Empty Your Backpack
and Claim Your Power
by Barbara Wilder
 Recent studies have revealed that school children develop long term back pain from carrying heavy backpacks. Like children with back packs all people carry a heavy load of past traumas, hurts, disappointments, losses, and grief. And what I have been noticing in my practice is that most of my clients not only have stored all these past miseries in their consciousnesses, and deep in their cells and molecules, they have also created an oversized psychic backpack in which to haul them around.
A lot of my clients, like so many people in our society, have been working on their psyches and their emotional growth for some time. Many of them have done various kinds of therapy and have come to me to help them to finally heal. My particular form of transformational therapy uses light energy to reveal and then shift the shadow material and burn it up, leaving behind only the essence or the nuggets of truth that each of life’s challenges hold. But our highly psychoanalyzed society has put such a heavy degree of importance on the work with the inner-child that we have forgotten that the inner-child needs to grow up eventually and become integrated into the healthy adult. Instead, I find many people so engrossed with their inner-child and parenting their inner-child that they have become over-indulgent, giving away their adult personal power to the wounded child.
In my book, Embracing Your Power Woman, I teach women to reconnect with their teenage selves, in order to unlock the door to their second half of life purpose. To do this they must delve into the traumas, hurts, disappointments, and shattered dreams from their teenage years, embrace them, and love them into healing, so that they can move through the dark passage of menopause into the light of their true purpose. But again, I often find women wanting to hold onto the pain instead of lifting up into the light of higher frequency, by pushing through, or diving down through the muck to come out the other side in the light. How much easier it is to coddle the wounded child’s tantrums, than to love her while simultaneously expecting her to heal through that love and come to stand on her/his own.
We humans actually prefer to stay in the old familiar patterns than push through into joy. Perhaps this is because joy is such strange new territory, and whatever is unfamiliar is frightening. But what if we could experience the joy? Would we still want to go back to the old patterns of worry, and pain, and anxiety? For many people the answer is, yes. For some people joy seems fleeting, ephemeral. Worry, anxiety, unhappiness, and drama seem more real in this world of illusion.
My grown son, Sean, and I have talked often about the necessity to dive deep into the darkness and continue until we come out on the other side to discover the light. One day he called me from Cancun where he was vacationing. He had gone snorkeling in a lagoon that afternoon with a couple of young women he’d met. As they dove down into the lagoon Sean saw what looked like a corridor that he felt might lead somewhere interesting. When he and his friends surfaced he said he was going to dive down there and check out where that corridor led and asked if they would like to join him. They rejected his offer and he dove by himself. The deeper he went the darker it got, and he was close to running out of breath. Then just as he was about to return to the surface, he heard a voice in his heart reminding him that when diving deep you must continue through the darkness...
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Copyright Barbara Wilder. This article was originally
published at our website, SoulfulLiving.com, in Fall 2007, as part of Soulful Living's "Personal Empowerment" Issue.
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