What you are experiencing today is just the aggregate of all the days and experiences you have had up until this moment. Your body is a recorder for every experience, no matter how minute, so nothing is lost. You might think you can avoid, neutralize, or forget the ones you are not sure what to do with, but you have assimilated all of them in some way. You are just a container for all the things that have happened and how you have metabolized them. This might make you feel helpless, but nothing is too dangerous and you have something to do with how you interface with your environment.

It becomes clearer and clearer as you get older that all your experiences are living in you. Your body starts to show the wear and tear of all the decades of days and minutes. It is nothing to be ashamed of. It is just who you are. You are like a tree growing in the forest or a whale swimming in the ocean – built of a thousand battle scars which have shaped you into a beautifully worn giant with a story. Some of that story you have chosen and some of it has occurred without your permission.

It takes a long time to change. In fact, it takes every day of your life. A long time ago, you started a slow, steady walk toward this place where you are now. Just like any plant or animal, you cannot observe the growth happening. You just wake up one day and you are decades older, bigger and wiser. Whatever you choose for this moment and the ensuing ones will have immediate consequences, but will also add to the sum total of what you will be in a few years and decades.

That is why, when healing, you must go slow. Don’t try to change too quickly. You, like everyone else, have been sailing toward this place for a long time. You have responded to everything that has happened with everything that is within you, just trying to survive. Expecting that you are just going to be able to change with a few pieces of good advice is shortsighted. You should just settle in and look at where you have been, how you have gotten to this place and decide which way you will step today. You are creating something from the materials you have been handed, including the pain.