Soulshine

Betrayal is the feeling of being duped. It is the gut-wrenching emotion that leads us to feel abandoned and to experience a sense of loss. The world as we have known it has suddenly changed in a way that makes us feel unsafe. Our well-being is disturbed. And our trust is shaken. Betrayal happens in many different ways. Sometimes we betray ourselves, or we may feel that our bodies have betrayed us. This happens when we develop a serious illness. The immediate feeling we have is that our body has in some way turned against us. It’s been unfaithful. It’s let us down. This sense of betrayal can often lead to a second sense, once we get past the initial shock of our illness: That we are the ones who actually betrayed our own bodies. We refused to eat well, or to exercise or to treat our bodies with proper respect by avoiding cigarettes or avoiding excessive alcohol or drug consumption. New feelings then arise: primarily guilt, shame and remorse. In a flash, we can be filled wit

“Follow your bliss” is a popular ideal, but you have to follow your pain first. I mean there can be no true bliss to follow if it’s buried under the boulders of your unresolved pain. Bliss is the end result of a deepening, maturing spirituality. Pain is the path you must blaze in order to mature spiritually. Pain-- be it physical, mental or emotional— awakens the empty spaces inside of us. If we are present and open to our pain, it will take us to the very places where we need to find spiritual healing. Pain invites us to truly take a soul-journey. This journey into the inner-areas of the soul is beautifully portrayed in the 2008 Japanese film Departures . The film centers on the life of Daigo Kobayashi, a cellist in a Tokyo symphony orchestra, who carries a dark burden in his heart. That burden centers on his relationship with his father, who Daigo hasn’t seen in 30 years. When Daigo was six years old, his father-- who operated a coffee shop-- ran off with one of the waitresses. Da

Today is Ash Wednesday, and I have been asked “Where are your ashes?” To which I replied “I am wearing them inside—within my empty spaces—where they will hopefully bring spiritual healing; and where they will eventually bring more good to the world than a one day public display on the forehead that is largely forgotten by the next day.”    If you practice Lent, allow it to be a genuine-internal-spiritual tour de force that propels you to love and bless the world with great goodness from within you. Do not allow it to simply be a hollow-external-ashen show of shows to garner public approval from outside of you. Public approval is for the religious. Choose to be spiritual, instead, and you will learn that Love is more valuable than any form of public approval.

I am in the womb of my emptiness. And I am exploring the scar tissue I find on the walls. Fear and shame have caused the greatest scars, and have etched an image of a god into the deepest recesses of my emptiness. It’s the god I was raised to believe in. It’s the god that is fear, shame, hate, judgment and revenge deified. And it is a god that is now dead. Clearly, my mind, my heart, my soul—and all of the empty spaces within me-- now officially declare this god is dead. There may be a vast womb of emptiness within me, but there is no longer any space for a god of hate to dwell. Nor is there any space for those who use fear and shame in the name of a hateful-god. I will wash myself clean of this god. And I will wash myself clean of its devils. The god I grew-up with, the god taught to me by adults and Church, is dead. My empty spaces have become its tomb. Within myself I sense death and stillness like earth buried beneath winter snows. I gasp for new life as all of me begi

“As we grow into adulthood, we often end up searching for someone to give us what we didn’t get as children. The absence of sufficient attention can create a gnawing hunger for outside approval… Though other’s responses to our efforts (to get their approval) feed our hunger, that satisfaction is only fleeting, and in the end we feel empty again.” Steve Flowers & Bob Stahl, Living with Your Heart Wide Open The great “gnawing” universal empty. That’s what so many of us experience on a daily basis: The Big Empty. Inside we are empty and we have been running on empty for years. We muster enough adrenaline to keep us searching from person to person, from face to face, to find some sign of love or approval. We look for those who have a “Fill ‘er Up” sign on their faces; whether it be in he form of an approving smile or some gentle kindness in their eyes. It may be enough to get us through the day or it may be only enough to get us to the next subway stop. But either way, it’s more than

“Your Actions always speak louder than your words. If you want to see the beliefs you are truly operating out of in this world, just look at your current actions.” Howard Falco, I AM Maybe we’ve met someone new; someone we feel an instant positive connection with; someone who puts a smile on our face because we experience wonderful feelings bubbling up inside of us as we talk with this person. The experience is mutual and the beginning of a new relationship, a new friendship is breaking across the horizon of our lives. We’re excited about this fateful meeting between our two souls. We want this new relationship, or so we tell ourselves. We also indicate through our smile and our words to the other that we want to move forward with him/her. Everything is bright and positive. We talk on the phone. We email each other. We get together… Then reality sets in. It’s the ugly reality of whom we’ve always believed ourselves to be: Mr. Unworthy. Ms. Pitiful. All of the old head-tapes of “I a

“Life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone, I hear you call my name and it feels like home. When you call my name it's like a little prayer…” Madonna, Like A Prayer What is prayer? Prayer is conscious contact with Mystery. Prayer is a heartbeat, a spoken word, a thought that transcends from you into the greater Mystery of the Universe; into the Eternal Power that is beyond human control. Prayer is the universal spiritual connection between your soul and mine. As a prayer, I can speak or call your name from many miles away, allow it to arise through the air and gently float away with the wind, across time and space, on the breath of Eternal Mystery, from my heart to yours. And when I mix your name with other beautiful words like “love,” “blessings,” “peace” and “healing,” my prayer becomes a spiritual bouquet that lights up your heart and brings you warmth from within your soul. Prayer can be a single spoken name of a loved one or it can be a litany of names: Richard, Jean, Ma

The codependent personality is always desperate for affection. Even years into recovery this fact remains unchanged for many people. Why? Because we are still lax in our willingness to meet our own emotional needs. Deep down we still want someone else to fill the void. And every person who comes along who shows the slightest interest in us—who smiles at us, who treats us with kindness or who flirts with us-- becomes our latest, greatest redeemer. Yes. We are so desperate for intimacy that we fall right into the trap again and again and again. Every smiling face offers us the hope of avoiding self-care. We want the easy way out. We want to be rescued. And our thinking is skewed in so many wrong ways we can’t possible see straight. First, we are forgetting that only WE can fill-up our emotional emptiness through proper self-care and the aid of a Higher Power. No one else can fill up our empty spaces. We have to invest time in loving who we are and in treating ourselves the way we want

It’s Valentine’s Day and I’ve bought myself a bouquet of red roses. Why? Because nobody else is going to do it. And because I have to love myself enough to even care enough to do it. If I don’t care enough about me to gift myself with flowers, why should I even hope that someone else would do so, or mope around because no one has done so. If you’re not getting the love you want or expect, it’s because you are not giving yourself the proper love and respect that is essential to projecting a healthy image of yourself to the world around you. What you give to yourself, you essentially give to the world—and the world gives back to you. If I treat myself with kindness, I will treat others with kindness and others will return the kindness to me. If I treat myself with hostility, I will treat others with hostility and those same others will return hostility to me. In the same way, if I treat myself as unlovable, I will project my belief that I am unlovable to the world around me. And

There’s a big difference between needing someone to fill up our emptiness and needing companionship. Everyone needs companionship. We all need the simple companionship that we usually find in various social settings, from school to church to clubs to work. We need the sense of connection, of belonging and of happiness we find in sharing common interests with others. This is how companionship begins. We meet people we like and we discern who we have the greatest sense of connection with and who we best feel we are able to trust. Then we begin to build a deeper bond with those persons. We all need to tell our story to others. And it’s essential that we open up and be honest about who we are with at least one other person. Someone needs to hear and experience the true mystery of who we are. And there is a two-fold miracle that evolves from our telling our story to others. Those who hear and experience it know and understand us better—and we begin to know and understand ourselves better.

“Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” Gospel of John How has God loved us? Passionately. Greatly. Unconditionally. Powerfully. Equally. God’s love for everyone is equally as great, as unconditional and as powerful. God has no favorites. No one is “more” to God or “less” to God than anyone else. We are all equal in the eyes of God and we are all equally loved by God. And so our calling is to love each other equally, just as God loves us. This means we need to come to terms with our fears concerning our own lovability. We must believe God loves us without fail and we must learn to love ourselves in the same way. We must then love others as we are loved by God and ourselves. To do so we have to come to term with a further set of fears: Fears about those who are different from us and fears of those who we simply don’t understand. In order to set aside our fears about those who are different from us, we need to lesson the grip of ignorance

“Party like it’s 1999.” I remember when Prince released his 1999 album back in the early 1980s. And I remember thinking that 1999 was unfathomable—that it was light-years away. No one could think that far into the future. In the naivety of my youth, it didn’t occur to me that 1999 could be a symbol of the end, and that the song could mean you better get with it, live and party to the fullest because now is all you have. There is no tomorrow. What if now is all we have? What if the Mayan calendar is right on the money? What if December 23, 2012 is the end? Maybe we better start partying like it’s 1999—again. Let me make it clear that I don’t believe in the Mayan calendar predictions. But I do believe in waking up from our self-imposed waking sleep. We walk through most every day Wide-Awake-Asleep. And it’s time a lightning bolt shot through our systems. If we suppose that December 23 rd is the END, are we going to go out with a whimper, like listless zombies, or are we going to go

Sometimes it’s just necessary to be sad. I can’t speak to the rest of the world, but in the United States , we don’t like to be sad. We’d rather be medicated on prescription or illegal drugs, or with alcohol or sugar, or sex, or with ANYTHING that will keep us from facing the discomfort of sadness. Today I feel very sad, but I am resisting the temptation to fight it. I don’t want to chocolate my way, or shop my way to feelings of happiness. Nor do I want to kick the sadness into orbit by using a “keep the stiff upper lip” mentality, or by using a “look on the brightside” pep talk on myself. Some days there is no brightside. Some days you just need to feel the clouds, acknowledge them and experience them. I am experiencing dense soul-clouds. I can’t see them, but I can feel them. They are filled with tears that tug my heart downward, but that never reach my eyes. And that’s OK. I can’t truly control them and I no longer want to. I just want to feel the sadness. It could be about ma

“I am the greatest!” Muhammad Ali In his book I AM , Howard Falco points out that Muhammad Ali declared himself the greatest boxer before he ever established that fact in the boxing ring. It’s Falco’s theory that Ali became the world’s greatest boxer because he believed himself to be the greatest. And Falco bases this theory in his personal belief that the purpose of the ego is to reinforce- and ultimately make real—whatever we believe about ourselves. I agree with Falco’s theory. Certainly in my own life, I have become the sum of my thoughts—of my I Am statements—which were too often self-negating. Throughout my life, my brain has been a vast sewer of negative I Am thoughts: I am not good enough, I am ugly, I am boring, I am stupid, I am bad, I am a disgrace, I am unworthy, I am unlovable… The list could go on and on. By the time I entered grade school I was already paralyzed by these thoughts. All of the wonderment, excitement and breath of life had been knocked out of me by what

  “Take this moment. Make it still. Stay forever by my side. Make a promise to your soul. Leave me never.” Afterlife, Miracle We all need to make promises to our souls—promises we are willing to pursue. But before we can make a soulful promise to never leave another, we have to make a soulful promise to ourselves. We need to promise to never again abandon ourselves—in any way. Once that promise is made we need to include the additional promise to always love who we are. Once we bring these promises to fruition, we can think about making the most breath-taking soulful promise of our lives: To work at being vulnerable before others. It takes great courage to love who you are enough to be totally vulnerable and real before other people. But once we are able to be vulnerable before others, our naked sincerity will invite others to be vulnerable before us. This is how we soul-connect with the right people in life. And this is how we discover our soul mates. No one meets their true soul-m

Ever try to find happiness with a very special person—who has a victim mentality? If you have, then I can safely predict that you are still trying desperately to find that happiness, because you will never find it with someone who is stuck in the groove of playing the victim. Victim mentalities feed on people with caretaker/people-pleaser mentalities. People with victim mentalities chew-up and spit out their caretakers like they’re tobacco. Why? Because perpetual victims have no intentions of being anything but lifetime victims of life—forever and ever. You can’t rescue them. They don’t want to be rescued. They just want someone who’s going to listen to and baby them over their now ancient sob stories or their latest episode of self-created chaos. And they’ll run you through the ringer of their martyrdom until you can no longer stand it, or until they can no longer stand your attempts to rescue them into a healthy state of happiness. I feel sorry for people who think that they are g

Ah, the codependent crazies. Those needy, needy feelings. I remember well the deep emotional pain in the pit of my stomach: The throbbing sting of shame, fear, loneliness and anxious desperation. Those feelings that are like fingernails on the blackboard of your soul. They eat you alive from within as they dig deeper and deeper into the black hole of your inner-emptiness. Yes, I remember them well. And I remember evenings of mental and emotional insanity-- squirming with a magazine, pacing back and forth, indulging in chocolate, chasing up and down the stairs hoping the doorbell would ring, and staring endlessly at the telephone for a sign of hope. All I needed was a call from my false higher power; a call that would help me to know that I was OK, that I was needed, that I was worth thinking about in some good way. I was dying to be emotionally caressed on the head like a poodle desperate for the attention of his master. And certainly I had made that other person into my mas