Innocence

Innocence is a quality that most of us find appealing, precious, and beautiful — what is it, exactly? 

To me it consists in openness of heart, a willingness to be vulnerable, an absence of emotional defensiveness. 

That's not the same as ignorance, inexperience or naiveté.  Parents in particular often confuse innocence with ignorance as they try to protect the innocence of their children — "Children are too young to know such things," is a familiar refrain. But children are boundlessly curious, and as long as parents offer a safe context for knowledge, information in itself doesn't harm them or diminish their innocence, it only prepares them better for life. 

What does rob children of innocence (and it happens all too often)  is not knowledge but suffering. 

Keep Your Innocence

Invariably as we get older, we lose our first innocence, that openness and unforced vulnerability we had as children.  We get hurt and we develop defenses to protect ourselves against being hurt again. 

Such defenses are valuable and are a necessary part of adult life — paradoxically, they actually help preserve your innocence by protecting you from further hurts that would make you more reluctant to to open up.  There's nothing wrong with being well defended as long as your defenses are not so unconscious, habitual or obsessive that you can't relax them to open your heart when you want to. 

Your defenses may be necessary for adult life, but the emotional wounds that impelled you to create them tend to make them habitual and involuntary, so you have a harder and harder time relaxing them when you want to.  Beyond protecting you, they come to box you in as you get older, weigh you down, and prevent you from opening your heart. 

If you're willing to do the work, though, you can gradually heal the emotional wounds that make your defenses reflexive and involuntary, so you can choose to be open to the people you care about.  That work is both tedious and sometimes very uncomfortable, but it's definitely worthwhile, because it lets you retain or regain your innocence as you get older. 

You can't just wish such wounds away, any more than you can stop yourself from wanting to sneeze when your nose tickles.  You can tell yourself that you know better, that there's no reason to keep flinching away every time something reminds you of a past hurt, but you'll flinch anyway. 

The only way to heal such wounds is to open them up and clean them out — you have to identify what hurt you before, and set up a safe way to re-experience it over and over again without renewing the wound, until gradually, like the animal you are, you learn in your body that it's not necessarily going to hurt you again. 

This is the work not only of innocence, but of integrity (see our page about integrity). 

Intimate Sex is Innocent

The best sex is innocent, which is one of the things that makes it so wonderful.  When you see two people fucking who are really intimate, they are so wide open to each other that their love is almost painfully beautiful.  This is a quality that's conspicuously (and intentionally) absent from almost all commercial pornography — see our porn page for a discussion of why.