HOW LONG IS CHILDHOOD?

7358400 minutes. That is seven million, three hundred and fifty eight thousand and four hundred minutes.

Just to clarify, that's calling 'childhood' from the age of four to eighteen. Obviously the length of childhood is different for everybody. This idea gets you past baby-toddlerdom and all the way through until most people might just bust out into the world on their own. For me that would be pre-school to high school graduation.

That is an incredible amount of minutes. Now of course, many of these minutes are spent sleeping, others eating food (hopefully good food that we like) others sharing the company of people that we like and love (like our friends and the best of our family, hopefully).

There are many of these minutes that are spent watching TV or on computers doing or watching what we want, many minutes reading and playing, many minutes soaking up the sun and laughing.

All during these millions of minutes we are also at risk of powerlessness from adults and peers.

There are so many lousy situations that befall children- and everyone has been a child. There are potentially abuses (emotional, physical, and sexual) from parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, siblings, teachers, and peers that befall everyone alive today on earth.

This is an absolutely sad, unfortunate situation here on our lovely Earth.

Sucks but true.

When you think about how minutes can drag along so painfully through childhood. When you live with somebody who might be abusing you, it can seem like it will never end.

When we spend all of these years in school, we are again at the mercy of teachers and students. So much power is yielded over us. We are graded and criticized and set up for disasters from bullying students.

Life during these 7.5 million minutes (more if you're going back into baby and toddler life- lots of time there for immense mounts of buried rage- stressed parents, doctors, incubators, fear) truly, as far as I can recall, feels like it will never end. It feels like an absolute eternity.

It is absolutely no wonder whatsoever that when many people finally bust away from from their families and school they go absolutely crazy with drugs and alcohol and disappearing and madness. Millions and millions of minutes of tension and fear.

Of course we repress rage as a protective mechanism. For the first millions of minutes of our lives we have to protect ourselves from wild beasts (other people) and definitely not provoke them in any way. Talking back, calling adults out, yelling, hitting- no way! Most people learn quickly that the beasts in their lives don't like that and will potentially lash right out at you, despite you being a child and vulnerable and full of way more innocence.

So it goes. We are certainly far from being an evolved species- that is for sure!

So is it any wonder, that if all of these moments from these grueling (and also wonderful) millions of minutes are recorded in our subconscious warehouses full of videos, that it takes a whole lot of mental work to undo the damage and just move beyond this warehouse full of junk?

I have had great success using Sarno's methods and no doubt about it it has involved reading his books back to back end to end over and over doing the work of talking to my brain about every lousy event that I could think of through my millions and millions of minutes of childhood and my millions and millions of minutes since then. Telling my brain that I get it that I am totally completely enraged of every form of abuse from yelling and nasty notes and bullies and control freaks ego maniacs that I have had the unfortunate experience of, well experiencing.

I get it brain, I am totally pissed and enraged about every miserable thing that any miserable person ever did to me. DON'T GIVE ME ANY SYMPTOMS!!!!

Thank goodness for all of the millions and millions of minutes (way way way more) of good loving fun and great times!

Life is great and we are truly all blessed to be here.

Doesn't mean there isn't a bunch of crap mixed in!