My body isn’t bad. What happened to me was scary and painful. My body did what has kept so many bodies safe for millennia—it tightened. Realizing that the pain, the tightening, was a natural response to something scary and unpredictable gave me instant compassion for myself, for my physicality, and even for the tightening. I could notice myself in pain and say to my body, as if speaking directly to the wise force entwined with my DNA, “Thank you for how you tried to keep me safe. You are doing the only thing you know how to do when something very scary happens. And although we are safe now,
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