#42 - You Can Miraculously Evolve Into Your Most Beautiful Self

by KC Johnson

Green Nudibranch Sea Slug (Nembrotha cristata) with amazing adaptations. Photo by Entienne Gosse

Do you feel unaware of your constant evolution towards becoming the amazing being you are destined to become? Can you look back at your past months and years and appreciate the growth you have made? Do you see a pattern unfolding? When I was in the deepest periods of my distress and trauma I lost my perspective for how far I had progressed, what abilities I had developed, and what future I was creating for myself. It was a truly dismal time that has vestiges still invading my thoughts many decades later, though thankfully to much less intensity.

I struggled with my worthiness, my sense of belonging, and not feeling any control over my life. You may encounter these same senses, and they can lead to self-destructive thoughts and behaviors, even overtly destructive behaviors towards others. Even if you are now told that you are a worthy person, a valuable part of this world, and are lovable, you may not believe it. You will instead follow the long-held sense of self established during your childhood that came from the messaging others were feeding you. By understanding this sense of self process you can begin taking control of your life and growing into the amazing person you are destined to become.

Growing up you learn to believe the many dysfunctional minds brainwashing you into believing who you are. But nothing could be further from the truth -- your truth.

First of all, the people you experienced in your past were struggling with their own sense of self, their own sense of their value in this life experience. They can only respond through their lenses reflecting their own traumas. They probably believed what they were telling you, even thinking that they were molding you into a responsible adult by giving you their words of wisdom and correcting your behaviors to meet their expectations.

Even when the parenting messages are positive and supportive you are adopting their sense of truth that you should follow. When the messaging is judgmental, destructive, and unsupportive to your little child’s needs, it can become an overwhelming burden to develop your own sense of self created by you.

As much as you had to endure their sense of reality you did not have to adopt their traumas, and you do not need to continue building your sense of self around their personal emotional struggles. Yet that is exactly what most of us tend to do. We believe their views over what we believe to be true for ourselves. That is how we give away our personal powers to create our authentic self and identity.

The greatest damage you can do to yourself is to relinquish your personal powers to determine what you believe, who you want to be, and how you want to love. Even if your friends and parents don’t understand you, reclaiming your personal powers is critical for you to start the process. It takes time for the changes to take place, it takes courage to assert the new you, and it takes intention to keep seeking the answers for yourself. So often, others need ‘soaking time’ to adjust to the new emerging you, to get reacquainted with your new behaviors, new look, and assertiveness to be yourself. Their letting go of your old personality takes time, so their initial rejecting reactions at first will often dissolve over time.

After years of self-examination you can begin unlearning ‘their truths’ about you and begin building your own true self. You are capable of shedding the fears others have laid on you during your earliest growing years and begin creating your true self. It can be a very exciting time when you begin seeing through your own true eyes feeling self-love. Those of us most consumed by someone else’s ‘truth’ about us are often feeling the most lost and emotionally fragile. But we have tools within us that can shed the nonsense we have been programmed to hold about ourselves.

Even the well-loved and support child will experience the messaging that is not their own. All of us need to intentionally create our authentic self so that we have a firm, stable footing for facing the world of experiences. Trying to navigate these experiences using someone else’s beliefs and standards becomes an uncertain footing to rely on because we have only an abbreviated understanding of their beliefs and knowledge. Facing the world with our own standards gives us greater confidence with our decisions.

Taking That First Step

Just acknowledging your power and desire to change is a huge first step. Once you open that door to identifying your fears and believing that you can create your future you set in motion a lifetime of new experiences all helping you with your creative process. The natural state of your life’s journey is to be happy and to learn to love every moment. This I believe is the ultimate purpose of life, regardless of how you choose to proceed along your path.

Your soul is ever-present in every moment you have and is constantly presenting you with experiences designed for you to grow towards loving every moment. Even difficult, life-changing, and painful moments are part of the learning process not to be judged, but to be learned from. When you create the desire to change your inner self, your soul will facilitate experiences that lead you to your desired point. There is no timeline and the learning experiences can take years to play out.

Often, you will have a desire that first requires other learning experiences in preparation for the desired outcome. But conversely, experiences can happen quickly. It is just a matter of when you are ready to accept the opportunities you have. It is important to trust this learning process that your soul provides you with, even embracing the zigging and zagging that inevitably follows. Your soul is always helping you discover how to love with out judgment and some lessons can be painful, some joyful, and all beneficial.

For those of us most deeply entrenched in self-destructive behaviors it can take several lifetimes to discover this reality, but all of us will eventually evolve into more loving beings. Perhaps we can change that timeline by focusing on learning to love in this lifetime.

By helping your Inner Child release the fears developed around traumatic experiences you can ease those early painful emotions. In turn you ease your present-self emotional baggage. After all, unless you release your acquired emotional fear-based protections held within your micro-voices you will continue reacting to those difficult emotions for a lifetime. Getting to know your Inner Child can be challenging, but it is the path you need to follow for finding relief. You also need to intentionally develop a loving emotional connection with your Child who just wants to be loved and accepted by your adult self.

Photo source is unknown.

The Next Step is the Most Challenging

My journey through this process has spanned forty years of self-exploration. My first real discovery of my Inner Child started when I heard from my little boy during a Voice Dialogue session. To my surprise he told me he just wanted to be hugged, to be played with, and to be loved . . . by me! I was working 6-7 days a week and didn’t really know how to play. I had left him behind, alone, and feeling unsafe. Thirty years later I began purposefully trying to listen to my scared little boy while in prison and began discovering how he was affecting me still.

This unlayering of emotional energies that my Inner Child created for protection will be an ongoing process. I am still unraveling even deeper, earlier emotions that are hard to understand from my adult-minded perspective. These earliest, vague impressions are the core of my sense of self development where I first started forming my personal identity, my view of how safe I believed the world was for me at that time.

My little boy self was a consummate explorer of his natural world. It was his escape from his loneliness. It was his security blanket. It also became the foundation for his sense of self and sense of the world. These early ideas about myself may always be the core for how I see the world and myself. I hope so because they are wonderful perspectives to hold on to and reflect the amazement my little boy was discovering about the natural world he so enjoyed exploring. But he also was adopting clues about his worthiness, his sense of feeling loved, and his belief that somehow he didn’t really fit in with others. Many young minds go through similar processes.

I can look at my present day behaviors to get clues about what my infant and young boy self experienced that became my budding sense of self, but I may never be able to remember the specifics. Though I may not be able to change those early experiences, I can ease the sense of trauma associated with them by loving my little boy-self every day and finally giving him the safety and assurance that he craved back then.

It needs to be said that my parents loved me very much and never tried to intentionally abuse me in any way. As so many parents continue to believe today my parents didn’t give the type of nurturing that every child desperately needs for developing a healthy, loving sense of self. Appropriate touch, hugging, intimate tenderness, sharing and encouraging thoughts about the world, wanting to help me explore my ideas, and preparing me for the complicated changes that come with approaching adulthood were missing. Likely, these factors were missing in their early lives as well. Done intentionally or unintentionally, the result of incomplete nurturing for every child will be the development of an unhealthy sense of self based on judgment and held fears.

A word of caution, if you are feeling anger towards a parent, or regrets about your childhood, or did not feel loved enough, then your traumatic experiences became the source for the defensive emotional tools created by your Inner Child for protection to feel safer. These emotions are seen as internalized judgments and used as ways to shield your Child from those traumas.

Recognizing your emotions is a good place to start exploring and releasing your held fears that prevent living a loving, happy, non-judgmental life. Write down the emotions you can identify including the subtle, quiet emotions that sabotage your thoughts and conversations. Focus on one emotion and let the non-judgmental part of your mind describe the connections to your past. The more you ask, the clearer the message comes through. You can even ask your micro-voices to let the inner soul voice come through.

This introspection is a tool you can use over and over. The tendency by your micro-voices will be to retry past injustices and grievances. The chatter and confusion of thoughts can become overwhelming, but keep focusing on where the emotion came from. Try to identify why your Inner Child created the defensive need to judge. By restating your desire to understand the pain your Child was experiencing you will begin hearing from your Child through your deep inner voice the truth about the need for the emotional defenses felt by your Child.

Your Inner Child doesn’t want to keep being on constant alert for being defensive. By giving your Child an opportunity to state the fears and concerns, and your Child will tell you if given a chance, you can begin changing your thoughts and actions to better support your Child. This is part of the letting go process that can lead to real healing and growth. Once you let go of the judgmental emotional baggage you are able to hear your true inner voice coming from your soul that guides your life.

After ten more years with the memories of that first encounter with my inner little boy I made contact with my Inner Child once again during a visualization journey with my Shamanic Healer/Therapist. That break-through seemed to be the final stage for me being able to love every moment without judgment or fear. My little boy told me what we all want more than anything else, to just be loved and accepted. As I reached through the fog during a journeying session I took his hand and I instantly felt a weight being lifted from my shoulders.

Now my little boy is a daily part of my life. Having him at my side has brought me greater peace, self-acceptance for my beautiful self, and a clarity about what to do now with my freedom to be myself. After all, his life perceptions became the basis for his sense of self, and that core sense continues with me to this day. That’s why I value so deeply reconnecting with him. He is me, and life begins making sense now.

As a way to keep my little boy self closer to me I visualize giving him a hug at night, something missing in my childhood and even talking with him about how he is feeling. It is surprising how the act of giving him room to speak to me opens the door to real dialogue and later breakthroughs around traumas he experienced back then. This also works with later periods of childhood and even into adulthood. These periods of self hood are alive within me many decades later.

Everyone’s journey is unique, but the process is the same . . . find ways to release held-on-to emotions that interfere with your abilities to love, to be your greater self, and to heal others around you.It is a lifetime pursuit that results in loving every moment without fear, without judgment that lets your miraculously beautiful sense of self evolve into the wonderful being you are meant to become. - kc