Soulshine

“I Am Who I Am” is who God is. It is a declaration of the God who lives in the eternal present. God is the God of the NOW, the present moment-- every present moment. God is not the God of the past or the future, but of the present. I am who I am is also all that we can be. We can all say “I am who I am.“ And none of us can be more or less than who we are in this present moment. So it’s important that we listen to and be aware of the I AM statements we each choose to own. Since we were small children, many of us learned, and have continually chosen to affirm, negative I AM statements about ourselves: “I am stupid,” “I am ugly,” “I am fat” “ I am worthless,“ “I am irresponsible” and “I am unlovable” are just a few of the bad I AM statements that have ruled our daily lives. These negative thoughts have produced much misery. And they’ve led us to believe the following: Overall, “I AM not good enough.” As a result, we have come to believe we are unworthy of love, of nurturi...

To grieve is to feel the flow of emotions as they arise within and pass through your heart and soul. It is allowing the flow of feelings to happen naturally. It is sitting with those feelings no matter how uncomfortable they may be. It is accepting those feelings just as they are and allowing them to bring their healing ingredients into our lives. Proper grieving means we give up our struggle to control our feelings. It means we allow tears to well-up in our eyes and flow down our cheeks. It means we fully breathe, feel and release each feeling on its terms-- not ours. There are many reasons why we need to grieve. Life gives to us and it takes away from us. Sometimes life gives us surprises we aren’t prepared for-- a bad medical report, a pink slip, or a serious accident. And sometimes life takes away the very breath from our lungs through the loss of a loved one or the ability to participate in those things that we have always found to be life-giving. Ultimately, life is ...

I often wonder why sadness has become taboo in our country. It didn’t use to be that way. The ancient native Americans had a wonderful proverb: “If the eyes had no tears, the soul would have no rainbow.” They understood the healing power of sadness and the need the human soul has to express and then release it’s sorrow. They knew it cleansed the soul and returned a rainbow of happiness to anyone who was willing to grieve their losses. Today, however, we are taught to almost be ashamed of feeling sad. As small children we are discouraged from crying. If we fall off our bike, adults hand us cookies and forcibly tell us   “ DON ’T CRY! You’re OK. STOP crying!” Why can’t we adults simply allow a child who, has fallen and scraped his/her knee, to cry until they feel better? Why is it that we can’t bear the idea of anyone being sad? The feeling of sadness is as necessary to the healing of the soul as the element of rain is to the healing of parched earth. Yet we rarely want to face ...

Most everyone is familiar with the old image of a ball and chain around the leg of an inmate. And many of us are aware of what this same sort of emotional ball and chain feels like inside our chests. As the chain wraps itself tightly around our hearts, the ball feels like a thousand pounds of lead against our souls. Our inner ball and chain constantly weigh us down because they are filled with many years of unexpressed, and thus unresolved, emotions. We’re aching with dishonored feelings of betrayal, disappointment, loss, abandonment, anxiety, hurt, fear and sadness. And every so often, when we can no longer repress these feelings, we erupt like a volcano spewing anger and rage at the world and any person in our path. Unfelt and unexpressed emotions stay trapped inside of us. Eventually, they become buried within us and transform our souls into graveyards of the living dead. Unprocessed feelings never die. They moan, ache, shiver and screech, but they never die. At times they seem do...

Betrayal is the feeling of being duped. It is the gut-wrenching emotion that leads us to feel abandoned and to experience a sense of loss. The world as we have known it has suddenly changed in a way that makes us feel unsafe. Our well-being is disturbed. And our trust is shaken. Betrayal happens in many different ways. Sometimes we betray ourselves, or we may feel that our bodies have betrayed us. This happens when we develop a serious illness. The immediate feeling we have is that our body has in some way turned against us. It’s been unfaithful. It’s let us down. This sense of betrayal can often lead to a second sense, once we get past the initial shock of our illness: That we are the ones who actually betrayed our own bodies. We refused to eat well, or to exercise or to treat our bodies with proper respect by avoiding cigarettes or avoiding excessive alcohol or drug consumption. New feelings then arise: primarily guilt, shame and remorse. In a flash, we can be filled wit...

“Follow your bliss” is a popular ideal, but you have to follow your pain first. I mean there can be no true bliss to follow if it’s buried under the boulders of your unresolved pain. Bliss is the end result of a deepening, maturing spirituality. Pain is the path you must blaze in order to mature spiritually. Pain-- be it physical, mental or emotional— awakens the empty spaces inside of us. If we are present and open to our pain, it will take us to the very places where we need to find spiritual healing. Pain invites us to truly take a soul-journey. This journey into the inner-areas of the soul is beautifully portrayed in the 2008 Japanese film Departures . The film centers on the life of Daigo Kobayashi, a cellist in a Tokyo symphony orchestra, who carries a dark burden in his heart. That burden centers on his relationship with his father, who Daigo hasn’t seen in 30 years. When Daigo was six years old, his father-- who operated a coffee shop-- ran off with one of the waitresses. Da...

Today is Ash Wednesday, and I have been asked “Where are your ashes?” To which I replied “I am wearing them inside—within my empty spaces—where they will hopefully bring spiritual healing; and where they will eventually bring more good to the world than a one day public display on the forehead that is largely forgotten by the next day.”    If you practice Lent, allow it to be a genuine-internal-spiritual tour de force that propels you to love and bless the world with great goodness from within you. Do not allow it to simply be a hollow-external-ashen show of shows to garner public approval from outside of you. Public approval is for the religious. Choose to be spiritual, instead, and you will learn that Love is more valuable than any form of public approval.