Snips

When I meet people or get in a new relationship, I start putting all these repressive restrictions on myself. I cant have my feelings. Cant have my wants and needs. Cant have my history. Cant do the things I want, feel the feelings I'm feeling, or say what I need to say. I turn into this repressed, perfectionistic robot, instead of being who I am: Me.
Sometimes, our instinctive reaction to being in a new situation is: Don't be yourself. Who else can we be? Who else would you want to be? We don't need to be anyone else.
The greatest gift we can bring to any relationship wherever we go is being who we are. We may think others wont like us. We may be afraid that if we just relax and be ourselves, the other person will go away or shame us. We may worry about what the other person will think. But, when we relax and accept ourselves, people often feel much better being around us than when we are rigid and repressed. Were fun to be around.
If others don't appreciate us, do we really want to be around them? Do we need to let the opinions of others control our behavior and us?
Giving ourselves permission to be who we are can have a healing influence on our relationships. The tone relaxes. We relax. The other person relaxes. Then everybody feels a little less shame, because they have learned the truth. Who we are is all we can be, all were meant to be, and its enough. Its fine.
Our opinion of ourselves is truly all that matters. And we can give ourselves all the approval we want and need.
Today, I will relax and be who I am in my relationships. I will do this not in a demeaning or inappropriate way, but in a way that shows I accept myself and value who I am. Help me, God, let go of my fears about being myself.
Melody Beattie©

Along our spiritual journey, every one of us is thrust into the desert. We find ourselves in a relationship wasteland or financially barren. We feel lost and abandoned, but it is during this time in the desert that God grows our souls.
Mary Manin Morrissey

AA Thought of the Day / In God's economy, nothing is wasted. Through failure, we learn a lesson in humility which is probably needed, painful though it is. / As Bill Sees It, p. 31

Because of mechanical habits, repeatedly doing the same thing again and again, you lose the capacity to look; you lose the freshness to look. Really, you lose the function of your eyes -- remember this. You become basically blind, because eyes are not needed. Life is flux, everything is flowing, nothing is the same. The same sunrise will not happen again. In a sense also, the sun is not the same. Every day it is new; basic changes have occurred. And the sky will not be the same again; this morning is not going to come again. Every morning has its own individuality, and the sky and the colors, they will not gather in the same pattern again. But you go on moving as if everything is just the same. Children are so excited because their eyes are new and fresh. And everything is a new world, a new dimension. Look at children's eyes - at the freshness, the radiant aliveness, the vitality. They look mirror-like, silent, but penetrating. Only such eyes can reach within.
Osho

You can always access the largeness, the unlimitlessness of life, no matter how hopeless things appear. You don't get that by romancing your partner. You get that if you have a love affair with life itself -- a passionate life. Then your relationships will be passionate and juicy too.
Lee Lozowick

"When you touch one thing with deep awareness, you touch everything. When you touch one moment with deep awareness you touch all moments. If you live one moment deeply, that moment contains all the past and all the future in it. The one contains the all."
Thich Nhat Hanh

Spiritual growth results from absorbing and digesting truth and putting it to practice in daily life.
White Eagle

It's but little good you'll do a-watering the last year's crops.
George Eliot

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
Kathleen Casey