05/08/2026
Sometimes the heart doesn’t return to the past because it wants to stay there.
It returns because something precious was left behind.
Yesterday, I felt a beloved facilitant in her fifties whose inner lover was still 16 years old.
She had never truly stopped being sixteen.
Time had moved forward..Her nervous system had not.
Her first love lived close to her childhood home.
Years passed..Life unfolded.
And then, after returning to the very home where so much of her story had begun, she learned that he had passed away.
His death did not simply bring grief.
It awakened a frozen timeline.
A younger self..
A love that had never been allowed to fully exist.
A relationship that had never been allowed to complete.
As we gently entered that inner landscape together, it became clear that what had remained frozen was not only her love for him.
It was her innocence.
Her tenderness.
Her longing.
Her right to love.
Her right to grieve.
As a teenager, the emotional depth of her heart had no place to land.
Rather than being met, blessed, & gently initiated into the sacred threshold of first love, she was asked to sacrifice it.
To sacrifice her feelings..her innocence..
To sacrifice the one she loved..
Again and again, the message became clear:
"Do not become this woman."
And so, her inner lover learned to disappear.
Not because she stopped loving.
Because loving had become unsafe.
What touched me most wasn't simply meeting her inner lover.
It was meeting the inner mother she had spent a lifetime searching for.
So many of our inner teenagers aren't asking for permission to fall in love.
They are longing for something even more ancient.
A sacred initiation.
A mother, just like Radha who kneels beside them & says,
"Your love is sacred."
When that initiation is absent, the nervous system often remains waiting..
Waiting for someone to bless the heart.
Waiting for someone to witness the innocence that never deserved to be hidden.
Waiting for someone to say,
"You never had to sacrifice yourself to belong."
Perhaps one of the most beautiful moments in healing is discovering that the mother we searched for outside of ourselves is slowly being born within us.
🤍