Soulshine

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” The answer to this famous question from Snow White is simple: YOU ARE! Snow White never cornered the market on fairness or beauty. Yes, she is fair, but so are you and so is everyone in this world. A more important question to ask yourself may be “Am I open to believing that I am the fairest of them all?” If you are willing to be open to believing that you are the answer, then you are on your way toward personal transformation. I’d venture to say that most people on this earth do not believe that they are the answer; that they are fair or beautiful. Yet EVERYONE is. When you look into the mirror and see someone who is less than the fairest, you are seeing a dark illusion of someone else’s vision of you which, at some point in your life, you accepted as true. It is false. Someone at sometime in your life lacquered you with their inner-pain and you accepted the shellacking. You came to believe that you were not fair or beaut

When you're feeling insecure do you treasure it? I treasure it Feel the pull of nature's course and treasure it Treasure it Feel the pull, feel the swing, There's no value `til you treasure it. The Fixx, Treasure It* “When you’re feeling insecure, treasure it? You’ve got to be kidding, right? I mean who treasures feeling insecure or bad about themselves?” These are the thoughts that used to run through my head when I first heard the song Treasure It by The Fixx back in 1986. I didn’t understand the meaning of this lyric until 10 years later, and it was one of the most empowering experiences of my life. In 1996 I began lecturing at the Cathedral of St. Louis. It was a tremendous challenge for a person who didn’t treasure himself or his insecurities. That first morning, I was in a side chapel before Mass started, and I was a nervous wreck. I had to get up in front of a crowd and read! Oh my God! How was I gonna do that? The fear was causing me to shake uncontrollably.

Many people grow-up with the belief “I don’t count.” They adopted this belief at a young age when 1) adults neglected to listen to them. And that neglect led them to believe that what they had to say didn’t count; 2) adults told them they were “too emotional” and dismissed their feelings as irrelevant. And that neglect led them to believe that what they felt didn’t count. Before long, after they eventually added one (what I have to say doesn’t count) plus one (what I feel doesn’t count) they got an ugly answer: I don’t count. The belief that “I don’t count” makes life miserable. It also makes it impossible for the belief-holder to set proper boundaries with anyone. As long as you hold tight to the belief that everyone counts in this world—but you—you have made yourself less than human. And as long as you are feeling less than human, you will always doubt yourself, place your needs behind everyone else’s and have an insatiable desire for approval from everyone. As soon as you adopt

“You always seek to experience what you believe about yourself.” Howard Falco, I AM Codependent behavior is an excellent example of how people subconsciously seek to experience what they believe about themselves. It’s well understood that the source of codependency, or any addictive behavior, is poor self-love/self-esteem. People who believe they are worthless or less-than will always seek to experience and validate their worthlessness or their feelings of inadequacy.   And as Howard Falco points out in I AM , they will seek to fulfill their beliefs about themselves in every facet of their lives; be it love, career, personal, etc. The vast majority of people suffering from codependency are starved for affection and intimacy. They don’t believe they’re worthy of love, however, and so they are willing to settle for whatever or whoever comes along. A codependent may be attracted to an attractive healthy person, but they will dismiss the possibility that this person could e

When someone enters a room, are you immediately aware of his/her feelings? Codependents tend to have a super-sensitive emotional radar when it comes to the feelings of others; in particular negative feelings. As soon as we come into contact with someone, we know if he/she is feeling sad, angry or fearful. We can pinpoint worry and we can read the language of the silent treatment as it projects feelings of resentment toward us or others. I believe codependents are hypersensitive to the feelings of others precisely because codependents are so emotionally shutdown to themselves. The fact that we turned-off our own feelings has opened the door to our being extremely sensitive to whatever someone else is feeling. It’s sort of like how a person who looses his/her sight develops a heightened awareness of other senses. We’ve lost our own ability to feel and so we are ever-more aware of everyone else’s feelings. There’s a strange contradiction here, however. After all, codependents detach f

Fear is a doorway into hell. One conscious thought, knocking at that door, is all it takes for the door to open. And once that door swings open, fear is ready to take you on a rollercoaster into the depths of your inner-darkness-- and beyond. One fearful thought leads to another as soon as you step foot into the darkness beyond the door. All of the “what if(s)” are there to greet you. Should they fail to terrify you, a host of “if only(s)” will wisk you away to a higher tier of darkness. On that next level, you will be greeted by lack and loss. After all, your fears are fueled by loss of control. Once the stability of control is yanked from under your feet, the fear of losing what you have, or of never having enough, prove to be the seeding grounds for perpetual worry. Worry is like an endless ocean in the depths of your inner-darkness. Soon you find yourself drowning in the “what if he leaves me?”, or “what if there isn’t enough money left to pay the bills?” As you gasp for air, y

For an active codependent, there are reasons why one sign of affection from another person can be one too many and why one hundred signs of affection will most likely never be enough. The codependent’s internal neediness for affection is fueled by self-negating factors. Let’s look at some of these factors. The first self-negating factor is the codependent’s belief that they are not as good as other people. This belief causes codependents to see themselves as unlovable in the eyes of others.   An active codependent can see value and beauty in most anyone aside from themselves. Why would this be? Well, most likely because, as children, they were treated like they were somehow subhuman by parents and/or other adults. Seeing themselves as subhuman robbed the child of self-love before it could ever take root inside of them, and thus robbed them of any hope for having good self-esteem. A second self-negating factor, also related to poor parenting skills, is fear of abandon

Let’s look a little deeper into the concept of a codependent as an emotional vampire. The mythic vampire is a human corpse that rises from the dead. It has but one life source—human blood— and so it sucks the blood out of living humans to sustain itself. The vampire can never get enough blood from others because it apparently can’t sustain its own life blood. So a vampire is always on the prowl for new victims. An out-of-control codependent is much like the vampire. Somewhere within the growth process of the codependent person, his/her life source vein—self-love—was severed. As a result, he/she became an emotionally-lifeless living corpse. The codependent then learned to sustain him/herself on the love of others, much like the vampire sustains itself on the blood of others. Since the codependent is not able to sustain love for him/herself any more than the vampire is able to sustain blood for itself, the codependent must constantly get his/her life source from outside of him/herself

“Detachment is the absence of a need to hold on to anyone or anything. It’s a way of thinking and being that gives us the freedom to flow with life. Detachment is the only vehicle available to take you from striving to arriving.” Dr. Wayne W. Dyer Detachment is a form of surrender. We finally realize and accept that we can’t control life or other people; and, with the help of our Higher Power, we gradually begin to let go. First, we let go of our misconceptions concerning the amount of power we thought we had over other people. Second, we learn to detach from our addictions to certain “things.” Many of us grew-up with the illusion that we somehow had real power to manipulate and control other people. And some of us even thought we had the power to stop the world from spinning, if necessary. We were starved for emotional attention and this intense emotional neediness made us into emotional vampires. We’d suck the life out of our victims because our need was so great for love and at

“When we are honest with ourselves, God shows up. It is guaranteed. Will that Presence make you jump for joy? Maybe. But maybe that Presence is going to make you cry. Maybe you will weep all night, until your face becomes a thing of beauty, filled with tender light.” Jason Shulman, Receiving God I believe God wants us to be honest with him. But I also believe we have to first be honest with ourselves in order to be honest with God. We have to be ready for God to show up, and we have to be willing to stop pulling God’s leg—as well as our own. This means we have to work our way out of any denial that keeps us trapped in self-fulfilling/self-sabotaging delusions. God is always present for us, but God will not enter into a serious relationship with us until we are ready—ready to be open, truthful, responsible and fully open to our real selves and to the real God. So who is the real God? The Prodigal God, I believe. God is the parent who loves us unconditionally, despite our flaws and f

In her book Choices , Melody Beattie mentions a visit with Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. During the visit a question is raised about “what it means to own my power”? Kubler-Ross replies “All you have to do is be who you are.” A simple answer to a complex question. An answer that seems so easy and yet is so difficult to successfully fulfill. In life it’s pretty difficult to own your personal power by being who you are. Society tells us to be the acceptable norm that it has collectively decided we all should be. Religion tells us to be the acceptable norm that our respective faiths have decided we should be. Family adds on its collective norm. Before we are old enough to discover and understand who we really are, we have had a dozen false personas pasted all over us with cement glue. And it’s only at some point in adulthood that many of us begin to realize we have been imposters. As adults many people begin to realize that certain “norms” that were forced on them simply don’t fit. These nor

Sometimes we need to wrestle with God. We have all sorts of ideas about how life should be—when it comes to love, justice, fairness, happiness, etc.—and too often life comes up short of our expectations.  And too often so does God. When life, or God, comes up short of our demands, we have at least three options. 1). We can pretend that everything is really OK because we’re afraid to question God, let alone be angry with God; or 2). we can be angry as hell with God; rant and rave and attempt to cut God out of our lives and shoulder all of the responsibility for making life right our way; or 3). we can wrestle with God. By wrestle with God I mean that we express our true feelings with God; be perfectly honest with God about who we are, where we’re at and what we need; and question God in every way possible. Options one and two get us nowhere. Option one keeps us stuck in first grade spirituality and victim thinking. We will always be a victim of life and of our concept of God as unappr

People often confuse guilt with shame, but there’s a big difference between the two feelings. Guilt is all about your behavior. Shame is about who you are, your very being. In other words, guilt tells us that something we’ve said or done is hurtful or wrong. Shame tells us that we are inherently bad or unacceptable in and of ourselves. Let’s look at how guilt and shame work. There is a difference between behavior and being. For example, I’ve never liked using the term “sinner” to describe a particular person, or the human race in general. It’s offensive and its intent is to make people feel shame for being human, for simply being who they were created to be. As humans we all make mistakes that we are not proud of having committed. This does not make us “sinners.” It simply means we are imperfect and our imperfection provides us with the opportunity to grow into being better people. Being sinful is NOT our nature. It is not the totality of who we are. It is simply an aspect of our nat