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Table of Contents
- Look For Events And Communities Of People With The Same Values
- Finding A Learning Partner
- Admit You Are Pushing Love Away
3 Powerful Ways To Speed Your Path To Love—Right Now!
Life-Changing Hacks That Lead To Romantic Love And Personal Healing
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Hello everybody and welcome to the Deeper Dating® Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist. I’m the author of the book, Deeper Dating®, and I’m the Cofounder of DeeperDating®.com, a site where single people can meet in an online environment that’s fun, inspiring, kind, and respectful. Today, I’m going to talk about three things that you can do that will immediately empower, accelerate, and deepen your search for love. In this podcast, I’m going to share with you the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing, and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love, which are the greatest skills of all for a happy life.Look For Events And Communities Of People With The Same Values
These different tools that I’m going to give you will help you live the magic of who you are, of what your gifts are. It will help you mature and develop those gifts and learn to become more of an artisan in your search for love and your intimacy journey as a whole. They’re all a little bit uphill. They take some work, they take some practice, but the first one is one that I have resisted a lot in my life, and then breaking through that resistance is what led to my marriage and a lot of growth. It was the absolute essence of what transformed a pretty painful and rough period of decades of deeply looking for love and never finding it. This was something that really transformed it, and here’s what it was. I stopped looking for love in my old ways, which in those days as a gay man in New York City, involved the clubs, the parties, and all of those kinds of things. It’s not that I didn’t adore dancing and continue dancing even when I changed these patterns because I did, but changing these patterns changed my world and changed my life. The skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love. Click To Tweet It was saying that I’m not just going to look for people in those ways, which now is just somewhat kind of mindless, habitual, or non-soulful approach to finding love online, which I think is the common way that people do that now. Instead, saying that you are going to think about what your deepest passions, interests, and values are, and that you are going to go to, at this point, online environments When you can go to non-online environments, fantastic, but there’s so much online too, with people who deeply share the values and passions that matter the most to you.Finding A Learning Partner
Next, find a learning partner. Literally, these three tools will change your future. They truly will so much more than a lot of the habitual patterns that probably, if you’re anything like I was, and like so many of us are, you’ve tried again and again but haven’t necessarily worked. Find a learning partner. How do you find a learning partner? You go through your list of connections. You look for someone preferably single, but they don’t have to be single, because you can support them in whatever area they want to grow in. It’s nice if it’s two single people doing that. There’s something really good about that. Someone who has integrity. Someone who doesn’t hurt you, who cares about you, who has your best interest at heart. Someone who has good character and someone who is willing to grow, change, and work toward their goal. Someone with a rich sense of insight. Those people are A-team. They are our gold. There is almost no greater meat and potatoes intimacy skill than seeing the ways we're not available for love and then changing it. Click To Tweet If you find somebody like that, and you commit to just connecting together for half an hour a week, making plans and bringing mindfulness and awareness to your search for love, you can use a template of learning. Any teacher that you want, including my work, the Deeper Dating® work, but any template you want. The two of you could use that together and you could go through it. Every week you could touch base to bring more power, bravery, depth, habit-breaking, risk-taking, vulnerability, and commitment to love, to your journey. I pretty much promise you, you will shave off vast amounts of time in your search for healthy love if you do this. The research backs this up 1,000%. We need a community or a person with whom we can learn, have insights, practice those insights, and do all of the failing, rewiring, bitching, complaining, sharing, longing, yearning, complaining some more. All the things that we do with people that we feel safe with when we’re on a journey with them, that you will get to do that with them. There will be so many points where you bring something up, and they’re just going to say something, and it’s going to touch you. It’s going to open a door and it’s going to spark a kind of ambition to growth and healing. That is beautiful. We learn from jumping from stone to stone, from rock to rock. Sometimes I think of the wiser dating journey as being like the Parkour. There you are, and there’s a ledge in front of you. There’s a space you can’t get through, so you look at what’s the next ledge that you could somehow get to, which for you, for me, for us is the next point of insight, the next point of understanding, the next point of commitment. Those insights are our fuel. We leap from where we are into that insight and it brings us to the next ledge, to the next rock, to the next point. We wait for insight and we get insight from our learning partner. We get insight from our practices, from our growth, and when we get that, we just make a leap. How does this Parkour person get from one point to another that looks just completely crazy? They do it by looking at the next point that they can leap to.Admit You Are Pushing Love Away
The third is a little bit harder. It takes a lot of courage. It is incredibly powerful. You get a huge bang for your buck with this one. You truly do. You change your field. You change your future. That is to admit. It’s a humbling thing to admit the ways that you are pushing love away even as you’re seeking it. Maybe you keep choosing people that you know in your guts aren’t going to be right for you or aren’t going to be good for you. Maybe you keep choosing people that you’re not deeply passionate about because they’re safer. Maybe you find that you’re drinking too much or smoking too much. Maybe it’s internet porn. Maybe you meet wonderful people, and then you kind of feel the need to flee. These are humbling things to face, but let me tell you, if you can, with the help of your learning partner or on your own, but hopefully with the help of your learning partner or therapist or coach, if you can find the ways that you are pushing love away consciously, unconsciously, semi-consciously, and you can admit those things to yourself, it’s very humbling, but it is very life changing. If you can make a plan to change that, and then please get the support you need because we do not change patterns just by willpower almost ever. That’s usually a myth. We do it and the research backs this up. I think 10% of people who want to change a really deeply entrenched pattern succeed unless they have a template for a process that they believe in, and they have a community of support where they can fail, pick themselves up, rewire and get support and care again and again. That’s who succeeds. If you can admit this humbling truth that almost against your own will, you are avoiding love, turning from it, pushing it away, not making yourself present for it. If you can do that, I believe that’s heroic, truly heroic. What I can almost completely promise you, but it’s something that I have found to be true again and again, when you address that, when you change that, there will be ways that your world will open. The people you meet will be different. The way you interact with them will be different, and your luck will shift. There’s almost nothing that you’re going to get a bigger bang for your buck around in your search for love than admitting the places where your fear of intimacy holds you back, and full-heartedly with support, addressing those things. It changes your luck. It changes your field. This may take some searching to find a path that you really believe in, teachings that you believe in, support that feels safe and that you really believe in. This is something I’ve found to be really true in my own life. There is almost no greater meat and potatoes intimacy skill than seeing the ways that we’re not available for love, and admitting it and longing to change, and then practicing changing. That is one of the most central intimacy skills that exist, not to be beyond our fear of intimacy, but to begin to learn its language, to work with it, and to create transformation. Thank you for listening. Before we end this episode, I want to encourage you to just take a minute. I encourage you not to get through and pass this episode without doing this. Consider picking one of these. Allow yourself to become a kind of growth athlete in your search for love. It’s a joyful, empowering, wonderful experience. It’s like that great experience when you exercise, and all of a sudden, you notice that you have more strength, more resilience, more muscle, more bounce. It’s just the best feeling. The same is true in our search for love when we start to really bring wisdom to it. There’s a joy that happens when we know that we’re really making change around something that matters so much. I deeply encourage each one of you to try at least one of these things. Just take it on. Take on all three if you really are ready to go for it and watch what happens. Thank you so much for listening. Go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com or DeeperDating®.com. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode.Watch the episode here:
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