We exist in an ever-changing environment that requires constant adaptation. We cycle through days, weeks and moments, while waking, sleeping, breathing and eating. Sometimes unconsciously, we adjust to fluctuations in career, finances and relationships.

Adaptation requires that we digest this barrage of changing stimuli and assimilate the experiences. This means that each and every one of us is an ever-changing and evolving being. In fact, the only continuity of the projection of self is that it has no continuity. For instance, you are not the same you as before reading this.

Unfortunately, assimilating experiences is not always easy or successful and can result in issues that remain unprocessed. Poor absorption of an experience is like a constant tapping on the arm—painless at first, but ultimately disruptive and bruising. And the reciprocal is also true: Just as the right digestive enzymes can break down food into basic components to be best used by your body, the right systemic mental, physical and energetic information can help break down experiences to be assimilated.

If an experience has not been properly broken down, what solution remains?

Often, the remedy applied is to anesthetize the undigested stimuli. That doesn’t work in the longterm: If you strain a muscle, a painkiller may provide relief from the pain, but it won’t treat the underlying trauma to the muscle.

Actually, mental digestion and assimilation are tools of presence in the present. And finding presence in the discomfort of the present often clarifies what “enzymes” are needed to break down and resolve past issues. Having presence in the present enables you to transcend the confusion of the past experience.

For, if you concluded at night that the sun will not rise and there will forever be no more light, you might then dejectedly retire to the basement of the mind to numb the pain of this realization. And, in the basement of the mind, the light of dawn would in fact be missed—a self-fulfilling prophecy, but not the truth.

Awareness is not hope, but the ability to discern the present information accurately and in context. This, in turn, allows for true reflection and the ability to discover what is needed to move on.