Soulshine

    It’s that time of the year again. The parties and shopping are well underway and so is the urgent need to be happy. Christmas has always been a difficult time for me mentally and emotionally. It’s the one season of the year in which everyone desperately wants to feel loved; and yet many of us who grew up in dysfunctional households don’t know how to accept love, or allow ourselves to be loved. We didn’t receive the love we needed as children and consequently we never learned to love ourselves. This is the real problem. Recovery has taught me much about me and self-love. Looking back now, I see that over the many years and Christmas seasons of my life I was in fact loved by many people. But I never acknowledged that love because I didn’t have the inner-tools to accept that love. I didn’t know how to accept it because I didn’t know how to love and accept myself. So I learned to play the victim of the holiday season. I ached inside and moaned and groaned to myself e...

“A persecution was started against Paul and Barnabas, who were then expelled from the territory. They shook the dust from their feet in protest. They knew only how to be filled with joy and the Holy Spirit.” The Christian Bible, Acts of the Apostles Why is it that when bad things happen to us we are far from being filled with joy and the Holy Spirit? Maybe it’s because we are rarely filled with joy even when good things are happening to us. And why would that be? Well, because we fail to recognize that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, and that we have the power to cultivate that heaven and to live it. Instead, as life-long addictive victims, we have chosen to give away our personal power over our inner-lives and to create our own internal-hells. Many of us have been guilty of giving away our inner-personal-power since we were small children. We gave away the heaven inside of us to Mom and Dad and many, many others. We were born believing we were beautiful, bu...

You can’t force feelings. It’s my birthday and I know I’m supposed to be happy, but I’m really feeling sad today. First of all, I’m way past the age of being happy about being another year older. And secondly, I don’t have the love and the other heart and soul necessities that I need to feel happy about facing another year. I spent the past couple of days with a really good friend, whom I love a lot, and we’ve had a really good time hitting the amusement parks in Los Angeles. I appreciate his friendship and the fun times and I am grateful for both. This friend even helped to maneuver a surprise birthday party for me yesterday. He’s a really precious person—and I’d probably be feeling even sadder today without his friendship. But I still feel a deep, deep sadness that isn’t going away. I think rationally that I shouldn’t be feeling this way and I don’t want to be feeling this way. Unfortunately, I know why I’m feeling this way:   I feel so stuck in a life that ...

I was talking with someone last night who had developed an energy-draining disease. He was bitter with God, himself and life. And he was playing the victim. Life had done him wrong. It had placed him in the path of an insect that could infect him with an incurable disease. Likewise God had done him wrong by allowing this to happen. No one escaped blame for his ailment, including himself. So I asked him “Can you accept the fact that you now have this disease? Instead of fighting reality through bitterness and blame, can you ask God to help you to take your power back from this disease by accepting that you have it and that you can’t change things back to the way they were before?” He looked pensive, but I could tell that he was beginning to understand. I went on to say that life may be different now, it may be less pleasant in certain ways, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t work with the illness. We can befriend it and see what it has to teach us about the true value of ...