face your pain
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.
💚
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.