"Inner Child" Resources

Books

Healing Your Aloneness: Finding Love & Wholeness Through Your Inner Child , by Erika J. Chopich and Margaret Paul

The Healing Your Aloneness Workbook, Erika J. Chopich and Margaret Paul

Recovery of Your Inner Child , by Lucia Capacchione

Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child, by John Bradshaw

Websites:

Inner Child Healing Techniques- Excellent article that I have found helpful when working with my own inner child.

Making Peace with the Little Child Within Yourself- Excellent journaling activity to help you get to know your inner child more intimately.

The Mirror: Looking at My Inner Child- beautiful, inspiring poem about one woman's encounter with her inner child.

My Inner World- my own inner child ADORES this site for many reasons... maybe yours will too! It's colorful and creative, with lots of pathways to explore. You can collect treasures in a little bag and if you gather enough treasures, you can even go into the castle! This site is my #1 choice for a computer play date with my inner child!

Music

Songs for the Inner Child, by Shaina Noll. My favorite songs on this album are: Return Again, How Could Anyone, and Deep Peace. These seem to speak directly to and affirm my own inner child every time I hear them. There are also some beautiful lullabies on this CD.

Spiritual Sun, by Thaddeus. Soothing, comforting music. This is the music playing in the background during the Magical Inner Journey (guided meditation).

Poems/Quotations

In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play. --- Friedrich Nietzsche

So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us. --- Gaston Bachelard

A grownup is a child with layers on. --- Woody Harrelson

Children have neither past nor future; they enjoy the present, which very few of us do. --- Jean de la Bruyere

Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon. A happiness weapon. A beauty bomb. And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one. It would explode high in the air - explode softly - and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air. Floating down to earth - boxes of Crayolas. And we wouldn't go cheap, either - not little boxes of eight. Boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built right in. With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and lime, amber and umber and all the rest. And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination. --- Robert Fulghum

The child wants simple things. It wants to be listened to. It wants to be loved... It may not even know the words, but it wants its rights protected and its self-respect unviolated. It needs you to be there. ---Ron Kurtz

When I grow up I want to be a little boy. --- Joseph Heller

Ode to the Inner Child
(Soliloquy 5)

Through my window, now decorated
With borders of frosty filigree,
Snowflakes dance wildly with no place to be
Creating views of sharp contrasts and soft textures.

Inside, I watch with a smile and warm heart
As past memories gather to greet the new,
Mingling and replaying impromptu
And planned moments of life’s delicate joys.

Earlier this day, like a child,
I stood face upwards, catching flakes
On my tongue, a simple thing lost when time overtakes
Simplicity with so called maturity.

But do such things have to be put aside?
Where is it written that childish ways
Have no place on adulthood’s cumbersome tray
Of overcooked reason and under done dreams?

Personally, I prefer a life decorated
With imagination and reason in textures
Woven into the fabric of the heart
With bright knowledge and colorful joys.
I refuse to abandon my inner child
To implacable maturity.
I accept and will not put aside
Responsibility, but will not discard my dreams.

--- by E.W.Richardson