Soulshine

"Don't stand in the corner, waiting for a chance, make your own music, start your own dance... Everybody is a star, it's got to come from the heart. .. Don't be afraid to try... Everybody wants to shine, don't stand on the sideline, step into the light, but it's got to come from INSIDE ... listen to your heart and step into the spotlight." Madonna, Spotlight (1987) I've known for a long time that the subconscious mind is very powerful. Howard Falco says in his book I AM that our conscious thoughts go into our subconscious mind and replay themselves over and over. It's then the job of our ego to reinforce what is being said in our subconscious mind and to make it our reality. What you think, you become. I'm reading Joseph Murphy's The Power of Your Subconscious Mind , and he expresses the same basic theory. Murphy says "All of your experiences, events, conditions and acts are produced by your subconscious mind in react...

I continually tell people who attend my Recovery retreats that “all of your answers are inside of you. I don’t have them; only you do. And between you and your Higher Power, you are going to have to go deep inside yourself and find your own answers.” In other words, “Everything you need is already inside of you.” Recovery from any addictive behavior requires hard internal work. No other person can do that work for us. We have to do it. We need to seek therapy, support groups, a Higher Power that we can trust, recovery-based reading resources, retreats, etc. We need to seek whatever is necessary to light our own fire. We do have the matches to light that fire from within and to shine brightly as the true person God created us to be. No one else can light our inner-fire. This is a hard lesson for codependents, or any addict who expects to be rescued or saved by another person.  Only you can rescue yourself. Only you have your answers inside of you. Only you can disco...

Addicts, and probably most people, have a continual war going on inside themselves. The war is between the beauty of our true selves and the trash of our inner-critic. For some of us, the inner-critic’s garbage talk is constantly dominating our thoughts. And, whether we understand it or not, it’s happening by default. We learned many years ago to pay more attention to criticism than to praise. Criticism, from inside and outside ourselves, became our norm. The feelings of self-loathing that criticism caused then disabled us from accepting positive thoughts, or compliments, about ourselves.  I don’t know why God gave us a subconscious mind. If I could rip mine out, I would because most of our inner self-abuse happens in our subconscious mind, and so we often aren’t aware of how mean we’re being to ourselves thoughtwise until our feelings of shame  begin to devour us. The best way to defeat subconscious negative thoughts is by investing all of our energy in posit...

In her book “Beyond Codependency,” Melody Beattie says “I was certain there was something fundamentally wrong with me...” This is a very strong statement and a very devastating feeling that many codependents/addicts share.  The thrust behind the belief that there is something fundamentally or inherently wrong with us is the self-destructive belief that whatever is wrong is unchangeable. And because it’s unchangeable, we invest a great amount of effort into people-pleasing or overachieving to prove we do have some sort of worth despite the fact the we are fundamentally and irreversibly flawed. As we grow from childhood to adulthood, if we don’t receive help, we continually reenforce the idea that we are never going to be as good as other people, and thus we will never be good enough in anyone’s eyes to deserve authentic love. I don’t think there’s any fear more devastating than “I’m fundamentally and irreversibly unlovable. Like butterflies, we can’t see our own b...

Recovery has taught me many lessons about codependency. The greatest lesson has been that I must fully accept myself, just as I imperfectly am, in order to authentically love myself. The more I love the person God created me to be, instead of hating that person, the more I attract people into my life who truly love perfectly-imperfect me, too. Total self-acceptance means we have to let go of who other people told us we “should be.” We also have to let go of all of the negative judgments we’ve made against ourselves because we never could live up to being the person others told us we should be.  If we refuse to work toward unconditional self-acceptance of ourselves, we will never love ourselves. And it’s REALLY true: “The consequence for the absence of self-love is loosing ourselves to people who don’t love” us either.  Every active codependent has spent their live accepting the crumbs of love they thought they deserved, because they refused to believe that t...