…it is still a beautiful world.

Sometimes it’s easy forget that, but there may be no truer testament to the preciousness of life than the way people fight to hang on at the end of theirs.

And babies.

Babies and death – the beginning and the end – are the poignant reminders of why we stick it out, even when it doesn’t seem to be worth it.

Lately I’ve been doing some intense – and truth be told, painful – inner child work with my friend/teacher/guide/and soon-to-be-business partner. It’s a workshop she developed 20 years ago and hasn’t really done since, but something I wanted to learn to facilitate. She decided that the only way to teach it to me was experientially, and thus, the two of us have been going through it together, day after traumatic day.

If sitting in a living room with one of your closest friends bawling about the pain of your infancies or toddlerhoods or pre-school years and crayoning with your non-dominant hands and discovering how those old wounds are haunting you still as an adult doesn’t sound like much fun, well…it isn’t. But alas, if you’re doing something in your life that you don’t want to be doing – thoughts, actions, addictions, inertia, you name it – then your subconscious is at work, and it will continue to ‘act up’ until it is healed. The only way out of it is through it.

Although perhaps a depressing thought to many (really: who likes therapy? My best friend once referred to it as “the most fun you’ll never have.”) the light at the end of the tromp down inner child lane is the hope of throwing off false beliefs, limiting negative self-talk, and other self-sabotaging behavior and recapturing some of the unrepressed joy that’s seldom seen outside early childhood.

If you don’t quite remember what I’m talking about, take a gander at this little guy: possibly the single greatest enemy Planned Parenthood has ever known.

(I love the stress-relieving sigh at 2:32. If they decide to clone this baby, I’m going to be the first one in line…)