10 Ways to Unleash Your Inner Child

"In my soul, I am still that child who did not care about anything else but the beautiful colors of a rainbow." ~ Papiha Ghosh

After a rough couple of months dealing with grown-up issues – job security, family obligations, internal health, and finances – everything got a bit too exasperating for me. I am left in desperate need of a reboot.

Over the years, I have come to rely on jogging, yoga, meditation, dinners with girlfriends, cooking for my honey, and a silly movie to recharge the battery – all essential means to keep my mind sane and body healthy. Yet as I explore these outlets deeper, I realized this: We adults don’t have a very good way of coping with the pressures of being a grown-up.

We take everything so seriously. We lead and plan our lives by shouldering the weight of the world. We let everything be our “problem” to solve. We sacrifice our time and energy (precious resources) for someone else’s riches and leave little room to nourish our own needs. We marry ourselves to yesterday’s past with regrets and wonder, constantly worrying and obsessing about what the future will hold. We torture ourselves when things don’t pan out just right.

Of course, becoming an adult in the first place is a complex transformation. There is an invisible threshold society expects us all to pass -- perhaps after college, or after a pivotal moment in one’s young life -- to forge into the ideals of the “real world”. It means we have to live up to expectations of the external, constantly be in the motion to do the right things, to never fail, to always be responsible.

And during this crossover, the child within us is tucked away inside, forever hidden in the shadows of a grown-up. We lose the memory of that it’s like to believe we can conquer the world, to dream the impossible, and to live in that spirited feeling of complete freedom.

Do you even remember what it’s like to feel the grass under your feet, to gawk at a colorful rainbow in full amazement, or play in the rain?

There is an unspoken expectation that once you have “grown up”, all things child-like dissipates with that transformation forever. What we haven’t realized is that a lot of the coping mechanisms we need as adults to navigate any stressful moments are innately learned in childhood – from birth and throughout our youth.