Soulshine

      “You don’t know all the beauty you possess inside, You just can’t see what I see in you… If you could see you through my eyes You’d see someone beautiful On the inside and outside, So beautiful you’d know how I feel You’d know how much you mean to me If you could see you through my eyes.” Kenny Lattimore, If You Could See You (Through My Eyes) Most everyone I know suffers from “blindness” when it comes to seeing their own personal beauty. So many of us suffer from self-persecution. We’ve made so many negative judgments against ourselves that we have long been blinded to the fact that we are wonderfully made. And, unfortunately, no one can tell us how beautiful we are inside or outside, and make us believe it. We have to choose to believe in our own beauty and value before we can accept anyone else’s positive evaluation of us. We have to look past our negative self-judgments and choose to love the REAL person that we are underneath all of ...

    It’s that time of the year again. The parties and shopping are well underway and so is the urgent need to be happy. Christmas has always been a difficult time for me mentally and emotionally. It’s the one season of the year in which everyone desperately wants to feel loved; and yet many of us who grew up in dysfunctional households don’t know how to accept love, or allow ourselves to be loved. We didn’t receive the love we needed as children and consequently we never learned to love ourselves. This is the real problem. Recovery has taught me much about me and self-love. Looking back now, I see that over the many years and Christmas seasons of my life I was in fact loved by many people. But I never acknowledged that love because I didn’t have the inner-tools to accept that love. I didn’t know how to accept it because I didn’t know how to love and accept myself. So I learned to play the victim of the holiday season. I ached inside and moaned and groaned to myself e...

Across the Western world, many people are preparing for Christmas. We are busy about looking for the perfect gift to give. And what we lose sight of is the fact that we ourselves are the perfect gift. First, there’s no better gift you can give yourself this Christmas than the gift of self-acceptance and self-love. You are enough. You don’t need any “thing” or anyone to complete you or make you OK. God has already taken care of that through the very fact that God created you and made you a gift to yourself and the world around you. The problem for so many people is that they don’t believe that they are good enough, and that all of their wholeness and happiness is resting inside of them. No matter how many times I emphasize this to people, I still find many of them searching for someone or something outside of themselves to validate them and make them OK. And these are the very people who are miserable at this time of the year because they haven’t been able to find that special...

“Codependents often minimize, alter or deny how they truly feel. In recovery I embrace my feelings; they are valid and important.” Recovery Patterns of Codependence During the Holiday Season it can be easy to rely on old coping techniques to get us through difficult gatherings. One of the patterns that saved us during childhood was learning to deny, alter or minimize our feelings. This is a functional survival technique for a child who is unable to otherwise protect him/her self from emotional abuse. But it is a dysfunctional escape technique for adults who want to simply run away from reality. It’s important that we own our feelings. Every feeling we experience awakens us and brings us back into real life. In addition to adding necessary color to life, feelings guide us. They are our inner-compass. Feelings guide us into proper patterns of behavior and help us to set good boundaries. Feelings also help us to be true to ourselves. When we honor our feelings we hon...

Hope everyone has a very Blessed Christmas and Holiday Season. Remember to let go of expectations. Accept each moment and every person as they are by not demanding that they be as you want them to be. If you accept the moment as it is you will find joy in it. If you accept others as they are, you will find beauty in them. And if you accept yourself as you are you will find joy, beauty and complete peace!

I first posted this two years ago at Christmas. I think it’s worth re-posting this year and maybe every year as a reminder that we need to work at owning our own power at Holiday gatherings. It’s the only way we can truly enjoy them. Merry Christmas! “Christmas time is here, happiness and cheer”… OK well maybe not. I mean, yeah, it’s Christmas, but the happiness and cheer is debatable. This time of the year most everyone wants to be happy, but let’s face it, family gatherings sometimes play out like real Nightmares before Christmas. Across America most every family has an Uncle Eeyore, who makes the Winnie the Pooh character seem like the Sugar Plum Fairy; an Aunt Grinchella, who’s conniving and controlling; and a brother Ebenezer, who is bitter and angry at the world. So much for happiness and cheer-- unless we adopt a new attitude toward family and the holiday. First, we have to choose to accept Eeyore, Grinchella and Ebenezer just the way they are by empathizing with ...

On Monday I took a little Christmas shopping excursion to Tubac, a small arts and crafts village south of Tucson . In one of the shops I came across a small Christmas ornament shaped like a heart. It was red and designed like a locket that you might open and place the picture of someone you love inside of it. The outside of the heart-locket said “You Fit My Heart” (or so I thought on first glancing at it). Immediately I thought to myself “How perfect is that? I fit my heart!” And I felt warm inside. It felt right. Self-acceptance and the gift of self-love were suddenly mine to own. I purchased the heart-locket ornament and when I arrived home later in the day, I already had a perfect place in mind on my Christmas tree for it. As I was taking the ornament out of it’s wrappings, I glanced at it again and realized that it didn’t say “You Fit My Heart.” What it actually said was “You Fill My Heart.” Any initial disappointment was immediately wiped away. “Wow,” I thought, “That se...

All I want for Christmas is self-respect, and it’s a gift that seems to be coming to me more and more each day. Truth is, when you have enough self-love to respect yourself you see the whole world awash in new, brighter colors. You feel like you finally fit-in. You find your space and you walk your path with new vigor. Inside there’s a new feeling and it sings to you and the world around you: “Nothing can stop me now!” Everyone is your equal and you are everyone’s equal. No one can put you down without embarrassing themselves. You own and retain your power regardless of what anyone else says, does, believes or wants. Suddenly you realize that you have become your own best friend. Your body feels comfortable to you no matter what size you are, what color you are or how old or young you are. Your personality bubbles up and spills all over everything and everyone around you—and you love it—even in the face of detractors. You need no one to complete you or make you OK. You’ve disc...