Oana
Hello and welcome to episode 32 of The Feminine UNCUT podcast. I’m Oana, your host, life coach, and founder of TheFeminine.com, a digital platform dedicated to women all over the world. A place where we champion a new paradigm of how to take care of yourself as a woman, the feminine way, and how to be the woman you admire the most. Why not? Why not be the woman you admire the most? And in this episode of The Feminine Cut, we talk about, well, something very important to us that keeps coming back and coming back, no matter how grounded we are in our healing process. The healing of the inner child. Yes, the healing of the inner child. So, yes, we’re talking again about our little girls, inner girls, and outer girls. And I know that you want this because you’ve given us constant feedback about going more in-depth here. So let’s dive in and explore more about this beautiful connection that we can establish in our psyche, in our lives, us, and the inner child. But before we start, I want to invite you to something pleasurable, amazingly pleasurable, and very feminine, which is the free mini-course we just launched.
Oana
It’s called The Arrangement of Beauty and Shine that beauty to the World. It’s designed and addressed to offer you guidance to connect you with your feminine energy, to make this process real and tangible, to improve your relationship with yourself and with your body, with your feminine energy, with men, and just kind of like give you a little bit of the ABC of what we do. And also a daily practice, a daily set of rituals that you can practice and use to connect and nourish your feminine self. It’s available. Just click on TheFeminineCom minicourse and it’s yours for free. And don’t be shy or selfish. Share it with a woman, a girl, a daughter, your boss, your neighbor, or whoever you feel that would benefit, would love to feel pleasure and the feminine essence in their lives. So you are here with me and we’re going to tackle our relationship with our inner child. We also have a story from feedback from Laura, one of our listeners. And I’m going to let you and I introduce ourselves and introduce Laura.
Ioana
Hi, Oana. Hello, everyone. I think it was time, in the end, to start talking more about the inner child. We addressed the topic of the inner girl a little bit more in the third pillar of the four pillars of femininity course. But as the inner child is one of the golden assets of your coaching methods, I think it’s time to let the light shine on it. So, yes, we have a very thorough, I might say you feedback from Laura, she replied. In fact, at one of the podcasts that were episode 28, where we were talking about the challenges of womanhood and ask our listeners to send us feedback about what are their challenges, and surprise, surprise, Laura pointed out that working and healing the inner child is in fact a challenge of her femininity. She says I think a new podcast about working with her child or adolescent would be helpful with more concrete aspects. And then she shares with us four specific challenges that she has. But before I go in-depth into her challenges which are very relevant to the topic at large, I want you to explain to us why. For Laura and for many of us at the same time.
Oana
The inner child can be a challenge for our femininity because most of our limiting beliefs reside in the inner child archetype, in the inner child aspects of our personality and of our psyche. We absorb these very unhealthy patterns, habits, limiting beliefs, and a set of emotions that are more negative as we go through childhood because we’re very vulnerable psychically, emotionally, and psychologically, we rely on our parents. And if our parents are not the best references or in relation to us, they’re not coming from their whole heart itself and just teaching us with no heart. In a way, the inner child feels abandoned, unloved, deserted, disappointed, betrayed, and so on and so forth. So these impressions, these perceptions, this set of emotions that we carry become our reality, our inner reality we develop as adults. We become very smart at what we do and we become very knowledgeable and educated and we tend to be amazing in the world. But yet our inner reality still is the inner reality of our inner child of who we were as a child. And not only in this lifetime. In many other lifetimes, some of us carry a particular set of things that until we resolve them just carry from one life to another lifetime.
Oana
So childhood is very important because no matter how much we develop our minds, even our energetic capacity to explore manifests ourselves as God in a way with Godlike potential. We are in reality limited to what the inner child feels, thinks, and can manifest. And unless we dig deeper into that, we are stuck in bringing that vision for ourselves into reality.
Ioana
Just to be clear from the very beginning, for those who are new to the topic, the inner child is the same thing as the inner girl.
Oana
Yes.
Ioana
Just tell us about how the inner girl and inner boy work and can be both aspects of our inner child.
Oana
Well, yes, the inner child is neutral because as children we are neutral up to a certain point in time, psychologically speaking. So we can have many inner children that can be boys and girls of different ages, of different ages. Because sometimes in meditation what comes up is the inner child is different aspects of our childhood where we got stuck and our psyche is bringing them to light as a personification of a child. So if I’m stuck at four in my relationship to life and being able to be strong in life for whatever reason, I had a situation. My parents weren’t there for me. I got stuck and I felt emotionally abandoned. And I really felt it like a trauma or emotional wound. I experienced it in my masculine sight. So a little boy is coming up in my meditation in my process to unravel and guide me into that situation, make me remember that situation, release my emotional baggage, question my limiting beliefs that I set forth when I was four, and kind of like, rely on this relationship to a whole new level, to nourish love this boy, to make him grow up beyond that limitation and kind of like, rely on this nourishment and this relationship to manifest whatever I need right now in my life as an adult that is connected to the energy that I was exploring at four when I got stuck.
Oana
So it’s like a maturation of what I was doing and being at four so that I can have that as a resource today when I want to manifest things as an adult.
Ioana
Okay, I will come back to the feminine aspect of the inner child. But before we go through the specific challenges Laura writes us about them because they are very relevant. For instance, the first thing she considers to be a challenge is how she can show her true colors and tap into her vulnerability. She connected with her inner child, and she connected.
Oana
Right.
Ioana
But why?
Oana
Well, because the inner child is the most vulnerable part of who we are, and he resides in love, and he needs love more than he needs knowledge and teaching and guidance and information. And this is something in our educational system, whether it’s coming from parents or from teachers, that is missing the most. We’re not teaching or educating people with love. Love is not at the core of our core values and core principles in how we guide children into the world. So we lack a developmental process in connecting with our emotions and feeling safe in our emotions, in expressing our emotions without the fear of losing something or losing someone. So when we are becoming adults, we experience this inner conflict between so much mind, a very educated mind, and a very uneducated emotional territory, mostly limited to child adolescence age. So it creates a conflict in our actions and we can see it or other people see it. And one of the things that we need to learn as children and nobody is teaching us, and then we have to catch up with it as adults is that having emotions is safe. And expressing your emotions is safe.
Oana
And expressing your emotions doesn’t mean losing something. It feels like that at the beginning. So how can we protect ourselves and still be vulnerable and open? And I think because I’ve heard her feedback and I’m going to address the last thing she says because she says, how can we have emotional autonomy and not rely so much on others? And I wanted to pinpoint that now because it is connected. If we stop having the need for other people to show up when we are emotionally vulnerable in a specific way to protect ourselves when we are emotionally vulnerable, to respond to our vulnerability in a particular way to make us feel safe if we stop that expectation and we protect ourselves and we allow ourselves to be brave and be vulnerable without the need for the other person to react a particular way. And if they don’t react and they reject and they’re shut down, it doesn’t have to hurt us because it’s not about us, it’s about them. And understanding that and being vulnerably open because you want to live life intensely and you want to be a human that’s alive, not dead, and you want to have that bravery for yourself, regardless of whether other people join the conversation or not join the game.
Oana
Then you are giving yourself permission to be open and you’re not going to feel hurt because you’re not having expectations and you don’t rely on others’ feedback to give you permission to be vulnerable. And if you understand that, then you are going to start engaging with your emotions without fear, expressing your emotions without fear, and step by step becoming a human that’s vulnerable. It’s secured in his vulnerability. He doesn’t need other people and learns about who she is and is able to communicate what she needs emotionally and also access it through the people that are in her life, his life right now or beyond.
Ioana
This connects, of course, a lot with both women and men. Vulnerability is a huge topic and something both men and women are very scared of. But tapping into our vulnerability or embracing our vulnerability can change the way we live our womanhood and our femininity.
Oana
Oh, it’s a total life changer because we need to have an open emotional body and self to be able to really access our feminine energy and our mature femininity. It’s only when we open up to our emotions that our sexuality gets opened. That’s why we need romance to open up as women because we actually need a safe container, a very emotional, vulnerable supporting climate to open up sexually. And when men come and they don’t create that with us, we feel abused because we are kind of asked to open our legs before our heart is ready.
Ioana
The entity that feels abused is we as women or in our girls or both?
Oana
No, I think it’s we as women because, of course, both. But we as women in total because we need to be emotionally open to open up sexually. And that’s not just the realm of the inner girl. It’s how women function. Yeah, but the difference is when we’re trapped in the inner girl psychic realm and we are at the level of the inner girl, how we respond to this.
Ioana
Yeah, that was my next question.
Oana
So the difference is how we respond and how we act when we are trapped in our inner girl realm and haven’t really developed ourselves emotionally and haven’t stepped into a rite of passage into mature womanhood and how we react to this when we are in our full embodied emotional self and we are connected with our emotions and we feel our emotions, we’re not afraid of it. We’re not afraid to express them. We’re not coming from a fight mode with men who are just confident and guiding. Can you give us an example, specific examples? Yes. The difference is huge. It’s huge for them. Also, I was actually talking with my partner. We were very intimately connected recently and sexually and emotionally. And I was really coming out of my motherhood. I’m going to give you the woman’s perspective, and then I’m going to be specific about the inner girl or both at the same time. I’m coming out of my motherhood, and I’m very slowly opening up to my sexuality and my emotional self as a woman, not as a mother. So it’s a very slow process. And one of the things that I’ve really connected with and I was sharing that with him is that I don’t want to rush it, and I don’t even want to compensate myself or him for the need to not rush it or for the lack of passion in our lives.
Oana
When he looks at this dynamic, he sees me traumatized after having a pregnancy and totally shut down or not shut down necessarily, but like a wreck, after bulldozer came after you, and he connected with that. And I actually asked him and I said, well, why do you say that? Well, because you’re not so expressed anymore. You’re not so passionate. You’re not so wild and loud. You were very wild and loud and very energetic. And I said I don’t feel traumatized. Like, of course, I felt traumatized the first four months physically, because when you really give birth to somebody naturally, you are traumatized physically. That’s like a reality check. You are traumatized, but the body heals. And I was like, I’m not feeling traumatized. I’m just not going to do the work for you anymore.
Ioana
And it’s not just you.
Oana
It’s men in general. It’s like I felt this inside my body coming back to a sexual life that before having a child, before having Anna, before growing up as a woman, integrating my motherhood, I was relying on my energetic sexual resource, which is mine. I’ve developed it. I know it has nothing to do with men. Recently, I played with them and we made love and we interacted. But it’s my work, and I was using that to compensate for your lack so that we can have a good time for the sake of being pragmatic on both ends and kind of like guiding you slowly into becoming better at this right now, I’m not in the mood to do that. First of all, I don’t have the energy. I need to really work more on loving myself. Nourishing myself. Coming back from this one-year-long, sleep-deprived lack of energy process of feeding somebody ongoingly, no matter how much you feed yourself, she wants more. So you’re always on a minus. And I really feel the need to nourish myself and love myself as a woman. It’s a very intimate womanly process. It’s not connected to men. So I don’t feel loud.
Oana
I feel quiet. But I’m not traumatized, I’m not shut down, and I’m not wounded. I just want you to understand that you need to bring more fire. You need to generate more love. You need to bring your masculine energy into the game. And I’ll react to that. And he was, like, really open to it, and we explained it afterward. We were playing this game, and he kind of stepped up into it, and I was demystifying what happened so that he actually understands he has a reference. And I said, in our relationship, in our dynamic, you actually have to generate more. It’s your part of the process. It has nothing to do with me, and it’s easy for me to step in and compensate. But then you were having two problems we’re facing. One, you will never know how to get me, and you will think you’ll know and you actually won’t know. So you’re not going to make me happy in the long term. I don’t think that’s going to work for you, because at some point, I’m going to get bored and disappointed, and then you really have a gap to measure, and it’s going to be hard.
Oana (19:19)
So just struggle a little bit and get right first of all. Second of all, understand that every single time we become intimate, whether it’s sexually or emotionally, it’s a new moment. It’s a moment in time that’s new now. So I’m a new woman now for you. It’s not something you already know. Men and women are so stuck. Oh, I already know her. I’m just going to push this button and push this button and push this button, and she’s going to have an orgasm. Are you having an orgasm? Oh, my God, what’s happening? You’re having a headache? No, you should have an orgasm because I pushed all three buttons, you know, and that’s how men worked. And women say yes to that, and they fix their orgasms because it’s easy. And they fix their orgasms for two reasons. One is because they’re trapped in their inner girl, and they are afraid to step into the unknown and afraid to guide men into that unknown and tell men, you’re not really clicking my button right now. It may have worked yesterday, but I’m a different woman today. I have different emotions. You need to connect with me differently.
Oana
You need to come in your heart, really come into your full passion, be here with me at the moment, secure me as a man, and then open me up because this is how I function. It’s a very alive moment-by-moment process. And my interval would have said, yes, forget about it. He’s stupid, he won’t get it or he won’t do it and he’s lazy and men are fucked up and she will have gone into the disappointment and the resentment. Men are stupid. So just be pragmatic. What do we want here? We want to have fun. Let’s have fun. We’re having fun. It’s just me actually playing the whole game. And of course, I’m not disregarding their contribution or their input because I’ve really had fulfilling relationships with men and they were contributing, but they were reacting to what I put in the space they were not generating.
Ioana
This is amazing. I’m just looking at you, struck by the synchronicity and I don’t want to get out of the topic we started with, but I think this should be done as a topic of another podcast because no longer than yesterday I was having this thought completely in another context. And after 2 hours of me having this thought, I was chatting with a very good friend of mine who is starting now to try and date a guy. And they went out, they had a date and she gave me the feedback, of course, the day after and she told me, I’m just amazed by his lack of sensuality. I experienced that.
Oana
That’s what she said.
Ioana
She’s not even into our work. I mean, she’s not a follower of the feminine, but she simply used that word. And I was very triggered and intrigued by what she said. And I asked her for some more in-depth details and she told me he’s like simply just staying there and looking at me, expecting me to do all the work. But you know what? I’m not available for doing his work anymore. And I think this is really happening at the collective level and probably is like one of the first tipping points of this new revolution.
Oana
Women feel challenged coming back to Laura, women feel challenged because they don’t have this access themselves to their energy and their psychic to connect with the inner girl and the woman. They don’t have the right to passage and they can’t make a clear distinction between the two. They can’t bridge it. They can’t bridge the woman they’re afraid to step into, the woman who they know they should be acting as a woman saying, I’m not going to do the work for you, step up. But that’s just mental and the emotion and the energy are still trapped in the inner girl or the adolescent who’s afraid to really go all the way through with that claim.
Ioana
Yeah. And I think this or she gets stuck with it.
Oana
Like she claims, she doesn’t know what to do and they both get exactly. And it doesn’t work.
Ioana
If you say what you think or how what you would like or you just state your inner truth, but probably with only 50% of your voice starts another topping and you have a problem and then you have to have a problem.
Oana
He would either disconnect and go with another woman, which is a big fear for women. He’s going to cheat on me or he will make you feel wrong for wanting more and make you feel weird that you want more and something wrong with you. Because of his challenge in his unworthiness and in his lack of power, it’s very hard for him to open up and be vulnerable and feel safe being vulnerable, saying, Well, I really have no freaking idea what to do with you, woman. Nobody taught me. It’s like boom, boom, boom. And that’s the only thing I’ve learned in my porno show. So either teach me or guide me or whatever. He won’t be able to say that because men live in a culture where that’s just too weak. But if you can bridge the inner girl with the woman and you have access in your sacred circle around other women who have gone through the rights of passage, who know who they are in their sexuality, who have nourished their sexual energy, they have stepped into their sexual emotional map. Inner map. That’s another podcast, your inner Map. Sexual emotion. It’s a good topic.
Oana
It’s like initiating him into my sexual emotional map, like stepping into my power as a woman, guiding the process, and not being afraid of guiding the process. I don’t have to teach him the process. It doesn’t have to be a mental, rational conversation. My body knows my body will guide me and it will guide him. I can guide him into what gives me pleasure and what doesn’t give me pleasure and make it fun. And in that way, he takes it on as a game, as a play, and he’ll play along and he’s smart and he wants to make you happy and he’ll do it. And then after, when an intimate space is created, you can share. You can just acknowledge him for what he’s doing. Great. Come from there. Build on that and say, what would you like more? And make it gameful. Make it sexy, make it playful. But you need to have the confidence that requires the healing of being a girl. Well, it requires not only healing, but it may also require time spent with yourself to build that confidence. It may require exploring yourself sexually with no expectation that the other shows up and deliver something so that you can feel.
Oana
Because your lack of feeling has nothing to do with the man. Your lack of feeling is your lack of feeling. It’s you constricted in your traumas or in your wounds, or just having your territory unmapped, caressing your full body from head to toe with no agenda, just to awaken the sensuality of your body. Awaken your sensual self. Caress the subtle energy of your body. Awaken the woman that you are so that you start feeling, and we’re coming back to the vulnerability. You need the vulnerability to feel, and you need to learn to protect yourself while you feel and understand that the other person’s reaction or creation in relationship to you has nothing to do with you but with him, with humans in general. So it’s like you’re doing it for yourself. This is a very strong awareness, and then it builds up from that. The important thing is how we ended our conversation, me and my partner I, it’s not about the technique. It’s about a lover’s attitude, right? It’s an attitude. It’s a way of loving what you are developing. And the best way to develop a way of love is to actually do something that’s not sexual at all, which is connected with your inner child.
Oana
Through meditation, through ritual. Your inner child is the best guide for you to understand who you are.
Ioana
I would like to end the podcast with a more specific practice, but we’re having two more questions coming from Laura, which are very relevant. And I want us to go you to go be through each of them. The second one is the daily triggers and the feeling that something is missing and something must be wrong. And she asks if working with her child can help in reducing the daily triggers we have on whatever topic or area in our life.
Oana
Well, yes, because actually and I’ve seen it with a lot of adults because I’ve really worked with hundreds of adults with their inner child. And I’ve seen this whenever we are emotionally disconnected as children, we developed this sense of anxious separation from everybody, from our climate, from the tribe, from climate, friends, family members, father, mother, intimate lovers. We develop this like skin. So it’s like a skin that’s wrapped around us.
Oana
That makes us ongoingly feel anxious and disconnected. And it’s also in relationship to ourselves because we haven’t really worked through our emotions. We haven’t allowed our emotions to be when we were children. So something is wrong. I’m afraid of something. It’s actually me becoming aware of the skin. It’s a good step. It’s a first good step because you are becoming aware that this skin is enveloping you mentally, emotionally, and energetically, and it’s disconnecting you from all of life. Is what you perceive real? No, but it is what the inner child perceived when he didn’t and couldn’t connect with his parents. So it was subjectively real, maybe objectively back then, not necessarily connected to reality today.
Ioana
But the story sticks.
Oana
The story sticks that you’re subjectively into the story. So it’s real for you. It may not be in reality, but it’s real for you. Now, how do you transcend that? How do you shift that, become aware of that, and understand that it’s so new that it’s like skin? It’s part of your second nature, to become the observer of this skin and this very permissive, all-inclusive state of affairs called your anxiety and really shower love on you, caress yourself, massage yourself physically, shower energetic love on you, and connect with whatever positive mantra you have that just says, I am safe right now. I am in love. I love myself. I open myself to life.
Oana
Anxiety is just an emotion. I can be with it. I can breathe with it, breathe from my belly with this pervasive feeling that just makes things wrong. I’m not wrong. I’m okay just the way I am. If a situation happens and it’s not working to my benefit, that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. It’s in a situation outside of me that’s not working. It doesn’t mean I’m not working. And slowly, step by step, through caress, through showering love energetically, through breathing, through talking with yourself positively, talking with actually, your inner child, securing him, telling him I’m safe, I’m loved. There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m fine. I can manage. I’ll be fine. I mean, I’ll be fine today, but I’ll be fine tomorrow. It’s a step-by-step process. I’m giving myself permission and giving myself space. This skin will melt. It takes a while. It doesn’t really melt very easily because you’ve built it for years. It takes a while, and everything works like meditation, breathing, whatever type of process you do, just keep going and it will enhance your observer and it will bring you more into the real present moment.
Ioana
I will make a personal sharing because it connects very well with what you’re saying. But before that, Laura’s last question is if. And I think the answer will be the same. Exactly. Because she asks if working with her child can also help us with self-judgment.
Oana
The self-judgment is the voice we absorbed that keeps the climate of anxiety present. So we observe the voice that criticizes us all the time. So the second scheme that you said we developed is connected also with connected with the feeling of anxiety and the permissiveness of something is wrong here, or something is wrong with me and I’m afraid, or I’m angry, or I feel betrayed all the time. That’s the feeling that’s the emotion. And then the voice that judges you is the mental aspect of the skin. So it’s like they’re connected, actually. So whether you’re working with the voice by doing a positive mantra, saying, I’m safe, I don’t judge myself. I’m happy in my own skin. I give myself permission. I’m loved whether you touch yourself or shower energetic love on you like a light love that’s coming, or you’re doing whatever breathing, meditation, or ritual practice you can do that feels right for you. You’re actually coming from different angles in the same core, emotional and rational, and mental. Yeah.
Ioana
I wanted to close this podcast by asking you to give us practice. Probably you already did. So I will give a personal example, which will serve also as a practice for those who don’t know. Juana teaches a one-year-long workshop on healing and working with the inner child. It’s a live workshop happening in real life, but probably we will work out an online experience as well. And after three years of struggle, I’ve just crawled through this one-year process, being very rebellious and letting a minor girl sabotage my whole process. But in the end, I did it and I consider myself a graduate. However, because one, I just said, it’s a long-standing process. It took you 20 years to get here. And of course, it won’t take only two weeks to reverse the whole engine. So I still had trouble with my sleep. This is like my famous theme. And she had this inspiration of telling me three weeks ago when I was going through a very deep crisis when I should get up every morning, I should listen to some inner child Montreal music. And of course, I didn’t.
Oana
That’s why it takes so long for me how to work.
Ioana
But not because I didn’t want it, but because I swear I simply forgot. Yeah, of course, I was feeling better and I forgot. Then one evening when I was showering, it just came into my mind because your words stayed with me and they were in the background. And one evening when I was showering feeling better, I just had this thought of taking the phone and just playing those tunes every time I go to bed, like a ritual. And I’m doing this for three weeks, I guess two or three weeks, like every single evening. And I’m feeling even if I still have moments when I get up in the middle of the night and I’m afraid I won’t follow it up again, I’m just going back to not even playing the tune, but only thinking about how I feel when I listen to the music and I suddenly start feeling better. I mean, less anxious, less afraid of what’s going to happen. It’s very difficult to talk about the process with somebody who didn’t go through it, but it’s not about understanding it.
Oana
No. You’re becoming stronger in your capacity to deal with the chronic negative, traumatized emotions that your inner child was having and playing along in your life through this insomnia period. So he was just trying to heal himself by being a zombie, by trying to catch your attention. It took a while. Hopefully, we’re getting there much easier. But it’s like, yeah, he needs the healing of a child. He needs the energy that children need, which is a lot of love, a lot of patience, and a lot of emotional safety. And that beautiful song. We can share it with the whole world. It’s from shine and all. How could anyone ever tell you you are less than beautiful? You are less than perfect.
Ioana
Yes. We put the link in the comments of the podcast.
Oana
So it’s just like a beautiful mantra for the inner child and music. And they need that they work through music. Children when they come into life. They first hear music and color and then they have the language.
Ioana
I think we really have to put an end to this podcast. It’s already long, but for sure we’re going to come back to the inner child topic because there’s so much to explore about how she or he can so much influence our lives. Thank you, Oana.
Oana
Thank you and thank our inner children.
Ioana
And thank you, Laura, for giving us the incentive to make a podcast dedicated to being a child.
Oana
Thank you, Laura, and thank you to everybody who’s listening and just sharing this podcast. If you know you connect with other people in your life that you think the conversation could be useful for them. Thank you, everybody. Bye.
