Soulshine

The relationship between thoughts and feelings is interesting. Some thoughts evoke appropriate feelings and some don’t. It seems natural that negative thoughts are going to evoke negative emotions, right? I mean it’s pretty hard to be beaming with joy when we have a head filled with angry thoughts. The moment angry thoughts enter our consciousness, they are going to produce angry feelings. But it doesn’t always work this way. For example, I directed a retreat recently where I managed to give my personal power away to a negative person. The retreat was actually going smoothly. Everyone was participating and everyone seemed to be “getting it,” except for this one person. I had the sense that maybe this person was on the wrong track, and that seemed to be confirmed the next morning when he returned the book I’d recommended to our bookstore for a refund. Sometimes this happens. Occasionally, there will be a person who reads what they needed into a retreat description, instead...

“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.” Henry David Thoreau Yesterday I was in Fern’s Garden, a little shop on Second Street in Long Beach, when I came across a small journal with this quote from Henry David Thoreau. Seems we’ve had life-coaches around for a long, long time! I bought the journal because the quote resonated with me strongly. I feel very restless right now. I don’t really believe I’m living the life I have imagined for myself. In fact, I know I am not. Since I was a small child I’ve had one dream in my heart: to be loved by that certain special irreplaceable someone. That’s never happened, mostly because—as much as I have desperately wanted it—I’ve been too afraid to pursue it. This is one of the great pitfalls of codependency. We don’t feel worthy to pursue the dreams in our hearts. For some of us, we don’t even know what dreams our hearts hold because we have been so busy diminishing ourselves in order to...