Soulshine

Sometimes life just sucks and there’s not much we can do about it aside from allowing ourselves to feel the disappointment and emotional pain. When life is simply sucking, I think it’s a clue that we need to grow ourselves and grow our Higher Power. We all have a higher-self we need to rely on more often. That higher self is a higher level of consciousness above our normal thought patterns. We can get in touch with this higher self when we take time to meditate and “watch” our thoughts pass through our minds. As we “watch” thoughts come and go we rise to a level of consciousness ABOVE our thoughts; we realize that we are NOT our thoughts; that we are more than and greater than our thoughts; that there is a more mature and more tuned-in to “God” side of us. I put “God” in quotes because God is a difficult word. “God” means so many things, both positive and negative, to so many people. I grew up with a very difficult Catholic God who was never on my side. Today I think the ...

“Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.” Neale Donald Walsch I’m beginning to think that life has always been a problem for me because my comfort zone is so massive and impossible for anyone to penetrate—including me. It holds me safely inside of it and it definitely keeps everyone else out—even those people I don’t really want to keep out. Actually, I’m realizing that I have been a prisoner of my comfort zone most all of my life. It was useful at first. It kept me safe from further rejection and emotional pain. But it grew with every year of my life until it grew into something so massive that I no longer had any power over it. I have been trapped inside my comfort zone for many years and never understood that it was holding me hostage. It’s true that life begins at the end of our comfort zones. And because I’ve never been able to penetrate my comfort zone, life has never truly begun for me. In recent weeks I’ve been trying to get beyond playing it safe. ...

“In the end what matters most is how well did you love, how well did you live, how well did you learn to let go.” Anonymous I found the statement above on a wall-banner in a small shop in Flagstaff , Arizona , earlier in the year. And I love its simple wisdom. Codependents, and all addictive personalities, spend most of their lives trying to control every aspect of every moment of every day—from whether or not the sun shines and just how much it shines, to what others choose to wear and how they choose to wear it, to what the checker at the grocery thinks about them and they’re eating habits. The problem with trying to control life is that it’s impossible to control life and live life at the same time. When we are always busy about controlling every moment of our day, we are in a defensive mode, a survival mode. No one enjoys being on the defensive. People enjoy life when they actually allow their day to unfold before them and they choose to walk through their day...

Many of us are too afraid to live life. Life happens and we don’t know how to handle it, so we desperately run away as fast as possible. And—sadly-- we even run away when life is presenting us with what we’ve really wanted, like a serious, loving relationship. I know too many people who have ended good relationships, even marriages, because they were too afraid to be involved in anything so intimate, even though their true-selves really wanted the intimacy. Unfortunately, their addictive-selves were frightened beyond reason and in the driver’s seat. So they zoomed off at 100 miles per hour out of the relationship. They allowed all of their addictive fears to escalate into self-destruct mode and they did everything in their power to alienate the other person. For example, let’s say Jared has been head-over-heals for Angela for a couple of years. He’s always suspicious of her, however, because she’s a very attractive girl and he’s heard some rumors about her past behavior wit...