Pip: If your integrative health practice also doubles as a letter to every wounded child who ever needed a wise adult to show up — you might be in the right place.

Mara: Today we’re sitting with a piece by Dr. Jen Wyman-Clemons, MD that works as a letter of guidance — covering ancestral belonging, how we relate to illness, and finding beauty as a daily practice. Let’s start with that letter itself.

Dearest Little One — A Letter Across the Distance

Pip: This post is framed as a letter to an older inner child — someone who grew up without reliable parents, and who needs to hear, maybe for the first time, that their unloved beginning was not the whole story.

Mara: The piece opens from a place of shared experience, and then pivots to something larger. Here is the line that anchors everything that follows: “While parents may be gone from us by events over which we have no control, or may have been experienced as unloving, there are ancestors in your deep lineage and other lifetimes who love and send you blessings.”

Pip: So the upshot is that belonging doesn’t begin and end with the parents who were present or absent. The lineage reaches back further, and that depth is offered as a real source of support — not a consolation prize.

Mara: The letter builds from there into very practical territory. It addresses food — thanking your meals, chewing slowly, keeping a clean diet. It addresses how you speak to yourself, how you carry your body, how you schedule quiet. Small, tangible things treated as serious medicine.

Pip: There’s a section on illness that reframes the whole concept. The spelling is deliberate — “I’ll-ness” as in “I will” — the idea being that symptoms point toward unmet needs and unspoken wants, like breadcrumbs back to yourself.

Mara: The letter also addresses addiction directly, calling it “an extra sticky attachment.” The advice is concrete: twelve-step community, breathwork, gentle exercise, pulling weeds. And one pointed note — avoid labeling yourself by your struggle outside of active recovery.

Pip: The philosophical spine running under all of it is the random walk — a concept from physics the letter invokes to say that energy sent in any direction eventually returns to its source. Blessings and harm both travel that loop.

Mara: It closes with this: “While we can’t control our future, we can guide it more surely by taking our next best move from a place of contentment — and knowing, in this moment we are exactly where we are supposed to be.”

Pip: Written by someone who, by her own account, also walked in that darkness as a child. That’s not a rhetorical flourish — it’s the whole reason the letter has weight.

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Mara: Belonging, healing, and the slow work of finding beauty in ordinary things — that’s the territory this letter covers.

Pip: Next time, we’ll see what else is waiting in the practice. There’s always more ground to cover.

Here’s a link to the letter https://drjenwyman-clemons.com/2023/05/31/dearest-little-one1five-years-later/