The Powerful Child-Within Visualization Meditation Technique (Look Into Your Eyes Again)

When we are babies or young kids we have an innocent and curious charm about us.

We don’t have any say in how we will be nurtured or conditioned, and we will one day be an adult and finally have life in our hands, but often the conditioning and ingrained biases and ideals have already taken effect by then, which can, unfortunately, see us drift through life rather than take hold of it.

Enter The Child-Within Visualization Meditation Technique

But try this exercise. Find a photo of yourself as a baby or young child. Put it on your desktop laptop or wallpaper on your phone.

Stare at it each day for the next week and ask yourself this same question.

‘What will I be when I grow up?’

Look hard, look into your own eyes, and find within your mind that baby that was the beginning of your journey.

Think back as far as you can to memories about being a child, being a toddler if you can.

Now take your adult brain into that child’s brain.

Now in a childhood memory close your eyes and wander around that memory, but instead of just following what happened on a particular day, now enter your adult mind into the memory.

Tell yourself you are going to do something, like jump, and then see yourself jump (as a child) in your own mind.
Start out with simple requests, to get a feel for interacting with your child self.

Now to some people who tried this we heard it drew a tear or two.

That’s completely natural and a good thing. It means it’s provoking something within, a change. This is good because you need change to occur for the magic to then happen next.

It might make you feel sad that life didn’t turn out quite like you hoped as a child, or makes you wonder how time flew by so quickly, or you may feel like you’ve lost the child within.

It’s just important for now to let the emotion run in this exercise.

You will naturally lose focus and come back to reality, but this isn’t a try once and magic happens technique. It needs consistent practice.

So, for the next week keep looking at your child-self photo and each time ask the same question.

‘What will I be when I grow up?’

Why do this? You may be asking.

Well us adults are masters of survival and part of that is also trying to cut out anything that makes us dream. Dreams were for the child-within and often stayed there. As adults, we have likely told ourselves enough times to just find routines and work hard, keep working hard and eventually something will come from it.

It might. Security. But not freedom, as freedom is found within, and freedom is found through peeling off the heavily ingrained layers of life experience that help us survive but also ensures we don’t take risks. It keeps us safe, and that is good for surviving, but to thrive we need to release the child-within.

You may have heard ‘trust the process’ before. It certainly applies to this technique.

So, try again.

‘What will I be when I grow up?’

The more you look at a picture of yourself as a child the more you will begin to connect with that child-within again.
You will start hearing what makes him or her happy, what is fun, what is life.

You aren’t going to just run to a playground and play on the swings or slide. It doesn’t turn you into a child again. Your adult brain has far too much experience to just lose sight of today’s reality.

However, you will begin to see the value in seeking deeper into your creative side, where that child wants to play.

We hear so much about different meditation techniques today, from mindfulness to visualization meditations, but so much is focused on the now. The problem is we are often lost in the now, and that’s why we try to meditate in the first place, to feel calmer in the now.

If you want to change the now though you can’t just feel calmer in it, you have to challenge it.

This is where the child-photo-technique really helps.

You look to get yourself back to a point in life where everything was a possibility moving forward.

If you have a child yourself now then in some ways this can be like a rebirth for you too. You don’t have to play with toys like a child, but you can certainly imagine like one again.

Think about what we tend to fill our minds up each day with today. So much of it is just energy-sapping and needless. We watch videos with stimuli that take a lot of processing, we learn so much about pop culture celebrities’ life details or the latest news headlines that are gone tomorrow.

A child doesn’t care about that. Sure they are learning how the world works, and a lot of their energy is taking up with curious questions of ‘what’s that?’, but the key is they are curious to explore and learn for themselves, not to fit into popular culture.

As adults, we already know the answers to what these young learners are learning, so we don’t have to spend our energy worrying about what everything is, but we can focus on exploring as a child does.

So, one last time.

‘What will I be when I grow up?’

This time you should really think about what you want to learn about. Be curious. Of course, it doesn’t have to be one thing. We, as adults, are conditioned enough to think it has to be a mountain-top approach to life. Instead, just let your mind wander through your child eyes and grow again with the child within.

It may seem hard at first but in time the layers of conditioning will fall away and you will unblock that curiosity again and may find that what you ended up doing isn’t what you really want to do at all.

You just needed to open your eyes again to help you realize it.