Seeing Life Through Child-like Eyes

As a child I was incredibly fearful. I was shy and quiet and a bit afraid of people or making new friends. I was also afraid of ghosts, monsters, sharks, bugs, fish and especially the dark.

I attribute this fear to that fact that I was incredibly imaginitive. I could always see stories and scenarios play out in my head very vividly. I could turn the world around me into anything I wanted and set the stage for a beautiful play. But this was also true of the images I found most disturbing. If the thought of a ghost or monster (or tiny brutal dinosaur from Jurrasic Park) came into my mind, I thought I had no control over it and I became terrified. I believed in and experienced my imagination so vividly and believed that my beautiful games and princess fantasies were real, that when a monster creeped in I thought I was powerless. And I would curl up in a ball and cry.

At some point around 7 or 8, my mind decided it was necesary for me to adopt the belief that I could not create these realities any more, at least not the one that didn't go along with the consensus reality that everyone else saw. There were no giant castles in the front yard. My bed was not the stage in a grand opera hall. There was no lava. But at least there were no dinosaurs or evil demons. Life became a little more bland. But that was my choice, and that felt like my strength. I controlled my mental visualizations.

Fastforward to me being a teenager and an aspiring artist, I encountered some creativity problems. Believing that I could no longer create these imaginary worlds meant I could also not draw them, because I could not see them. I said again and again that I couldn't visualize and draw something that wasn't there. I had to have an object, a building or a subject in front of my face and could only use my visual eyes to see. This hindered me.

And all the while, me believing this made up belief that wasn't really true. I couldn't see made up things? Not true in the slightest, only now my attention was focused on boys and debilitating social rejection. My mind, still full of fears, without access to enchanted playgrounds, chose to show me moments with "real" things in them, like getting rejected by the cool girls, boys laughing at me because I was ugly, and me falling flat on my face when I tried to do anything new. I was still very imaginitive and fearful, I just chose to make it about my identity being in danger instead of my body.

Now that I look back and realise that I've done this all to myself, consciously and unconsciously, I choose to re-embrace my gift of sight, my third-eye strengths, my creator nature. We are all free to decorate our inner world however we choose, what we see is after all personal and private.

So now I choose to see trees as people, people as faeries, cars as spaceships, trains as time-machines, buildings as kingdoms, schools as sacred temples, my parents as the king and queen, and my daughter as Merlin, my magical teacher, guru and friend.

What do you choose to see?

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