Soulshine

“’What is real?’ asked the Rabbit one day… ‘Does it mean having things buzz inside and a stick-out handle?’ ‘Real isn’t how you are made,’ said the Skin Horse, ‘It’s something that happens to you.’ ‘Does it hurt?’ asked the Rabbit. ‘Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse.” Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit    Discovering our true God-encoded purpose in life requires that we become authentic or real people. It means we stop hiding behind our fears and allow ourselves to be vulnerable— to open up to ourselves, to life, to others. It means we recognize that we alone are the stewards of the life God gave us. It means learning to honestly love ourselves.    Becoming real, as the Velveteen Rabbit learned, means we must own our thoughts and choose them wisely (Choosing the kind over the critical). It also means we must open-up to   our feelings and be willing to accept them, even when they do hurt. It likewise means that we must learn to treasure our bodies...

The codependent personality is always desperate for affection. Even years into recovery this fact remains unchanged for many people. Why? Because we are still lax in our willingness to meet our own emotional needs. Deep down we still want someone else to fill the void. And every person who comes along who shows the slightest interest in us—who smiles at us, who treats us with kindness or who flirts with us-- becomes our latest, greatest redeemer. Yes. We are so desperate for intimacy that we fall right into the trap again and again and again. Every smiling face offers us the hope of avoiding self-care. We want the easy way out. We want to be rescued. And our thinking is skewed in so many wrong ways we can’t possible see straight. First, we are forgetting that only WE can fill-up our emotional emptiness through proper self-care and the aid of a Higher Power. No one else can fill up our empty spaces. We have to invest time in loving who we are and in treating ourselves the way we want...