Clarity of Innocence

The average person today has suffered enough hurt, to cause us to feel lost about our own identity, values, needs, and ambitions.

As our world becomes less accepting, and more dangerous, people often question the loss of that focused awareness, that we used to take for granted.

We aren’t connected any more to our physical selves, not like before.

For most, if not all of us, we have partially disconnected, internally. We can feel the difference, even though we cannot fix it.

We can bring some of it back.

Of course, this damage should never happen. Not to any life form.

To have it happening to people, the supposedly dominant life form of the planet is particularly troubling.

What is happening?

Our young are hurting.

Why do they hurt?

They are no longer allowed to be self driven.

All life is self driven! That’s what life is!

It bursts into this world with it’s tail on fire! It has been created to treat threats to it’s survival passionately, with aggressive, dynamic, and instant action.

Each new life is already the best of the best. They know it too! They come out of the gate, with the pedal to the metal!

Now for a serious and sobering question. What happens if we take a new life, while on fire with the determination to survive at all costs, and then tell it to sit down, shut up, and do as we say?

Well, what do you think? Could this work? Can people with this much drive stop their own efforts, and accept obedience, all without damage to themselves?

Time, and phycologists will sort out those answers, however in the meantime, the answer is a very loud, NO!

We already know the answer. We also know what to expect. We already live with the consequences of trying to control all this energy, coming from such a tiny body.

Any new life, forced to stop helping itself, will hurt. Evidence of the hurt can be seen. The reason’s can’t.

We first learn to walk and talk. We do it easily, and pretty much all by ourselves. People may try to help us, but it’s us that reaches out and takes command of our own learning. Teaching someone who doesn’t want to learn, demonstrates what happens when they aren’t doing that.

When we are focused on the next skill to develop in our march into surviving, but at the same time we find ourselves forcibly prevented from following any action towards our goals, we just hurt.

We are all warriors. We get born, alert and ready to bust our asses, in an all out blast for survival!

That’s nature’s way.

What if we take a room full of warriors, then make them sit down and study. Meanwhile there is all kinds of action happening that is clearly more important to their unique but perhaps undeveloped skills.

What results would you expect?

I expect we just damaged a roomful of warriors.

I believe the hurt is obvious. The crying and screaming stops instantly when we respect any child’s own drive and wishes. Life suddenly goes quiet and peaceful.

The next step is not as obvious, but we have watched it happening in various therapies, as people move into and out of trouble.

People disconnect. They can do that. Getting back is very difficult.

With enough hurt, people can disconnect. This is a sort of twilight zone. In this condition, we aren’t really living the way life is supposed to. We are mostly hiding. We can feel the wrongness of it. Conflict is everywhere. The love and trust we crave is absent. We no longer have the ability to express even one uncensored experience. We aren’t living. We are in limbo, waiting to heal.

We will not heal though.

The forces that caused us to stop presenting ourselves in our own full glory, are all still in play. If we reveal ourselves as we really are, we will be devastated with guilt, intense shame, (which comes as feelings of not being good enough), and the fear of being vulnerable, just waiting to be shut down again.

Who, among us, has the courage to walk into those old feelings, because to regroup, that’s what we have to do.

To recover from being disconnected, it is necessary to reintegrate. To do that we need to own every feeling that happens, or ever happened to us. We are ashamed of most of those feelings, because we believed that we were wrong in trying to live through our own efforts. We weren’t wrong, but we had no way of knowing it.

Therefore we go to therapy, to feel wrong, and to sort it out.

It works though!

That part of our feelings becomes ours once again, and we can work out the right and wrong of it later. As it turns out, we were right all along, in our original condition. Each human is unique, and is a warrior, simply by being born into this world. We all are. We come equipped to adapt, and survive. What we need is support, and some room. Putting us in a cage is the absolute most destructive thing that could ever be done to us. We are not designed to live through that, intact!

The kindest, most compassionate person we can ever be, is that original person, just the way we were born. That’s because we could feel our own needs. The first and strongest need is, we need to feel loved! Feeling full of that, how would you act? Would there be conflict? Of course not. Being accepted is more important than anything else, and anybody still connected, knows that.

Changes happen when we feel accepted as we are, and when we manage our own environment. There is a whole other life available here. A life of joy. Unfortunately, we don’t know much about this side of life. Pity! We can be far closer to other people in this condition than we ever could while controlling each other. Every attempt at control holds all of us back.

People are at their very best when not controlled. That just happens. Perhaps nature is wiser than us, at least until we make some sort of effort to really understand what people really need.

When we get stopped every time we return to our own path, our conclusion is the same. We feel like we were wrong. That happens over and over again, seemingly forever. Now we believe we are wrong, wrong all over, wrong every which way, wrong about everything, wrong every time. That’s been our experience so far. How do you see this turning out?

Still feeling this way as grown ups, is why we try so hard to prove we are right. Every one of us, is completely sick of always being wrong. It may not always feel like it, but it’s always there, and we boil over, pretty quick.

Why would anybody treat a warrior this way?

Whatever the reason, it happened, planetwide.

The results are exactly as would be expected. We have children who hurt, people who don’t know what they want, being aware they aren’t right, but arriving at different conclusions as to what went wrong, and how to fix it.

Everybody struggles with who they are. That’s because we had to bury that, out of excessive hurt.

Obviously, we have to stop doing that to our children.

We cannot do that without a radically different mindset!

Our young are indeed warriors. For their entire life, they will be all that stands between life, and their own sudden death! Treat them with a high degree of respect, and they will view you in the same way.

Now, can you imagine a better world than what happens with everyone living like that? That’s the mind set that works. People can feel strong, capable, and proud of everything that they are. That’s a good start to a far better life. A natural life.

Removing damage at the beginning of every child’s life is going to change our civilization. As far as I can tell, it’s the loss of connection with our feelings, that is causing the conflict we all suffer through.

Any problems remaining, once we have undamaged people, will probably not involve conflict.

I believe the need to feel loved, and being unable to know that, is the cause of just about all of the conflict that we struggle with.

Should any problems still exist, taking care of a great many people will probably be all that remains.

With cooperation, instead of everybody secretly trying to be more rich and powerful than the next guy, (which happens with excessive hurt), I expect we can easily manage. With everybody healthy and on board, we could probably clean up this world in 50 years, or less.

There are some examples of lesser damaged people who still live somewhat through their feelings. It’s a whole different life.

This blog is clarity-of-innocence.com There are many posts, all exploring the same topic.

Thank you for allowing me to be part of your day.

Norm Cormier.