Soulshine

Life is what we make it when we choose to retain and own our personal power. Sometimes we give our personal power away to others and sometimes we give it away to life events or things that happen to us. But often times we give our personal power away to our own fears and the beliefs that spring from these fears. For example, a lady in her mid-50s came to me anonymously several years back. She wanted to talk about the fact that she was divorcing her husband. She said he had been unfaithful and she made it clear to me that she lived by this ironclad rule or belief: “If my husband ever cheats on me, it’s over. I will divorce him.” I asked her to explain what had happened and she told me the following. She and her husband had been married for 26 years. They had known each other since high school. He had lots of friends from his college days that he still socialized with. In fact, they got together every Thursday night for a boys night out where they played poker. Everyone gat...

We make dozens of choices every day. Yet there’s no choice we make more important than this one: Do I want to be right or do I want to be happy? Too often in the past I’ve found myself making the choice to be right—even in the face of a reality that clearly told me I was wrong. Life wasn’t responding the way I wanted, my fantasies weren’t being indulged, life wasn’t treating me fairly and I wasn’t going to stand for it. Things had to be my way—the right way—or else. Unfortunately the “or else” only ensured that I would be miserable. Many people get stuck in believing that being right is going to make them happy. This is a warped fantasy in itself. A few years ago an anonymous lady came to me with a problem. She had learned that her husband had been cheating on her and she had made the choice to divorce him because she had a rule that she lived by faithfully. That rule was “If my husband ever cheats on me, the marriage is over. I will leave and divorce him” and she was...