Soulshine

Seems most of us enter recovery with a very dire need to control life. The concept of flowing with life is totally foreign to us. We are so used to scripting every moment of every day in our heads. We decide what we think others should or should not do in order to please us. Thoughts like “No one should bother me today,” “He should have called me,” “She should want to see the movie I want to see” run through our heads second by second. These are all controlling thoughts. They are designed to ensure our personal happiness—and yet they do just the opposite: They make us miserable because we can rarely enforce them and make them reality. Every day we have a choice. We can script out our day and set ourselves up on a course of manipulation (control) and disappointment, or we can let go and ease into the flow of the day as determined by our Higher Power. I have learned to stop scripting not only my work days but also my free days and vacation days. Sure, I take time to plan what I...

“It’s not the power of the curse. It’s the power you give the curse.” Billy, Penelope (2007)    The 2007 film Penelope is a wonderful lesson in self-acceptance and the self-love that grows from accepting yourself just the way you are. Too many of us have walked through life cursing ourselves with every possible form of self-condemnation. We’ve criticized ourselves because we thought our noses were too big, or our bellies were too fat, or our teeth was too stained. We’ve beat ourselves up because we thought we weren’t nice enough, or smart enough or cool enough.    As a result, many of us turned to self-improvement. We joined gyms and aerobicized. We read books on how to become better people. We invested in the latest fashions, music and trends to make ourselves feel socially acceptable. We did everything but look in the mirror and say “I love and accept you just the way you are.”      In his book Be Happy , Robert Holden says “N...

“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...