Pictures at an Exhibition

Posted on | March 29, 2009 |

A short while ago I asked some of my workshop members to select pictures of themselves, aged about 5, and to examine and discuss what they saw.

At first the discussion was somewhat hilarious, looking at these snapshots of kids in unusual or cute poses, yet it quickly became obvious that there were two stories one could detect, each very different.  For my workshop participants, without exception, chose pictures of themselves at moments just before or just as their lives changed in some significant way, and sometimes not in ways that were happy.

This left the group in a space in which they could have chosen to attach to the pain of the situations that had revealed themselves, the shadows of hurt that lurked just beyond the frame but which could be seen in many of those children’s eyes.

Instead of pain the group chose something so much more empowering.  They saw themselves in these pictures as possessing the strength of integrity, even at that early age.  “I knew something wasn’t right in the family, even then,” as one woman put it, and a man added that he saw “the essential happiness of that kid, then,” which he hoped to reconnect with.

In fact what each person in the group connected to was not the possibility of misery but the actual strength of character in these early versions of themselves, and they knew it could fuel them into the future.  This is the power of the Innocent.

We never lose that power, although sometimes we think we have.  It’s always there, waiting, patiently, for us to reclaim it. It’s the one uncrushable part of ourselves, created when we were a few minutes old, and nurtured was we learned how to feed and be loved. It’s primal, and it doesn’t go away.

Reconnect with the Innocent within you and your life will be given a jolt of energy the like of which you simply cannot get anywhere else.

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