Archive for July, 2008

From The E Mail Bag

Andreya writes: “I do want to be with my body/mind/soulmate. I don’t remember being abandoned by girlfriends while I was dating someone nor when I broke up with him. I found my girlfirends most supportive. This was true for boyfriends and when I divorced…..

I have long-term male and female friends, friendships lasting decades. I am visiting a guy friend and his family as well as a single friend for two weeks each on my trip to California….

AND, I am still single and would prefer to be with my body/mind/soulmate. (I want it all.)”

Hi Andreya,

Thanks for your post. I admire your ability to sustain lasting relationships for so many years. It is comforting to have a host of supporters…like the cell phone commercial! Even though you have wonderful friends, there is no doubt that what you want (to meet men who could be that Soul Mate) is not measuring up to what is happening (you are only meeting men who do not qualify or you are not meeting new and interesting men at all).

What I do know for sure from my work with highly successful women who are not with the man ideally suited to them for a long term relationship, is that they are not aware of the image they are projecting to the world.

Most are stunned to realize that they are projecting an “I’m not available” image. Not only that, little do they know that this image or vibe is amazingly efficient at keeping the “right” type of man out of their experience.

How do I know this to be true? Exactly, how many prospects with real potential have you dated in the last year? I rest my case!

If you think you might be sending out this “I love being single” vibe when you want to be sending a “I’m ready for a man with substance ” vibe, it is wise to look deep within your heart to see what is behind your singleness.

One way to approach this is to take a few days to compile a list of all the best parts about your life right now. What are the advantages of being single? While you might not come up with many at first, if you work on this for a couple of days, you may surprise yourself. Once your list is complete, go through each item and decide mindfully whether or not you are negotiable on it.

This self reflection may be just what the doctor ordered in helping you discover why you are still single. If you still don’t see yourself as unapproachable, ask a close friend to go through your list with you. Her view of your current state of affairs or lack of (sorry, couldn’t resist) may add extra dimension to your self inquiry.

Once you unearth the root to your singleness, you will have one of two outcomes. One, you may indeed embrace your singleness with new passion as it IS life affirming for you or two, you will find yourself in the right place and the right time more often where you will cross paths with many more interesting and available men!

Talk about a win-win!

Good luck to you, Andreya!

Catherine

Looking for more ideas on how to enhance your relationship? Would you like to feel more loved and cherished?  Maybe your Love Set Point is set too low.   Click here for a complimentary Love Set Point Consultation.

Bless my man’s heart! He brings me flowers, after nearly 4 years together.

You know that special kind of flowers….the for-no-reason flowers.

I was on the phone (happens a lot) and he came home after golf yesterday with three pink roses in a bud vase. Not just a bouquet from the store. No, he took time and picked something for me.

I can’t help but reflect on how cool that is. I choose to realize how happy he makes me feel at times. Knowing he took time to think of me while he was away from me builds my confidence in my ability to strengthen our connection by thinking about it in a consciously positive way.

There are times when I don’t feel connected to him and that can be scary. My mind used to jump to “I wonder if he loves me thinking”. When he is tired or stressed, he is not very available to me. For a long time I took that personally and felt hurt and unloved. Now I am starting to recognize those times and choose to pull in my energy a bit to give him his space.

If I do that consciously, I don’t feel as rejected as I used to. Then I have more energy to think of something to do alone that is fun for me. Fully engaging in something that is fun and entertaining is a great way to balance the energy that seems to need him at the moment. I just bought a hoola hoop and a dart board and I am learning to juggle. I am having a ball learning how I can entertain myself. It always makes me feel better

Over the four years we have been developing our relationship I see now that he always swings back to me out of his unavailable stance. Understanding that has helped me relax and then I am more fun.

Cute and funny is not only a really fun way to live, it is also pretty irresistible to my man.

Anyway, if you read this far, you probably wonder about the cat. Well, her name is Jade and she loves flowers. I mean….to eat them. She is a Bengal and I think she still dreams of living in a forest somewhere.

When I got up this morning, there on the floor was the lovely little bud vase

Yum!

with three half eaten flowers scattered around it.

Like I said, Bless my man’s heart, I just love him!.

“Hey Darlin’, want to drive down to the beach and take a walk?”

“Not really,” he says keeping his eyes focused on the sports section.

“It is a beautiful afternoon and it will be cooler down there,” she says hopefully.

“Too much traffic and it will be a problem finding parking,” he says still focused on the sports section.

I used to allow scenarios like this to frustrate me. Feeling like my desires were being disregarded, I would feel anger somewhere in my belly and rather than deal with it, I would store it in some handy dandy inner receptacle, suck up my disappointment and withdraw from my partner emotionally. Hardly the pathway to a loving relationship.

Now I handle things differently. As much as I enjoy going places with my man…and I do, I even like going to Walgreens with him, I am starting to go more places alone and loving it! Yesterday, I took my little self right down to the ocean and enjoyed a beach walk…alone. I was alone with my thoughts and delighted with the people watching.

When I got home, I told him how much fun I had and how beautiful the ocean was. He asked about the parking and I told him it took a little time to find my spot, but not bad. He said “I don’t like the beach in the summer, it is too crowded. I prefer to go down there in the winter.” I said, “I like winter too, but it was fun watching all the different people enjoying the day.”

In my first marriage, I didn’t make the choice to do fun things on my own. If he didn’t want to go, then I didn’t do it. Slowly but surely, I built up some heavy duty resentment. I don’t know where I got the idea that a couple has to do everything together, but a part of me sure believed that was true.

These days my man and I enjoy our separate interests. If he is not up for something that I want us to do together, it doesn’t stop me from doing it myself. We do share beach walking from time to time and I love the hand holding romance of that, but you know what? The power and majesty of the ocean and the quietness of my thoughts when alone are pretty magnificent too.

When we met up at the end of the day, we went to Home Depot together to buy some supplies. Holding hands as we walked from the parking lot was sweet too, the view was just a bit more mundane!

I will keep inviting him to do things I want to do as a couple but I am not going to let his preferences keep me from having fun on my own! If I feel disappointed, that’s ok, I can find ways to tell him that. I find that just saying, “I need some Larry time” almost always opens him to me.

Learning to enjoy my own company,

Catherine

Looking for more ideas on how to enhance your relationship? Would you like to feel more loved and cherished?   Maybe your Love Set Point is set too low.  Click here for a complimentary Love Set Point Consultation.

I love men.

I really do.

But one of the things that is toughest for me is when the man in my life thinks he is right when I am pretty darn sure that he is not.

It has been a challenge to look at arguments differently. If it is critical that he know that he is not as right as he thinks he is, I am building the courage and the vocabulary to gently express myself. This morning I mentioned that I met a new friend, a medical doctor, and that I wanted to nurture the relationship.

His reaction was, “You know, you have to watch that kind of thing.” My immediate reaction was to defend myself by saying, “Why are you….(always so negative).” Parentheses because I stopped myself (boy did it take me forever to stop myself midstream!) I changed my language and said, “That sounded negative to me, what do you mean?”

He then explained to me that a friendship with a medical person could be hampered by asking for free medical advice and then told a personal story that supported his feelings. I then explained that I was aware of that and further explained why I enjoyed my conversations with this gifted young man interested in healing the whole being.

It was important for me to express myself this time and I did. The exchange was positive and I felt happy that he saw my perspective and accepted it. My heart warms to him when he sees my side of things.

There are other times, and ladies, I suggest you find as many of these as you possibly can, where I say “You are right about that.” even if he is not quite as right I think he thinks he is. When he expresses an opinion about something I am not emotionally invested in, I eagerly agree knowing his heart expands when I do so.

For example, if he is talking about the high salaries of major league athletes, I really don’t care and could say nothing, but I now know that saying…”You’re right about that.” scores me mega points in his eyes, whether he consciously realizes it or not!

Then, if I need to express something because he is wrong about something important, I have created a comfort zone with him and he is more open to me.

I like being happy. I like it a lot!

Maybe being right is overrated!

Are you out of tune with your man? Did he used to be in to you but now you are not so sure? Were you sure he was your soul mate and now you are thinking, “What was I thinking?”

Looking for more ideas on how to enhance your relationship? Would you like to feel more loved and cherished? Maybe your Love Set Point is set too low. Take control of your love life! Click here for a complimentary strategy session.

The Answer May Surprise You.

The disappointment I hear in the voices of the women who are lonely and looking for romance in their lives is haunting.

“Why do I keep attracting the jerks and losers?”

“All of the men in my age group are married or satisfied with being single.”

“What if I never meet the love of my life?”

Ouch.

There is a hidden key to finding the man of your dreams and believe it or not, it has nothing to do with your past lovers or the emotionally distant relationship you might have with your dad.

The key to finding a man who gets you and loves you is to fully recover from the hurts from the women in your past.

What you say?

How can my friendships with women have anything to do with finding my soul mate?

Let me tell you a story.

When Janna went to college, she felt really lucky. She hadn’t fit in with the cool kids in high school and was a loner. College was different though. She met people she could relate to and began to find friends.

Naïve and open, she began to trust these girls and let herself be known more and more deeply. It was fun to come home to the dorm and always find someone up, no matter what time it was, to share about dates, guys and guys.

These were really great friendship times and Janna flourished.

Then, out of the blue, Janna met a guy of her own. It was an instant crush. Every cell in her body vibrated when she thought about him. Body, mind and soul all completely captured by this wonderful man.

She fell hard and, lucky for her, so did he. Janna and Dan began hanging out together as often as they could. They didn’t really date, they just hung out. It was comfortable and fun and felt very right.

What happened next with her girlfriends blindsided her completely. Janna’s roommate, Kate, was going through a messy breakup with her longterm boyfriend at the time. Somehow, they saw Janna’s time spent with Dan as an abandonment of Kate.

As they made their stance more and more clear, Janna was faced with a difficult choice. Her girlfriends or…..her soulmate.

Of course she chose Dan. He was her whole world.

What a time it was. The chemistry was strong and steady. They got each other. It was so easy to be together and they couldn’t get enough of each other. It was completely natural for them to spend more and more time together. And so they did.

The price was high though. In the not fully informed decision making of a teenage crowd, Janna was excised from the group. At the time, it didn’t seem to matter. The hurt and disappointment was completely hidden by the overwhelming chemistry between Janna and Dan.

The loss of the friendships, the support, the smiles, the involvement the fun of girlfriendness was never addressed.

When Janna and Dan broke up after a passionate, complicated and significant length of time, Janna was left not only without her soulmate and her girlfriends, she also had taken a huge hit in the area of trust. After all, she had picked those girls and her soulmate and those choices were filled with drama and trauma.

Unaware of the unexpressed disappointment still deep in her memory, Janna never trusted women again. Holding her heart closed from other girls, she could comfort herself knowing she couldn’t get hurt like that again.

Fast forward ten, twenty years or so. Janna now has had many women friends over the years but few that have sustained themselves. She is lonely and, truth be told, desperate to meet a man to be with. She wants what she had with Dan. She wants to feel that excitement again. The wanting of it is steady and intense. “Where is he?” She cries into her pillow at night. “Why can’t I meet him?”

Freeze Frame:

The betrayal of women, by women, is the single most injurious of emotional wounding. Self protective postures and behaviors keep women at arms length from each other.

Ask yourself, how many women do I trust completely?

Unless you are very different than most, you come up with a very low number.

What in the world does all this have to do with your invisible soulmate?

Everything.

When you are drawn into a romantic relationship with an unconscious (which by its nature is naïve and open, bless its heart) desire to fulfill both a girlfriend’s and a boyfriend’s roles, the result is always devastating. Whether it ends sooner or later, the results are the same. The relationship is lopsided and, without help, pretty doomed.

Not many men are going to be attracted (in the invisible but oh so real world of energetic signals.) to you with this signal. Men run from neediness every time. They can’t be everything to you and you wouldn’t want a man who thought that he could. Trust me.

They read it with their Man Radar.

Yuck, you say, I don’t want to radiate that!

Are you ready to start doing things differently?

How serious are you about finding your soul mate?

Take an inventory and see how many of your past female friendships ended badly. Check in with your heart to see if past betrayal still hurts.

Are you holding yourself back in your search for your soulmate because the pain of a broken heart seems worse than being alone?

Learning to open your heart again toward women will put you on the fast track to receiving the man the Universe has been trying to bring to you.

Before you say that you don’t have any issues with those mean girls, ask yourself this question:

Why am I still single?

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