ISSUE 69 | OCTOBER 10, 2025
There’s wisdom in what you might think is the worst part of you
My Loves,
Today I am going to take you into the recesses of my dark psyche and back into the light. A FIELD TRIP OF RADIANCE! Without the snacks.
TERMINOLOGY
So let me give you a refresher on Inner Child terminology. It’s a symbolic term. It’s not us when we were kids in this lifetime. So, whatever happened when we were eight years old—we go to therapy for that.
Inner child is a powerful phrase because it elicits gentleness. Interchangeable terms for Inner Child: your unhealed self, your fragments… darkness. It could also be called the unconscious self, subconscious self. The shadow self. Depending on the day, I refer to my Inner Child as Baby D, or Shadow D.
The most important thing to know: you are the parent of your Inner Child. You’re the creator, the holder, the sole caretaker of your unhealed stuff.
Healing is not about getting your Inner Child to grow up.
Healing is about integration.
Healing is not about yelling at your fear until it becomes courageous.
Healing is not about admonishing your doubt so that it becomes confident.
Healing is about loving all fragments of yourself as is, not asking them to change.
We incarnate to love all things as is, AND… to honour them.
This is where we really move up the evolutionary spiral.
THE SHADOW HAS SOME LIGHT IN IT
What’s your job when you’re caretaking a child? It’s to listen to them closely—to anticipate their needs and meet those needs in whatever way is wise and, ideally, immediate.
We all know that children, are wise beyond their years. Every child has some truthbomb, some gorgeous wisdom nugget to give to us, right? Right. So does your darkness.
Your most rapacious, greedy, needy stuff that you’ve been in therapy for, that you’ve been pressing down, that you don’t want to deal with because it’s difficult….shocking shame… despair.
There’s actual wisdom embedded in all of it.
This is primary the teaching of Carl Jung—that the diamond is in the darkness. I’ve understood this on another level this year.
You’re in a relationship with your darkness. And we can have a quality, unconditionally friendly, loving, compassionate relationship with our darkness.
You’re in a relationship with your Inner Child. Your Inner Child is not a burden. Your Inner Child has intelligence for you.
PAIN TO POWER PORTALS
Let me tell you how I’ve gotten to the deepest layers of this most recently. I’ve been in an intense transmutation—letting go of a marriage. We weren’t married long, but the love was profound, and so the grief was intense. It’s brought on some of the most punctuated Inner Child and Shadow Work I’ve done.
One of the benefits of getting on your knees to pray for emotional relief and any mercy that the Universe will dole you that day, is that you become very, very intimate with your pain. Your relationship with your pain intensifies. And that’s the point of pain: to improve our relationship to our fragmented parts, to learn to better hold it, see it, understand and LOVE IT—more than ever.
Our pain comes to the surface not to take us down, but to deepen us. Rolling in the deep means that a grand rising is underway. The closer you get to your darkness, the closer you get to your Radiance. (If you’re in the total shit right now, please trust me on this.)
SHADOW CHECK INS
One really simple practice is my morning and evening Inner Child check in.
I put my right hand on my lower belly, and my left hand on my heart. And before I get out of bed, I say:
“Baby D” (or sometimes I say, “Shadow D”), “What do you need from me today?” Or… “How can I support you to come into balance?”
In the midst of marriage-ending-pain, my Shadow has a lot to say. With shocking intensity. These were not calm conversations. I’ve been shocked at how much pain and craving and grief—pre-existing grief and current grief—and hostility, and just general fucking gnarliness has been in my unconscious self.
In the past I would have discounted it as irrelevant psycho garbage. Nonsensical.
Not this time. This time, I leaned in. I listened, I kept saying, calmly, to my raging, grieving inner voice… Tell me more.
I listened like a Divine Mother. Like I listen to my own son when he’s been in pain. Like psychotherapists and spiritual directors have listened to me. Like I listen to my friends and in our CENTERED Collective.
Instead of trying to change the pain, or get my Inner Child content to calm down. I got very very still and curious. Spacious. And I asked for all of it to be shown to me.
This is self love.
This what my Shadow was aching for:
“I want certainty. I want clarity. Tell me the future. Tell me. Tell me. Tell me. I need to know what’s going to happen. I need certainty. I need clarity. You haven’t been listening. Can you please be clear and certain with me? Tell me what’s going to happen.”
Fair enough. Completing a relationship can upend your life.
Now, what I’ve done many times in the past, is spiritually bypassed my pain. I would have said to my shadow self:
“Well, you know that the only time that exists is the Now. The past never happened, the future isn’t certain, and clinging to our desire to be certain about the future is the root of all suffering.”
Metaphysically true but what an insensitive response to the part of me that’s in turmoil.
I could have gotten all Buddhist on my Inner child. But that would’ve been invalidating.
Instead: I didn’t shame my Inner Child for wanting certainty. I didn’t belittle myself for wanting more clarity than ever.
Instead, I did what all good mothers do. And I thought quickly and came up with a loving idea:
“I love knowing that you want certainty and clarity. I love hearing it all,” I said to my Shadowy self.
“And I want to give that to you. I’m going to give that to you. How about this?:
Let’s get up at the same time every day. Let’s say the same mantra in front of the altar every day.
I have so much respect for your needs. I’m going to give you certainty and clarity every day.
You know what’s certain? Look at all of the friends that we have. Anytime of the day, anywhere I am on the planet, with WhatsApp and texting and phone calls and letters and intuitive capacity, we’re getting some form of beautiful, wise, loving, encouraging, happy, devoted, want-to-be-there-for-us support from the humans in our life. That is certain. That is clear. It’s always been that way. It will always be that way.
You want more certainty and clarity, my love? Okay. I understand that. That’s why we’re having an astrology reading tomorrow. We’re going to get more clarity on what’s happening and what’s possible in the future.
You know what’s certain? We have a trip booked to Paris in November. We are one thousand and eight percent, for sure, no shadow of a doubt, going to be eating chocolate croissants in Paris in November. Certain.
You know what I’m for sure certain of? That the Divine Mother and Father have me. Something magnificent is breathing me and always will. The Divine has me, and I have you. We are inseparable.
And I am 100% certain that you and I are inseparable. You, my darkness, you my Inner Child, my shadow, my ego, my fragmented self—I made you. You are from me. We will always be together. Everywhere we go, that is certain.
And I am very clear. I am so clear, about what I have come to the planet to create in this lifetime.”
And that, my loves, was an evening conversation with my Inner Child.
That’s meeting my woundedness where she’s at.
And for me, that’s being in relationship with my darkness.
Your needs, when you get down to them with gentle attention and compassion, are always going to bring you back to your irrefutable divinity.
You know what else I’m certain about?
Whatever you might be going through now or in the future that is difficult and challenging, it will pass. It’s for your expansion. We make it through the tunnel, every single time.
And you can give that message to your Inner Child every single day.
I will be here next week for you. Without any spiritual bypassing, with lots of clarity. And that is certain.
With Love,
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