Soulshine

When we learn to balance our light sides with our dark sides, we find we can like who we are without liking everything about ourselves. Once we essentially like who we are, it’s easier to be reasonably happy and to feel like we fit-in with life and the universal flow.  This doesn’t mean that all is rosy and perfect. It means we accept that we still have dark issues from the past to work through and that we will still have days when we come up short in our behavior and don’t like ourselves very well. It means we know we will still feel sad or lonely, anxious or down on ourselves at times—and that it’s OK. It’s just part of being human. It’s the universal norm. I was at an amusement park riding roller coasters with a friend yesterday. As we walked around, ate Dippin’ Dots, and boarded the coasters, I noticed I felt really comfortable and in-sync with the world around me. I didn’t generally feel that way in the past. But yesterday I felt pretty happy with myself and my li...

One of my favorite mantras, which I repeat to myself daily is “Gently, lovingly, I heal all of the deep dark wounded spaces inside of me. With great love I fill-up all of my empty spaces with light, peace and well-being.” I say it slowly and with great reverence. I choose to offer myself love and to allow that love to gently stir within me and to gradually wash me clean of all my inner-wounds; be they spiritual, mental, emotional or physical. We have the power to heal all of the internal wounds that for too long have made us feel powerless over life. The healing process requires only one thing from us: That we be willing to help ourselves. Once we are willing, we can begin our healing journey by offering kindness and love to ourselves. By doing so, we finally make the life-affirming choice to treat ourselves with proper care and respect. Essentially we are making the necessary step toward choosing to value ourselves, and to believe that we are worthy of love and everything tha...

“I’m too sexy for my shirt, too sexy for my shirt. I’m, I’m, I’m too sexy!” Right Said Fred I often encourage people to alter their morning ritual. I suggest that they make one little adjustment when they approach their bathroom mirror. Before shaving or applying makeup I tell them to sing a chorus of   “I’m Too Sexy for My Shirt.” And as soon as I make this suggestion, everyone does what you just did: They laugh out loud—or at the very least they allow a little smile to steal across their faces. In recovery, it’s important to be able to laugh at yourself. We codependents tend to take life way too seriously. We ruminate over our feelings of emptiness and worthlessness. Some mornings it almost seems unbearable to look at ourselves in the mirror. We’re sick of our self-loathing and our self-imposed loneliness. And a good way to rise above all of our gloom is to be able to laugh at ourselves. More importantly, if we stand in front of our mirrors and sing “I’m Too Se...

Once we’ve gotten recovery’s wake-up call, it’s easy to see ourselves as the victims of many abusive people. Suddenly, everyone we chose to be in a relationship with looks like an evil never-do-well. We look to the past and see our “innocent” selves as having been willfully abused by these people. We pretend that in every instance they knew what they were doing in hurting and victimizing us for their personal pleasure and gain. This way of seeing the past is called denial. And it’s denial because of one word: choice. No one forced us to be in relationship with anyone from our past. We chose to be in relationship with them. Nine times out of 10, we became obsessed with a particular person—not understanding that he/she was toxic for us—and we chose to pursue a relationship with him/her. We thought about this person obsessively, called him/her constantly and bent over backwards to please him/her until we succeeded in taking this person hostage. Once we had our great obsessio...

"… Just talk, I’m listening, Just talk. I know your tastes in food and wine, but never really what’s on your mind. What’s going on inside your head? I hear you say what you can or can’t. I’m never sure what it is you want. There’s always something left unsaid." Morten Harket, Listening  Being emotionally unavailable in a relationship is a major problem. It’s a form of abandonment. If we are emotionally unavailable to others it’s a sign that we have abandoned ourselves. We don’t believe we are worthy of voicing who we are, what we like, what we need, what we think or what we want. In all of these essential areas we remain silent and in being so, we stifle relationships and keep them from growing. The other person feels left out of our inner-world and thus abandoned by us. Over time, the more the other person tries to break through our wall of emotional unavailability, the further we distance ourselves from them for fear that they will find out we really aren’t good...

When I give spiritual talks involving recovery, people sometimes raise their hands and say “That’s great, but it doesn’t work.” I listen to their story and then I say “Let’s clarify something: Is it that it (recovery) doesn’t work, or that you didn’t work it?” Silence ensues and then the person usually says sheepishly “I didn’t work it.” Information and awareness are great to have. They are necessary. We can’t begin to understand ourselves or our old ingrained patterns of behavior until we have awareness of how we have been hurting ourselves and others, and information about healthier patterns of behavior. But information is just information and it’s easily forgotten if we don’t put it to good use. Recovery is a lifetime process. There’s no end to it until we breathe our last breath. It works when we work it. Working a recovery program for a few hours, a few days, a few weeks, a few months or even a few years isn’t going to cut it. The moment we stop working it, we gradual...

What’s missing from your life? If the answer isn’t “you,” in other words, if you’ve been showing up for yourself, but there’s still a sense that something’s missing, what is it and how do you find out? A good way to start is to look to your feelings. What makes you sad? If we feel great sadness about something, it could very likely be the missing piece. For example, often times the missing piece is hidden because we aren’t being truthful with ourselves. Maybe we’re comfortable with befriending ourselves now and we’re happy spending time alone with ourselves. We’re busy at work, probably busier than we’d really like to be. We keep in touch with family and we make time to have dinner or a cup of coffee with friends here and there. Everything seems good on the surface, but now that we’re really getting in touch with our feelings, we realize that there is a deep sadness inside. It’s a sadness we’ve been ignoring because it represents a difficult truth. And that difficult truth i...

Who makes you happy? In reality, no one can make you happy. People in your life can enhance your happiness through sharing your interests. Or they can add to your frustrations by pushing your buttons. But no one can be responsible for your happiness or your misery—aside from you. One of the biggest problems for codependents is that we too often enter relationships looking for everlasting happiness. We expect that the person we choose to attach our dreams to should be responsible for making us happy. In our minds, we fantasize that he/she will be focused solely on us, will spend every waking hour with us and will do everything in his/her power to insure that we are as happy as we can possibly be. In other words, we assume this person will meet all of our mental, emotional, physical and spiritual needs in the same way that we plan to meet all of his/her needs. In our little dream world we will smother each other with attention and we will both drip with the honey of happiness. R...

Your happiness in this life is determined primarily by how happy you are with yourself. The happier you are with yourself, the more you love who you are, the happier you will be with life. Self-acceptance and self-love provide you with a an overall sense of well-being and contentment that no person, place or thing can give you. Thus a healthy combination of self-acceptance and self-love enable you to weather life’s storms with a positive attitude of faith, hope and eventual success—all of which serve to enhance your personal happiness. Being happy with yourself won’t make life perfect in a fairy tale sense. But it will make every day of your life brighter as it makes you more resilient to the howling winds you are powerless to control. Self-acceptance and self-love will also make you more accepting and loving toward others; who will then be more accepting and loving toward you. In this way, self-love provides you with a wonderful sense of balance between give and take. As ...

“Misery is God’s way of telling you that this isn’t the path you should follow.” Rev. Candace Chellew-Hodge Personal misery has much to tell and teach us. Yet, even in recovery, we sometimes don’t want to listen to our misery. We are so accustomed to wallowing in it. Misery is how many of us define ourselves. We wouldn’t know how to behave without feeling miserable in some way. And so if things start changing too much for the better during recovery, we may find ourselves engaged in a game of self-sabotage. Before recovery we didn’t understand that we were trapped in bad patterns of behavior. All of our attempts to manipulate and control others backfired and increased our misery, but we were blind to the fact that control wasn’t the solution to our problems. So we kept loading our pistols with control tactics and we kept having these tactics blow-up in our faces. Our misery intensified and yet we still weren’t willing to listen to it and ask it what it was trying to tell us...

“Life sucks and then you die.” Anonymous It’s easy to get discouraged in recovery. Bad days are still bad. We take steps forward and then we regress back into old destructive patterns of behavior. We understand there is no such thing as positive instant gratification, and yet we are still desperate for instant intimacy. So we continually find ourselves looking for that person who can make us happy, despite all we’ve learned in recovery. We still look to every face-- on every street corner, in every restaurant, in every social gathering, in the supermarket and even in our doctor’s waiting room.  We understand no one can rescue us, and yet we are still codependently seeking our savior. On those days when life truly sucks, I think it’s especially hard for those of us who lost their youth to codependency. It’s easy to look back and regret that we lost our twenties and thirties-- and all of the attainable happiness that comes with being young-- to a disease we didn’t even k...

The human person has three primary drives. We all possess the drive for 1) Pleasure, 2) Power and 3) Purpose. Our drives for pleasure and for power supplement our drive for purpose. In other words, these two lesser drives aid us in accomplishing our purpose in life, which is to love well. Everyone’s individual and collective purpose is to love well in their lifetime. Obviously then, if human nature was perfect, the Planet Earth would be a utopia of loving people. No one would ever go hungry, no one would place his/her personal gain ahead of anyone else’s, no one would ever be marginalized and no one would ever die alone after having spent years feeling unlovable. But human nature is not perfect. It’s broken. And as a result, we don’t always do a good job of loving well. Some of us are so broken that we never fully understand our purpose in life and we are too fearful to pursue it. Instead, we get stuck in our drive for pleasure or our drive for power. As a striking example, let’...