When ruminating prevents you from moving forward and growing.

Every time we feel an insect bite, especially mosquitoes or mosquitoes, the natural reaction is to scratch with our nails. Scratching gives us a feeling of relief, in fact, it gives us pleasure, maybe that is the reason why we do not stop scratching, we keep itching and we keep scratching and so on, infinitely.

This act of scratching and scratching reminds me of rumination, the digestive process of some herbivores that swallow their food and what they do not chew they store in their stomach, return it to their throat, regurgitate it to grind it and then swallow it again in order to digest it. That is, looking at it, it is almost like a vomit that is not completed because it gets to a place in the throat and then goes back to the stomach. That is, it is an almost vomit that is swallowed again.

Scratching, rubbing, regurgitating, ruminating, pondering are synonyms for what we do with our sorrows on many occasions. When something bad happens to us, our brain, accustomed to "scratching", starts to ruminate, that is to say, to think over and over again about that misfortune. We feed on it by returning it to our throat for further processing, chewing and returning it to our stomach, but unlike a ruminating cow that does the process only once, we do it again and again, we ruminate and ruminate our sorrows and regrets.

We scratch ourselves with pleasure, because yes, it seems to give us pleasure to rub ourselves over and over again with our negative thoughts of guilt, sadness, recrimination, anger, hatred, revenge. Persistent thoughts and feelings that keep us going back and forth in the same place.

As an "expert" in scratching thanks to mosquito bites, I discovered two things. First, that sometimes there is only one mosquito that is around and not a herd, therefore, those "bites" that I feel are unreal or old; they were not made by the mosquitoes that stalk me. And the second and most important thing I discovered is that when I stop scratching and forget about the bite, it stops demanding that I keep scratching it with my nails. As if by magic, the itching disappears or at least diminishes.

The moral? Simple: stop scratching, stop ruminating, stop regurgitating our sorrows. And if we regurgitate, let it be once and to feed on them, but in the sense of learning, of enriching ourselves with their nutrients and discarding the negative. To learn and to continue eating, to continue living.

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Love, Sam.