Soulshine

In Recovery meetings, some people talk about fear of failure, while others talk about their fear of success. Personally I think the two often lock hands with each other; after all, the common bond between the two is FEAR. This past weekend, the two definitely intersected for me. I was browsing through my email Saturday morning when I found I had an offer to become the new Communications Director for our North American Conference. At first I felt elated and excited, but as I read the job description, I felt overwhelmed and fearful. I forwarded the email to two close friends, and both responded: Go for it! Yesterday, I received an email from the publisher of a magazine that had printed my story on addiction and recovery in their October 2017 edition. He was writing to inform me that their Board of Directors had recently met and had unaminously decided to nominate my story for the National Association of Press Awards. Again I felt elated, excited and grateful. But that feeling wa...

Many codependents live in fear— fear of being imperfect and fear of being judged for being imperfect. I learned a lie at a very young age: “You have to be perfect or no one will like you.” Unfortunately, I believed that lie as a child and held on tightly to it as I grew into being an adult. This lie kept me from accepting myself just as I am, imperfect. And it forced me to pretend to be something that is impossible for any human being to be, “perfect.” Through Recovery, I’ve discovered the real truth: I’m perfectly imperfect— and so is everyone else. So I no longer am self-consumed with worry over how people judge me. If they do judge and criticize me, I now tell them “Come back when you’re perfect, and then you can judge me, but never before you’re perfect.” And I try to practice the same rule when I find myself wanting to judge and criticize others. It’s better to have empathy and compassion with ourselves and others because truly NO ONE is PERFECT!

We can read dozens of  Recovery books, we can attend meetings everyday, we can work the 12 Steps with the best of workbooks— But all of this is useless if we don’t first develop a good sense of self-acceptance. No on has been less accepting of me than ME! No one has been meaner to me than ME! For years, I’ve beaten myself up with negative self-talk. True. I learned this negative talk from my parents, teachers, bullies at school and others that I gradually gave my personal power away to, but I’m the one who accepted their negative words and chose to use them against myself. I allowed them to victimize me and then I became my own worst enemy. Endless negative self-talk destroyed my self-acceptance and prevented me from developing a positive self-Love and self-esteem. And as Melody Beattie says in her book “52 Weeks of Conscious Contact,” “The biggest challenge to accepting ourselves isn’t what other people tell us. It’s the things we tell ourselves.” Self-rejection is self...

I’m tired of drama, but in a good way. Im so tired of chaos and drama that I am no longer creating it for myself, nor am I emotionally participating in anyone else’s self-made dramas. When drama comes knocking I no longer open the door, and if someone brings me their newest drama, I tell them I have a new boundary: I no longer participate in mind games that produce chaos and drama. I’m learning— finally— to live in the moment and not in my head. I’ve learned my lesson: Living in my head is the same as living in Wonderland, except it’s not as pleasant. Only in my head can I create chaos and drama for myself. This past weekend, I directed a new retreat I entitled “Prodigal Love.” The retreat went very well because I allowed my Higher a Power to guide me through directing it. The participants were very talkative and everyone participated fully. I stayed in the present moment and LISTENED to them, instead of wandering around in my head worrying about what negative thoughts they mi...

Most every addict is preoccupied with the voice of the inner-critic inside their heads. When we look in a mirror, we see only what the inner-critic has told us about ourselves. When we pray, we ask our Higher Power to remove all of our imperfections, to make us better people inside and to make up more lovable on the outside as well. Well, it’s about time we flushed the inner-critic out of our heads and started asking our Higher Power to show us the truth about ourselves— how beautiful we really are. Each one of us needs to see the beauty we possess; the beauty that’s been buried under years of self-criticism and hatred. I’ve spent much of my life hating the person looking back at me in the mirror, and being envious of others who seemed to have their lives together and seemed to be smarter and better looking. According to Robert Holden, in his book “Be Happy,” envy is a wake up call. It’s actually saying to us “when are you going to wake up and see how beautiful you are?” Eve...

Sometimes we not only need to cancel our subscriptions to other people’s issues, but also to our need for them. Today I got up and everything was fine, but suddenly there was a bad old feeling purculating up inside of me. It was a very familiar feeling; one that I’ve never quite known how to label. It’s like a mixture of fear, dread, anxiousness and feeling unsafe. Some might label it as “waiting for the other shoe to drop,” but I think it may be a feeling of actually wanting the other shoe to drop— of missing and wanting chaos in my life. I had a good weekend. I went to the Symphony last Friday night and was mesmerized by Gil Shaham’s rendition of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. On Saturday, I directed a filled to capacity Surrender Box retreat that went magnificently. I gave a talk on living life to the fullest in the present moment at three different services Saturday evening and Sunday morning and received nothing but accolades. In other words, nothing chaotic or bad happ...

Too often, as a codependent, I have felt powerless. At a young age I learned to surrender my personal power to my mother, who was very willfull and controlling. As a result, I never learned how to own my personal power and I developed a pattern of feeling helpless, trapped and unsafe because I easily gave my power away to most everyone. Somehow everyone else became more powerful than me. Their opinions, beliefs, wants and needs counted— but mine didn’t. As I grew into adulthood, this pattern continued and I continually gave my power away to everyone. I never counted, or had value until I entered Recovery. In Recovery I have learned that no one can take my personal power away from me without my consent. I’ve also learned that my opinions, ideas, feelings and beliefs do count. They are equally as important as everyone else’s, and I don’t have to agree with everyone to be acceptable. I can agree to disagree with certain people who also have learned to own and honor their personal...

I especially like the part of this quote that says “when you see a period at the end of the sentence (relationship), don’t try and turn it into a comma.” Why? Because, as a codependent, most every relationship I entered into already had a period at the end of the sentence before the relationship even got off the ground. I immediately erased the period and continually placed commas in its place until the relationship finally blew-up beyond repair. I’ve always chosen the wrong people to love, and to expect love from in return, my entire life. The door was always closed already, in terms of hoping for a healthy relationship, and yet I forced my way past every closed door. My attraction was always to the most toxic person in every room I ever entered. I was totally blind to my emotional attraction to toxic people, and those who responded positively were totally blind to their toxic attraction to me. We played each other, used each other, manipulated each other until we exhausted eve...

Too often I have missed out on the many blessings of life because my heart has been frozen to receiving those blessings— the greatest of which is love. I’ve spent most of my life living like an ice sculpture: too afraid to let me out and too afraid to let life in. Being frozen provided a protective layer from being hurt, but it also kept me from living life by truly experiencing the beauty that many relationships provide. I missed out on the beauty of sharing a smile with persons I passed by on countless sidewalks. I missed out on talking with the person next to me on a plane. I missed out on having deeper relationships with family and friends. And I missed out on having a life-giving relationship with God. In my frozen world, my only true relationships were with things: the TV, the Stereo, clothes, doughnuts, and the latest whim that caught my attention and was purchaseable. None of these things brought me satisfying happiness, and none of them filled me with gratitude. Toda...

This quote from Bryant McGill is brilliant. And so true. Our future begins with our next thought— and every thought that follows shapes our day. So the choice is ours: We can choose to think positive thoughts, to trust and have faith that our Higher Power will helps us work through difficulties, or we can choose to default into fear and self-defeating thoughts that become worries. We can choose to think grateful thoughts for all of the good in our lives, or we can choose to think negative thoughts about what’s absent from our lives. Essentially, we can allow our thoughts to control our day by defaulting into negative thinking, or we can take our personal power back by choosing to be positive even when life seems to be working against us. As long as we choose negative thoughts, life WILL be working against us with our assistance. But if we choose to engage in positive thoughts we begin to change the flow of life toward the beauty and goodness that God has planned for us. The ...

I’ve learned in recent years, that I am too often a victim of my internal responses to someone else’s words or actions. One person can criticize a talk I give and it wipes away the joy I felt over 200 other people praising my talk. Why? Because, as a child, I was programmed to feel bad about myself. My negative internal response, usually shame and embarrassment, in the present moment to a negative person isn’t about that person, what they have to say or the present moment at all. My negative internal response is foremost about the past. All of the old repressed feelings from childhood to adulthood come rushing over me like hot, burning lava from a valcano that has just erupted inside of me— a valcano of old, hurting feelings that my wounded inner-child is still painfully bearing. I believe it’s important to realize this. It has never made sense to me that over the course of my entire life, one critical person’s response can destroy my joy; even when he/she is in the vast mino...