Soulshine

In his book Loveability , Robert Holden says “the basic fear ‘I am not loveable’ can play itself out in so many ways… ‘There is something wrong with me,’ ‘I am unseen,’ ‘I am not understood,’ ‘I am incapable,’ ‘I am not safe,’ ‘I am not interesting,’ ‘I am all alone,’ or ‘I don’t matter.” Over the course of my life I have experienced all of these fears. Likewise over the past 18 years of my recovery, I have encountered countless numbers of people who have suffered greatly from the same fears. Anytime we believe we are not good enough to be loveable—not even to be loveable to our parents or God—our thinking will begin to nosedive off a cliff into total self-annihilation.  For me, believing I was “not good enough” led me to believe that I needed to be invisible. It seemed logical to me that if people couldn’t see me, they also couldn’t defile or hurt me: They couldn’t criticize or bully what they could not see. So I worked hard as a child to be silent, to breathe quietl...

“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...

“I Am Who I Am” is who God is. It is a declaration of the God who lives in the eternal present. God is the God of the NOW, the present moment-- every present moment. God is not the God of the past or the future, but of the present. I am who I am is also all that we can be. We can all say “I am who I am.“ And none of us can be more or less than who we are in this present moment. So it’s important that we listen to and be aware of the I AM statements we each choose to own. Since we were small children, many of us learned, and have continually chosen to affirm, negative I AM statements about ourselves: “I am stupid,” “I am ugly,” “I am fat” “ I am worthless,“ “I am irresponsible” and “I am unlovable” are just a few of the bad I AM statements that have ruled our daily lives. These negative thoughts have produced much misery. And they’ve led us to believe the following: Overall, “I AM not good enough.” As a result, we have come to believe we are unworthy of love, of nurturi...

As a film buff, I’ve come to really love Mae West. She was someone who really knew how to own her personal power and no one—absolutely no one—could take it away from her. In her 1935 film Goin’ to Town , West exclaims “ Yeah, for a long time I was ashamed of the way I lived.” When questioned about whether she changed herself to please others she says “No, I got over being ashamed.” Seems many of us could take a good lesson or two from Mae West in learning how to get over being ashamed of who we are. No one can shame us unless we allow them to do so. No one can make us feel worthless unless we believe deep down inside that we are worthless. And no one can make a doormat out of us unless we voluntarily lay down for them. It’s time we all learned to get over being ashamed. We can start by realizing that we’re good enough just the way we are. Let’s focus on the inside instead of the outside: Affirm our own goodness. Let’s also care only about what we think of ourselves, an...