I'd like to share this passage from 'A Path With Heart' by Jack Kornfield with you.  I found it earlier.  I wasn't really looking for it, in fact it was just in the next page of the book I'm currently reading.  I'm a firm believer in the universe giving or telling us what we need (or need to know) when we need it:

' A sign in a Las Vegas casino aptly says 'You must be present to win'.......To come into the present means to experience whatever is here and now.  Most of us have spent our lives caught up in plans, expectations, ambitions for the future, in regrets, guilt or shame about the past.  When we come into the present we begin to feel the life around us again, but we also encounter whatever we have been avoiding.  We must have the courage to face whatever is present - our pain, our desires, our grief, our loss, our secret hopes, our love - everything that moves us most deeply.....each of us will find something from which we have been running - our lonliness, our unworthiness, our boredom, our shame, our unfulfilled desires.  We must face these parts of ourselves as well.'

The universe told me what I needed to know.

  I have to live in the now, I have to let myself experience what hurts me and figure out why it hurts me.  I have to sit with that hurt...until it no longer hurts.  I can't afford to compatmentalize anymore, I can't just shove bad experiences into little mental boxes and put them away in the corners of my mind.  I have to deal with things as they come...because putting them away gives them power.  I fear what is in those boxes, and that fear makes me do things to avoid opening them; it gives them power to influence my decisons.

No more compartmentalizing.  Living in the here and now is the way to go.  I have to let myself experience life fully, in all it's wonder....

....the wonderful good, the wonderful bad, and the wonderful ugly.