Healing Our Inner Child

We all have a child within us that is wounded—the child reminds us of those elements of our past that need reflection and attention. Even though our practice in Zen is to learn to dwell in the present moment and not be carried away by the future or be swept away by the past, when we meditate, we need to know how to deeply touch our historical suffering with compassion. If we don’t transform it, we will unwittingly offer the same suffering to whoever is close to us.

My family were refugees from the war in Vietnam and eventually settled in Canada. My father was a boat person, and then he experienced a really tough time in a refugee camp. And of course, if you can’t handle the deep suffering of being uprooted from your home in this way, then you find ways to express it that are not always skillful—often through emotions such as frustration and anger as well as behaviors like excessive drinking. As children, we’re so pure; we just suck in all of the suffering of our parents, and it becomes a part of who we are. It was that way with me and my father.

I grew up in a Buddhist family. Ancestor worship is part of our tradition and history. Every day before going to school, my parents instructed me to light a stick of incense and put it on our family altar. I did not understand the deeper meaning of this daily ritual; I just did it because I was an obedient child. Finally, one day I got fed up with this tradition and said to myself that I no longer wanted to light incense. It seemed to have no relevance to my life in Canada.

Years later, when I came to Plum Village for the first time, I took part in one particular celebration—the Rose Ceremony—that honors our moms and our dads. In that ceremony, which Thay (Thich Nhat Hanh) created in 1983, we begin by lighting incense to light up our gratitude toward our parents. If our parents are still alive, we then receive a red rose. If one of our parents has passed away, we receive a white rose to pin on our jacket or shirt. In that ceremony, supported by the collective energy of the community, I was able to reflect on how much my parents had sacrificed for me to be here: to have moved to Canada, to be in Plum Village in France for the occasion of the ceremony, and to be alive at all. My father made the decision to leave Vietnam to find a better future for his family. I was able to truly see all the suffering and struggles he went through just for me to live in a society and country with more safety and freedom.

I hadn’t grown up with that understanding. But suddenly, when I was in the ceremony talking about remembering our parents’ sacrifices, my heart filled with gratitude. All the mistakes and suffering within our family suddenly became very small; I was able to see the bigger picture of what they had offered us.

As I’ve grown older, I have come to recognize that rather than believing I’m a victim of my parents’ struggles, I have the ability to help transform that suffering for them. As a child, I remember seeing some behaviors in my father that I didn’t like. I promised myself, When I grow up, I’m never going to be like that. But one day, I suddenly recognized that I was acting exactly like my dad. I recognized that I shouldn’t expect my dad to transform that behavior; first I can transform it in myself—the right conditions may not have been present in this lifetime for him to be able to change.

Bullying

Growing up together in Canada, one of my cousins was full of anger, and he bullied me for what seemed like no reason. This was a source of great pain in my childhood. When I joined the monastic community as a young teenager, I realized I still held a lot of fear inside. I am on the short side, and my fear was directed toward a few monks, in particular, a strongly built, six-foot-tall monastic who resembled my cousin. Whenever I saw him, I shrank a little, feeling scared for no real reason. These dynamics were buried so deep in me that it took four years in the monastery before I could identify my inferiority complexes and call them by their true name.

Thay teaches that we all have a hurt young child inside us; it is important to turn toward and listen to that child. They are like a wound telling you that healing is needed. I learned from Thay to communicate with the child within and tell him that now we have a chance to heal. We are grown-ups: We have the right to protect ourselves; we know how to speak out; we know how to be stable. We can learn how to care for our happiness, to cultivate our joy, our compassion, and our understanding—that young child needs all of this. They need to be treated with tenderness, to be embraced, to know they are OK now. This is why it is so important to know how to nourish our well-being and our sense of safety, for example with meditation.

I remember telling the young child inside, “Everyone around you now, especially in Plum Village, is very kind. They are not here to harm you. They’re here to just be with you on this path.” It sounds so simple, but in that moment of meditating with the wounded child inside of me, I felt a breakthrough. I remember feeling so much lighter, so much more free. It wasn’t the end, though—we have habits and marks of fear that need to slowly be transformed. From time to time, I still recognize an unnecessary fear-based reaction in my body. When this happens, I sense the presence of the young child within and I remind myself that it’s okay to embrace him, to be there for him. That child is still present, but he is so much stronger, so much wiser, contained within the adult me.

There’s an even deeper practice: recognizing that any person who caused us harm as a young child must themselves have experienced intense suffering to behave in such a way. When we remember this, we can have a little more understanding; perhaps we can even dare to have compassion. This practice has helped me to forgive my cousin—for my own sake, for my own growth—and to forgive myself for my own reactions in those moments, my perceived weakness. Through that process, I learned to forgive a lot of people.

I’m lucky to be able to draw on my mother when I practice forgiveness. She is very kind and understanding—these qualities have been transmitted to me through her way of taking care of me as a child, for which I’m deeply grateful. Her example helps me to practice forgiveness, which can sometimes still be quite difficult.

Meditation gives us insight, but we also must have courage to act, to do what is right.

The cousin who bullied me now has children. I think if I had not become a monk and met the Buddhist teachings, I may have behaved angrily toward my nephews and nieces, his children. But because I have been able to understand and forgive him inside of me, I’ve been able to stop that cycle of hate. When I see his children, I have only love for them, because I’ve learned that whether we are a parent, an elder brother, an elder sister, an uncle, an aunt, or a friend, our way of being is itself a teaching, far more powerful than anything we might say.

As a young child, one of my responses to being bullied was to feed anger and violence in myself, and I started bullying one of my younger cousins. I did this even though she was an only child and looked toward me and my elder sister as her own siblings—we played together every day. From time to time, I would say something really mean or do something just to make her angry. After recognizing my 5-year-old child within and healing him, I called this cousin, whom I had not seen in four or five years, and I apologized. I spoke up and acknowledged something I am not proud of—I felt if I didn’t have the courage to express my remorse, she might continue to hold on to the woundedness she’d experienced.

Meditation gives us insight, but we also must have courage to act, to do what is right. The Plum Village tradition is based on the idea of Engaged Buddhism: It’s not enough to sit on a cushion and seek enlightenment; we must take our insights out into the world to help others transform their suffering.

♦

Reprinted from Calm in the Storm: Zen Ways to Cultivate Stability in an Anxious World by Brother Pháp Hữu and Jo Confino, 2025, with permission from Parallax Press.