In keeping with what we have learned from the study of NDE’s and reincarnation, we know that as infants, we come to this lifetime fresh from our time on “the other side of the veil”. It is said that as young children, we experience life here on Earth with full force, so to speak, because we are free and open, and haven’t yet learned self-protective strategies that will develop as needed for the new lifetime.

Depending upon the family environment we come into, we may be faced with a crisis of how to cope and survive from a very young age. The necessity to manage our situation and the anxiety it evokes, may overwhelm us to the extent that security and other basic needs are not met. If we cannot trust our caretakers, or if they cannot protect us from deprivation or harm, our infant self will not remain whole; there will be some damage that will leave a wound as we move to the next stage of life experience.

We are amazingly resilient, and much of our young selves can manage to continue to learn and find much to enthrall us. But some of us are serially wounded, and we arrive at adulthood with healing work to do. Is this true for all of us? No, but the percentage of people who have secure and “easy” childhoods is certainly not the majority. And because it is so “normal” for children to blame themselves and feel shamed by their emotional pain and suffering, it can take many years, indeed decades, of trying to overcome poor self-esteem and “prove oneself to be worthy of love”, before true self awareness is possible.

It is then that with courage, and compassion for our wounded inner child, we are able to take hold of the direction of our own lives, and to actualize the purpose for which we were born. That purpose always involves joy, and freedom from the tyranny of being other than who we were born to be.