Soulshine

What does it take to be happy with yourself? What does it take to love the person God created you to be? TOTAL SELF-ACCEPTANCE. Complete, unconditional self-acceptance is the doorway into self-love. Self-acceptance opens the flood-gates and it allows self-love to flow in and naturally fill-up your inner-emptiness. Self-acceptance means we have to become aware of, dismantle and let go of all the judgments we have made against ourselves over the years. It also means that we have to begin living our lives authentically, which requires us to throw-out all of our “SHOULDS.” Shoulds and negative self-judgments go hand in hand and they cause of to feel shame and guilt about our natural selves. They force us into living through idealized, false selves that betray who we really are and make us feel even more inadequate. “I should look like this” (You look just fine as you are!), “I shouldn’t act like that” (People who really love you will see beyond your behavior and love you anyw...

In the 1942 film Now, Voyager , there’s a very moving scene between Bette Davis (who plays Charlotte Vale) and Paul Henreid (who plays Jerry Durrance). It’s evening and the two are standing on the deck of an ocean-liner that’s heading toward Brazil. Earlier, they had spent the day site-seeing together.   Now, they’re sharing inner-secrets and taking time to actually be real with each other. Charlotte wipes away some very bittersweet tears and thanks Jerry for helping her to almost feel fully alive. It’s a touching, sad and yet hopeful moment for Charlotte—and those of us who can relate to her.  I’m not sure that I know what it feels like to be fully alive. There are times when, for just a few fleeting seconds, I have felt fully free, exhilarated and alive. It’s as if I am suddenly a real person in a real world that is filled with love, opportunities and excitement. The sky is electric blue, the air is fully fresh and I feel like I can swim oceans. But the feeling qui...

Fear is a major motivating factor in the behavior of many people. We have fears layered upon fears, and many of us are not aware that our surface fears are signposts. They tell us we need to do some inner-digging. We need to go deeper inside ourselves to undercover the primary fear that drives our belief system, and thus all we say and do. Last year, I mentioned the 1944 movie “Mr. Skeffington,” starring Bette Davis, in one of my daily posts. And today I’m going to revisit the character of Fanny Trellis-Skeffington. On the surface, Fanny seems like an extremely vain and plastic person. But Fanny’s obsession with her physical appearance is not driven by vanity. It’s driven by fear. If we begin to examine Fanny’s fears, we first come to see that she is fearful of aging. She’s unhappy to learn that she is pregnant. Why? Because it means she can no longer be a child herself. Worse yet, her baby will grow-up and as it gets older, so will Fanny. Underneath her fear of growing ol...