I’m in a yoga class. I’m moving, stretching, efforting, trying to preserve my flexibility and strength. I’m keeping my body company, honoring it in moments of awareness, noticing sensations and breathing into them, saying “yes” to pleasures and discomforts with (ideally) equal enthusiasm.
Simultaneously, I host running critical commentary in my busy brain.
That person needs to rotate their shoulder tops away from each other in downward dog. Why is the teacher not adjusting them?
My bum right shoulder is making me favor my left side every time I put my weight on my hands and that is for sure going to f*** up my whole alignment.
That teacher needs to speak up; I can’t make out what they’re trying to relay in their Very Spiritual Monologue.
Did I forget to pouf the top of my hair up after I plopped it into that topknot before class? Do I look stupid?
In front of me there—what’s with that sports bra pulled so far down in the back? That looks weird.
This is representative of mental chatter to which I am subjected for most of my waking hours. Perhaps you identify?
(Perhaps…you’ve got lots of Virgo in your chart? Or a loaded 6th astrological house, like I do?)
I try hard to quiet this voice. I try not to give it my energy. I laugh at that One who never stops trying to identify what’s wrong and needs fixing. I have tried to counter absurd criticisms of self and others with positive and loving observations.
Nothing’s helped much…but I think I may finally have found a way—by finally knuckling under to this whole Inner Child thing I’ve been hearing about ever since I moved from the East Coast to Southern California.
I’ve had therapists and friends tell me that this hypercritical, controlling part represents a very young part of myself:
one that came to believe that setting “wrong” things right was the way to earn appreciation and love.
The more things I could see as broken, the more things I could help fix, and then, well, I would be so valuable, so beloved.
I would be the Big Fixer of All the Broken Things. And the world would love me for it. Or, at the very least, it would prevent me from being a wretched outcast.
In yoga today I have a more vivid than ever sense of that very young part of me.
She emerges clearly to me, in whatever part of one’s awareness holds images of things that do not exist in the hardscape of the present.
She is six years old with a shiny helmet of straight fine dark hair and eyes that droop at the corners, Snow White skin and plump cheeks and long lashes. She’s wearing a white nightgown with colorful smocking on the front. She’s curled up with a tattered pale pink blanket in one hand and her thumb in her mouth.
As my present-time self stretches, bends, and breathes in that sea of Spandex-clad bodies, each of us inhabiting our rectangle of sticky mat…
I sit down next to this soft, scared child and fold her up in my arms, spooning her little body with mine.
For a blessed few moments, the other noise stops.
The critical one keeps surfacing, and I keep letting that baby girl show up, and I keep wrapping my arms around her. I can feel her warmth, the velvety softness of her skin.
The present-time self’s critical spurts and blurts are becoming her signal to show up in all her fragility and need to be comforted.
Like a hungry house cat hearing its food can pop open across the house, she wafts through the ethers to me whenever I start whinging about things that are none of my business.
I hold her and hum to her. I tell her things—not canned affirmations (“You are enough just as you are!”), but more a speaking in tongues, a soul-patter that soothes and heals the part of her that thinks it can never rest.
Do you have a bitingly critical part who you wish would STFU?
Is there a chance that this part of you, too, is the adult expression of an early need to control, to shape, to fix in order to feel loved?
The next time you are aware of being critical about something that is (a) unchangeable or (b) not your business—see if you can open some interior door to let that wee one peek through.
Notice just exactly what that child looks like. How old are they? What are they wearing? What are they doing? How real can you make them? What do they need you to say? To do?
Invite them in. Fold them up in your arms.
In whatever way they need to feel your love: make it felt.