Inner Bonding Guided Meditation
Internal vs. External Rewards
All of us have inner children and inner adults at different levels of communication and bonding. Most of our lives, when caretaking our children or even caretaking adults, there can be a disconnect from our own Inner Child. It can become a habit when external rewards replace internal ones. This is especially true if we don’t know we can generate our own rewards.
For example, a schedule can look like a critical parent who only scolds us, and we end up focusing on the gaining the approval of those people who create the schedule. This shuts down communication with the Inner Child. Or, another example, we can create an unloving adult that just treats the child as an addict to numb the child’s pain. This also shuts down communication with the Inner Child.
Our outer schedules are there to meet the needs of the inner children of other people. These exchanges have their place, but you can remind your Inner Child of how these schedules help your Inner Child achieve their wishes. This helps to maintain the inner bond. You can also make schedules for your free time. These schedules can include time for rest and relaxation. These schedules help you understand that if you care-take too much, you can end up being exploited by the unloving inner adults of others, and their addicted inner children. Inner bonding also helps you avoid using your unloving adult to exploit others when you are in a more satisfied state.
Filling your own gas tank
When the inner child is parented by a loving parent, the need for addictive processes and substances goes away. This comes from the inner child’s gratitude and approval for your inner adult’s caring actions. An internal source of pleasurable approval. In this relaxed state, think about your tasks and how they help to satisfy your inner child’s wishes. It could be a clean home for your inner child. It could be a paycheque to take care of your child’s needs. It could be love you give to others because of the energy you are inner bonded. You can ask your Inner Child for their preferences for the day. The wishes can go as far as they want because your Inner Adult will find realistic ways to get them met. When you look at a schedule, look at how it is helping you organize how you will get your Inner Child’s needs met. When your needs are met more efficiently, your Inner Child is satisfied sooner. At the same time the people you serve are also having their needs met efficiently by you so that your inner bond is intact and is helping others. The service to others doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive.
Healthy anger
Despite this being a loving-kindness guided meditation, your negative emotions are important too. Most people you are dealing with have broken connections to their Inner Child. Your inner bondedness will threaten their fragile egos and they will threaten to reject you for not validating them. This validation requires you to lower yourself and imitate their brokenness to relieve the ego threat. This is because they are disconnected from their Inner Child and their loneliness needs external feeding by gaining approval from others like you. Their egos are fragile because external approval and objects are not always available, and there is a need for constant replenishment to prevent emptiness and loneliness. But because you are inner bonded, you are not lonely, and your Inner Child is with you all the time. You don’t care about their rejection, because you can give yourself approval and parent yourself. You do what’s right for your child. As long as you don’t push others away from their bonds, you can demand better treatment, and get help when you are being bullied. Being assertive with your boundaries is fair for others because they are allowed to do the same. Being assertive with boundaries goes beyond revenge because you allow others to correct you when you make a mistake by crossing their boundaries. Pain is a signal we don’t have to ignore anymore. We can learn from it.
With the Inner Adult you need to respond with realistic methods of getting needs met. These can’t be excuses that look like reality to shut down the Inner Child, when there are legitimate ways of getting these needs met. When you are engaging in these goals, you are still in a learning mode of thinking, and failures and mistakes along the way have to be integrated in oneself as information that helps you learn more skills so you can continue attempts at getting your needs met. Sometimes the Inner Child just needs to learn more skills, including people skills which will help in the future. There are going to be positive and negative emotions along the way and that is part of the pleasure when goals aren’t satisfied right away. If it was too easy it would be boring, and blocking out pain leads to inaction and isolation.
When your positive and negative emotions of your Inner Child are validated by your Inner Adult, you are then free to truly be yourself.
Inner Bonding Guided Meditation
Other Guided Meditations: https://psychreviews.org/category/guidedmeditations/
Spiritual Bypassing and Inner Bonding: https://psychreviews.org/spiritual-bypassing-and-inner-bonding/