2025 Reparenting Sadhana
After a request for work that can help remediate trauma from infancy, we developed a year long practice reparenting practice. Of all the group practices Inner Currents has facilitated over the years, we feel this may become one of the most impactful and we are overjoyed to be offering it.
This offering will be presented in the form of a year long sadhana. It will require each participant to commit to a daily practice, while Theresa facilitates internal healing work for the entire group daily as well. Through our work at Inner Currents, we’ve found that healing work is far more effective when recipients have the opportunity to directly participate and sadhanas are far more effective when assisted. This offering will combine both.
As we age, change, and grow, we pass through many stages and aspects of self. Each of these stages still lives within us as a unique part of our being. Some parts feel integrated and harmonious, while others carry sorrow and trauma that affect our lives through conscious and unconscious pathways. Carrying these wounded parts can feel like a burden, but it also gives us the opportunity to improve, support, nurture, and heal all aspects of ourselves. There are many methods and teachings around how to do this but few that focus on the first years of our life. This is a time where we are in a very different state of being than we are as we develop language skills and a reasoning mind. It makes it harder and more elusive to access.
This is a time of life where we strongly identify with our caregivers and have little sense or ability to exist autonomously. We are largely animalistic and rely on the support of our caregivers to reflect back to us what it means to process existence as a human and as an individual. This is a time where we should have been cherished and attended to by a large group of people of all ages.
Unfortunately many of us come from cultures who don’t value people intrinsically, the emphasis on one’s value is what you can do. The value of what you can do is determined by what the culture holds dearest. Often this is earning power, social status, worldly accomplishment and agreement or cooperation with societal expectations. This means people whose pursuits (or ability/capacity to pursue) differ from societal values are seen to have lesser value. Women, who for a long time had few opportunities to work outside the home, were deemed to be of lesser value. Children of even lesser value and infants even lesser. When many of us were infants, parenting books recommended isolating infants in sleep, not to respond to their cries, not to “spoil” them by holding them or comforting them too often. For a long time, it was believed that infants couldn’t feel pain. There is still a widespread attitude towards infants and children that they are not full people deserving of respect and consideration. Traditional punishments include isolation, violence, threat of violence and taking away comfort objects. These punishments often begin within the first year of life. Many Christian groups view human beings as inherently bad and there is an imperative to punish them so that they can become good. This attitude has bled into the larger culture.
Because of all these factors, it’s very likely that we were not cherished and cared for as infants in the ways that our body and psyche needed for ideal development. Even if our caregivers meant well and tried their best, it’s likely they weren’t receiving adequate support to meet their own needs which means ours would have suffered as well. If you were born in the United States or come from a culture with similar perspectives, it’s likely that this has been present in your family for many generations.
This has likely affected our ability to feel safe and comfortable inside ourselves. It can contribute to attachment difficulties in relationships and seeking external comfort and support with no lasting satiation.
From the perspective of spiritual development, there has to be a core of self-perception that acts as a reference point, even if your work ultimately aims for the dissolution of the self or the realization of lack of self. A strong reference point allows us to face the more difficult and abstract experiences spiritual paths reveal. It also acts as a leverage point that allows us to let things go. In spiritual paths and practices where you’re trying to have a realization of formlessness or non-dualism or empty self, it’s most ideal to use this deep core self for the practices until most everything else has gone, this being the last thing to go. Many people who are drawn to spirituality are looking for this lack of core development to be renewed or fixed because they know it will make them feel more naturally and effortlessly themselves and connected to the world in a balanced way.
Many attributes we see as being mystical or spiritual in nature are actually human in nature, but pervasive damage to the human form has created widespread obstacles to accessing many things that should be innate. We cannot promise that this sadhana will give you access to all of your innate qualities, but it can help create a profound shift in your access to internal solidity, forming a foundational base for further work and exploration. Those who’ve been working with us know that we prefer not to push anyone in a specific direction spiritually and are much more likely to talk about the potential risks a body of work could present. In this case, we feel the opposite. We hope everyone will participate in this sadhana. There’s potential for some emotional difficulty in this work, but overall it should be extremely stabilizing and help with any kind of life or spiritual work you’d like to cultivate.
The practice on your end will consist of a daily visualization that we’ll send more information on, but simply, you will go inside your internal landscape and hold yourself as a baby every day for a year. We recommend downloading an infant development app so you can keep track of how quickly the baby you grows and changes over the course of one year. This is a simple practice, but we expect it to feel profound and moving. Part of the practice is holding the baby, part of it is showing up for yourself and building the habit of showing up for yourself. For some of us it will bring up feelings around self worth and grief. You are welcome to add more to the practice, but that will be the only thing we ask everyone to do.
Theresa will also go in every day and hold you as a baby and ask divine fathers and mothers to care for the infant as well. She’ll use her tools to help resolve trauma or difficulty that might be present and work to foster a healthy identity development. If you accidentally miss a day of holding your baby, the baby will be cared for. Not only will you have the opportunity to have an expanded experience from a primary caregiver, but from a community.
Theresa is also going to be teaching how to facilitate this work in the future. If this is a modality you’re interested in learning, please participate in this first year. Depending on how many people are interested, we’ll have additional meetings and information for trainees during the course of the year.
Donations for this will be hugely appreciated as it will be a large commitment and we want it to be available free of charge to as many people as possible. Even a few dollars a month will go a long way.
Our Friday night meditations around “The Wise and Nourishing Mothers” will shift a bit to act as a regular meeting point for those who participate in this and ask for extra help for the practice and our infants.
We will begin January 1, 2025 as though our birth day falls on the new year. Please feel free to contact us with any questions, to sign up and to let us know if you’re interested in learning this as a healing modality. Thank you.
*If you have children and feel guilt for any gaps in your parenting to them, you can do this same practice for them at any point in your life after you do it for yourself. We hope that one of the outcomes many people will have as a result of this work is greater compassion and understanding for their parents. We truly believe that there are many circumstances that have led to this among many unideal circumstances we will all experience and that most if not all people are doing their best within the options they have.
