Our inner child plays a huge role in who we are and how we approach life. Photo: Pexels
As I have mentioned a few times before, a person is not just a body. You know you have something inside you that makes you you. In fact, we are highly complex creatures.
We have feelings and emotions, and usually those guide us through life and make us act a certain way. A memory of how something made us feel might influence how we act in the present and the future. We carry wounds and trauma with us that might come to the surface again much later in life.
Sometimes we act out on what our brain tells us and sometimes we listen to our heart. We might suppress feelings and act accordingly in order not to get hurt and try to empathize with other people and do things we normally wouldn’t do because we know it serves this particular moment best.
But what most don’t know is that we’re not just someone. We’re not our brain, or our heart, or our body, or our emotions. We are actually made of three different selves. They are the base self, the conscious self and the higher self.
The Base Self
According to Dan Millman – he wrote about this in his book ‘Sacred Journey of the peaceful warrior’ – the base self is our unconscious part, the inner child. It acts irrationally and based on emotions.
The base self is especially active at night, when it heals our body during sleep. The base is the one who collects our hurts throughout our lives and carries our wounds. It remembers things people said to us and how they treated us.
It’s important not to neglect our inner child. It wants our attention. It wants us to heal our wounds and traumas. If we don’t, it makes sure that those feelings come to the surface again. These unhealed traumas can damage our relationships.
It communicates to us with dreams and intuitive feelings. When we ignore it for too long though it sends us symptoms of disease, like infections and pain. It understands the energies of nature. It wants to feel loved and to belong somewhere.
The Conscious Self
Our conscious self is who makes our decisions on a daily basis. It is guided by logic and reason. This self is more unemotional and acts like a robot. We know when we act like x we’re going to get reaction y.
The way we go through life is mostly based on mind versus body, robot versus child, thinking versus feeling, logic versus instinct. Oftentimes, the brain shuts down our emotions and feelings, mostly to protect ourselves from somethings.
However, this is exactly when our inner child feels neglected. Our conscious self tries to shield us from mental, emotional and spiritual pain but doesn’t always know how to do it the best way.
It can also not predict which reaction is going to be best for our higher self.
The Higher Self
Our higher self is who you are in your purest form. It’s your soul that you can’t access through reason or emotion. Your base and conscious self make you human, but your higher self makes you divine.
It’s our lives purpose to come into contact with our highest self. The first two experience this life, but your higher self has experienced many lives before that. We get to meet our higher self when we awaken spiritually.
Your higher self knows the secret of the universe. It knows that a higher power guides you at all times, it trusts that everything serves our highest welfare, it is calm and it knows that we are never a victim of our circumstances.
However, we as humans forgot that when we were born, amnesia is part of our soul-contract.
How do they work together?
Our three selves’ job is to guide our body through this lifetime. We have it in our instincts to love ourselves. However, sometimes we struggle with this. All of our three selves try to show us love in their own way.
The base self nourishes and protects the physical body, guides you through intuition and emotion. Your conscious self protects your inner child through reason and logic. It delivers information, interprets the world, comforts and educates it.
Whenever it’s heart versus brain, understand that both try to give you the best. Your inner child wants you to open up your heart and receive love, wants to feel protected and cared for.
But your conscious self tries to protect you from getting hurt by acting based on reason. Both want the best for you and try to get the most amount of love and the least amount of hurt.
If you have been hurt a lot and usually pull up your walls, it’s likely that your conscious self has suppressed your base self. Your inner child feels lonely and misunderstood and longs for love. The bravest thing you can do then is to listen to what your base self really needs and once in a while open up your heart for possible positive outcomes.
Even if it means that you let your protector down and risk people hurting you. Because as Shakespeare said: “If you get hurt, love. And if you get hurt more, love more.”
Your highest self finally radiates love. It sparks the passion inside you. The three selves help each other and form a greater whole. But it’s important to not suppress one of them and instead let them lead each other.
Hope you liked this text 🙂
Love, Valentina <3
Written by Valentina – spiritual writer & founder of Valentina’s Diary
