I am beginning to realize how incredibly important it is for us to relate not only to others in a positive manner but to ourselves as well. I remember watching a movie entitled "The Edge", with Anthony Hopkins, Alex Baldwin, and Harold Perineau. There small plane crashes in the Alaskan wilderness. Hopkins had studied survival and the other two men had little or no survival skills. At one point Hopkins whose character was Charles Morse, asked the other men,"Do you know what people die of in the wilderness". The other men did not have an answer and Hopkins made the statement that, "They die of shame". Wow! What a mind blowing concept. What is it that deadens us slowly over time, bit by bit, and drains of our energy and vitality? Poor diet, hum! Aging? Maybe Most likely and more than any other reason it is due to our own sense of shame, doubt, and self criticism. There are many things we can blame for our misery, our wife, our kids, our job, our depressed mother, or our father who passed away 20 years ago. But the reality that many of us don't want to face (including myself) is that it is our own tendency to be unkind to ourselves. Others can hurt us but don't really have the power to destroy our sense of well being. For that only we have the power! The recent research on cognition shows us that each person has from sixty to seventy five thousand thoughts per day. Around eighty percent of those thoughts are negative either toward ourselves or others, and ninety percent of these thoughts are repetitive each day. How many of those thoughts are negative toward ourselves?