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(I wrote this blog back in May 2008 and I think it’s still relevant. I’ve edited it slightly and reposted it.)

A big part of growing and changing as a person is recognizing the poisonous presences in your life and having the courage to eliminate them. No one is immune to poisons. Not even mediums and psychics who should really know better. It all boils down to the fact that we are all human and we are going to make mistakes, but what allows you to advance as a soul is the ability to leave poisons behind with the genuine desire never to return to them again. This is the basis of Confession to Catholics and a desire to grow in all other forms of spirituality as well.

What are these poisons and how do we identify them? They can be people in your life who are not good for you, they can be the little demons in you that make you drink too much, do drugs, starve yourself, stick your finger down your throat, eat like a glutton, throw your pride and health away on hard partying and promiscuous unprotected sex. Poisons to your soul are anything that make you feel less than your worth, or that you have to compromise your convictions to prove your worth to others. These poisons cause you to fall off your life path and eventually you become addicted to misery because it’s all you know. Until you purge your soul of these poisons, you will continue to feel lost and like everything bad is happening TO you. Most of the time it is our own decisions that CAUSE bad things to happen. Personal responsibility is one of the most important steps in ridding yourself of poisons.

Even being honest and sticking to a good moral code has its pitfalls because there are always people willing to make you into a scapegoat or make you look bad for their own devices. It becomes a poison in your life when you allow people to make you feel less than worthy of all the love and happiness that the universe can bestow on you. I have learned the hard way that instead of asking, “Why did this happen to me?” we should instead be asking ourselves, “What inside of me attracts dishonest people?” To quote a friend of mine: “What I have tried to do is to look at what it is in me that has attracted these people into my life. This is really hard and involves quite a bit of internal struggle. Thinking of the law of attraction consider that what I am putting out for a vibration or an energetic pattern, whether I am doing so consciously or not, is what will come back to me. It is what I will attract. … The underlying belief is ‘I don’t feel good enough so I am sending that out’ and getting a bunch of people in my life who don’t feel good enough…mix that with life experiences and you get a circle of people who are insecure and jealous amongst other things.”

Read about the Law of Attraction: http://healing.about.com/cs/selfactualization/a/lawofattraction.htm

Eliminating negative thoughts and feelings about yourself is the same as taking responsibility for who you allow into your life. Allowing other people to make you feel inferior is the same as allowing those people to have power over you and that has to stop, otherwise the pattern will perpetuate itself with future people coming into your life.

I have a friend of a friend who has, for lack of a better term, been addicted to a man for twenty years. It is plain to everyone that he has never loved her. He uses her for his own gain, he gets her pregnant and does nothing for his children, he lies, he’s a criminal, he cheats, and everything else under the sun. This woman has never been able to kick her addiction to him and it has made her into not such a great friend. She still holds out hope that he will fall totally in love with her, be a husband and a father, and she is pretty much focusing all of her energy on the pipe dream of a knight in shining armor. The poison has infected her so badly that she can no longer see him for what he really is. The poison creates an illusion for her that everything will be all right if SHE does this or that to make him love her, when it was never HER at all who was the problem. The man is the poison ruining the rest of her life in a great ripple effect, and the poison has become of her own cause because she refuses to purge her system of him.

I have another friend of a friend who grew up in a horribly abusive home. The initial poisons were his parents and they nearly succeeded at infecting him with their own poisons until, at the age of 14, he reached an epiphany that he was not going to let them win. He took an active role at that young age to correct the poisons in his life, but those poisons left such open wounds on him that it left him extremely succeptible to further poisons later in his life. His first wife took advantage of him in every possible way and like the woman I talked about in the paragraph above, he took the poison into himself and refused to believe the warnings of others about his wife. He was drowning in it until it became his own poison and it took him twelve years to leave her. Now he is in another unhappy relationship. He moves from one poison to another because misery is all he knows and all he expects for himself. The poison has become an internal disease within himself because most people feel that deep down he doesn’t feel he deserves any better.

Another woman I know followed the same pattern for most of her life. The poison of abuse and addiction came from her father and she grew up believing it was the only life she was designed to live. Her own addictions and lack of self-worth pushed her onto a hard road, constantly struggling to make ends meet. She allowed more poisons to come into her life by marrying men who were replicas of her father because, again, she didn’t feel she deserved any better. She gave up one of her children for adoption because she was on the verge of homelessness. It took the realization that her fourth husband was sexually molesting her daughter to make her realize that she alone was responsible for correcting the poisons in her life so her soul could advance. Since then, she has worked every day to remove poisons from her soul and since then, she finally has a man in her life that is not cruel or abusive. Positive changes happened to her because she took responsibility for her own misery. This woman is my mother.

I use this analogy for people who don’t understand that they need to be taking a proactive role in their own life path: Getting punched is someone else projecting their own poisons onto you. Coming back to get punched again and again creates your own poisonous misery and is your own fault for not taking active steps to rid yourself of the misery. People who do nothing to change the misery in their lives are as much at fault as the people who they say are causing the misery.

What do you do about it?

– Recognize that there is poison in your soul.
– Look at every aspect of your life and pinpoint what you think is causing it.
– Ask yourself if this person, habit or thing is really worth the misery.
– Think about what path your life might take once the poison is removed.
– Eliminate the person, habit or thing from your life.
– Take an active role in personal responsibility and realize that you are responsible for your own happiness.

The biggest problem I see in people out there is a lot of people in love with their poisons and misery will point the finger at everyone for the cause. Do me a favor and act like you’re pointing your finger right now. Look at your hand. Do you see your other fingers? You point the finger at someone else but there are four more fingers pointing back at you. Poison and misery are a two way street. It takes someone or something else to infect you but it takes your own decisions to perpetuate the cycle. People who live for years in miserable situations are stalled. They are stagnate. Their souls are not growing and will not grow until they learn to cast off the shackles holding them back from advancing on to the correct life path. You will know you’re on the right life path because you will feel satisfaction broken up by occasional unhappiness, rather than misery broken up by occasional satisfaction.

That man or woman who treats you like a toy or punching bag is never going to change. His or her personal poisons cannot be allowed to become your own. Smoking that joint, sucking down that bottle or refusing to let yourself eat is not going to fix the poison causing your pain. It takes enormous reserves of strength to purge our souls of negativity and misery but once you do, it’s like entering the world with all the wonder and peace of a newborn child. It is worth the tears and agony of coming face to face with your poisons. You must face them head on and do battle to rid yourself of them.

I wrote this blog because I’m dealing with a poison in my own soul. I’m not above these things just because I am extremely sensitive to the spiritual side of life. Sometimes writing out my own advice forces me to follow it. God willing, my soul will be totally purged of this damn poison. I work at it every day but I do struggle just like everybody else.

Do yourselves a favor and look at what’s causing unhappiness in your life. What will you do about it?