Carla briefly explained to Matthew that the Kids’ Journey is like a magical fairytale or inner adventure that carries you inside your body to emotional blocks that are stored there. She explained that it would be gentle and healing, and asked if he’d like to give it a go. Matthew shrugged his shoulders. ‘Sure, why not?’ He wanted to please his mum, and perhaps secretly he hoped it might help. And so Carla turned to the back of the book and began to read the process outlined. Part of the process involves getting access to specific ‘cell memories’ – limiting patterns which get stored in our cells. For Matthew, The Journey was surprisingly simple. He had no problems focusing or paying attention, because it was like listening to an exciting adventure or a really good bedtime story. Everyone likes a good story, especially kids.
Matthew’s own inner wisdom seemed to guide him perfectly to the exact place where his emotional block was stored. It guided him to the specific cell memory of when the initial ‘shut down’ had occurred – when he was only five years old and had just begun to learn his ABCs. In his memory Matthew was newly at school, and what neither his mum nor his schoolteacher knew was that he had an acute problem with his eyesight. He couldn’t see things clearly up close. Ever since he was a young child, when something was put directly in front of his eyes it would go all blurry and out of focus. He never told his mum because he thought it was normal, that it was just the way things were. He had no idea that others could see close things with crystal clarity, and it hadn’t really been a problem until he started school and was required to write his first letters on a page.
Matthew desperately needed glasses, but no one knew: not his mum, not his teacher, not even Matthew himself.
Matthew kept trying to write the letter ‘A’, but couldn’t figure out why it seemed to come out all wrong on the paper. Across the room, a friend of his held up his paper – his letter ‘A’ looked perfect, just like the one on the blackboard, but when the teacher came around to check on Matthew’s writing, she kept chastising him, telling him to do it better, more accurately, more carefully.
On the third day of learning ABCs the teacher, who was new to the kids and serving as a substitute, grew frustrated with Matthew. Why wasn’t he even trying? All the other children could write the letter ‘A’. In her frustration, she grabbed his paper out of his hand and marched him to the front of the classroom. Holding up his paper so all the other kids could see, she exclaimed, ‘Look at this page. Matthew is so stupid he can’t even write the letter “A”.’ All the kids laughed, and for Matthew time stopped. He froze. He looked into all his friends’ faces, laughing and ridiculing him, and the humiliation burned. His face got hot, his stomach began to churn; he couldn’t bear it another second. Something inside him shut down. A wall came down: he shut everyone out. The laughter faded into the background, everyone became a blur and he turned his face away and ran out of the room.
That afternoon when his mum picked him up from school he was unusually quiet, and when she asked him, ‘How was school today?’, all he could reply was, ‘OK.’ He felt too ashamed to tell her what had happened. Everyone thought he was stupid. Everyone who mattered had laughed. And now he felt numb to it all, incapable of finding his way through it. A wall had come down internally. He found himself shut down and shut out.
After that he could no longer focus at school. He didn’t care what the teacher said and didn’t want to hear. It didn’t matter anyway – he was stupid, so why bother?
Three months later, it was finally discovered that Matthew needed glasses, but by that time the damage had already been done and there would never be any way for Matthew to truly connect with and be part of school fun and learning in a healthy way again … not until he did his first Journey process.
Like Matthew most of us have had childhood experiences where we have felt unable to cope. I’m sure you can imagine how easy it would be to shut down in the face of such humiliation. Matthew’s story could be any of our stories. Maybe for you it wasn’t a paper being held up in front of the class; maybe it was being ridiculed in the playground or not making the sports team. None of us were trained in how to deal with these issues, and so often we found ourselves withdrawing or pretending it didn’t matter, losing ourselves in our colouring books or refusing to play with the other kids, all the while feeling desperately alone, alienated, excluded and not knowing a way out of our own pain or a way into the ‘in’ crowd.
During Matthew’s Journey process, not only did he access this old memory but he finally faced, released and let go of all the pain of the humiliation that he had carried for so long. He came to realize that his teacher didn’t really think he was stupid; she was just frustrated. She didn’t know he needed glasses; she just thought he wasn’t trying hard enough. Now that he had finally felt and expressed all of his stored shame and hurt, he found he was able to forgive easily. His mother did the ‘Change Memory’ process with him, where in his mind’s eye Matthew revisited the old memory, played it out on a video screen and then played it out a second time, but now seeing how it would have been if he’d had access to a whole host of more supportive and healthy emotional resources at that time. (More on this in Chapter 9.) He received a lot of imaginary balloons which gave him the internal emotional resources he would have needed at the time of the humiliation. His mother gave him a balloon of self-confidence which he breathed in until it filled his whole body. Then she gave him a whole series of balloons: courage, a sense of humour, the knowledge that the teacher was just frustrated, the knowledge that his friends all loved him and that they were only laughing because the teacher had made fun of him. He received balloons of self-worth, self-love and the ability to understand what was taking place. He also got a crystal dome balloon that allowed him to be inside a protected space, so any ridicule would roll off of him and he could just be at peace inside. Finally, he got a balloon of innate intelligence and the ability to reach out to his friends. He breathed in all of these beautiful qualities.
When he played the memory again, this time with all his balloons, he was able to see how it would have gone if he had had all those internal resources at that time. He found he was still hauled to the front of the class, but when the teacher criticized his paper it just rolled off him – he realized his teacher was just in a bad mood and frustrated; she didn’t know he needed glasses. When he looked into the faces of the other children he saw that they were laughing with him, not at him, and he himself broke into peals of laughter – laughing at his own paper, saying what a mess it was – and later he joked easily with the other kids as they played together.
Matthew realized in his Journey process that the teacher just didn’t understand that he needed glasses – neither had he at the time. Realizing that it didn’t matter anyway because all his friends liked him, glasses or no glasses, he forgave his teacher and the kids. When his Journey was over (after about 20 minutes) he opened his eyes and looked at his mum with a clarity that he hadn’t had in ages.
The Friday after his first Journey process he got his first ‘A’ and over the next several months became the brightest student in his class.
Carla was overwhelmed with joy when she wrote to tell me that Matthew was performing healthily at school – no more Attention Deficit Disorder, no more dyslexia.
So often we seem to label our children, giving them labels for behaviour we don’t understand. We pigeonhole them into a dysfunctional syndrome and see them through the filter of that syndrome, forgetting the beautiful, radiant souls that they really are. These days it has become almost fashionable to label kids and then put them on drugs – as if narcotizing them could possibly get to the root cause of their problem. It really is a crime, and very sad indeed that in our ignorance of how to cope with behaviour we can’t understand why we try to put that behaviour to sleep with drugs, mood-altering chemicals that change the very character and personality of these innocent souls, when all that is really needed is to uncover an emotional block and buried emotion that is part of what