Emma Arbogast
Willingness is 90% of healing
Being genuinely willing to believe that something can change, even if you don’t know how, and offering that intention to the Universe, is 90% of healing.
I don’t mean just intending something will change everything. I’m saying that when you’ve gotten to the point where you are able to believe that something really can be different, you are 90% of the way to resolving the pattern.
Because when we’ve struggled with a pattern for a long time, it becomes like furniture in our mind. It’s just a Thing That is There, and to imagine it being different is very difficult. After all, there’s a reason it is there in the first place. And you need to work through that reason to get to a place where you can genuinely imagine yourself free of that pattern.
So you really, really don’t need to know “how” to heal. You just need to keep working through whatever is in the way of you being able to believe you can heal.
Changing your beliefs rearranges the furniture in your mind. So flexibility in changing your beliefs is one of the best skills to develop, IMHO. And it just takes practice! Neuroplasticity FTW!
Just try it:
“I’m willing to believe that ___ can change”.
Things you can make peace with today
- your feelings
- your needs
- your desires
- how your brain/mind works, your neurodivergence
- your habitual ways of being that you don’t like but can’t find any motivation to change right now
- your body
- your past
- the image of your parents in your mind
- everything you haven’t done but feel you ought to have
- the mistakes you’ve made
- the things you haven’t said but wish you had
- the things you said but wish you hadn’t
- the things you don’t know how to say
- the anger you don’t know what to do with
- the parts of you that don’t fit in modern society
- the parts of you that you can’t understand or don’t particularly like
- the parts of you that live in the dark murky depths and you like to pretend are not there
- all those parts in other people
- the fact that people have left you
- the fact that you’ve left other people
- anyone you don’t want to forgive
- anyone you want to forgive but don’t know how
- anyone at all, really
- reality as it currently exists
Peace is magical. When things are allowed to be as they are, they begin to unfold along the natural pathway toward wholeness that exists in all living things.
Wholeness is an inherent property of the Universe. Peace brings you into alignment with it.
What is peace? It’s just deciding to stop the war.
Stop resisting, stop fighting, stop hating, stop denying.
No fight, no blame.
Just allow, just exist-with, exist-alongside.
Letting it be what it is, letting it exist.
Whatever it is has a wisdom of its own that it might share with you if you sit quietly and let it be.
Just be willing for it to be what it is.
Just be willing to allow it to exist.
And see what happens.
💚
Our lives don’t entirely belong to us
The more I study astrology and see the energies unfold in my life, the more I have realized our lives don’t entirely belong to us. We are a process of Universal energies unfolding, that we happen to experience from a first-person perspective. Whoever we interact with are seeing the dance from their own perspective. But we are all part of the same dance that unfolds through time.
Astrology is developed through observation and correlation. We have no idea how it works. Any given chart is just for a moment in time–it applies to anything “born” in that moment, whether it’s a person, an event, or an idea. The fact that we can make any meaningful correlation between the state of the sky in a moment in time, and the unfolding of everything whose life began in that moment of time, implies the Universe and everything in it is co-arising and profoundly interwoven. We are part of the fabric of time and space, and it is part of the fabric of us.
Self-love means giving yourself what you want others to give you
What “You can’t love others if you can’t love yourself” really means is that if you are missing fundamental self-love, you will end up becoming fearful, controlling, and codependent in relationships because you are dependent on a source of love you have no control over. And that’s a fundamentally untenable position. It doesn’t mean you don’t love or care for other people. It just means eventually your love will turn into some form of controlling behavior that is not really based in love but in fear of losing love.
Self-love is not an abstract concept. It just means being OK being who you are, and not needing someone else’s permission to approve of yourself or take care of your own needs. And it’s the basis of healthy relating because if you can give yourself love, you won’t compromise your needs to attain love from others, and therefore you won’t become resentful or overwhelmed in relationships.
But if you were not loved as a child, you have to learn how to love yourself. Which takes quite a lot of work and time. But it helps if you stop thinking of it as a nebulous, abstract concept or purely based on feelings. Think of it as learning how to take care of a hamster, but more complicated. Imagine giving that hamster everything it needs to be a happy hamster. That is how you love a hamster. You love yourself the same way. You make sure you have what you need to thrive. You stop depriving yourself, thinking it will earn you love. You stop punishing yourself, thinking it will redeem you. You let yourself pursue what makes you uniquely happy, regardless of what people think of it. You stop putting off loving yourself until someone else loves you. You let go of the past and let yourself just exist as a person in the here and now, doing the best you can. Nothing to prove, nothing to earn, and nowhere else to be but the present moment.
Karma is not punishment
People in the West tend to misunderstand karma due to the influence of Christianity. Karma literally just means cause and effect. It’s not punishment. Christianity is really into punishment and retribution, but the Universe does not actually work like that.
The way the Universe teaches us is through the natural consequences to our actions.
If you treat someone like crap, and they stop wanting to be around you, you learn to stop treating people like crap. That’s it, that’s the whole lesson. You don’t need to be punished on top of that.
Punishment comes from a good/bad, right/wrong paradigm. But it’s not wrong to need to learn things by making mistakes. It’s just not. We all come here to learn.
When you do something, there is a result, and you learn from that result. That’s all karma really means. It means our actions have consequences, and through experiencing those consequences, we learn to choose better actions in the future.
Punishment is the idea that if you make someone suffer more on top of natural consequences, they will somehow learn more. But that’s not how learning works. So it’s just a dumb idea.
You weren’t wrong in the first place for making a mistake, so punishment will not purify you. It will just harm you by creating shame and confusion. Retribution or punishment doesn’t accomplish anything and it’s harmful.
So you don’t need to punish yourself either. It has no purpose–it’s just self-harm.
Don’t argue for your limitations
Sometimes when I try to explain possibilities beyond the limitations someone sees as real, they will become defensive & accusatory. “You don’t understand how limiting this limit really is!!”. Sometimes this takes the form of, “You are privileged; you don’t get it; you don’t have to suffer this limit, so you can’t possibly understand it”.
I usually walk away from these conversations just feeling sad. It’s not that I disagree that privilege is a real social phenomenon–of course it is. But that doesn’t mean people are helpless, and it doesn’t mean there are no possibilities to work around the way society is set up. Two things can be true–life can be unfair, and you can still make the best of your life. But if you argue for your limitations, you are making them more real, not less.
This usually boils down to an unmet need for validation, but limiting yourself to prove you have been limited is a costly strategy to employ. You can validate the suffering you’ve experienced without staying in it. “This sucks, and I’m moving forward anyway.”
You are the sky, not the weather
The spiritual path is about dis-identifying as a human and identifying as a spiritual being that is more than human. This doesn’t mean denying your humanity. It means seeing your humanity within the larger picture of who you really are. Of course you are still human and need to tend to the human experience you are having. You came here to be here. But you also came from somewhere, as something, that is far more than this temporary experience of humanness.
“Honor your incarnation” – Ram Dass
The decision to value yourself
At a certain point you have to stop caring that you don’t fit in and decide that who you are is purposeful and holy and devote yourself to the task of being yourself fully and freely. Because doing anything else hurts in the way that seeing something beautiful be destroyed hurts. Your uniqueness is precious and will only exist once in all of the known Universe. Even if you were the only one who ever valued it, that would be enough to satisfy the reason you were born.
To find that fierceness, you have to get in a really quiet place with yourself and commit to your own unfolding. There is nobody who can give it to you because it’s an expression of your own sovereign will. It’s the decision to value yourself-as-you-are, and only you can make it.
Talking to yourself is good actually
It’s ironic to me that we are told that talking to yourself means you’re crazy when it’s really the opposite – parts work (talking to the inner parts of yourself) makes you sane.
But you have to do it with respect. Give up inner bullying, inner tyranny (thinking one part can overpower all the others and “get them in line”)…approach your inner parts with genuine curiosity, respect, and care and you can transform your inner world from a battleground to a symposium of support and cooperation.
Self-authorization is part of spiritual development
“No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche
Millions have walked the spiritual path before you. But they’ve all also been walking a unique path of their own. We each have a unique spiritual path that we have to discover by walking it. And part of the path is learning to trust inner guidance over any other form of guidance.
There are many tools of liberation, but the only one who can liberate you is yourself. You are unique. Your tangle of patterns and meanings is yours. It is and always will be on you to untangle it.
You can follow other people’s teachings, and many will help you and work for you. But ultimately you can only become free by working with your own soul and walking your own path. Because our individuality is part of our awakening. There is nothing about us that is not purposeful.