The Journey for Kids: Liberating your Child’s Shining Potential

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Introduction

PART ONE – INSPIRING KIDS’ STORIES

1 Discovering Our Shining Potential

2 The Journey in Schools

3 Partnering Your Child

4 Working with Health Concerns

5 Issues of Death and Loss

6 Using The Journey in Everyday Life

7 The Immense Power of Forgiveness

8 Divorce and Relationship Issues

9 Empowering Internal Resources

10 And the Greatest of These is Love …

PART TWO – A HEALING ADVENTURE FOR KIDS

11 A Healing Adventure for Kids: Instructions

12 A Healing Adventure for Kids

PART THREE – THE KIDS’ JOURNEY PROCESS FOR EIGHT TO TWELVE YEAR OLDS

13 The Kids’ Journey: Instructions

14 The Kids’ Journey Process

15 Working with Teenagers

Gratitude

Author’s Note

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

This is a book about liberation – about freeing the boundless potential that is shining inside each and every human heart.

Deep inside all of us is a boundless joy, a potential for true genius, an infinite love, a wellspring of creativity. It’s waiting there, beckoning, calling you right now, inviting you to discover your own magnificence, urging you to plummet the depths of the wisdom within to discover a vast potential that is capable of creating anything.

Each of our children is born as this radiant presence, as this boundless potential. Unfortunately, through the course of life’s pains and trials, their innate radiance may seem to get covered over – with layers of unresolved hurt, moments of failure, emotional shutdowns. It’s as if we come in as a brilliant, shining light and somehow life conspires to put a lampshade over it, obscuring it. In time we start to identify with all the layers, forgetting that there ever was a greatness within.

In this book you’ll learn very real and practical ways to take that lampshade off. You’ll learn simple but powerful tools for liberating that shining magnificence.

This book is full of joy, full of inspiring stories that will speak directly to your own deepest knowing. It is full of real-life accounts of everyday children who have gone on Journeys, freed themselves and taken the lid off their creativity. As we travel with them, we learn how they’ve healed their bodies and we share their love of life as they peel away the layers and unearth their own genius. We feel the poignancy of their easy ability to forgive that which might seem to be impossible to forgive and, through their Journeys, we see ourselves, and we are liberated.

The truth of the children’s wisdom, the health and vitality they experience and the simplicity of their awakening serve as a model of possibility to us all, inspiring us and giving us the courage to begin our own Journeys.

This book is also chock-full of practical tools, simple step-by-step process work, everyday wisdom and user-friendly skills, written in what I hope is a down-to-earth style that will encourage you to begin working/playing easily and effectively with your children, starting now.

It is my deepest prayer that, as parents and guardians of these beautiful souls, we truly learn to partner our children in their spiritual and healing Journeys. I pray that we recognize that our children are, in fact, already free, whole and full of shining potential.

All that we are doing as partners is helping them to clear away the veils that have obscured that potential, liberating their true selves. We are helping them take the lampshades off their already shining lights.

Currently, the Kids’ Journey is being used all over the world by schoolteachers, school counsellors and children’s therapists. It is being used in addiction treatment centres, by abuse groups, children’s support organizations and social services organizations. It has been adopted and used by priests, nuns, ministers, rabbis, monks, pastors and swamis from a wide range of spiritual traditions. Most of all, it is being used by everyday mums, dads, aunts, uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers from all walks of life – people like you and me.

Because there are literally thousands of inspiring kids’ stories to choose from, I have included those that deal with everyday issues – the questions and challenges that beset normal children from all cultures. Each story provides us with a lesson on how to address those issues, and specific tools and process work that are designed to liberate and heal the issue. So it’s the children themselves who are actually providing us with the teaching we need to lovingly partner them in their healing and growth. I’ve changed almost all the names, as I feel children deserve the same respect and privacy that we, as adults, feel we need. In some cases I’ve expanded on the process work to give a fuller explanation and understanding of how it works, but in all cases the actual issues and their moving and extraordinary results are intact, chronicling the children’s triumph, awakening and healing.

To make the work easier and more user-friendly, I’ve organized the book into three main sections:

1. The first section is an introduction to the work. It includes the children’s stories, their issues and how they resolved them, ultimately teaching us how to liberate our own shining potential.

2. The second section focuses primarily on our little ones – five to seven year olds. It includes in-depth instructions and then a specially designed therapeutic fairytale-like story that works at a subliminal level with the youngsters. It is like a spiritual adventure and can be read as a bedtime story. Kids love it! Even if you intend working only with older children, I strongly recommend you read this section in full, as it contains many of the teachings on which the older kids’ work is predicated.

3. Section three is primarily for working with older kids – eight to twelve year olds – and also has some instructions for working with teenagers. It includes the actual Kids’ Journey process together with in-depth instructions.

Finally, if your children inspire you to go on your own Journey, which undoubtedly they will, I recommend you read the original book for adults: The Journey: An Extraordinary Guide for Healing Your Life and Setting Yourself Free.

Journeywork was originally born from my own direct experience of healing from a large tumour without drugs or surgery in just six-and-a-half weeks’ time. In 1992 I was diagnosed with a large tumour in my uterus. Having served for 15 years in the natural health field as both a teacher/seminar leader and therapist, it was the last thing I had ever expected to take place. I thought I had been doing everything ‘right’. I’d attended countless seminars, therapy sessions and had done a huge amount of emotional / physical clearing work – I’d definitely dropped a lot of my emotional ‘baggage’. Physically, I lived all the principles I believed in: I meditated daily, did daily exercise, ate clean, vibrant, whole, organic vegetarian food, drank pure filtered water and received regular massage and bodywork. More important than all these things, I felt fulfilled and at peace in my life: I was deeply in love with my husband of 18 years, the kids had been brought up with what I trusted were wholesome and empowering belief systems, and my work was hugely uplifting and satisfying – I travelled worldwide teaching tens of thousands of people how to create vibrant health. I was a living example of all that I believed in: I looked vibrant and healthy, and felt that way inside and out. So the last thing I ever expected was to be diagnosed with a large tumour.

I was sent reeling and was catapulted on a profound healing journey that ultimately led me to face an emotional issue that had remained blocked, stored in my body for years. In freeing that old cell memory, my body was finally able to go about its own natural process of healing.

The Journey was born from my deep desire to share with humanity what Grace had so generously blessed me with: the means to get direct access to our souls, to uncover old repressed cell memories, to release the stored emotions and finally to forgive and complete with these issues so that our bodies and our beings can go about the process of healing naturally.

In the original Journey book you join me on my personal healing journey. You are guided step-by-step through the two mind – body healing processes which were born from that experience: the Emotional Journey and the Physical Journey. And you are freshly inspired as you read how others have found true freedom and healing in their own process work.

From the moment The Journey was published the work caught fire internationally. Currently hundreds of thousands of people worldwide have read the book, and more importantly are using the process work successfully and fruitfully in their lives. With the Emotional Journey people have successfully cleared issues of grief, loss, abandonment, depression, jealousy, betrayal, low self-esteem, sexual blocks, fear and anxiety. They’ve cleared chronic fatigue, fear of criticism, long-held guilt, issues of abuse, hostility and rage. With the Physical Journey people have naturally healed from a variety of health concerns, including allergies, acute asthma, eczema, cancer of many kinds, Crohn’s disease, tumours, fibroids, sports injuries, arthritis, migraines and even the common cold.

It has been deeply moving to know that so many thousands from all walks of life have successfully participated in their own healing journeys. And it’s been equally rewarding to see so many therapeutic and medical practitioners offer Journeywork alongside their own healing work. Cancer centres, orthodox hospitals, alternative health practices, doctors, nurses, homoeopaths, herbalists, kinesiologists, chiropractors, physiotherapists, massage therapists, nutritionists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts – people in nearly every field of healing, both emotional and physical, have felt free to incorporate Journeywork into their own specialist areas.

This book gives you new, fresh ways of using Journeywork with kids. It’s your invitation to partner your child in liberating their shining potential, and I pray it will also be a catalyst for you to begin your own healing journey.

It’s time we all took the lampshades off our lights.

1 Discovering Our Shining Potential

I recently received a heart-rending letter from a deeply concerned mother of an eight-year-old boy, Matthew. Carla wrote that the school board had come to her about her son. He wasn’t keeping up with other students in his class. He couldn’t focus or pay attention, and often he appeared withdrawn from the other kids. He’d been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and dyslexia, and his teacher was apologetic and regretful, but she believed Matthew was too dysfunctional to continue at normal primary school. He needed to go to a school for children with learning disorders, as he was beginning to hold back the rest of his class.

Carla was stunned, horrified that they considered her son not only incapable of functioning in a normal school but so disabled that he needed to go to a special school. She just couldn’t and wouldn’t believe that her son was ‘stupid’ or abnormal. There must be some mistake, some explanation. She pleaded with the school board and begged that Matthew be allowed to stay at school just one more term. She promised to get him daily tutoring after school and, being a physical therapist herself, she would do regular therapy with her son. She’d also look into getting other alternative therapies that might help.

Reluctantly, the school board agreed, but with the proviso that if Matthew’s grades did not improve significantly by the end of term then, regrettably, they would be compelled to let him go and would recommend alternative schools which might be more suitable for him.

Carla gave Matthew her all. In addition to daily tutoring following school, she tried other therapies, including her own field, kinesiology. Matthew’s grades began to improve marginally … but not enough. Carla became desperate to reach her son, to find out what was really going on. She just knew in her bones that he was a beautiful and intelligent soul. He had always been a bright child. Even though he had been diagnosed with dyslexia, it did not mean that Matthew was inherently stupid. She just knew that there must be some emotional blockage that was holding him back. He was full of potential – she’d seen it from the time he was a toddler; sometimes that potential, that brilliance, would come out at the most unexpected moments. Yet she’d also sensed that there was something holding him back. She had noticed that often Matthew seemed quiet and isolated, shut down and emotionally unavailable. She just didn’t know how to get through to him, but with all her being she wanted to help him take this lampshade off his light. She was determined to do whatever it took to help her son find himself, to liberate his true nature, so that he could shine again.

Carla began to pray fervently to find a way to get through to her son. It was at this time that, by chance, she came across The Journey. She read the book from cover to cover – she could not put it down. It spoke deeply to her own wisdom. It detailed simple and powerful processes for opening into our true potential, and gave down-to-earth step-by-step tools for clearing emotional and physical blocks that might be obscuring that natural potential. In her heart of hearts Carla knew that Matthew could benefit from the work, if he was willing to participate. And she was thrilled when she turned to the back of the book to find in-depth instructions on how to work with children. She thought, ‘What have I got to lose? It’s worth asking Matthew if he’d be willing to give it a try.’

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 co-created these supposed ‘syndromes’ in the first place.

Matthew’s story could be your story; it could be mine. Recently I was in South Africa where The Journey is being used by teachers in primary schools. After I gave a school assembly programme to 800 shining, beaming children, I walked out into the school car park. There, two parents were standing in their Sunday best clothes, clearly having taken time off work to meet me personally. They stood there patiently waiting in the hot African sun with their three beautiful children, all in starched white shirts and school uniforms.