The past couple of mornings there has been a tapping sound on my kitchen window. It happens around 6 or 7 in the morning. I go to the window and find this bird tapping away on the window and I am puzzled. It looks at me and flies away. Within 15 seconds it comes back and taps again. Then it flies to the nearby tree and just watches me before it flies away again.
Well, to say the least, I was a bit curious why the bird would be tapping. I learned from online sources that it may see its reflection and be fighting with its reflection, thinking its another bird.
This made me think of how we, as humans, sometimes do this to ourselves. We look in the mirror and see things we don’t like, images that seem ‘too old’, ‘too fat’, ‘too many wrinkles’, ‘too much sun’…you get the idea. We have inner struggles. We don’t yell at the mirror, but we begin the inner chatter that seems to self sabotage.
My daughter was looking at old videos of herself the other day and came across one where she was doing a class report in elementary school. She was about 8 years old and fierce, but innocent. Her 8 year old version of herself was confident, but kind. My daughter beamed watching this video of her younger self. A few days later my daughter was saying something negative to herself. She was beating herself up in a way with some self-talk. I gently turned her around to face me & said, “would you say that to your 8 year old self? You wouldn’t be that mean to her would you?” She smiled and got the lesson.
We all have our ‘inner Childs’ those places within us that need to be protected and built up. Life can be harsh and there are plenty of other critics out there. We don’t need to be one of them. We need to protect ourselves from our inner critics and be kinder to ourselves. Who else will? When we can be kind, say kind words, build & not tear down, that is where our healing will begin. That is where we will begin to grow. That is where we will begin to find our best self. AND, that little child within will smile that you finally figured it out.
What are you saying to yourself? What will help you—-fight or fly? be kind to you.
Peace to you. -H
yourhappyplaceblog 
I am terribly guilty of that, looking at my reflection and picking a fight about all the things I see that I don’t like. But I like your approach, of thinking of our younger selves–our inner children–and asking if we would want to be so mean to them. It’s all too easy to forget, I think, that we’re still the same person we were when we were 8, and not give ourselves the love and care we deserve.