Hi Anita

I’ve often felt the same, that I never truly experienced being a child in the way others describe it. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that my memories of feeling like a child are at best unreliable, fragmented, or shaped survival and insecurities than innocence. Funny I couldn’t tell you if the survival and insecurities of child hood that influenced the future or if its my adult insecurities coloring the past… such a tangled web.

This makes me wonder if it’s helpful to distinguish between our personal experience of childhood and the archetypal inner child. The former is shaped by circumstance, memory, and emotion which are often tangled with unmet needs or early wounds. The latter, though, is symbolic: a living presence within us that represents vulnerability, playfulness, creativity, and the longing to be held and seen.

When we speak of healing the inner child, we’re not necessarily trying to reconstruct or validate our actual childhood. We’re tending to something deeper, a part of us that still needs care, even if our early years didn’t provide it. A invitation not to recover what was lost, but to begin offering now what was never given, or understood or felt as given.

I’ve found the same approach helpful when working with the archetypes of mother and father. Not as literal parents, but as symbolic presences within. Just as with the inner child, it helps to separate the lived experience from the archetypal energy. The personal stories may be tangled, painful, or incomplete, but the archetypes offer a way to relate to, develop and reclaim within, qualities like protection, nurture, strength, and guidance.

In attempting integrating these archetypes, I’ve had to wrestle with the idea of unconditional love. A work in progress, as I’ve found that its to often misunderstood as unconditional allowing, sentiment without integrity. For me Love without accountability isn’t love, it’s enabling…

It’s difficult to articulate how we can love someone unconditionally… to accept them as they are in the present moment, even when and as they fail us… its difficult enough to love ourselves that way. But I’m learning that unconditional love holds it all… the failures and the boundaries.

I wonder that to love someone unconditionally is to hold their humanity with compassion, even when they fall short. Isn’t that now how we love our children? I’ve often wondered if its the reason the wisdom traditions turn to the word compassion more often then the word love…

For me the word Compassion, is spacious… less about how we feel and more about how we relate. Compassion includes empathy, but also clarity. Compassion can hold pain without needing to fix it, and can set boundaries without withdrawing care. It’s love with wisdom, love that sees clearly. Unconditional Compassion?

Hi Anita

My first thought was what would the ‘look’ like and the second wondered if this was associated to the conversation happening in the safe and brave threads.

As an invitation what I’m hear you suggesting as entering garden as children (integrated child archetype) as a call to engage with openness, curiosity, and presence while not abandoning maturity… remembering the part of us that knows how to wonder and trust.

Where adults tend to build boundaries and walls the child in us knows how to climb them for joy, for connection.

Tending this, or other, gardens in this way means honoring both the walls that protect, and the vines that reach beyond. To Alessa point, It’s not about returning to innocence as a romanticizing of childhood, but about re-membering wholeness where innocence and experience, child and adult, safety and bravery, all have a place.

Growth coming from care, risk, and trust in the unfolding… even if and when we scrape our knees in the process…

Reading your invitation through the lens of Threefold Breath, I’m reminded how each breath holds movement and stillness, rising and returning, much like the child and adult within us. The garden a place where breath becomes presence, and presence becomes transformation.

In child like wonder perhaps tending this garden is itself a kind of breath a rhythm of creation, dissolution, and reconciliation that ask us: How does the breath move in your garden? What grows when you listen to it?

Hi Alessa

I’m glad you pointed that out. Speaking for myself, though I felt Anita’s reflected the same feeling – seeing the child and adult held together in the ‘spiral of becoming’ contains, and mixes, all the complexity you’ve named.

What you’re reminding us of that the common romanticization of the child is often used as an escape from wholeness. For me the integration of the child archetype, as Jung described, is not just innocence and joy but also carries vulnerability, dependency, and wounds. So when I speak of ‘seeing the child in the adult,’ I mean reclaiming the child’s wonder and spiritual connection, but also integrating its shadow: the fears, the wounds, the longing. It’s not about idealizing the child but becoming the child again, with eyes wide open. As you say “accepting human nature. Taking the “bad” with the “good””. Different paths landing in a similar place. 🙂

I might also add that ‘seeing the adult in the child’ isn’t idealized either. Sometimes I see confidence and maturity… but sometimes I see the adult’s crushed spirit already present in the child. Wholeness holds both.

Thanks everyone: after posting I wondered if the word failure was a “Freudian slip” when I meant to say familiar. 🙂

The “connecting me to the We”… I ponder the notion of wholeness or is it holiness… which shares its root with wholeness – whole, uninjured, sound… healing… AUM? 🙂 everything connected…

Reflection On Wholeness
We live in a world that teaches and even rewards fragmentation.
From early on, we learn to divide self from other, body from spirit, sacred from ordinary.
We are taught to measure, to compare, to strive.
Wholeness becomes obscured, our attention trained elsewhere.

We often mistake wholeness for perfection fearing it or deny it possibility.
But wholeness is the presence of everything, held together in love.
It includes the wound, the shadow, the longing.
It is not a clean slate, but a full one.

Wholeness is elusive because it asks us to slow down, to listen, to receive.
Wholeness is not something we lack; it is something we forget.
Wholeness cannot be grasped, it can only be entered.
Wholeness is not a destination to be achieved, but a presence to be remembered.

Wholeness is the breath before the breath,
The silence beneath the sound,
The stillness within the motion.

Wholeness holds the part without dividing,
Holds the wound without denying,
Holds the unfolding without rushing.

Wholeness is the circle that contains the spiral of becoming,
The center that is everywhere,
The circumference that is nowhere.

To live from wholeness is to move with intention,
To receive without grasping,
To act without forgetting the source.

To live from wholeness is to live in holiness.
It is to remember that nothing is outside the circle.
Where time flows, and the Eternal breathes through it all.
That the spiral of becoming is held in love.
And love holds it all

I wonder what others experience on wholeness?
What does wholeness mean to you, is it something you wonder about?

Concerned I may have confused the notions of change and fixing I ran the above response through AI to evaluate it. The response I found helpful in the exploring how the words change and fix are often entangled in our language and psyche, especially across different life stages. So I’ll pass it on as possible points of discussion.

1. Fixing as Control vs. Change as Emergence
You’ve articulated that fixing often carries the energy of control — an attempt to restore or correct something according to a preconceived ideal. It’s often reactive, rooted in discomfort with what is. In contrast, change in your framing feels organic, like breath, something that arises when we stay present. This is a distinction where fixing implies a problem while change implies a process.

2. The Dance Metaphor: A Living Image
Your dance metaphor fits. The attempt to “fix” a missed step by speeding up or slowing down mirrors how we often try to correct the past or force alignment with an imagined future. But the rhythm the music asks for is trust, not control. It’s not about getting back to the step, but rejoining the flow. That’s change as listening, not fixing.

3. Seasons of Life and the Shift in Task
Your reflection on the second half of life as a season of letting go is aligned with many contemplative traditions. Fixing belongs to the first half, where building, shaping, and striving are necessary. But later, the task shifts to softening, releasing, and being. And even this realization is itself a change, a quiet transformation.

4. Language as Mirror
You’re also pointing to something subtle: how language can shape or distort our experience. “Fix” and “change” may seem interchangeable, but they carry different emotional and existential weight. Your mindfulness in how you use these words is part of the contemplative work itself.

5. The Human Condition: Not Broken, Just Becoming
Your closing thought “we were never broken, only human” reframes the impulse to fix as a misunderstanding of our nature. We don’t need repair; we need relationship with ourselves, our past, our breath, our music. And in that relationship, change happens.