In the last piece, I walked you through pranayama, the second gate, the practice that starts pulling you out of your head and back into your body. When you maintain a deep and consistent breathing practice followed by meditation, something starts to loosen. The ego, the computer in your head that performs and protects and manages, finally steps aside. And when it does, someone now has room to come forward.
That someone is your Inner Child: the living part of you, formed before you had language, that still carries your innate passion for the things you loved before anyone told you what you were allowed to love; the aliveness you had before the world taught you to manage yourself instead of feeling yourself.
Your Inner Child is NOT a metaphor. He, she or they are where real healing begins. Not in disconnecting from the ego for its own sake, but in what that disconnect makes room for: an honest meeting with the child within you.
HOW THE WOUND ACTUALLY SHOWS UP
Most adults don’t go about their day-to-day thinking about their inner child. What they recognize instead are the symptoms, which I break down into three patterns called The Three T’s: Triggers, Trammels and Toxic Habits.
Triggers are reactions out of proportion to what is happening or has happened. Someone doesn’t text back for an hour and you spiral. A family member provokes you and you go from zero to rage. That disproportion is the tell. You’re not reacting to the present moment; you’re reacting to an old wound that just got touched.
Trammels are freezes or shutdowns of the body and/or the mind. The moment intimacy gets too close, something in you goes numb, distracted, or simply leaves the space while your body stays in it. That’s not you being cold. That’s a much younger part of you deciding it isn’t safe to stay present.
Toxic Habits are the compulsive loops: substance abuse, endless scrolling through apps at 2 a.m., the low vibration patterns you’ve told yourself hundreds of times you should stop. These aren’t moral failures. They’re relief valves that soothe the wound momentarily and resolve nothing while keeping the cycle alive.
If any of these sound familiar, they’re not diagnoses. They are simply displays of a human being who was never shown how to meet their own pain.
THE LOOP YOU KEEP RUNNING
The Three T’s don’t stay contained inside you. They play out everywhere. Family, friends, coworkers, strangers, lovers. Every interaction is a chance to either respond, from the present moment, or react, from an old wound that just got touched. All of these relate to what the Buddha referenced as duḥkha: the vicious cycle of fear, control, and desire repeats continually in our head, taking old history and projecting it onto your present as though it were happening again, right now, for the first time. So, whether it’s a parent, a friend who let you down, or a love interest you’re drawn to, you’re often not responding to the person in front of you. You’re reacting to everyone who made you feel small, unseen, or not enough and asking this person, right now, to somehow prove them wrong.
That’s an impossible job to hand another person. No one can heal an old wound from the outside. That work must happen from the inside, with you.
TWO PHASES TO HEALING
Meeting your inner child isn’t a single breakthrough moment. It’s a process. And in my work, I walk it in two important phases:
The first phase is PLAY. That might sound too simple to matter, but it’s the opposite. Ecstatic dance, unstructured movement, anything joyful and without purpose: this is what coaxes the adult ego to step aside long enough for the child buried in your innate feminine to surface. Most of us haven’t played, really played, since we were hurried to grow up. That playfulness is the doorway in.
The second phase is SPECIALIZED TRANCE WORK with an experienced intimacy practitioner like me where you witness and re-experience emotionally specific childhood memories. During this meditative therapy, a credible and knowledgeable intimacy healer will guide you into those memories to reclaim the powerless child and to empower them through a partnership of you now taking on the responsibility of parenting the child, and the child promising to make you aware of your original passions and purpose.
Both phases are actual medicine, because the child in you was never waiting for someone else to rescue him. He/She/They were waiting for you. And reclaiming that child isn’t solely about healing the hurts — it’s about recovering what they loved before the wounding, before you learned to perform and protect instead of simply being. That passion never disappeared. It got buried. Your inner child still holds it.
NO ONE-TIME FIX
Reparenting doesn’t end after one session or one cathartic cry. It continues, daily, through the same thing that started the healing: play. Painting, dancing, building something with your hands, watching cartoons that make you giggle and guffaw. Whatever form of joy you lost access to believing “seriousness is safe,” play is the daily remedy now. This healing practice also includes integrating your shadow: bringing the wounded child inside instead of keeping him locked out, ashamed, running the show from the basement of your psyche while you pretend he isn’t there.
WHY THIS IS REAL WORK
Everything I’ve shared so far — access versus intimacy, breath and presence, reclaiming the inner child — circles back to one point. You cannot be present with another person or align with the purpose you were innately meant to pursue, while that child is still locked away. Your inner child is not just the keeper of your wounds. He/She/They are the keeper of your passion. Reclaim him/her/them. Parent him/her/them, and he/she/they will point you back to the life that was always meant to be yours.
This is the work. Not managing triggers. Not white knuckling your way past toxic habits. It’s reconnecting with the part of you that got hurt, reclaiming the part of you that still knows what you love, and becoming your own solid, loving protector.
As I remind all my students: you are already whole. The answers are all in you. Just do the work to realize it.
— DaddyGuru
About the author: John Kristopher Thomsen, known to his students and clients as DaddyGuru, is a Canadian Tantric teacher and intimacy healer based at Casa Kāma, his healing sanctuary in Costa Rica. He works with gay men on erotic maturity, inner child healing, and presence. This piece draws on the work at the center of his book, You Are the Love of Your Life.