The Inner Child in Traditional Community Wisdom

There are many ideas that arise in inner child work that are reminiscent of ideas from traditional community wisdom. Our own workshops were developed beside Andean healers who spoke of a little us as something embodied and always present within us. Sobonfu E. Somé is an African community teacher and mentor who homed-in on inner child work as a medium to express indigenous wisdom from her Dagara elders. What inner child work allows is the creative and safe space to have conversation, relationship, which to the Dagara always has a spiritual dimension. The Dagara have preserved old ways of village life with family and spiritual practices that have been bound together for more than 10,000 years.

For Sobonfu, who’s name means ‘keeper of rituals’, the inner child concept used in therapy has given a more joyful capacity for transferring the wisdom of her people in a meaningful tone. Providing analogy to the animistic forms of ancestral connection. We’d like here to explore how that can be most understood through our practices with The Inner Council.

Sobonfu says that the social and communal aspects of their people do not differ that much from indigenous communities elsewhere. There is one grounded common sense that comes from community living. Meaning that in a village directly inspired by the earth and surrounding nature the community is built into those relationships, the same way we think of relationships between each other. With that in mind she has identified that A lot of us suffer a great deal in our lives because our inner child has old wounds that have never been healed. It is important to know how to overcome our old wounds, because all too often they stand in the way of our ability to fully love ourselves, other people, and the children in our lives. Our old wounds often become our children’s burden.

This concept has allowed Sobonfu to extrapolate the teaching of elders, who’s own techniques are often abstract from our own understanding. To speak of embodied relationships with aspects of ourselves is to give a creative approach to ideas of healing and integration. A graceful solution is then proposed, explained alongside several biographical examples. The core of the solution is to emulate the practice of loving and paying attention to your inner child in a way that you can identify any previous absence. To invert the sense of pain or loss that we feel into the giving embrace. Feeling out the role of being on the other side of a child who is asking for something. She states that by giving love to children and by nurturing the spirit in children in a true and unselfish way, we actually heal our own wounds. This is based upon an idea that what you are capable of putting out, comes back around to be received. This thinking is also at the root of projection and victim consciousness.

Throughout the literature provided by Sobonfu and her husband Maladome, much of that shared gives consideration to soft rituals. The spaces that we can create in order to approach our own personal inner healing. How we form an inner relationship in order to have the conversation. Children need a voice and a listening ear, so in inner child work we begin with the most simple of rituals to create a space for a conversation. With our eyes closed, a relaxed state of mind and a willingness to engage with the rhythm of our heart we can begin to hold the space that’s required for the conversation to play out.

When we begin this work, there’s much catch up for our inner child. There are conversational skills that we need to refine. There are aspects of our lives that need to be considered for the effect they have on our wellbeing. Then there are stories to share. For traditional communities, stories are the medium in which wisdom is shared through metaphoric tales. Stories are a way for communities to tell truths without scaring or shaming individuals.

What we find in these held spaces of ritual conversation is that spirit likes to be invited into space and there is a tendency for spirit to gather friends, relatives, friends of friends and so on. So we often find quite early on in this work, that there’s a team gathered that wants to act something out together. Each aspect of spirit has a specific virtue or unique gift that will be presented at some timely place in the story of integration. Many are intrigued by this area of the work and questions are often raised around validity etc. As the elders remind us, all you really need is the sincerity of your heart and a willing ear. An open-minded conversation and a nonjudgmental attitude gives children the freedom to express themselves without feeling that the world is going to come after them.

Sobonfu says that children form a very important part of ritual. When children are present, the most simple and vibrant rituals become possible. If they are there, whatever you do wrong is right. For some reason they are, by their own nature, naturally ritualistic. We’ve often described this in the inner child work as having a golden ticket, access-all-areas or a backstage pass. The child, through innocence, is divinely blessed, protected and totally self-authored. The elders will instruct that when we call on the spirits, we need to state our purpose and allow them to take the lead while we follow. Sincerity and purity is the solution for criticism and negativity that may prevent us from proceeding. Next we can be very specific about our needs or goals, and as we do we can feel the rousing interest of spirit to be involved in our healing ritual.

This is where things get interesting and we establish a mutuality in the shared narrative with ancestors. Our personal insights are often collaborations in parallel integration of ancestral traumas. Traumas themselves can be considered as dense knots of wool or bundles of wood, Carl Jung called them complexes and more specifically constellations. Ancestral healing is powerful work. by releasing a traumatic energy from our own childhood, we’ve seemingly unchained a burdened and haunted group of exiled souls. When this level of work has been demonstrated to the participant in meditation, the personal relationship with doubt in spirit changes. We may find out that scepticism is a reverse-defence mechanism designed to keep us away from places that we have no business in attending until we are ready. To those who are, the weight of self-responsibility in the space of spirit can land on us in an appealing and powerful way.

Sobonfu reminds us that every time you want to move into a ritual, you need to recognize that there’s a whole line of ancestors behind you, there’s a whole spirit world around you, there is the animal world, the ground world, the trees, and so forth. If you have a way of saying to these forces, “Come and be with US in such a way that we can feel and do such-and-such,” then you’re already in ritual.

When we talk about ancestors there’s often a question about who these ancestors are, what they want from us and who they may represent. Elders explain that these ancestors are nobody in particular, but at the same time can fit any configuration that may lead us to self-understanding in a healing or integration process. It can be a tree, a cow, great-great-grandfather or primordial agents from another dimension. That anyone who has lost their physical body is a potential ancestor. An elder once said to me… ‘when ancestors come out of the sky and from different worlds, it means that we’ve got ourselves into a huge mess and require out of the box solutions’. See Carl Jung’s essay Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies.

If you need the support of the ancestors, you can begin an invitation addressed to the ones who I know, and the ones who I don’t know, and those who know me more than I do myself.

In inner child work we are generally reflecting back to the emergent process of consciousness arriving into the configuration we recognise as our-self. Me. Our unique constellation that gives the sensibilities and quality to our specific sense of awareness.

There is much within this to unpack from our present relationship with others in our community, especially when considering our sense of self and purpose. Sobonfu adds that we might think that the confusion we experience in our daily life happens in isolation, but in reality it has something to do with our lack of connection to our ancestors. The idea of healing our ancestors can be helpful in this context.

Initiation in traditional communities is a great instruction of spirit to raise the developing soul to a fully fledged member of the tribe. During initiation there are no secrets left out, intimacy and sex is discussed, the danger of energetic forms entertained from personal pursuit are clearly demonstrated. The individual is extinguished. After initiation, there is a long period of mentoring. If there is something that isn’t understood, you turn to the elders for instruction. This is one of the forms that we include in inner child work. Once the tools have been given through the workshop, the participant may require a period to ask questions and to be guided into new areas of nurturing and developing the trust relationship with their inner child.

Ancestor spirits can see future, past, and present. They can see inside of us and outside of us. They can see cross dimensionally. And they’re lucky not to have physical bodies as we do, because without the limitation of the body, they have the fluidity of an eye that sees many different ways, many different directions.

We are the eyes of all the ancestors that are not living in this world. When something doesn’t feel right in our relationships or with things that are happening on a bigger scale in the world, we have the ability to make contact with these ancestors.

For many people the lack of creativity is a barrier to confronting these issues. Inner child work is designed exactly for people to gain their creative power in order to sling it around and make their presence felt and known with impact in places of spirit. Inner children are not passive, well behaved creatures, they have full agency and a powerful role to play in our sense of identity and purpose. Children have curiosity with precision, they are apt to intuit what is needed from their environment and present their gifts with graceful conviction. They respond to genuine love, not conditioned responses or the offhanded demands of others. They cannot be sold out, they do not respond to smash-and-grab tactics. They demand the exact amount of attention that makes a difference to the quality of being alive. In Subonfu’s Dagara village, the elders say that the best teachers are the children. That a child cannot be born without a purpose and that each soul comes to this world to give a unique gift. In inner child work we can demonstrate the protective attitude required in order for our inner child to reveal this gift to us, to speak to us directly from their belly, truth without fear.

Sobonfu says that children sometimes struggle because they find doors shut before they have grown out of infancy, then they have to rebel to make people hear them in order to open those doors. The uniqueness of the child can only be understood if the child is consulted and provided the room and support for nurturing their gift. The most valuable gifts may be obscure until they are unveiled.

Do we as parents have the patience and trust to support that nurture unconditionally?

Until these attributes can be understood and provisioned, our inner child may be reluctant to reveal the big purpose that will give us the sense of belonging to our community.

Sobonfu says that to succeed as a parent we must: acknowledge that there is a powerful spirit present that should be honoured instead of taken away.

In order to understand more about inner child work and how it concerns your personal development, please contact us for a confidential and friendly conversation. We are, by the way, expecting you.

Sobonfu E. Somé

• The Spirit of Intimacy: Ancient teachings in the ways of relationships
• Welcoming Spirit Home: Ancient African teachings to celebrate children and community
• Falling Out of Grace: Meditations on loss, healing and wisdom

 James Hillman, Michael Meade, Malidoma Somé

• Images of Initiation

Carl G. Jung

• Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. – Civilization in Transition, Volume 10 of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung.