Soulshine

“Today become aware of the beliefs to which you are attached; allow yourself to become free of them and to live as you choose.” Don Miguel Ruiz Jr, Living a Life of Awareness Many of us suffer from attachments to beliefs that serve us poorly. And we aren’t even consciously aware that our attachments to these beliefs are making us miserable. For example, we may believe that we have to find Mr. or Ms. Right in order to be happy. Or we may believe that we can’t fully accept the fact that one of our children is gay because the religion we practice won’t allow us to fully love a person who is gay. Or we may believe that we will never be lovable until we are as thin as a fashion model. These are just a handful of bad beliefs that people often get attached to. They then use these beliefs to put their lives on hold. If I am waiting on Mr. or Ms. Right to come walking along and sweep me off my feet so I can then finally be happy, I’m putting my happiness on hold indefinitely...

In many ways the human person is like a caterpillar. Throughout our lives we are faced with major changes that cause us great fear and emotional pain. Every day we are constantly being asked by God or the universe to change, grow and morph into being new creations; much like caterpillars change, grow and morph into being butterflies. This process is never pretty, however, because we are forced to leave our comfort zones and enter into dark, scary places inside ourselves. Deep within we realize that life—as we have known it—is changing in ways that make us fearful and resistant to these changes. Sometimes we may even feel like our world is coming to an end. And in reality, our world—as we have known it— may truly be coming to an end if we make the conscious choice to grow into the newness of life that God is calling us to enter. The choice is ours. We can freeze-up with fear and be overpowered by the need to stay in our comfort zone, or we can choose to move forward into an...

“Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” Gospel of John How has God loved us? Passionately. Greatly. Unconditionally. Powerfully. Equally. God’s love for everyone is equally as great, as unconditional and as powerful. God has no favorites. No one is “more” to God or “less” to God than anyone else. We are all equal in the eyes of God and we are all equally loved by God. And so our calling is to love each other equally, just as God loves us. This means we need to come to terms with our fears concerning our own lovability. We must believe God loves us without fail and we must learn to love ourselves in the same way. We must then love others as we are loved by God and ourselves. To do so we have to come to term with a further set of fears: Fears about those who are different from us and fears of those who we simply don’t understand. In order to set aside our fears about those who are different from us, we need to lesson the grip of ignorance...