Meditation on your childhood experiences and emotions can be profoundly beneficial.
How should this meditation be practiced?
During meditation, there may be moments when certain childhood memories unexpectedly surface.
In such instances, it’s important to simply watch the images and emotions as they arise without making any deliberate effort to analyze or control them.
Allow these memories to come and go naturally, acknowledging their presence without resistance.
If a specific memory or emotion repeatedly resurfaces during meditation, it might be a meaningful subject to explore further.
A useful starting point is to focus on negative memories from your childhood that tend to surface repeatedly during your regular meditation sessions.
As a child, you were physically, mentally, and financially dependent on your parents and influenced by the adults around you.
During this time, you may have unconsciously formed parts of your identity, which now impact your current self.
Understanding past experiences and emotions helps not only to understand your past self but also to gain insight into your present self.
Events that might not seem significant from your current perspective could have been traumatic or deeply impactful to your younger self.
This is because, during those formative years, with limited decision-making power, you might have felt helpless or even developed feelings of regret and self-blame.
The key is to observe suppressed emotions from childhood, such as unavoidable frustration, sadness, or despair, with acceptance and compassion.
Understand and embrace them as they are.
Look to see if there are situations in your present life where you respond similarly to your childhood self, despite having grown and changed over the years.
By doing so, you can break the pattern of reacting to current situations with old fears.
Through this meditation, you can recognize the ways your past self informs your current reactions and heal from those old wounds.
The goal is to see the current “I” through the lens of the past “I,” embrace those old hurts, and use them to move toward a better future “I.”