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Note: I have kept a personal journal for almost 20 years and each item in My Sunday Journal is based upon an entry in my journal on this date in one of those years.

I once wrote an article titled "Taming your Inner Shoeshine Boy." As you can imagine, it was about our sometimes compulsive desire to please people.

Dale Carnegie wrote a classic, "How To Win Friends and Influence People." Like most good things, this good thing can become a compulsive, destructive thing that will ruin your life.

In childhood, we are parent-oriented and mainly desire to love and please our parents. Then in adolescence, we become peer-oriented and desire to please those in our age group. Some of us stay frozen in adolescence.

Some of us get into sick relationships along the way where the only way we are given love and approval is to totally please some self-centered jerk whom we don't see accurately as a self-centered jerk but see instead as someone we "love." Try to reason with someone in this kind of morbid relationship and they'll always say, "Oh, but I love him," or "Oh, she loves me but just doesn't know how to show it," or "she was so abused as a child."

Hogwash. We were all abused as children by someone. Then as teens and adults. So long as we're here, someone will be abusing us to the extent that we allow it to happen. The only way to stop it is to stop it. Firmly, finally and permanently stop it.

This new you may be such a stranger to people that you will have to go without love for a while. So during that period, just love yourself a little extra. Go for walks, buy some goodies you've always wanted, go to places you've always wanted to go. Spend time with those who respect you. Spoil thyself real good.

It is a fundamental law of human relations that people learn how to treat us by observing how we treat ourselves.

ONENESS DISSIPATES FEAR

Peace Pilgrim is one of my heroes. She had a spiritual experience in which she was led to walk from one end of America to the other in support of peace. Along the way, she exuded her own personal peace to everyone she met. People who met her testify to the depths of her centered peacefulness.

She told how to get rid of fear. She said, "When we have found inner peace, we feel unity with the Divine within all human beings and unity with God, so all fear is gone from our lives. As long as we feel separate, we are afraid...As soon as we feel oneness, that feeling is gone."

I have discovered her truth to be my truth. As I feel oneness with what George Fox called "that of God in every man," fear dissipates. As I feel separate, it grows.

No truth is more needed in the world today. Despite barriers and terrors of all kinds, we must open to points of resonance within all people.