine can help us to access old wounds and blockages by expanding our awareness and shifting our perspective to see the bigger picture and reconnecting us with our inner love and power.

However, the Ayahuasca is not a magic pill! She will not heal your pain.

She will show you the way to healing and wholeness. But you must take the steps and make the necessary changes. In your healing, you are the most important part, and healing is a participatory process. The medicine will help you to see what you need to do, but ultimately you must do it!

You are the healer; you can change your life.

It’s not going to be an overnight process. Change takes time, we process things layer by layer. So, this inner child work will take a while to complete.

The best thing you can do for yourself is to have a therapist to do your inner child work with – to have a safe container and loving support and guidance will make your process faster and easier.

Remember that Ayahuasca, a therapist, yoga etc. are all just tools that are here to help us remember our own power, innocence, and beauty.

You are the healer, and love is the medicine!