Soulshine

“It’s not your hair that makes you handsome; it’s your personality.” Charlie Wehrley I have a good friend who’s gradually losing his hair. He likes to claim that it doesn’t really bother him, but he keeps a comb in his car (as vain as I am, I don’t even do that) and he’s always combing his hair forward to cover balding areas. He’s also constantly forcing it forward with his hand if the wind blows up. So I suspect that his hair loss bothers him more than he likes to let on. He’s the type of person who likes to laugh everything off, and that makes it hard to know just how much something painful really eats at his heart. But when hair loss came up again while we were talking recently I told him “It’s not your hair that makes you handsome; it’s your personality—and you’ll never lose that.” And it's really true. He has the type of personality that makes him loveable in every respect because it's who he REALLY is. Unfortunately in our society people often don’t ge...

Remember, a rose never has a bad hair day. It can’t see itself in a mirror and has no idea of what it looks like physically. A rose thrives on its inner-beauty and thus wisely grows into its outer-beauty effortlessly. Thus the outer elegance of a rose develops from its inner chemistry. The same can be true for us. Make the choice today to thrive from within-side yourself

It’s only when we shed concern for our outer-beauty that we can discover our true inner-beauty. In American culture, outer-beauty Is everything. We are encouraged to live and breathe our outer-appearance. Billions of dollars are spent each year on make-up, clothing, hair styles, skin care and weight loss because so many people are so unhappy with their physical appearance. In the chaos of this physical jungle, we lose touch with our souls. Our inner-beauty lies trapped and dormant under our fears concerning our outer-beauty, or lack thereof. And we forget that anyone can look like a well maintained mannequin. A mannequin has a one-dimensional beauty. It has physical appearance, including the nice clothes we place on it, but it has no personality, no soul. The day we stop being so concerned about looking like Barbie or Ken is the day that we make peace with our outer-appearance. It’s the day we come to love and accept our looks just as they are. It’s also the same day that...

“When we stop naming ourselves, who we think we are disappears…” Adyashanti, Falling Into Grace We use thoughts and the words that enable those thoughts to define ourselves, others and the entire world. As children, we allow the thoughts and words of others to define us: child, white, black, chubby, skinny, pretty, plain, shy, aggressive, good, bad. And we become, in our minds, whomever others have defined us to be. We believe their words. We capture those words in our heads as thoughts. And we come to define ourselves by the words that adults have placed upon us. We own their words and we become their definition of who we are. How many of us still define ourselves today by the words that others assigned us as children? Probably all of us do to some degree. How many of us ever take the time to challenge these outer-imposed identities? Probably all too few of us. So let’s start today. As Adyashanti says, when we stop naming or defining ourselves with the thoughts/words others origina...

No one’s body makes them truly sexy. Sexy is inside of you. It exists in your personality, your being in-touch with your inner-workings-- with the true inner-reality of who you are. Let’s face it: A body—however nice—is just a body. And a body always disintegrates, second by second, day by day. While the body is busy falling apart in the hands of time, the spirit within you is ever growing; becoming more beautiful, more profound and increasingly sexy—if you nurture it. We spend a lot of time and effort nurturing our bodies. We hike, jog, swim, weight-lift, do yoga or aerobics. And all of that is good, but it’s also meaningless if we basically have nothing cultivated inside of us to share with others. People can admire us for our bodies all that they want, but they will never love us for them. Oh, they will lust-us for our physical appearance, but then we are never anything more than a body that resembles an empty bottle. The empty body may be beautiful in shape or form or color, but ...