Bridger of Worlds
The Bridger of Worlds podcast is an in-depth walkthrough between the world of matter and world of spirit. I struggled with porn addiction for close to fifteen years, and all of this led me to discovering some very crucial and beautiful things about not only the physicality of my existence, but the spirituality of it as well. Since then, I‘ve been building bridges that have served me in feeling more whole and well-integrated. I’ve now made it my mission to share with you whatever it is I’ve learned.
Themes, topics and healing modalities such as spiritual embodiment, psychosomatic practices, Shadow Work, Masculine/Feminine energetics, conscious sexuality and archetypal meanings are brought to the forefront in order to raise awareness around what is out of sight because it is only from there that new life can ever emerge.
The greatest paradox of the human condition is to live amongst duality as we seek unity. This is a podcast honoring both and in doing so, creating the loving connections and honest-to-raw conversations we so desire in our lifetimes.
Bridger of Worlds
A Call To The Inner Wild II: Bridging Soul and Shadow With the Wild Child
In this episode, Ioannis Kokkinos explores the archetype of the wild child as a key to deep personal healing and soul embodiment. Building on the previous episode’s discussion around the soul and the shadow, he reveals how both are intimately connected through the inner child.
In this episode, we explore:
- The wild child as the unconditioned self that holds our original joy, vitality, and creativity
- How the shadow is formed through rejection of core aspects of our inner child
- The role of Jungian psychology in understanding repression, fragmentation, and integration
- Why reclaiming our wildness is essential for authentic self-expression and spiritual alignment
- The energetic invitation of Leo season to embody courage, radiance, and personal truth
- Compassionate approaches to shadow work and the path to inner reconciliation
This episode invites listeners to challenge inherited beliefs about the shadow, reconnect with the raw truth of who they were before conditioning, and begin the process of healing through integration. The wild child is not a part of us to tame—it is the part we must remember.
Introduction and Welcome
Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Bridger of Worlds podcast. I'm your host Ioannis Kokkinos. Thank you so much for joining me. If you're on YouTube watching, thank you for tuning in and if you're on one of the podcast platforms, thank you for tuning in as well.
Connecting the Wild Child to the Shadow and Soul
So today I want to talk about the wild child.
I am going to connect it to the previous episode because last week I talked about the difference between the soul and the shadow, the daemon, the demon, and the common denominator is, in fact, the inner child when we're talking about the soul, when we're talking about the shadow.
I know in many instances when we're talking about the shadow, we can paint it as a villain, as a monster, as something that really has like power over us, control over us.
It really does speak to the denied, rejected part of us that takes over really when we are triggered or activated. But at the end of the day, it really does just speak to inner child wounding, right? That is basically what is denied and rejected is inner child wounding.
Understanding the Inner Child and Shadow Work
And we are to learn how to hold space for these parts of ourselves. So when we're actually working with our shadow, we are basically just holding space for our inner child wounding.
And maybe that can be comforting in some sense because we don't have to always paint the shadow as a big, great villain that we need to vanquish or as a big scary monster that you know has control over us. Even our addictions, even our compulsions, which is really shadow material, is rooted in inner child wounding.
So when we go past these images and these depictions of what we may perceive our shadow to be, we can fully come to embrace basically our inner child that has been waiting for us, and um, basically holds the key to everything. So this is also connected to our soul, right? So I did say that the shadow is one means to reach the Self, the nucleus of the psyche, which is basically the soul, that is a part of Jungian psychology.
And the child is very much connected to our soul, right? So before programming and conditioning get their hands on us, right? The younger we are, the less programmed and conditioned we are, the more attuned we are to our soul, actually.
The soul is the thread of creation. The soul is an expression of spirit. So before we get into that judgment space, right, like as we grow up, we start to move through conditioning and programming, we start to judge what is right, what is wrong. We can actually render ourselves further and further away from our soul in that manner.
And in fact, that is what causes us to render ourselves further from our soul because our soul is wild and we have to remember and connect to the wild child, right?
The Innocence of the Wild Child
So today's episode is about the wild child. It's the wild child that is wounded, right? When we're children, when we are hurting, when we're, uh, in pain as children, that is what activates shadow material for the future.
But when we are young, wild, free, and innocent, the wild child, that is our soul. So we need to connect to that inner child. We need to connect to that part of us that holds basically the key to everything, to our healing, to our medicine, to our joy, to our freedom, to our expression, to our creativity, because that is how we get to further align, remember and reconnect with our soul, with our wildness.
Now, the wild from the child's perspective, of course, is innocent, right? So as children, we scream, we rage, we cry, we have tantrums, right? We run all over the place. We are constantly emoting. We don't care about how much we're crying. We don't care about what kind of sound we're making.
We do not care because we are in fact a lot less conditioned and programmed to know that this isn't wrong or bad, right?
But from creation's perspective, from basically the soul's perspective, it's actually not bad or wrong because as children we know that this is how we get to move energy within ourselves, right? Remember emotion is energy in motion. So by constantly moving emotion unapologetically and um, without judgment, we get to transform the energy, right?
So.
Embracing Emotions and Healing
If a child is screaming and is angry and is or frustrated or is is you know, very sad about something, it will emote what it needs to emote and then eventually, peace comes, tranquility, laughter, lightness, joy, and ultimately this is what we also have to learn how to do with our adult selves because a lot of that emotion is suppressed.
We started to stop ourselves at some point from feeling and emoting because we were told that it's wrong, it's bad, it's weak, especially as men, right? So, that wildness, that innocent wild does hold the key to not only working with our shadow, but also further aligning and further reconnecting with our soul.
It is through shadow work that we get to our soul. And the common denominator, as I said, is the wild child, is the inner child that is pure lightness, is pure joy, is pure freedom of expression, is pure love, is pure innocence. That part of us never gets lost no matter how much programming and conditioning gets piled on top of it.
So I wanna bring this to the space today because last week I made, you know, the distinctions between the shadow and the soul. And really the one that is holding the key to both is the inner child and specifically the wild child. Because our wildness, part of our wildness is innocent.
When we look to the nature world, we see that there's a lot of death and separation and decay and hunting and survival, right? But it's all happening in the name of innocence because that is nature. That is how nature intends it to be. And if that is how nature intends it to be, that is how creation intends it to be. Creation created nature.
Creation is God, source. Spirit. So even in all of the suffering, even in all of the separation, even in all of the death and decay, there is an innocence to it all. Now, as humans, we have the free will. We have the choice to use this wildness that each and every one of us has, consciously. We are to use our wild in the name of unity and connection.
In the previous episode, I said that the shadow's origin story is the realization of duality. That is why we all have a shadow. It's the part of us within us that perceives duality as a means of pain, suffering, and basically emptiness, right, within that gap between the two polarities. To live within the knowledge of duality and to know that there is separation and death and loss, but still love, in spite of that, still move through life openly and wholeheartedly in spite of all of that, is to be aligned with the soul, because the soul knows that even though duality exists, love does not die.
Whatever space exists between the two polarities, god is present. Truth is present. Consciousness is present. Love is present. And the only way to basically start to integrate this knowledge within ourselves is to fully hold space for our wildness because our wild is wounded. Our wild child is wounded, and these are the parts of us that feel separation, feel a sense of pain and suffering because of loss, death, and separation.
The Role of Grief in Spiritual Awakening
So when we start to basically let ourselves feel these emotions, which is basically grief. Um, you know, there's all kinds of emotions, loaded, heavy, dense emotions, obviously, but grief speaks to loss. Grief speaks to death. And in my journey, in my personal journey out of, know, all the emotions that I express, it really comes down to grief.
And I think grief is even more so primal than fear. You know? I think like fear definitely has its messages and fear definitely has its place in our medicine and healing and showing up. But so does grief and that grief, right? Like when we move through the grief and we let ourselves mourn and, you know, feel like the loss of separation, feel the loss of the thing, the place, the person.
Ultimately and inevitably love actually gets to fill the spaces, and this is how we awaken to our soul. I did say last week that when we spiritually awaken, it's our soul that awakens. We are wild from day one, right? We have a soul from day one, but we are all born asleep. We are all born unconscious. The soul and the unconscious are synonymous because it is our unconscious that awakens.
So that is our soul that awakens and our unconscious becomes conscious.
The unconscious and consciousness, two sides of the same coin, the soul and the spirit. Two sides of the same coin.
So I guess today's message really like the takeaway message in this episode is, yes, the shadow and the soul are different. But they're ultimately connected and what connects them is the inner child, is the wildness of the inner child, because we want the wild within us to not perceive creation and life as separation.
That is like, if I can say, like wrap up, you know, spiritual knowledge in a nutshell, and wrap it up in a nice gift and put a big red bow tie on it, is that. We want our wildness, our wild, our soul to fa basically awaken by realizing that in all the separation and all the spaces between the dual nature of things, between death, decay, destruction, and loss, that God exists.
Consciousness exists , love exists. And it's not. It's not. I dunno if it's something you read, right? I don't know if it's even just me saying this to you. Maybe of course, I would love for something to become activated within you as you're listening and watching or watching, but it really is going within yourself.
And just holding space for the parts of you that are hurting due to separation, which is the shadow, and then realizing there is no separation. That is the soul.
The Leo Archetype and the Wild Child
So this episode is being released at some point during Leo season. And the Leo archetype is very much associated with the wild child. It's also associated with leadership, with courage, with radiating our inner light and authenticity, showing up unapologetically.
And Leo is ruled by the sun. So we all have a sun sign, right? We have to look toward our sun sign for all of these qualities and the house in which our sun is positioned in. This is the area of life where we are to shine and radiate and show up and be leaders, and be authentic, and be courageous and bold to express.
And the foundation, what holds all of that as our adult selves is the wild child. Is the wild child that feels safe first and foremost with us, right? because if that wild child in our, within our being and psyche is fragmented, is feeling lost, is feeling, is feeling alone, is feeling rejected, is feeling abandoned, then that wild will very much show up as shadow material because it will all be separation based.
We want our wild to be unity based, and of course in sexual encounters within physical intimacy, our wild does bring two people together in the name of love, connection, God, consciousness, creation. That is the ultimate nature of our wild, and that all happens in the name of innocence, right?
The the innocent wild. And this is what we must tap into fully and wholeheartedly as adults so that we're not expressing our wild as shadow material. As addiction, as compulsion, as inflation, excess, hoarding, right, greed, gluttony, et cetera. We are to live wildly, we are to be fully connected with our animal self and that animal self needs to perceive life as oneness. That in all of the differences in all of the separation and all of the endings and losses and you know, transitions and changes of life, love is eternal. Truth is eternal. The one truth, right? When I say truth, it's the absolute truth where everything came from that is the truth. Which is God.
Which is Spirit, which is the source.
So I hope you enjoyed this episode. I wanted to bring this to the space as well because I think it really does speak to last week's episode and kind of tying up loose ends, and it is Leo's season and if you don't know your astrology chart, but if you know your sun sign, just know that this, these are the qualities that you are meant to embody for your sign in question.
This does not mean to act like a child, right? We are to grow in wisdom and presence and knowledge.
We are to mature and develop as we age and grow older. It is not to become immature. It does mean to continue to mature, but still being childlike. Connected to the inner child that does not perceive life from a separated and fragmented sense of self. So a little homework for you. If you know, shadow work triggers you, if these uncomfortable parts of you trigger you, just show up to them with patience, compassion, and kindness as you would to a small little child that just needs love and embrace. That's it.
That's really how it starts. And then you will be able to go further, to go deeper. And of course, the child, the inner child, the wild child will have all kinds of beautiful messages and wisdom for you as you continue this work.
And the most beautiful part about all this is you get to reconnect and remember your soul, your wild self, the part of you that was true and authentic before programming and conditioning got their hands on you,
and it's different now because you're an adult. You're a grown person showing up to this part of you, so you're not just a child anymore, you're a bridge, you are a hand, you are a connection. You are the future self reuniting with the past self, and that's what it's all about really.
Moving forward by understanding backward.
Conclusion and Final Thoughts
So I'll leave it here. I think that's enough food for thought for today. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you're on YouTube watching, please hit that like subscribe button. I so appreciate it. If you're on one of the podcast platforms, share the content if you still feel called, on YouTube as well. Please leave a message.
You can text me, you can leave a comment below if you're on YouTube. I'm on socials threads, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram. I'd love to see you over there as well.
I will be back next week, every Thursday, as always here on Bridger of Worlds. And in closing, please remember that you are the medicine and I am just the messenger. Thank you very much.