Soulshine

“Today I look in the mirror and say ‘I love you. I really love you. You are the joy of my life.” Louise Hay I was up early this morning and the Abbott and Costello movie Lost in a Harem was on Turner Classic Movies. In one of the scenes Abbott asks Costello “Did you ever take a good look at yourself in a mirror?” to which Costello replies “No. Why should I hurt my own feelings?” Costello’s comeback was funny and yet sad. So many of us with addictive personalities have difficulty looking at ourselves in mirrors. Before we even look, we already know that we are going to be uncomfortable with what we see, and we don’t want to hurt our already fragile feelings any further. I know that when I look in a mirror myself, I see all of my deformities and shortcomings—or at least the ones that are in my head, the ones I project onto the mirror image of myself. The deformities I see are the ones that society tells me are unacceptable, like wrinkles, lines, sagging, love-handles, ...

Across the Western world, many people are preparing for Christmas. We are busy about looking for the perfect gift to give. And what we lose sight of is the fact that we ourselves are the perfect gift. First, there’s no better gift you can give yourself this Christmas than the gift of self-acceptance and self-love. You are enough. You don’t need any “thing” or anyone to complete you or make you OK. God has already taken care of that through the very fact that God created you and made you a gift to yourself and the world around you. The problem for so many people is that they don’t believe that they are good enough, and that all of their wholeness and happiness is resting inside of them. No matter how many times I emphasize this to people, I still find many of them searching for someone or something outside of themselves to validate them and make them OK. And these are the very people who are miserable at this time of the year because they haven’t been able to find that special...

“A good scare is worth more to a man than good advice.” E.W. Howe I had a very big scare over the past week that was like hitting bottom harder than hard. My father had heart disease, so I had a calcium scan to make sure I don’t have heart issues. The calcium numbers themselves came back great, but the scan indicated a potential mass in my chest. When those words were spoken to me over the phone, my heart sank through the floor. I never expected to hear anything like this. Then my OCD went on a tear: “Oh, my God! What does “a mass” mean? Is it huge? Is it cancer? Am I going to have to have surgery? Radiation? Lose my hair? Die before I ever even truly live my life to the fullest? I never in my life have seriously thought about dying. I’ve always been amazingly healthy for an often wacked-out OCD codependent crazy (!), but now I was faced with the true reality of life and death. I turned to my Higher Power and said “Enough is enough. I’ve wasted too many years hating myself....

What does it take to be happy with yourself? What does it take to love the person God created you to be? TOTAL SELF-ACCEPTANCE. Complete, unconditional self-acceptance is the doorway into self-love. Self-acceptance opens the flood-gates and it allows self-love to flow in and naturally fill-up your inner-emptiness. Self-acceptance means we have to become aware of, dismantle and let go of all the judgments we have made against ourselves over the years. It also means that we have to begin living our lives authentically, which requires us to throw-out all of our “SHOULDS.” Shoulds and negative self-judgments go hand in hand and they cause of to feel shame and guilt about our natural selves. They force us into living through idealized, false selves that betray who we really are and make us feel even more inadequate. “I should look like this” (You look just fine as you are!), “I shouldn’t act like that” (People who really love you will see beyond your behavior and love you anyw...

“It’s not the power of the curse. It’s the power you give the curse.” Billy, Penelope (2007)    The 2007 film Penelope is a wonderful lesson in self-acceptance and the self-love that grows from accepting yourself just the way you are. Too many of us have walked through life cursing ourselves with every possible form of self-condemnation. We’ve criticized ourselves because we thought our noses were too big, or our bellies were too fat, or our teeth was too stained. We’ve beat ourselves up because we thought we weren’t nice enough, or smart enough or cool enough.    As a result, many of us turned to self-improvement. We joined gyms and aerobicized. We read books on how to become better people. We invested in the latest fashions, music and trends to make ourselves feel socially acceptable. We did everything but look in the mirror and say “I love and accept you just the way you are.”      In his book Be Happy , Robert Holden says “N...

“You think you’ve bought my love like a toy You better watch your stuff, my pride and joy You never know what you’ve got till it’s gone You better not play with love until you know what you’re doing You never know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” Bell & James, You Never Know What You’ve Got (1978) The older I get the more I realize that it’s really true: You never know what you’ve got until it’s gone. We rarely take time to appreciate the youthful glow our faces radiate or the youthful enthusiasm that spills forth from our souls when we are young adults. But as soon as we start losing these youthful treasures, reality hits and we find ourselves desperately trying to hold on to them or to reclaim them. The same is often true when we think about the people we love and the importance of our relationships. Addictive thinking stripped many of us of having good relationships with ourselves and thus with others. Self-rejection left us being really uncomfortable in...

“You are hard for me to paint, Angela. Always you wear a mask to hide the soul within you.” Gino, Street Angel (1928) Angela, Charlie, Lisa, Richard. It doesn’t make any difference what our name is, many of us wear a mask to hide the souls within us. And we do that for a very serious reason: Shame of who we are inside. My shame of being unacceptable and unlovable kept me behind a stealth mask for many years. Even to this day I still wear a mask. It’s just much more see-through than it used to be. But the stealth mask was essential to a younger me. I truly believed that I was so unacceptable of a person that no one could possibly like me. On the surface people might think I was nice enough. I could certainly project the good boy image. But I was petrified that if they ever got underneath my mask, they’d reject the real me. And I greatly feared it would mean the emotional—and maybe the physical-- death of me. So I wasn’t too different from Angela in the 1928 film...