Soulshine

“Love yourself And the rest will follow.” Don Miguel Ruiz    Kindness is an act of acceptance and of love. Whenever we acknowledge our weaknesses and personal brokenness and treat ourselves with kindness we are loving ourselves. Kindness is the healing ointment we cover our hearts and souls with in order to alleve the emotional pain generated by negative thinking about ourselves.    Practicing kindness means we replace our stinging, hurtful self-thoughts with gentle, compassionate self-talk. It means that we work on sympathizing with and thus better understanding ourselves— and the fact that we are flawed, or perfectly imperfect, just as EVERYONE IS! Kindness is the process by which we reclaim our wounded self-love.    For humans there’s great importance to understanding that we are ALL in the same dilemma; that we all suffer from inner-brokenness. First, it helps us to be less critical of ourselves when we truly acknowledge that no one is...

“Love yourself And the rest will follow.” Don Miguel Ruiz    Kindness is an act of acceptance and of love. Whenever we acknowledge our weaknesses and personal brokenness and treat ourselves with kindness we are loving ourselves. Kindness is the healing ointment we cover our hearts and souls with in order to better recover from our self-loathing.    Practicing kindness means we replace our stinging, hurtful self-talk with gentle, compassionate self-talk. It means that we work on sympathizing with and thus better understanding ourselves— and the fact that we are flawed, or perfectly imperfect, just as EVERYONE IS! Kindness is the process by which we reclaim our wounded self-love.    In recovery, there’s great importance to understanding that we are ALL in the same dilemma; that we all suffer from inner-brokenness. First, it helps us to be less critical of ourselves when we truly acknowledge that no one is perfect. Second, the more we pr...

“In order to protect our emotional wounds, and because of our fear of being hurt, humans create something very sophisticated in the mind: a big denial system… We put up these barriers for protection, to keep other people away.” Don Miguel Ruiz , The Mastery of Love We can be in recovery for many years and wonder if we are ever going to get relationships right. Most of us have been so emotionally stunted and unavailable for so long that we have developed an intense drive for intimacy NOW. We are deflated inside and desperate to be touched, cuddled and passionate to the 100 th degree. We bounce between being depressed and being anxious about our inability to have intimacy with another person. So let’s honestly look at ourselves for a moment. If we did indeed emotionally shutdown as children, we long ago lost touch with our vast realm of God-given emotions. We have most likely spent our entire lives in-touch with two feelings: numbness and anger. If feelings of real int...

“We have a tendency to make assumptions about everything. The problem with making assumptions is that we believe they are the truth.” Don Miguel Ruiz , The Four Agreements Codependents love drama. We create endless dramas in our heads every day. And most of these dramas are based in false assumptions we make about others and unreasonable expectations that we love to impose on everyone we know. Rarely are our dramas favorable ones. They usually entail us being the victim of someone else’s behavior; and, of course, we always imagine that behavior as being detrimental toward us. Unfortunately, because we believe our assumptions are the truth and our expectations are legitimate, we make terrible judgments against innocent people. We get angry with them, we pout, we accuse them of things they have never said or done, and we layer them with guilt or shame for not being who we wanted them to be. In other words, we screw-up our relationships based in the very messed-up drama...