Soulshine

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...

“We’re tapped because of a universal human expectation that the world will treat us fairly. This is a cherished, childish assumption—‘If I’m good, the world will be good to me.’ We should know better.” Phil Stutz & Barry Michels, The Tools Granted, like Jimmy Seymour in Broadway Serenade , many of us mess-up our relationships because our self-love and self-esteem are poor. But many of us also mess-up relationships because we have an age-old bad belief stored in our subconscious minds. And that belief is that life should be fair. The belief that life (and thus relationships) should be fair is as irrational as an old belief that plague me for years: Everyone should like me. Both of these beliefs produce expectations that only serve to make our lives miserable. For many years I agonized whenever someone obviously didn’t like me. It left me feeling like a failure as a person. The belief that I should be liked by everyone kept me on constant guard. It meant everyt...

“The whole point of focusing on ‘the NOW ’ is to end the search for happiness.” Robert Holden, Happiness NOW   Going with the flow of our day means getting out of our heads as much as possible. Sure, we have to be in our heads some. But the average person probably spends 80 percent of their waking day living inside of their head, and they only bother to leave it when the bump into the reality of the outside world. For example, you can be at work, sitting at your desk, fully engaged inside your head until your phone rings or someone knock on your door. These perceived interruptions take you out of your head and lead you back into the real world. They place you back into the flow of life, and yet we are often crusty about the fact that the real world is disturbing our little inner-world. Think of it this way: Our little inner-world is filled with expectations, shoulds and other such happiness-zappers. When we are constantly caught-up in our little worlds of “th...