Rediscovering the Child Within

Rediscovering the Child Within

Ian Mansell

Mindfulness is usually defined as being completely “in the moment”: being alert to everything happening in your environment, aware through all your senses (including the ones you don’t normally use), yet not allowing yourself to engage intellectually with what you see. 

The ability to perceive without judgment or opinion is the key. In fact, you are rediscovering how to observe and discern through your feelings without the engagement of your intellect: which is very difficult to do if you are encumbered with a highly trained intellect but quite natural if you are a baby, fresh from the universe.

Have you ever walked through a public place and encountered young babies sitting in their mother’s trollies, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, staring at you and following your gaze as you move around them? They invariably focus not so much on your eyes and nose but just above and around your head. It is easy to imagine they are seeing a halo around your head and perhaps the angels that accompany you. Most people working with their angels will have experienced this on multiple occasions.

This quote describes it well:

”Babies have “super perception.” They may seem like they’re not really paying attention to anything. But they have a “lantern perception” that perceives everything, rather than a “spotlight perception” like adults have. So they do not yet distinguish between what is “important” and “unimportant.”  It is precisely this distinction that makes adults lose so much zest for life and curiosity.”

In your first seven years of life, you live purely from your ‘feelings’, so you are like a sponge, absorbing everything around you. It is the period before your intellect has developed enough to kick in and divide your loyalties into a competition between ‘what feels right for me’ versus ‘what others expect of me’. From the onslaughts of training you receive at home and school, you become programmed to behave according to what is ‘good’, ‘right’, ‘correct’, ‘polite’, ‘nice’ and so on. Your young intellect learns to seize on what is ‘important’ for you to be accepted by your family, friends and teachers, and in the process, your self-loyalty goes out the window.

You inevitably learn to ignore the whole picture and instead concentrate on what is ‘important’ in advancing yourselves in the eyes of others. You develop an opinion about everything. In your teenage years, you largely use your body of opinions to define who you are, basing your friendship circles according to those who agree with your ‘tastes’ and expelling those who do not fit.

To practise Mindfulness now requires you to become aware of how much you are running your life on opinions and then challenging and dismantling all the opinions you have been using to define who you are and what you stand for.

The intellectual opinions you formed ‘yourself’ around in your teens and twenties – what you ‘believe in’ - is precisely what stands between you and your attainment of Mindfulness.

You have to discard all your ‘grown-up’ ideas before you can stop choosing what is or is not ‘important’ in what life presents you. Only then can you open your eyes to the wider picture of non-judgmental discernment that Mindfulness requires of you.

The more you can achieve this, the closer you are to regaining your child-like part, and the closer you are to your feelings – your eternal soul part – and the unimaginably profound wisdom contained within it.

I close with a quote from a recent Living Illumination course:

“How aware we are in our day is how deep our angels can take us in our regrouping.”

What can you do now?

  1.  Take action – if your feelings are inspiring you to take action, check out our upcoming programs and one-to-one consultations at  www.livingillumination.com
  2. If you have received this email from a friend, you can subscribe here.  It’s safe. We will never share nor sell your details to any other providers.  We look forward to connecting with you.
  3. If you received this email – it’s time to inspire and share this article with others.

Read other articles related to this topic:

#livingillumination #spiritualenlightenment #awakening #howtoawaken #spirituality #affirmations #mindfulness #meditation #selfdevelopment #selflove#spiritualtruths #life #lovinglife #success #fulfillinglife #mindfulness