Soulshine

Growing up, I attended Catholic grade school and high schools. In those schools I was verbally taught the words of Jesus Christ, "Turn the other cheek;" meaning when someone is cruel to you, return their cruelness with kindness. These were the words I was taught, but this was NOT the behavior that I witnessed. The behavior I witnessed from adult Catholics/Christians was "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." I witnessed those same people who were saying "turn the other cheek" choosing instead to return evil for evil when push came to shove-- to seek revenge instead of reconciliation. For many years, I followed their example because their words were worthless. Recovery has taught me that my word and my behavior must parallel each other. As a Christian, I now choose to "turn the other cheek" when people are cruel or unkind to me. Why? Because I know who I am now. And being cruel in return is not the real me. An eye for an eye is...

Notice in this quote it says kindness is a simple way to tell "another" struggling soul that there is love in the world. "Another" implies, to me, that we too are struggling. And certainly as codependents or addicts, we are. This is why kindness needs to begin with us. We first need to learn to be kind to ourselves. It's important to share words of kindness, love, compassion and forgiveness with ourselves. It's also important that we begin to do nice things for ourselves. We can say "no" to helping someone when our plate is too full. We can spend the money on a massage for ourselves. We can take the time to prepare a nice cup of tea for ourselves. And we can learn to better accept kindness from others when it is offered to us. By treating ourselves with kindness, we prove to ourselves that we do have value and worth. And by being kind to ourselves, we build up the spiritual-mental-emotional resources to then be able to offer kindness ...

Recovery has taught me the difference between codependent love and authentic love. And the difference is eye-opening. For most of my life, all I knew was a codependent love; one in which I “loved” others for the sole purpose of being loved back by them. This codependent love I experienced was filled with anxiety, neediness, insecurity, manipulation, fear, unreasonable expectations, fear of abandonment and the constant urge to cling desperately to the person I “loved.” It was horrible. And it was not love. Love and codependence cannot coexist with each other. They are polar opposites. If we reach out to others from a deep, dark needy emptiness within ourselves, it is not love we are attempting to share. It’s a desperate cry for intimacy, for a sense of belonging with another person, but it is not love. It is codependence. And codependence always has strings attached. It is strictly self-serving. Authentic love flows freely. It does not arise from a deep, dark, needy place ...

Kindness has become my theme for 2016—and maybe for life. Being kind is something that I have struggled with mostly because I have been so unkind to myself for as long as I can remember. No one has been meaner to me than I have. Sure, there have been many mean and hurtful people in my life, but I have only had to face one of them 24/7—and that’s me. People come to me daily with their problems and I quickly pick-up on their self-effacing language: “If only I weren’t so stupid…” “I’m such a lame-brain…” and “I can never get anything right…” are just a few of the side-comments people make while talking. I don’t think most of them even realize how much they belittle themselves with negative statements. I honestly believe that if we want to have a good relationship with others, we must start by first having a good relationship with ourselves. This means we have to start befriending ourselves through words and acts of self-kindness. We need to catch are selves when we say somet...

“Who am I to judge?” Pope Francis Codependents, like most all addicts, spend a great deal of time playing prosecutor, judge and jury. Most of our attention is focused on ourselves. This is actually one situation where we do focus our attention on us—unfortunately. When it comes to negative energy, we have an abundance of it for ourselves. We are critical, merciless and unforgiving with our every fault or failing. Of course, this pattern of negative behavior causes us eventually to be just as easily critical, merciless and unforgiving towards others. I’ve come to believe that the people in this world who are most critical of others must either be codependent/addictive thinkers, or those who are totally obsessed with following rules, or both. And I’d like to see this all change. We need to make this world a kinder place. That means that we need to focus on being kind to ourselves, first and foremost. Once we can empathize with ourselves, we will stop being so self-criti...

Author’s Note: The next few meditations will be from a retreat I directed recently called The Good News According to Disney . If you aren’t familiar with the films that are referenced, I’d suggest to take time to see them and to look for the deeper meaning within them. Many people today still live by the biblical adage “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” They actually believe that they will be at peace if they achieve revenge or restitution for any mishap that has befallen them at the hands of another. They believe they will reclaim their personal power once they have achieved their revenge, but this is impossible. Disney’s Cinderella (2015) reveals the true secret to owning one’s personal power and to retaining it no matter what we experience in life: “Have courage and be kind.” On the surface this motto looks a bit simple and wimpy. But in reality, it holds great power. That power comes from the heart of a person, or in this case Ella, who sees the world not a...

“For gracious and merciful is he, Slow in anger, rich in kindness, And relenting in punishment.” Book of Joel , Chapter 2 Many of us, as codependents, enter recovery bitter and angry. We feel like we have been used and abused by so many people, and these negative feelings make it hard for us to fathom working Step 4 of the 12 Steps. So we are sometimes inclined to practice self-righteousness instead of practicing mercy. When we enter this self-righteous mode we are quick to point out how everyone else in our lives sinned against us, abused us and abandoned us, and we subconsciously use are self-righteousness to hide our own sins and character defects. We become blind to them all. I know I did. The first time I looked at Step 4, I thought to myself “what did I ever do wrong? I’m not the abuser. I’m the abused.” At that point in recovery, it didn’t occur to me that I had been secretive, manipulative and controlling. Nor did it occur to me that I had lied, spied and done w...

One of the best lessons we get in recovery is to keep our focus on ourselves. Other people don’t make us miserable. It’s our focus on other people that makes us miserable. The average codependent learns at a young age to completely take their focus off of themselves. As children, many of us learned we weren’t worthy of having needs and wants; and some of us learned that we were so worthless that it was simply too painful to focus any attention on ourselves. So we began the dysfunctional process of making everyone else’s lives our business. We focused our eyes completely on others and we began to judge them based on the harsh criteria that we were taught to judge ourselves by. We watched for every mistake, every misstep that most everyone around us made and we made it our business to judge and to criticize them. Many of us learned to focus on one person that we encountered daily—at home, or school or work—and we began giving our personal power over our own serenity away to...

I’ve long believed that the root problem for all addicts is extreme lack of self-love. We are very mean to ourselves, and this self-loathing and self-hatred destroy our souls. When we can no longer bear the pain, we then turn to some addictive behavior as a means of temporarily rescuing ourselves from our own self-abuse. The remedy for this situation is obviously a healthy dose of self-love, but that’s not easy to accomplish when we’ve spent years self-destructing through self-criticism. So a necessary first step is the daily practice of being kind to ourselves. Self-kindness is the first step toward healing. And being kind to ourselves can be expressed many forms. We can start by speaking words of kindness to ourselves. We are long used to sharply criticizing everything we say, think or do. We criticize our bodies, our personalities, our abilities, our loveability and our self-worth. It’s time we replaced our very harsh criticisms of ourselves with compliments and other word...

If we did less judging and more loving the world would be a holier place. And if we want to be less judgmental and more loving of everyone, we need to begin by being kinder to ourselves. Today is the last day of 2014. Let’s take a few moments and look back over the year. How well did we love ourselves and others? Did we do a good job of choosing to be kind as opposed to being critical? Did we listen with compassion and express understanding when people needed validation? Did we place ourselves into the hearts and minds of others in order to empathize with them, even when they were difficult or even ugly with us? Or did we immediately go on the defensive, take things personally and go into attack mode? Did we make love our priority? The answers to all of these questions depend on how we treated ourselves. If we made loving ourselves a priority in 2014 then we most likely did a better job of loving others as well. The choice to love ourselves better enabled us to be less judgme...

“Love yourself And the rest will follow.” Don Miguel Ruiz    Kindness is an act of acceptance and of love. Whenever we acknowledge our weaknesses and personal brokenness and treat ourselves with kindness we are loving ourselves. Kindness is the healing ointment we cover our hearts and souls with in order to alleve the emotional pain generated by negative thinking about ourselves.    Practicing kindness means we replace our stinging, hurtful self-thoughts with gentle, compassionate self-talk. It means that we work on sympathizing with and thus better understanding ourselves— and the fact that we are flawed, or perfectly imperfect, just as EVERYONE IS! Kindness is the process by which we reclaim our wounded self-love.    For humans there’s great importance to understanding that we are ALL in the same dilemma; that we all suffer from inner-brokenness. First, it helps us to be less critical of ourselves when we truly acknowledge that no one is...

“Love yourself And the rest will follow.” Don Miguel Ruiz    Kindness is an act of acceptance and of love. Whenever we acknowledge our weaknesses and personal brokenness and treat ourselves with kindness we are loving ourselves. Kindness is the healing ointment we cover our hearts and souls with in order to better recover from our self-loathing.    Practicing kindness means we replace our stinging, hurtful self-talk with gentle, compassionate self-talk. It means that we work on sympathizing with and thus better understanding ourselves— and the fact that we are flawed, or perfectly imperfect, just as EVERYONE IS! Kindness is the process by which we reclaim our wounded self-love.    In recovery, there’s great importance to understanding that we are ALL in the same dilemma; that we all suffer from inner-brokenness. First, it helps us to be less critical of ourselves when we truly acknowledge that no one is perfect. Second, the more we pr...

“I now find myself eating for all the same reasons I drank:  I’m lonely, I’m afraid.” Craig Nakken , The Addictive Personality Many people mistakenly belief that addiction itself is the primary problem. It is not. Addiction is a symptom of a deeper problem. The deeper problem is self-hatred. Most every addict suffers from a severe amount of self-loathing. In fact, self-love is a tern that is completely foreign to people who are caught in the throes of addictive behaviors. No one over-indulges in alcohol, drugs, food, gambling, sex, shopping or any other addictive behavior for no reason. The reason is clear to me. It is lack of self-love. That lack of self-love leads to lack of self-esteem and lack of self-worth. We are then left fearful and lonely. We fear that others will find out how miserably imperfect and unacceptable we are and so we isolate as much as possible to avoid rejection. As we separate ourselves from people and healthy relationships, we begin bui...