The Alchemical Child
unasked for parenting advice for those who love
The Alchemical Child is born in love, regardless of whether it is conceived in love or not. It is born from the Divine spark as is all life. It is born in innocence – coming directly from Infinity to experience what it means to be human.
A child is born with infinite love. It knows itself to be Divine and it knows it without doubt. Infinitely resides in its eyes and when we look at a child we see ourselves reflected there. We see our own true selves and who and what we are. There is no hiding from a child’s eyes. As the Love it holds for us is complete. It is eternal and it is unconditional. Regardless of what we do, this child continues to love us and it continues to seek love from us. In many cases, long after the parent is gone, the child continues to seek love and approval form the parent, hoping and seeking. Unless it has come to realize that the most important love it has, is the one it has for itself – the eternal Divine Love that is our birthright, without condition and without judgement and it is ours regardless of who or what we have done with our lives and who or what we have become.
I have spent much of my life working with children and with the parents of children, both internationally and domestically. I have worked to help parents understand their children better, how to discipline more appropriately, and how to respond to their problems. But after years of doing this, I have come to realize my approach has been from the wrong perspective. The problem is not the child – the problem is the parent.
Children are our future. Often this statement is written but it moves far beyond this. Children are the mirror of our souls. Children reflect back to us who we are, who we have become as adults. They show us where we are wrong; children show us where we need to look within ourselves in order polish ourselves to become the gold we were meant to be; the Gold we somehow lost and spend our lives trying to find..
Alchemy is the process through which lead is transformed into gold. It is thought to be a myth – a sort of allegorical statement for our life’s journey. The Alchemist is in truth the child we bring into this world. This child comes in, in innocence and as it grows it gives back to us what we give this child, The catalyst that creates this process is Love. The Catalyst allows the interaction, provides the necessary elements for the action to happen but does not, itself, interfere with the process. It allows the process to proceed on its own without interference. It provides all of the elements for a positive outcome but allows the process to proceed, and if the process does not succeed, tries again. The catalyst has no investment in whether the process is successful but when it is, the entirety of creation celebrates.
A catalyst is defined as “a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without itself undergoing any permanent chemical change.” And this is the definition of Love. Love does not depend upon our belief in it, nor does it care about how we feel about it. It has no prejudgments and no expectations. We are free to reject Love or to accept it, as we see fit. Nothing we do can ever change it nor cause it to leave us. However, it is our choice whether we accept it or not. If we accept the presence of Love there is a remarkable alchemical process that happens within us that is beyond anything we could ever have imagined. But Love will never force itself upon us and we must open ourselves to it. And when we reject Love, we create our own suffering.
We bring children into the world and often repeat the statement, the child is our future. We see our future reflected in our child but what we so often fail to see is the present of who we are NOW reflected in the child. The Child becomes the mirror of who we have become as a present representation of our past. If we haven’t moved beyond fear and pain and shame and guilt, our child becomes the reflection of this past. We project onto the child the incompleteness of our own lives. If we haven’t learned to love ourselves, then how can we love the child. Unless we are conscious caring adults who seek to know ourselves better, our relationship with our children will be built on a foundation of ear and repulsion for what we see in their eyes. The Love they show us will terrify us and we will seek to prove we are not worthy and neither are they.
A Child comes into the world in innocence. When we look into the innocence of their eyes we see ourselves, not the Child. When we experience trauma, we relive this trauma until we figure out how to move beyond it. Early on in our lives we learn to become survivors. We turn from enjoying and being who we are and being alive to celebrate life, to operating in a survival mode. We become afraid of moving out of spaces we have discovered are safe – we begin to fear ourselves.